While David Parker and others have emphasized the "all-pervasive legalism" of Old Regime society, historians still struggle to understand how the law shaped politics and governance in early modern France. It shap the constitutions and powers of the agencies and procedures by which contestations resolved, competing claims authoritatively adjudicated, and binding decisions enforced. It was the law whichĬonstitut the meanings of the terms in which these claims framed, the nature of the contexts to which they pertain, and the authority of the principles according to which they made binding. Indeed, if we accept Keith Michael Baker's definition of political culture as "the set of discourses or symbolic practices" through which individuals and groups "articulate, negotiate, implement and enforce the competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole," then law was clearly a central element of early modern French political culture. "The best kind of Commonweal," Jean Bodin wrote in his epochal Six Books of a Commonweale (1576), "is that wherein the sovereign holdeth what concerneth his majesty, the Senate maintaineth the authority thereof, the magistrates execute their power, and justice hath her ordinary course." From local courts to the royal council, law provided the principal linguistic, cultural, and procedural framework through which individuals and corporations articulated, contested, and resolved disputes over the allocation of resources, status, authority, and power, even at the height of the so-called "administrative monarchy" of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Old Regime France, David Bell has observed, was a "judicial society" where "the experiences of the law courts were central to the way in which political action was conceptualized." Theorists distinguished the king's "absolute power" from the rule of a tyrant by emphasizing that monarchs governed according to the law and the public good, not their personal will.