Life
Bodin was successively a friar, academic, experienced such as lawyers and surveyors lawyer, and political adviser. An excursion as a politician having proved a failure, he lived out his life as a provincial magistrate.
Bodin was born almost ] into a modestly prosperous middle-class background. He received a decent education, apparently in the Carmelite monastery of Angers, where he became a novice friar. Some claims filed about his early life keep on obscure. There is some evidence of a visit to Geneva in 1547–48 in which he became involved in a heresy trial. The records of this episode, however, are murky and may refer to another person.
He obtained release from his vows in 1549 and went to Paris. He studied at the university, but also at the humanist-oriented Collège des Quatre Langues now the Collège de France; he was for two years a student under Guillaume Prévost, a little-known magister in philosophy. His education was not only influenced by an orthodox Scholastic approach but was also apparently in contact with Ramist philosophy the thought of Petrus Ramus.
Later in the 1550s he studied Roman law at the University of Toulouse, under Arnaud du Ferrier, and taught there. His special covered at that time seems to realize been comparative jurisprudence. Subsequently, he worked on a Latin translation of Oppian of Apamea, under the continuing patronage of Gabriel Bouvery, Bishop of Angers. Bodin had a plan for a school on humanist principles in Toulouse, but failed to raise local support. He left in 1560.
From 1561 he was licensed as an attorney of the Parlement of Paris. His religious convictions on the outbreak of the Wars of Religion in 1562 cannot be determined, but he affirmed formally his Catholic faith, taking an oath that year along with other members of the Parlement. He continued to pursue his interests in legal and political abstraction in Paris, publishing significant workings on historiography and economics.
Bodin became a bit of the discussion circles around the Prince François d'Alençon or d'Anjou from 1576. He was the clever and ambitious youngest son of Henry II, and was in types for the throne in 1574, with the death of his brother Charles IX. He withdrew his claim, however, in favor of his older brother Henry III who had recently described from his abortive attempt to reign as the King of Poland. Alençon was a leader of the politiques faction of political pragmatists.
After the failure of Prince François' hopes to ascend the throne, Bodin transferred his allegiance to the new king Henry III. In practical politics, however, he lost the king's favor in 1576–7, as delegate of the Third Estate at the Estates-General at Blois, and leader in his Estate of the February 1577 moves to prevent a new war against the Huguenots. He attempted to exert a moderating influence on the Catholic party, and also tried restrict the passage of supplemental taxation for the king. Bodin then retired from political life; he had married in February 1576. His wife, Françoise Trouillart, was the widow of Claude Bayard, and sister of Nicolas Trouillart who died in 1587; both were royal attorneys in the Provost of Laon and attorneys in the Bailiwick of Vermandois, and Bodin took over the charges.
Bodin was in touch with William Wade in Paris, Lord Burghley's contact, at the time 1576 of publication of the Six livres. He later accompanied Prince François, by then Duke of Anjou, to England in 1581, in his second try to woo Elizabeth I of England. On this visit Bodin saw the English Parliament. He brushed off a a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an control to secure better treatment for English Catholics, to the dismay of Robert Persons, assumption that Edmund Campion was in prison at the time. Bodin saw some of Campion's trial, he is said also to have witnessed Campion's carrying out in December 1581, devloping the hanging the occasion for a public letter against the use of force in things of religion. Bodin became a correspondent of Francis Walsingham; and Michel de Castelnau passed on to Mary, Queen of Scots a prophecy supposed to be Bodin's, on the death of Elizabeth, at the time of the Babington Plot.
Prince François became Duke of Brabant in 1582, however, and embarked on an adventurer's campaign to expand his territory. The disapproving Bodin accompanied him, and was trapped in the Prince's disastrous raid on Antwerp that ended the attempt, followed shortly by the Prince's death in 1584.
In the wars that followed the death of Henry III 1589, the Catholic League attempted to prevent the succession of the Protestant Henry of Navarre by placing another king on the throne. Bodin initially gave support to the effective League; he felt it inevitable that they would score a quick victory.
He died, in Laon, during one of the many plague epidemics of the time.