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Geopolitical factors make the Duchy of Savoy a small singular state with an uncertain existence in the early modern period. Re-founded in 1559, torn between the Spanish and the French alliance, and situated on the European confessional dislocation line facing Protestant Rome, it was divided into two distinct entities on both sides of the Alps. The instauration of order as well as a certain social cohesion was partly thanks to justice, controlled by the Senate of Chambery, a court of appeal created in 1559 in the duchy’s Savoyard part on the model of French parliaments. Based on the statistical analysis of the criminal procedures and registers found in written form, the study shows that the Senate adopted an attitude similar to the inferior courts–at least until the mid-seventeenth century. Condemning little and accepting every request, particularly in terms of intermediary arrests, it enabled a constant dialogue with those to be tried, within the framework of a justice of mediation. It became more repressive after 1650, with exclusive focus on the administration of justice. The 1680s were marked by an effervescence of regulation following the French grande ordonnance of 1670. Complaints were rejected in order to stop any delay tactic. Afflictive penalties and banishments superseded fines. The place of the court of appeal changed. As an institution open to the plaintiffs’ requests, it was at the heart of the sixteenth century society. From 1650 onward, it operated a vertical migration to become central to the state within a normative system based on exclusion. The appeasement policy, which characterized the sixteenth century, gave way to the will to discipline society, and especially violence. Homicides and aggressions were the most severely prosecuted and repressed crimes, with thefts not being criminalized until the second half of the eighteenth century.