In 16th-century France, absolutism was initially written in the legal idiom of sovereignty by a group of lawyers concerned to find a way to end the religious conflicts. This effort was translated in the following century by Cardinal Richelieu and his jurists into precepts for the practice of ruling designed to limit and coordinate the privileges of the great nobles as well as economic actors (merchants, bankers, financiers etc.) with the interests of the court. As a result, the state in France turned into more or less stable oligarchic arrangements that united the interests of French elites under the sovereignty of the king, as exemplified in the massively expanded system of office venality. In the end, however, the Sun King’s exorbitant interest in glory on the battlefield undermined the search for a stable system to exploit the realm’s resources; by the time of the Peace of Utrecht (1713), French elites were desperately looking for something new.

The Conclusion emphasises the dialogic, performative properties of politique both as a word and as a character, and emphasises that although the particular politique problem traced in the book is a sixteenth-century phenomenon, there is no particular rupture between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; I explore continuities and differences across the decades after the end of the wars, and consider the political writings of Cardinal Richelieu and Gabriel Naudé. The Conclusion also argues that sixteenth-century debates about politics and politiques had a long-term impact on the European political imagination; it looks briefly at early modern English and contemporary French examples to consider this. It further considers what room there might be for optimism amid the negativity attached to politics in the early modern period.