From Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique Bodin

Summary

[‘Bodin’ is one of several articles in which Bayle reflects on contemporary politics through the historiography of the French Wars of Religion, 1559–98. Historians, Protestant as well as Catholic, continued to misrepresent Bodin's impartiality in religious matters as support for ‘absolutism’. Read in context, Bayle replies, Bodin was no absolutist but a politique, whose brilliance in dark times had served the public good, and who, through his theory of sovereignty, had tried to put limits on Papal influence. As a deputy for the Third Estate he had opposed selling off royal lands to pay for religious persecution, and he had advocated, initially, legal tolerance for the Reformed religion. It would be more just, Bayle suggests, were posterity to recognise Bodin as a man of action as well as intellect whose compromises had been made to protect the innocent and forestall bloodshed and war.]

Bodin (Jean), born in Angers and one of the most intelligent Frenchmen of the sixteenth century, studied the law at Toulouse and having taken his degrees he then gave lectures there to the great acclaim of those who heard him. His early ambition was to become a professor of law at Toulouse. Therefore to gain favour with the Toulousians he entitled his oration De instituenda in republica juventuti [On the Education of Youth in the Republic] which he dedicated to the People and the Senate of Toulouse, and which he delivered publicly in the University Faculty.