François Hotman

François Hotman (23 August 1524 – 12 February 1590) was a French lawyer and writer, associated with the legal humanists and with the monarchomaques, who struggled against absolute monarchy.

His grandfather Lambert Hotman, a Silesian burgher, emigrating from Emmerich, (in the Duchy of Cleves), had left his native country to go to France with Engelbert, Count of Nevers.

Pierre, a zealous Catholic and a counsellor of the parlement of Paris, intended his son for the law, and sent him at the age of fifteen to the University of Orléans.

The work of a practising lawyer was not to his taste; he turned to jurisprudence and literature, and in 1546 was appointed lecturer in Roman Law at the University of Paris.

On the invitation of the magistracy, he lectured at Strasbourg on law in October 1555, and became professor in June 1556, superseding François Baudouin, who had been his colleague in Paris.

He was entrusted with confidential missions from the Huguenot leaders to German potentates, carrying at one time credentials from Catherine de' Medici.

[2] Five months later his house and library were wrecked by a Catholic mob; he fled by Orléans to Paris, where Michel de l'Hôpital made him historiographer to king Charles IX.

Returning to Geneva in 1584 he developed a kind of scientific turn, dabbling in alchemy and the research for the philosopher's stone.

His works were very numerous, beginning with his De gradibus cognationis (1546), and including a treatise on the Eucharist (1566); a treatise (Anti-Tribonian, 1567) to show that French law could not be based on Justinian; a life of Coligny (1575); a polemic (Brutum fulmen, 1585) directed against a bull of Sixtus V, with many other works on law, history, politics, and classical learning.

[2] His most important work, the Franco-Gallia (1573), found favour neither with Catholics nor with Huguenots in its day (except when it suited their purposes); yet its vogue has been compared to that obtained later by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Contrat Social.

{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) Salmon, J. H. M.; Hotman, François; Giesey, Ralph E. (1972).