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From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France

University of California Press

Few states were as body centered as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. The rhetoric, rites, and rhythm of political life derived from bodies. Political discourse abounded in body metaphors. Under the Bourbon monarchs, guildsmen spoke of their "corporation," and magistrates, of their "corps." Legal theorists talked about the "body politic," while royal apologists described the king as the "head" and his subjects as "members." The Jacobin republicans were no less body minded. Even though they rejected the king and replaced him with the nation, they still needed to embody authority (as either Hercules or Marianne), and they still talked about the "great body of the nation."

The most important rituals of the state also centered on bodies. At the coronation ceremony, the bishop of Reims anointed the king's body with the holy chrism. The king in turn touched, and supposedly cured, the bodies of scrofula sufferers.1 The royal entry allowed city dwellers to glimpse the king as he passed under triumphal arches that celebrated the corporal themes of Bourbon fertility and potency.2 Engagements, weddings,

Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France , trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1973); Richard Jackson, Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Le Sacre des rois: Actes du colloque international d'histoire sur les sacres et couronnements royaux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985).

See Lawrence Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1986). The ritual of the lit de justice also focused on the body—the king's body; see Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Abby Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981).

and births of royal family members occasioned public festivals and regular celebration of Bourbon fecundity. Of course, the revolutionary republicans despised these monarchical rites and abolished them. But they created new rituals in which bodies played just as important a role. Bare-breasted statues embodied the state at the great Jacobin celebrations, and the nude portraits David did of Marat and Lepelletier de St. Fargeau became icons of the Jacobin regime.3

Under the monarchy, however, the body had a special resonance. Bourbon absolutism invested power not in anonymous institutions, as today, but in a body, that of the king. All authority flowed from the royal person, and proximity to the king equaled power. Consequently, at Versailles courtiers competed to be near his royal presence. They vied to participate in the ceremony of the levée, especially in the sixth entrée, during which they might have the enormous privilege of standing close enough to the king to hold his candle.4

Outside Versailles, French subjects had little hope of physical contact with the king, but his body was still a subject of speculation and concern. Was the king ill? Did he drink too much? Did he suffer from impotence, or was he too promiscuous?5 The monarch's appetites had political significance, for a sudden death or an interruption in the royal line could bring on civil disturbances or foreign war. Frenchmen believed that the king's health reflected on, perhaps even determined, the welfare of the realm. If the king were fertile, agriculture and commerce would prosper; if he were impotent, the kingdom too would be unproductive.6

Clearly, a special affinity existed between the king's body and his king-

Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). On the paintings of Marat and Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 74–75. Marat's nude image also figured in revolutionary pageantry; see Marie-Hélène Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death , trans. Robert Hurley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

This ceremony is examined in Norbert Elias, The Court Society , trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 78–85.

On speculation concerning the king's health, see Thomas Kaiser's essay "Louis le Bien-Almé and the Rhetoric of the Royal Body" in this volume.

In her forthcoming book on depopulationist delusions in eighteenth-century France, Carol Blum explores the connections believed to exist between the king's health and the material well-being of the country. On speculation regarding Louis XVI's potency, see Antoine de Baecque, Le Corps de l'histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993).

dom, an affinity promoted by the legal fiction of the king's "two bodies." According to medieval law, the king had a material or "natural" body and an invisible or "sacred" body. The material body died, but the sacred body lived on, for it consisted of all the king's subjects, united harmoniously in the fiction of an immaterial, figurative "body politic."7 The sacred body was the incarnation of the realm, just as the Host was the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The relationship between the king's two bodies was made visible at the king's funeral. When he died, not one but two bodies—the second an effigy—were displayed before his mourners.8 They cried, "The king is dead; long live the king," seeing in the "natural" body being buried the immortality of the "sacred" body of the state.

Imaging the state in terms of the king's body made it difficult to conceive of the state as a separate entity. King Louis XIV articulated this fusion when he said, "In France, the nation is not a separate body but resides entirely in the person of the King"; and as Louis XV announced to the rebellious Parisian magistrates, "The rights and interests of the nation, which you dare to render as a body separate from the Monarch, are, of necessity, united with mine and remain uniquely in my hands."9 Small wonder, then, that the defining gesture of the Jacobin republic would be the beheading of the king, an act that signified the end not just of the monarchy but of a certain kind of society as well.10

If the king's body had great political significance, so too did the bodies of his subjects. As sites of signification and symbolization, subject bodies constituted a valuable "political resource," one that neither the old nor the new regime could afford to ignore.11 By disciplining the body, the monarchy mastered the mind—and nowhere did it do this more effectively than at Versailles. The noble who longed to hold the candle at the

See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton...