La emergencia del concepto de leyes fundamentales en la Francia de las guerras de religión (Beza, Gentillet, Bodino) : ¿Frenos o pilares de la autoridad regia?
In this article, I first reconstruct the polemical context of the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) in which the concept of fundamental laws emerged. Secondly, through an exhaustive reading of the passages that the Huguenot jurist Gentillet dedicated to defining the concept, I make the case that the fundamental laws were originally conceived and invoked in a double sense. While Seyssel (1512) and Beza (1574) tended to identify them with the limits or constraints that had traditionally been placed upon royal authority, Gentillet –anticipating some of Bodin`s later arguments– understood and defined them as the “foundations” and “pillars” that supported the edifice of the monarchy and reinforced royal authority itself. In continuation, I explore some of the arguments and exempla that Gentillet employed to argue that the “Salic Law,” the law maintaining the inalienability of the dominions of the Crown, and the convocation of that
Estates General were the principal safeguards of royal potestas. These additional textual considerations allow me to restore to the concept its original plurality of senses, which the liberal historiography, committing grave anachronisms, has tended to read (simplistically) as the precedent for the constraints put upon executive power in modern constitutionalism.
