From the world of the Italian city states this chapter now turns to the political thought conceived in the French polity of the late sixteenth century, encountering a Renaissance commonwealth that differs in many ways from those we have seen envisioned in previous chapters. The questions that were raised to make sense of this French commonwealth, however, were similar to those asked by earlier Italian thinkers, and the intellectual context in which these questions were answered was a continuation of the tradition encountered earlier in this book. Our focus in this as well as in the next chapters will be on Jean Bodin’s major work Les Six livres de la République and its context. The chapter shows the importance ofprivate life and the centrality of gender in Bodin’s political thought. It is concerned with the extent to which oeconomics, thinking about the family and about marriage, shaped and marked Bodin’s thought on politics in general and his ideas on the state and sovereignty in particular.