Introduction: O hommes disposez & prompts à la servitude

Here a despotic, freedom-hating ruler contemptuously castigates the obsequiousness of the Roman Senate, which abases itself before him despite being composed of free-born citizens. The quotation was invoked as a parallel for current circumstances in late sixteenth-century French political literature and was later alluded to by Racine. Its very popularity is an index of the extent to which in early modern French historical, political, and literary traditions, questions of freedom and servitude remained perennial topics of debate. They came to the fore with particular acuity during the French Wars of Religion (1562–98) when tyranny and