“The jurist,” François Baudouin wrote, voicing a position widely recognized in early modern France, “is a political man.” In the first four chapters of this book, we have analyzed the political activities of Dijon's avocats in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. We have shown how the avocats used the opportunities provided by the city's large and powerful mairie to satisfy their political ambitions. At the same time, we have demonstrated how the avocats' legal and rhetorical expertise helped Dijon's embattled hôtel de ville maintain its jurisdictions and governing authority for more than seven decades after the Wars of Religion. The preceding chapters have also shown how the avocats responded to the dramatic decline in political opportunities available to them after the 1668 reorganization of the city government. Although some avocats continued to find outlets for their political ambitions—at the scaled-down mairie, as subdelegates to Burgundy's intendant, or as minor royal officers—most found themselves excluded from local politics and governance, roles which they believed they were to entitled by virtue of their professional training and personal qualities.

This chapter and the one that follows will examine the other principal component of Dijon's avocats' political experience—the conceptual framework they used to understand the French state and their place within it. Although absolutist ideology theoretically made governance the secret du roi, restricted political thought and analysis to the king and his advisors, and reduced all others to passive spectators of royal majesty, the reality was quite different.