Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture
Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Écriture sainte
Dieu est la justice même: la justice du prince doit être l'image de la justice de Dieu.
Our renderingGod is justice itself: the justice of a prince must be the image of the justice of God.
What it is
Begun in 1679 as part of Bossuet's tutorship of the Grand Dauphin (Louis XIV's son, tutorship 1670–1679), this text was set aside unfinished when the tutorship ended and only resumed around 1700. Bossuet drew almost exclusively on the Vulgate—especially the historical and wisdom books of the Old Testament—to ground royal authority and its obligations in God's direct dealings with Israel. Left unfinished at his death in 1704 and published posthumously in 1709 by his nephew, it stands as the most systematic statement of divine-right absolutism in Catholic political theology, while insisting equally that divine right creates binding obligations of justice, mercy, and religious submission. Its reach remained largely academic after publication, read more by scholars and theologians than by the courts it was originally designed to serve.
Why it still matters
Read selectively, its chapters on the obligations of power—that authority is a divine gift requiring accountability to God and active service to the poor—offer a searching meditation for any Christian in a position of leadership or governance. It is best approached as a series of thematic meditations rather than read as a continuous treatise.
Kept alongside
Abandonment to Divine Providence
L'Abandon à la Providence divine
A spiritual treatise assembled from letters and conference notes that Jean-Pierre de Caussade, SJ wrote to the Nuns of the Visitation at Nancy between 1733 and 1740, where he served as spiritual director. Mother Sophie de Rottembourg grouped passages from his correspondence into eleven thematic chapters; this manuscript circulated in Visitandine houses before Henri Ramière published a reworked version in 1861 under the title L'Abandon à la Providence divine. The text's governing idea is total surrender to what Caussade calls 'the sacrament of the present moment' — the conviction that God's will is encountered fully in each immediate circumstance. Though addressed to enclosed religious women, the letters were recognized from the outset as broadly applicable to devout laypeople navigating the anxieties of life, and they circulated among spiritually serious court and convent circles in France during the mid-Bourbon era.
The Secret of Mary (Le secret de Marie)
Le secret de Marie
Written around 1712 as a personal spiritual letter to a devout religious sister in Nantes, this short treatise presents the same doctrine of total consecration to Jesus through Mary as the longer Traité, but in condensed form accessible as a single sitting's reading; it also contains the distinctive section 'The Tree of Life,' a meditation on the soul's spiritual growth through Mary. It survived only in two handwritten copies held by Montfort's religious congregations and was not published until 1868; since then it has appeared in over 400 editions and 40 languages. Together with the Traité it forms the doctrinal core of Montfortian Marian spirituality.
The Adventures of Telemachus
Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse
Written by Fénelon in the early 1690s as private instructional reading for his charge Louis, Duke of Burgundy—grandson of Louis XIV and presumed heir to the French throne—this didactic prose epic follows Telemachus and his mentor Mentor through allegorical encounters with kingdoms of virtue and vice. Fénelon was formally appointed tutor to the Duke in 1689. The work was never intended for publication; the first Paris edition appeared in 1699 from the widow of Claude Barbin with a royal printing privilege, and a pirated Hague edition also circulated that year. Louis XIV recognised the implied critique of his absolutism and wars and suppressed the book, but it was already unstoppable: it became the most widely reprinted work of French prose fiction in the eighteenth century, with over 300 editions between 1701 and 1801, and was described by contemporaries as the most-read book in France after the Bible.