Chapter La liberté dans les royaumes: pratique et théorie

Abstract

The author reviews the history of monarchies and the sources of the practice to highlight how, unlike the experience of Italian municipal cities, the concept of freedom did not represent an omnipresent concept either in political life or in the texts of the theory of the end of Middle Ages: the term appears above all in the phrase «libertés et franchises» or in reference to particular statuses such as that of citizens recognized as free from royal privileges. The demands that emerged in the English and French revolts, which expressed a widespread awareness of everyone's right to exercise their freedom, were then reworked by William of Ockham's doctrine on equality between men and on the role entrusted to the kingdom to ensure the full exercise of the divine gift of human freedom.