At the local level, the ancien régime French state was embodied primarily in the panoply of royal, seigneurial, municipal, and clerical law courts that dotted rural and (especially) urban communities. This fact had significant consequences for early modern French politics. David Parker has noted the period's “all-pervasive legalism,” marked by “a constant preoccupation with the extent and limits of the liberties of the subject as sanctified by custom.” Even at the height of Louis XIV's reign, Parker argues, contemporaries viewed royal authority primarily in terms of distributive justice. The main obligations of the king and the royal council were “to ensure a fair and proper distribution of justice, and the harmonious operation of legal procedures.” Although the legal system and the state were hardly autonomous, they were also not entirely captive to the interests of the ruling classes. Rather, they were “a mechanism for conducting and regulating the incessant struggles for power, status, and wealth among the great families, clienteles, and corporations that dominated French society.” French law and legal institutions, in short, were an indispensable source of legitimacy for virtually all political actions.

At the local level, the early modern French state was also characterized by a bewildering complex of overlapping jurisdictions and institutional rivalries. Disputes over jurisdictional boundaries and sociopolitical status were endemic in a political system whose framework had been cobbled together from widely disparate local institutions, royal innovations, and temporary expedients implemented over several centuries.