ABSTRACT
It is certainly true that in order to understand Jean Bodin on taxes one must appreciate his position on the role of private property in society. Taxing away property, as we have seen, was regarded by Bodin as an attack on the very foundations of the state. As in taxes, so in money; all power belongs to the king, therefore all responsibility is his. Let the king remember that Dante put Philip the Fair of France, an incorrigible debaser of the coinage, in the lower depths of hell as a common forger. If the interpretation put forward here is correct, the actual effect of Bodin on taxes was far from his intent. Bodin on taxes may have had more influence, ironically, in seventeenth-century England than in sixteenth-century France; he was widely quoted by opponents of the Stuarts, who found in the Republic arguments to support the old view that "the king should live of his own.
