Property regulations determine how space is organized, particularly real estate property, which has always held a specific economic and symbolic importance, but which came to the forefront of European consciousness in the twentieth century. In this century of radical changes in political regimes and massive shifts of population, property had an existential impact. The hypothesis of this article, vast on an historical level, is that since at least the beginning of the period of European expansion and religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, property has been a central instrument for state power, helping define how the population is composed and which regions are inhabited. The growing legalization and the ties established between property and protection of the nation-state contributed to its political instrumentalization, which over the twentieth century became a tool fully in the hands of power.