Jean Petit (theologian) - Justification of Political Assassination

Justification of Political Assassination

On 23 November 1407, Louis I, Duke of Orléans, brother of Charles VI, was murdered by assassins in the pay of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. The Duke of Orléans was unpopular with the people and was held responsible for the disorders and the taxations under which the kingdom groaned, during the madness of the king, his brother. The University of Paris was bitterly opposed to him for having renewed obedience to Benedict XIII.

The Duke of Burgundy, on the contrary, was very popular; he was regarded as a friend of the commoners and an opponent of taxation and abuses, while the university was grateful to him for his lack of sympathy with the Avignon pope. Being excluded from the royal council after the assassination, he withdrew to his estates in Flanders, raised an army, and called around him several of the university professors, including Jean Petit, who for three years had been attached to his suite and was receiving a pension from him. Reassured, doubtless, by the talents of his defender, he declared that he would go to Paris and justify himself. In vain the royal council forbade him to enter the capital; he came, and was received with acclamations by the populace. He demanded an audience with the king. It was granted him on 8 March 1408, in the Hôtel de St-Paul, where the court habitually resided.

There, in presence of the Dauphin, of the Duke of Anjou, King of Sicily, of Cardinal de Bar, of the Dukes of Berry, Brittany, Bar, and Lorraine, of the rector of the University of Paris, and of many counts, barons, knights, and citizens, Jean Petit delivered on behalf of his client a pedantic address, bristling with propositions, syllogisms, Scriptural texts, and examples from Holy Writ. His argument may be expressed in the following syllogism: Whosoever is guilty of high treason and becomes a tyrant, deserves to be punished with death, all the more so when he is a near relative of the king; and in that case the natural, moral, and Divine laws allow any subject whatever, without any command or public authorization, to kill him or to have him killed openly, or by stealth; and the more closely the author of the slaying is related to the king the more meritorious the act. Now, the Duke of Orléans — so ran the minor proposition — a slave to the passion of greed, the source of all evil, was guilty of high treason, and was a tyrant; which was proved by holding him guilty of all the pretended crimes which popular imagination and the partisans of the Duke of Burgundy laid to his charge. The conclusion was therefore that the Duke of Burgundy not only should not be punished or blamed for what had been done to the Duke of Orléans, but rather should be rewarded. This thesis seemed preposterous to the more rational members of the assembly; but the Duke of Burgundy was present with his troops, ready to suppress any attempt at reply, and further he was in the good graces of the university; so he had no difficulty in obtaining letters of pardon from the king.

As for Jean Petit, who in his address was not ashamed to admit that he was receiving, and expected still to receive, a pension from the Duke of Burgundy, he found it more prudent to withdraw from Paris and retire to the estate of the Duke of Burgundy at Hesdin, Artois, where he died in a house of his protector, regretting, it is said, that he had ever allowed himself to defend such a proposition.