In 1591, a political theorist named Louis Turquet de Mayerne penned an eerily prophetic essay entitled De la monarchie aristodemocratique. In it, he “proposed a form of government in which the king was the executive and the symbol of the state and presided over the Estates General, the representative body which was the voice of the people, the true seat of sovereignty, and the legislative power.” As the “authentic radical” among the old regime's political thinkers, Turquet de Mayerne also “proposed to improve the political system by altering the social structure” – that is, by replacing the primordial clergy, nobility, and Third Estate with a novel social elite of industrious and meritorious Frenchmen. The author of this treatise was a prophet without honor in his own time – indeed, Marie de Médicis's regency banned the essay immediately after its publication in 1611 – but he nonetheless set the essential sociopolitical agenda for the entire ancien régime.

If the French Bourbon state wished to compete successfully with its rivals, it would at the very least have to emulate them in harnessing domestic elitist energies to the purposes of foreign policy. In itself, this might not secure the international greatness of the historic Gallic realm, but it was a prerequisite toward that end. Accordingly, the Bourbon monarchs would have to discharge at least three interrelated tasks. First, they would have to admit significant numbers of articulate and ambitious Frenchmen from all three orders into national and local governance.