The Estates General of 1484 laid out a clear statement of commonwealth principles, largely followed by Charles VIII and Louis XII. Francis I, however, set out to undermine these commonwealth elements. With the Concordat of Bologna (1516), he gained the right to name successors to most French benefices, a tool kings would use as their most effective patronage weapon. The institutional thickening under Francis I and Henry II transformed the meaning of many traditional phrases. The regional noble elite and the legal hierarchy, led by the Parlements, developed mutually contradictory understandings of the “commonwealth” element of the monarchy. By the time of the Estates General of 1560, local elites wanted a codified return to a commonwealth whose principles had been effectively abandoned.At the Estates General of Orléans (1560–1561), they would lay out clearly a system built on elections: of bishops, abbots, priors, noble baillis, judges, town governments, and deputies to periodic meetings of bailiwick and national estates. The central judicial elite and the monarchy made sure this system never became operative. Together, the monarchy and the central judicial elite would develop a political vocabulary built around the “good of the State.”

The demons loosed in 1559–1561 transformed the French monarchy and hastened the arrival of a new rhetoric of politics, soon to be built around “the State” [l’Estat]. Practical political crises, such as the capture of John II, had often accelerated rapid changes in practice, theory, and justification, and I would argue did so precisely in that order. John’s capture led to the most fundamental change in the history of the French monarchy – permanent taxation – and, under his son Charles V, to a new monarchical discourse seeking to legitimize it. Permanent taxation required both a theoretical foundation and a public justification: that Charles V’s subjects rankled at this innovation is obvious from the events of 1380–1382. Charles V’s new discourse emphasized the “chose publique” of the kingdom of France; the “bien de la chose publique” lasted for nearly two centuries as the monarchy’s key justificatory phrase. After rampant rhetorical confusion between the 1560s and the 1590s, the neologism “bien de l’Estat” permanently took its place, as French (and other) monarchs sought to convince their subjects that the State was the new form of the res publica.