Matthew Nelson (University of Mary Washington)
The French Revolution, beginning in 1789, represented the end of an intellectual period that accepted social divisions as a natural aspect of life. French philosophers, along with many other European nations, conceptualized this as a tripartite system consisting of the church, the nobility, and the peasantry. There was no specific term for this system at the time, but the disillusioned revolutionaries coined the term Ancien Régime as they overthrew it and established the First Republic in the 1790s. This idea of social divisions developed and became legally codified thanks to the writings of Charles Loyseau (1564-1627), a French jurist who lived during the reigns of Henry IV and Louis XIII - the first two kings of the Bourbon dynasty. Throughout his career, Loyseau wrote several argumentative treatises either contesting royal edicts or supporting royal law against popular dissent. His most influential work was his 1610 Traité des ordres et simples dignites, in which he helped established the Ancien Régime and contributed to the longevity of a system that created such tension it erupted until the violent French revolution. Loyseau, however, did not come up with his theories completely independently. One of the most important categories of legal evidence he cites is the available Greek and Roman literature on a variety of topics. Of note among his Classical references is his use of Greek philosopher, poetry, and language to make the argument that the Greeks perceived the human world as something inherently divided into social groups. This paper examines Loyseau's references to the language and thought of Plato, Aristotle, and Homer to understand how the reception of Classics in the early seventeenth century impacted such a profoundly oppressive era such as pre-Revolutionary France.