Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This is a study of the life and political writings of the French Catholic royalist Pierre de Belloy and his place in the history of sixteenth-century France, in order to shed light upon the connections between the intellectual, religious, political, and social history of the French Wars of Religion. A committed royalist and enemy of proponents of popular resistance to royal authority, Belloy is known to intellectual historians principally as a forerunner to seventeenth-century theorists of absolute monarchy and as a proponent of religious toleration. This book tests those claims by considering the authorship techniques of his key works, the Apologie catholique of 1585, the Moyens d’abus of 1586, the Examen du discours of 1587, and De l’authorité du roy of 1587, in the context of the polemical exchanges that produced them. This study considers these works both as examples of learned political thinking and as instances of political advocacy in action. It looks to the strengths, shibboleths, and inconsistencies of Belloy’s rhetoric in those debates to develop our understanding of the political and social attitudes of his readers. As well as studying Belloy as a political writer, this book considers his life and career in the labyrinthine legal world of early modern France. Using material from both notarial and court archives, this shows the intensity of disputes over status among the magistracy of early modern France, and constitutes an important contribution to the history of Toulouse during the Wars of Religion.</jats:p>