5 - The chose publique and Urban Government

Summary

Medieval municipal deliberations survive from towns such as Lyon and Toulouse; after 1500, even more records can be searched. Using deliberations from twenty towns around France, and documentation such as guild statutes and grievances sent to the king, this chapter examines urban and local politics. The guild statutes invariably cited the “bien public” or the “bien de la chose publique” in their opening justifications. Dijon’s long record of such statutes, enables us to see their evolution over time. Even princes maintained a steady usage of “bien public” with respect to economic matters. This chapter also examines the considerable regional differences in political rhetoric: the Paris region, the Loire Valley, Normandy, and Brittany became early strongholds of the “bien de la chose publique.” Flanders and southern France held out against this new vocabulary until well into the fifteenth century. In the early sixteenth century, especially in Paris and other cities with Parlements, the legal elite began to shift away from the crudely vernacular “chose publique” to the Latinizing “respublique” as the French term of choice for the Latin res publica, presaging a rift between the Parisian legal elite and regional elites, with respect to the definition of a monarchical commonwealth.