Résumé
The power of the state in France saw the establishment of its sover eignty as early as the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. The king was no longer merely a suzerain: he was sovereign, exercising an institutionalized power the content of which-making ordonnances ordinances-was new. ‘Li rois’, Beaumanoir wrote, ‘puet fere teus establissemens pour le commun pour fit, et ce qu’il establist doit estre tenu [The king can make such dispositions for the common profit, and what he establishes must be kept]’.1 But if the king, like the Roman emperor, was already the holder of this power ‘de faire des ordon nances qui vaillent loy [to make ordinances which are valid as law]’, as Boutillier put it, he was also, and more so at this time, the possessor ofjurisdictio.As source de toute justice (the fount of all justice), the king obtained from this right the power of administering justice, reducing and subordinating first feudal lords, then ecclesiastical judges, in short, accumulating the ‘rights’ that it would be impossible to draw up a list for this period because they were so numerous and constantly expanding.