ABSTRACT
From Switzerland, federal theological and political ideas and practices spread along the Rhine River Valley through western Germany, eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, wherever Reformed Calvinist and Protestant Free churches established themselves. German covenantalism made at least one major contribution to the developing federal theology in developing an emphasis on the prelapserian covenant of works alongside the postlapserian covenant of grace. France, the first home of statist absolutism in Europe and later the home of the Jacobin antithesis to federal ideas, became the battleground between those espousing covenantal ideas and those vehemently opposed to them at the time of the Reformation. Later, in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, there were French political philosophers who excelled at developing sophisticated theories of liberty, fraternity, republicanism, and federalism—Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, P. J. Proudhon, and Alexander Marc, for example — but they were utterly incapable of putting them into practice.
