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Orest Ranum, James B. Collins. The French Monarchical Commonwealth, 1356–1560., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1332–1333, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae333
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Extract
Scholarly editors have been known to delete opening and closing salutations on documents in the interest of saving paper and ink and because they all seem to be the same. James Collins has spent much of his scholarly research in unfamiliar territory, the archives of towns, fiscal records, and court records: with a concentration on changes in salutation. The results are truly pathbreaking and convincing. Changes first occurring during the reign of Charles the Wise (1364–1380) would quite quickly be adopted by local officials all over the realm as it was constituted at the time, and they would continue to prevail into the 1560s. Instead of addressing just the king, the salutation became la chose publique and for the bien public, distinct marks of inclusiveness, not a reduction of royale puissance (not pouvoir) but a shared commonwealth respectful of hierarchy calling for action as a social and political ensemble.
It had been Charles’s personal curiosity set off by reading Aristotle’s Politics in a not very intelligible translation that prompted him to ask his most learned subject, Nicolas Oresme, whether he could produce something better. The king supplied a living and the possibility of never visiting so Oresme could work in Paris. In a relatively short time when the task is considered, Oresme came up with a translation of both Politics and Ethics, as well as a treatise on money. When Oresme sensed he had a correct meaning of a word but could not find it in existing French, he created a new word, and in doing so contributed hundreds of new words to the French language. Charles set out to create France as a monarchical commonwealth when he ordered the royal scribes to address virtually all correspondents as part of the chose publique, and individuals would soon be addressed as citoyen not sujet. Perhaps the most ingenious of all the revived terms settled an extremely important issue. The ancient Greek city-states were small and quarrelsome; the kingdom of France would be one very big cité.
