METHODS AND APPROACHES

These papers, written over the past twenty years, are the outcome of an even longer period of preoccupation with the history of early modern France. This involvement began when I arrived at Cambridge University from New Zealand in 1953 with the intention of studying the ideas of Jean Bodin and their impact upon English political thought. The project widened into a comparative study of French and English ideas. Perhaps it was relevant to the theme which emerged from my research that, fresh from what was then a colonial background, I resented certain assumptions, doubtless misperceived, about the nature of the English past, and turned to a French counter-model where discontinuity, social protest, and a vein of rationalist idealism presented alternatives to stability, the acceptance of status, and the much vaunted methods of British empiricism. A growing appreciation of the tolerance and respect for academic values that prevailed among my mentors eventually tempered my brashness. An argument appeared: that the ideas generated in the French wars of religion were taken up on a massive scale by English controversialists in the subsequent age and applied to a parallel set of conflicts across the Channel. In consequence English liberalism was much less the product of native experience than it was reputed to be. While this hypothesis, like many revisionist interpretations, was partly the unconscious result of my own conditioning, the evidence for it seemed then, and seems still, entirely to justify the conclusion. It resulted, however, in the subordination of ideas to contingent political events, and owed far more to the methods then in vogue at Cambridge than I realised at the time.