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king, who backed the Protestant Henri of Navarre as the legitimate heir, according to Mariana
gave “an eternal honor to France.” 77
While the book’s initial publication did little to stir the people of France, Mariana’s work
received much unwanted publicity following the murder of Henri IV in 1610 by François
Ravaillac. No evidence existed that Ravaillac had ever read De Rege or had any ties to the
Society of Jesus, but Mariana’s subversive writings were perceived by some as having instigated
the assassination, thus connecting the Jesuits to the act of regicide. 78 The Parlement of Paris, the
highest law court in the land, condemned the book, and less than a month after the death of the
king it was burned publicly in front to the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-Paris.
The court had long feared that the Society sought to compromise the Gallican state. On
two previous occasions plots had been made to take the life of Henri IV, and in each case the
assassin had a connection to the Society. In 1593 Pierre Barrière was arrested for conspiring to
murder the king, a plan that he claimed was encouraged by the Jesuit rector in Paris, Father
Varade. Then in December 1594 Jean Chastel tried to assassinate Henri IV at a Parisian hôtel.
In the ensuing inquisition into Chastel’s motives, he admitted to having studied for three years at
the Jesuit Collège of Clermont. Following this second attempt on the life of the king, the
Parlement began to look for a way to prohibit the society’s ministry in France. Although it was
unable to establish any complicit involvement by the Jesuits in the assassination attempts, the
Parlement succeeded in labeling them as promoters of tyrannicide, banning the Society from its
jurisdiction until 1603. 79
The strong reaction to Mariana’s work in 1610 is not surprising given Gallican
sentiments towards the Society. To prevent further repercussions against the Jesuits, the superior
general Claudio Acquaviva sent a decree to the French fathers forbidding any discussion of
tyranny, but members residing in other countries continued to aggravate matters by publishing
books advocating the temporal power of the pope over sovereign monarchs. 80 The Italian Robert
Bellarmine and the Belgian Martin Becan both wrote treatises on the right of the Roman pontiff
to depose rulers for heresy while the German Jacob Keller and the Spanish Francisco Suárez
published works specifically dealing with the validity of tyrannicide. 81 Igniting further
controversy was the condemnation of each of the foreign texts by the Parlement and the
University of Paris, acts which angered Pope Paul V, who had specifically praised the work of
Suarez in a special laudatory brief. 82 The entangled situation only cooled when a second decree
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