Pierre Grégoire

Pierre Grégoire (about 1540 to 1597), also called Petrus Gregorius Tholosanus, was a French jurist and philosopher, born to a poor Catholic family in Toulouse. He taught law at Cahors and Toulouse from 1566 and from 1582 held a chair of civil and canon law at the University of Pont-à-Mousson, where he and the Scottish jurist William Barclay quarrelled with the Jesuit masters. His De Republica, a detailed analysis of the purposes of a Christian commonwealth within a legal framework, often compared with Jean Bodin's République, argued that monarchy is the most natural constitution, used the image of the body politic with a single head, and took an anti-Machiavellian line against using religion as a prop to power. It was the work most cited by Johannes Althusius in his Politica. His encyclopedic Syntaxes artis mirabilis of 1578, which placed magic and demonology beside astrology and mathematics, stood in the tradition of Raymond Lull and was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.