Foreigners were not less impressed than the French themselves with this advance in order, activity, and prosperity amongst the French community.  Machiavelli admits it, and with the melancholy of an Italian politician acting in the midst of rivalries amongst the Italian republics, he attributes it above all to French unity, superior to that of any other state in Europe.

As to the question, to whom reverts the honor of the good government at home under Louis XII., and of so much progress in the social condition of France, M. George Picot, in his Histoire des Etats Generaux [t. i. pp. 532-536], attributes it especially to the influence of the states assembled at Tours, in 1484, at the beginning of the reign of Charles VIII.:  “They employed,” he says, “the greatest efforts to reduce the figure of the impost; they claimed the voting of subsidies, and took care not to allow them, save by way of gift and grant.  They did not hesitate to revise certain taxes, and when they were engaged upon the subject of collecting of them, they energetically stood out for the establishment of a unique, classified body of receivers-royal, and demanded the formation of all the provinces into districts of estates, voting and apportioning their imposts every year, as in the cases of Languedoc, Normandy, and Dauphiny.  The dangers of want of discipline in an ill-organized standing army and the evils caused to agriculture by roving bands drove the states back to reminiscences of Charles VII.’s armies; and they called for a mixed organization, in which gratuitous service, commingled in just proportion with that of paid troops, would prevent absorption of the national element.  To reform the abuses of the law, to suppress extraordinary commissions, to reduce to a powerful unity, with parliaments to crown all, that multitude of jurisdictions which were degenerate and corrupt products of the feudal system in its decay, such was the constant aim of the states-general of 1484.  They saw that a judicial hierarchy would be vain without fixity of laws; and they demanded a summarization of customs and a consolidation of ordinances in a collection placed within reach of all.  Lastly they made a claim, which they were as qualified to make as they were intelligent in making, for the removal of the commercial barriers which divided the provinces and prevented the free transport of merchandise.  They pointed out the repairing of the roads and the placing of them in good condition as the first means of increasing the general prosperity.  Not a single branch of the administration of the kingdom escaped their conscientious scrutiny:  law, finance, and commerce by turns engaged their attention; and in all these different matters they sought to ameliorate institutions, but never to usurp power.  They did not come forward like the shrievalty of the University of Paris in 1413, with a new system of administration; the reign of Louis XI. had left nothing that was important or possible, in that way, to conceive; there was nothing more to be done than to glean after him, to relax those appliances of government which he had stretched at all points, and to demand the accomplishment of such of his projects as were left in arrear and the cure of the evils he had caused by the frenzy and the aberrations of his absolute will.”