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‪With the rise of “commercial society” in the 18th century, a major change took place in the idea of citizenship: the citizen came to be considered as a shareholderin public affairs. By adapting the terminology of business law to the political domain, a more economic and contractual approach to the link between electors and elected officials took over progressively at the end of the Early Modern era, and this led to the idea of representative mandate. This article aims to trace some of the stages of this semantic transformation by showing the part played by translations from English to French in this phenomenon in the18th century. At the end of the 17th century, Cicero’s image of the magistrate as guardian of the republic was revived in British political thought, but it was translated into the terms of the law of trust in the great British anti-absolutist and republican texts, leading to the emergence of a whole doctrine of good government as a limited government by rulers who were trustees of their people’s liberties. Difficult to translate, this political terminology was transcribed into French in the 18th century using the vocabulary of commission and proxy. This set of translations led to the politicising of a set of terms that had previously been confined to commercial use and that would come to constitute the political vocabulary of the French Revolution, such as commettants (“principals)”, commis (“employees”), constituants (“constituents”), and pouvoirs constitués (“established powers”). All this transformed citizens into political shareholders.‪