Innocent Gentillet (1535–1588) was a French lawyer and politician. A Huguenot moderate lawyer and parliamentarian, he was exiled to Geneva after the

massacre of St. Bartholomew The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (french: Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy) in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence, directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) during the French W ...

, and then returned to France after the

Edict of Beaulieu The Edict of Beaulieu (also known at the time as the Peace of Monsieur) was promulgated from Beaulieu-lès-Loches on 6 May 1576 by Henry III of France, who was pressured by Alençon's support of the Protestant army besieging Paris that spring. Th ...

in 1576. His Protestant views are the cause of a new exile to Geneva in 1585, where he died in 1588. He wrote and published in 1576 the ''Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner'' (Sermon on the means of governing), in which he condemned the ideas of

Niccolò Machiavelli Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli ( , , ; 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527), occasionally rendered in English as Nicholas Machiavel ( , ; see below), was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. ...

, suspected of trying to introduce impiety and immorality in government. He also accused the Italians of the entourage of

Catherine de' Medici Catherine de' Medici ( it, Caterina de' Medici, ; french: Catherine de Médicis, ; 13 April 1519 – 5 January 1589) was an Florentine noblewoman born into the Medici family. She was Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 by marriage to King ...

to make the propagators. The book, translated and published in Latin in 1577, then in English, has considerable diffusion throughout Europe until the mid-seventeenth century. It was known as the ''Anti-Machiavel'' and was the first source of the concept ''machiavellism''. Gentillet argues that the source of wealth of a state is its large population. He believes that the infighting and bad laws are contrary to the development of population and condemned luxury as detrimental to national welfare. He also announced political science as defined by

Jean Bodin Jean Bodin (; c. 1530 – 1596) was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. He is known for his theory of sovereignty. He was also an influential writer on demonology. Bodin l ...

References

1535 births 1588 deaths French Calvinist and Reformed Christians French non-fiction writers Politicians from the Republic of Geneva {{France-reli-bio-stub