Theodore Beza vested the right of resistance not in the private individual but in the lesser magistrates — the constituted officers who stand between the sovereign and the subject — making revolt lawful without making it universal. François Hotman built his case from history, arguing in Francogallia that absolute monarchy was a corruption of France's older, better constitution. And the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, published under a pseudonym in 1579, grounded the whole structur

In the decade after 1572, and especially in the seven years that followed, the Calvinist world produced a body of political theory that would change the trajectory of Western liberty. Theodore Beza, François Hotman, the anonymous author of the most systematic treatise of them all, and the Scot George Buchanan set out to answer, with rigor and at length, the question that Luther had raised at Worms and refused to resolve.