H Hotman, Franc ¸ ois Ethan Alexander-Davey Campbell University, Buies Creek, NC, USA Introduction François Hotman (1524–1590) was a French Prot- estant jurist who played a leading role in the religious and political controversies of his day, both as a scholar and an activist. He has been called one of the first modern revolutionaries (Kelley 1973). The first born son of Pierre Hotman, a conseiller in the Parlement de Paris, the highest judicial court in France, he stood to inherit not only his father’ s estate but also his office. This was not to be. While at the law school at Orleans, and later in Paris, he studied with several controversial humanist scholars and adherents of the reformed religion. After a visit to Lausanne in 1547, he began a correspondence with John Calvin and soon after committed himself to the Protestant cause. For the rest of his life, he served that cause as a professor at several universities in Switzerland, Germany, and France; as a writer of legal and political tracts, propaganda, and pane- gyrics; and as a diplomat and advisor to prominent political actors such as John Calvin, Theodore Beza, Henry of Conde, Gaspard de Coligny, Henry of Navarre, and German princes such as Philip and William of Hesse and the Elector Pal- atine Frederick III. The religious and political affairs of his native land were what concerned him the most, but the persecution of the Huguenots, and his direct involvement in their struggle, meant that he had to live most of his life in exile. Tendencies of Hotman’s Huguenot Political Theory Trained as lawyer, Hotman’ s expertise was pri- marily in law, history, and political theory. Rela- tive to his output in those fields, Hotman’ s contribution to theology is slight. But his Protes- tantism is likely the source of an important ten- dency in his thinking, that of assuming that the true form of a thing is to be found by returning to its origins. In The State of the Primitive Church (1553) and On the Sacrament of the Christian Supper (1565), he establishes the true organiza- tion of the church and the true nature of the sac- rament by tracing each back to its beginnings. The Pope cannot have supreme authority in the church, because Christ is its head, and not the Pope, and because the early church was national, and not under the dominion of Rome. Likewise, the Last Supper must be understood as it was in the early ecumenical councils. The true nature of the religion is to be found in its original pristine form and not in subsequent deviations therefrom. © Springer Nature B.V. 2022 M. Sellers, S. Kirste (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_987-1