This paper studies the background, structure, and workings of the French Council of State under the Ancien Regime. In order to obtain the corresponding information, the head researcher and the assisting students consulted sources of an exclusively documentary sort, as well as books about the lives and works of the four Louises who preceded the Revolution and of their most outstanding counselors. Basically, two methods were used in this approach the historical one and the comparative one. Our main conclusions are: 1) The remotest precedents of the French Council of State are to be found in the Roman concilium principis. 2) Administrative contralization is not a French Revolution but an Ancien Regime feature.