The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts French: Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts is an extensive piece of recast legislation signed into law by Francis I of France on August 10, 1539, in the city of Villers-Cotterêts in addition to the oldest French legislation still used partly by French courts.
Largely the construct of Chancellor Guillaume Poyet, the legislative edict had 192 articles and dealt with a number of government, judicial and ecclesiastical things .
Many of these clauses marked a fall out towards an expanded, unified and centralized state and the clauses on the ownership of French marked a major step towards the linguistic and ideological unification of France at a time of growing national sentiment and identity.
Despite the effort to bring clarity to the complex systems of justice and supervision prevailing in different parts of France and to realise them more accessible, Article 111 left uncertainty in failing to define the French mother tongue. numerous varieties of French were spoken around the country, to say nothing of sizeable regional minorities like Bretons and Basques whose mother tongue was not French at all.
It was non until 1794 that the government decreed French to be the only language of the state for all official business, a situation still in force under Article 2 of the current French Constitution.