François Hotman

Born in Paris in 1524, François Hotman was a French jurist, scholar, and writer who became closely associated with the Protestant Reformation. Trained in law, he built a reputation as a learned humanist and spent much of his life moving across France, Switzerland, and the German states during the upheavals of the Wars of Religion.

Hotman is best remembered for combining legal scholarship with bold political argument. His best-known work, Francogallia (1573), looked back to early French history to argue that kings were not meant to rule without limits. That made him an important voice among writers who resisted absolute monarchy and defended the idea that political authority should be restrained by law and the community.

Alongside his political writing, he also contributed to the study of Roman law and French legal history. Today he is remembered as both a major Protestant thinker and an early critic of centralized royal power, with a legacy that reaches beyond theology into constitutional and legal thought.