BODIN, JEAN. — One of the most notable thinkers of the French Renaissance, born in Angers in 1529 or 1530, died in Laon in 1596. He first practiced law, then entered the service of the monarchy; in 1577–78 he was appointed royal prosecutor in Laon. He represents a Renaissance that was already transforming itself into the Baroque: symptomatic in this regard is his *Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem* (1566), in which history is conceived as an expression of human will and necessity, and historiography as the free interpretation of the past by man, yet at the same time subject to political reason and to a cosmological and naturalistic fatalism.
*Les six livres de la République* (1576) represents his most complex and original effort as a political thinker: against Machiavelli’s concept of the political state as undermining morality and law, he affirms the concept of the juridical state, in which justice is achieved by moral forces operating outside of religion—veiled—and where religion is reduced to a tool of morality, which he deplores. He defends a state outside of any confession, in which tolerance must serve as an effective method of pacification. Among Bodin’s minor works are *La démonomanie des sorciers* (1580), which affirms the reality of sorcery, and the *Universae naturae theatrum* (1596), placed on the Index in 1628 for its concept of natural religion and for its view of the soul akin to the probable, which also appears reaffirmed in the *Heptaplomeres* (published in full only in 1853). For Bodin, only natural religion is valid, innate in the human mind and prior to all positive historical forms, yet at the same time he upholds the divine derivation of every religious faith.