Rhetoric and Resistance
The rituals of the French monarchy and representations of French monarchs employed verbal and visual versions of a conventional rhetoric of order and disorder. This rhetoric located the crown within con-
[22] See Jeffrey Merrick, "Politics on Pedestals: Royal Monuments in Eighteenth-Century France," French History 5 (1991): 234–64.
[23] See Annie Duprat, "La Dégradation de l'image royale dans la caricature révolutionnaire," in Les Images de la Révolution française , ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988), 168–75; and idem, "Du 'roi-père' au 'roi-cochon,' " in Saint-Denis ou le dernier jugement des rois (La Garenne-Colombes: Editions de l'Espace Européen, 1992), 81–90.
centric structures of authority and subordination, routinely embodied by cosmological, familial, and corporeal metaphors that naturalized politics and politicized nature.[24] Like the sun in the heavens, the father in the household, and the mind in the self, the sovereign unified, guided, and disciplined the country. In principle, at least, the sun did not scorch the planets, the father did not abuse his wife or children, the mind did not endanger the limbs, and the sovereign did not misuse his prerogatives, intended to preserve the privileges of his subjects and secure the welfare of the realm as a whole. The corporate kingdom, insofar as it resembled the human body, was composed of a multitude of interdependent parts with a variety of functions to perform. Some texts worked out the comparison in detail, for example by identifying magistrates, soldiers, and artisans and peasants as eyes and ears, arms and hands, and legs and feet, respectively.[25] As long as all of its parts, including its figurative head, cooperated, the body politic remained healthy. If the organs and limbs rebelled—as they did in La Fontaine's fable about the stomach—or if the head ignored their needs, the state fell sick.[26] If not cured, through purgation or some other appropriate treatment," it eventually perished.
According to the natural order of things, the mind, which associated humans with the suprahuman Creator and entitled them to dominion over the earth, ruled, or at least should rule, the body, which associated humans with the subhuman animals and involved them in disruptive misconduct. Husbands, fathers, and kings, by the same token, were supposed to rule wives, children, and subjects, all of whom were ruled by their instincts and therefore incapable of ruling themselves.[27] Endowed with ra-
[24] On political metaphors in general, see James Daly, Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979); George Armstrong Kelly, "Mortal Man, Immortal Society: Political Metaphors in Eighteenth-Century France," Political Theory 14 (1986): 5–29; Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[25] François de Gravelle, Politiques royales (Lyon, 1596), 118. On the body and the state, see Paul Archambault, "The Analogy of the Body in Renaissance Political Literature," Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 29 (1967): 21–53; D. G. Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (Hague: Mouton, 1971); and Anne-Marie Brenot, "Le Corps pour royaume: Le Langage politique de la fin du XVIe siècle et du début du XVIIe," Histoire, Economie, Société 10 (1991): 441–66.
[26] Jean de La Fontaine, "Les Membres et l'estomac," in Oeuvres complètes , ed. René Groos and Jacques Schiffrin, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1:74–5.
[27] On the household and the state, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973),134–51; Pierre Ronzeaud, "La Femme au pouvoir ou le monde à l'envers," XVIIe siècle , no. 108 (1975): 9–33; Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 4–27; idem, "The Monarchic State in Early Modern France: Marital Regime, Government, and Male Right," in Politics, Ideology, and Law in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of J.H.M. Salmon , ed. Adrianna Bakos (Rochester, N.Y: University of Rochester Press, 1994), 107–26; Robert Descimon, "Les Fonctions de la métaphore du mariage politique du roi et de la république: France, XVe–XVIIe siècles," Annales E.S.C. 47 (1992): 1127–47; and Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
tionality and invested with authority, patriarchal figures preserved domestic and public order by correcting the errors and curbing the passions of the unreasoning and unruly characters subordinated to them. Thanks to the progress of reformed Catholicism and royal absolutism, they consolidated their disciplinary powers over the disorderly bodies of their dependents.[28] The crown regulated female waywardness by punishing illegitimacy and adultery, checked youthful recklessness by strengthening paternal control of marriage, and bridled popular forwardness by suppressing rural and urban rebellions.[29] Bodily and familial metaphors provided a way of describing, connecting, and maintaining social and political order. These familiar but versatile tropes, at the same time, did not have just one fixed configuration or one fixed signification during the period from the Renaissance to the Revolution. At different times, in different circumstances, jurists and pamphleteers used them in different ways for different purposes, not only to justify but also to challenge the official version of absolutism.
In their classic expositions of the principles of French absolutism, written in the 1570s, 1670s, and 1770s, respectively, Jean Bodin, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and Jacob-Nicolas Moreau linked order in the kingdom with order in the cosmos, the family, and the self. Bodin subordinated kings to God, magistrates to kings, subjects to magistrates, wives to husbands, children to fathers, servants to masters, and "bestial" appetites to
[28] See Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites, XVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); idem, L'Invention de l'homme moderne: Sensibilités, moeurs, et comportements collectifs sous l'ancien régime (Paris: Fayard, 1988); and James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 1550–1730 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[29] On "the people," see Pierre Ronzeaud, Peuple et représentations sous le règne de Louis XIV: Les Représentations du peuple dans la littérature politique en France sous le règne de Louis XIV (Aix: Université de Provence, 1988); and Benoît Garnot, Le Peuple au siècle des lumières: Echec d'un dressage culturel (Paris: Imago, 1990).
"divine" reason.[30] The members of the household and the population of the realm obeyed their superiors, just as organs and limbs obeyed the head, because they embodied the dictates of reason, "always in conformity with the will of God."[31] These superiors, who deserved to rule others because they managed to rule themselves, restrained the cupidity of women, curbed the excesses of sons and daughters, and repressed the license of the populace, described as an unreasoning "beast with several heads."[32] They ruled their subordinates, of course, justly and not despotically. Bodin distinguished the "royal" monarch, devoted to public welfare and visible to subjects who loved him, from the "tyrannical" monarch, preoccupied with selfish pleasures and inaccessible to subjects who feared him.[33] Against the background of the civil wars, which he compared to self-destructive fighting among parts of the human body, he condemned rebellion within the body politic, but he also qualified the obligations of subordinates.[34] Wives did not have to comply with "illicit" orders of their spouses. Fathers who squandered their estates, abused their children, or lost their senses deserved to be deprived of their powers over others, "inasmuch as they have none over themselves."[35] Subjects were not obliged to obey their sovereign in things "contrary to the law of God or nature."[36] Bodin scorned unmanly husbands dominated by their wives and effeminate monarchs dominated by their passions (like Sardanapalus, who spent more time "among women than among men") because they betrayed the standard of reason and degraded the authority entrusted to them.[37]
Bossuet excluded planets, climates, and humors from his analysis of politics, based on "the very words of Holy Scripture" alone, but he endorsed the patriarchal vision of the interconnected state, household, and body outlined by Bodin. In the 1670s, as in the 1570s, the Creator invested husbands, fathers, and kings with authority over various categories of irrational subordinates identified with the passions that disrupted human society. "The whole state exists in the person of the ruler," according to Bossuet, because "the reason that guides the state" resided only in the ruler,
[30] Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la république , 6 vols. (Lyon, 1593; repr. Paris: Fayard, 1986),1:34.
[31] Ibid., 52.
[32] Ibid., 6:149.
[33] Ibid., 2:35.
[34] Ibid., 1:54.
[35] Ibid., 75.
[36] Ibid., 2:80.
[37] Ibid., 4:17.
who embodied and administered justice.[38] The divinely ordained sovereign, with "eyes and hands everywhere," preserved order throughout the body politic by restraining the "natural indocility" of the people, who were obligated to obey his commands provided "they contain nothing contrary to the commands of God."[39] He respected the lives and property of his subjects, whom he treated like children, not slaves, and they, in return, loved him like a solicitous father instead of hating him like "a ferocious beast."[40] The paternalistic monarch, whose mastery of the realm depended on his mastery of the self, "the foundation of all authority," did not allow whims, resentments, or desires to confound his intelligence or weaken his resolve.[41] In this regard at least, he shunned the Old Testament examples of David, who, despite his prowess, failed to discipline his own children, and Solomon, who, despite his wisdom, surrendered to slackness and dissipation.[42]
Moreau, who, like Bossuet, composed his text at the behest of the crown for the instruction of the dauphin, restated many of the same lessons a century later, in more modern and less metaphorical language. He attributed the authority of husbands over wives, which supposedly ensured the preservation of morals in most countries, to the laws of nature and the difference established by the Creator between the "strengths" (presumably in multiple senses of the word—physical, mental, and moral) of the two sexes.[43] He described the family as the foundation of the state because it inculcated "domestic docility," "the model for political sub-ordination," among the younger generation.[44] Nature, according to Moreau, made humans sociable, by making them dependent upon each other for the satisfaction of their needs, and also made them something other than animals, by giving them the faculty of reason to regulate their conduct. Nature granted rights but also imposed obligations, which the multitude, inclined "to let itself be led astray" by unruly passions, could
[38] Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte , ed. Jacques Le Brun (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1967), 185.
[39] Ibid., 170, 99, 194.
[40] Ibid., 90.
[41] Ibid., III.
[42] On the shortcomings of these kings, see ibid., 429 and 435, respectively.
[43] Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Les Devoirs du prince réduits à un seul principe (Versailles, 1775), 312. On Moreau, see Dieter Gembecki, Histoire et politique à la fin de l'ancien régime: Jacob-Nicolas Morreau, 1717–1803 (Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1979); and Keith Michael Baker, "Controlling French History: The Ideological Arsenal of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau," in Inventing the French Revolution: Esays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59–85.
[44] Moreau, Devoirs du prince , 313
not fulfill unless coerced into doing so.[45] The royal father, responsible for "protecting us against our own license," subjected "all our passions and all our interests" to the rule of justice, without translating all of his own desires into decrees.[46] He was not required to negotiate with his people, but he was expected to promulgate reasonable laws, after consultation and deliberation, that served the collective welfare.
Bodin, Bossuet, and Moreau, writing in different centuries and different circumstances, explicated the body politics of French absolutism in somewhat different terms. They agreed, nevertheless, that husbands, fathers, and especially kings, in order to prevent the blindness and brutality of their ignorant and irresponsible dependents from turning the world upside down, must, in their persons and their policies, embody the dominance of reason over the passions. Richelieu incorporated this exhortation into his political testament, addressed to the temperamental Louis XIII. He declared that humans, as a species, should obey the faculty that distinguished them from beasts and specified that kings "more than all others should be motivated by reason," both because God made them responsible for enforcing its authority and because subjects automatically loved rulers who were guided by its dictates.[47] Women were excluded from government, he explained, because "the disorderly ascendency of their emotions" deprived them of "the masculine virtue of making decisions rationally" along with "the masculine vigor necessary to public administration."[48] The cardinal warned the monarch against the weakness and indolence characteristic of women, which disposed them to injustice and cruelty. He urged Louis XIII to exercise foresight, avoid precipitousness, weigh the judicious advice of male counselors, and shun the destructive influence of female favorites, who inevitably subordinated "public interest" to "private affections."[49]
The masculinist myth of royal rationality, like other types of gendered discourse identified by Joan Scott, articulated relationships of power.[50] Given its mixed or at least multiple messages, which were acknowledged by exponents of the official version of absolutism, this myth turned out
[45] Ibid., 36.
[46] Ibid., xvii, 63.
[47] The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu: The Significant Chapters and Supporting Selections , ed. Henry Bertram Hill (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 39 (excerpted and translated from the French edition of Louis André [Paris, 1947]).
[48] Richelieu, Political Testament , 75, 45.
[49] Ibid., 108.
[50] See Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28–50.
to be one of several ideological sites in which debates about the unwritten constitution were played out in figurative form. Bodin, Bossuet, Moreau, and Richelieu all supported royal authority in prescriptive literature by linking personal order in the male self with public order in the lawful state, which was peopled by infantilized subjects. They insisted that kings, like husbands and fathers, must discipline themselves, as well as their subordinates, because they recognized that the passions of these patriarchal figures, if not carefully regulated, might cause injustice and legitimize disobedience. Critics of royal policies throughout the early modern period fixated on the dangerous consequences of the fallibility of ministers and monarchs. They challenged royal authority, or at least abuses of royal authority, in polemical literature by linking personal disorder in the feminized and animalized self with public disorder in the lawless state, which was reduced to slavery or even savagery. During the sixteenth-century civil wars, for example, pamphleteers accused Catherine de Medici and Henry III of tyranny not only by cataloguing their misdeeds but also by characterizing them as diseased, depraved, and diabolical.[51]
During the Fronde critics of the regency government denounced Anne of Austria and, even more aggressively, Jules Mazarin for mismanaging their own bodies as well as the body politic.[52] The authors of the Mazarinades (some five thousand tracts published between 164.8 and 1653) made extensive use of cosmological, familial, and corporeal rhetoric in condemning Louis XIII's widow and minister for ruling the country in an ungodly and unjust manner. Working within the flexible framework of conventional principles outlined above, pamphleteers blamed misrule on the disruptive passions of the Spanish queen, who corroborated traditional stereotypes about female indiscipline, and the Italian cardinal, who betrayed traditional expectations about male discipline. The disorderly couple, allegedly obsessed with the pleasures of the flesh, effectively repudi-
[51] See David L. Teasley, "Legends of the Last Valois: A New Look at Propaganda Attacking the French Monarchs During the Wars of Religion, 1559–1589," Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1985; and idem, "The Charge of Sodomy as a Political Weapon in Early Modern France: The Case of Henry III in Catholic League Polemics, 1585–1589," Maryland Historian 18 (1987): 17–30.
[52] On the Mazarinades, see Marie-Noëlle Grand-Mesnil, Mazarin, la Fronde, et la presse, 1647–49 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967); Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades: La Fronde des mots (Paris: Aubier, 1985); and Hubert Carrier, La Presse de la Fronde, 1648–1653: Les Mazarinades , 2 vols. (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1989–91). On the theme of the undisciplined body in these texts, see Jeffrey Merrick, "The Cardinal and the Queen: Sexual and Political Disorders in the Mazarinades," French Historical Studies 18 (1994): 667–99; and Lewis C. Seifert, "Eroticizing the Fronde: Sexual Deviance and Political Disorder in the Mazarinades," L'Esprit Créateur 35 (1995): 22–36.
ated the young Louis XIV's fatherly obligation to defend the persons, property, and privileges of the men and women entrusted to his care. Instead of preserving "the legitimate liberty that makes kings reign in the hearts of the people," they surrendered themselves to debased and despotic appetites that degraded the monarchy and alienated the affections of the population.[53] Instead of consulting the faculty of reason, which should have guided their policies, and cultivating the spirit of love, which should have united the country, the selfish and licentious foreigners spread discord, violence, and fear throughout the realm.
Pamphleteers, who blamed Mazarin, more often than not, for the mis-government of the country, inscribed his many offenses on his disfigured body and in his perverted biography. One of them anatomized his monstrous person, described as a sewer full of refuse, from head to foot—or rather, the other way around. His feet guided him into "sordid places" and directed him toward prey and booty. His hands, "completely crooked," were suitable only for grabbing and pillaging. His stomach consumed "enough food to provision a well-ordered kingdom." His liver produced an overabundance of bile that fueled his rage. His lungs filled him with pride and presumption that choked his heart, which engendered thoughts "darker than hell." His tongue pronounced nothing but contradictions and curses. His eyes, like those of the legendary basilisk, emitted deadly vapors. His physiognomy, marked by ferocious veins, revealed his tyrannical disposition. His head, full of devious and malicious spirits, plotted the despoliation of the French people and misled all the other parts of his body into "the most enormous crimes."[54] Another pamphleteer, recounting one of the king's nightmares, represented the rapacious cardinal as a snarling monster with huge teeth and a body composed of vermin and vultures.[55] The Mazarinades condemned "this animal who is the cause of our problems" by describing him as a veritable menagerie of parasitic and predatory creatures: leech, serpent, wolf, panther, tiger, dragon, harpy.[56]
The diabolical minister, animalized or at least feminized by his destructive and debilitating appetites, disrupted and disintegrated the state. In his case the body, which should have been the "slave," instead usurped the role of "master," such that he spent his entire life in the state of sat-
[53] Journal de ce qui s'est fait ès assemblées du Parlement (Paris, 1649), 28.
[54] L'Effroyable Accouchement d'un monstre dans Paris (Paris, 1649).
[55] Songe du roi admirable et prophétique pour la consolation de la France (Paris, 1649).
[56] Recueil général de toutes les chansons mazarinistes (Paris, 1649), 6.
urnalian disorder that the Romans celebrated only once a year.[57] Wallowing in sensory pandemonium, the "Sardanapalian" cardinal squandered royal revenues, extorted from overtaxed and oppressed subjects, on expensive perfumes, exquisite sauces, and exotic pets.[58] Addicted to "the most immoderate pleasures," he used or rather misused his genitals, like his prerogatives, in a lawless and unnatural manner, by committing sodomy throughout his meteoric career.[59] During his adolescent years in Rome, the effeminate Mazarin adopted the passive role in anal intercourse in order to manipulate his superiors and advance his fortunes. He graduated to the active role, without losing his feminine characteristics, by the time he settled in Paris, where he reportedly buggered numberless pages and priests, as well as Anne of Austria herself, who was quickly seduced by and completely infatuated with him. Enslaved by "the passion that tyrannizes her," she allowed him to enslave the country.[60] Since his ministry supplied the realm with "so much p[rick] and so little cash," the devious and dissolute cardinal had the perverse satisfaction of sodomizing and dominating the entire French population as well as the regent herself.[61] His oversized and undisciplined penis, the synecdochical "tool that makes its master rule," not only degraded her but also disordered the kingdom as a whole.[62]
By exposing his grotesque body and carnivalesque biography, the Mazarinades condemned "the Italian sausage" for inverting and corrupting the divine and natural order of things in the cosmos, household, self, and state.[63] He gained rank and wealth incommensurate with his lowly antecedents and meager talents, they charged, through collusion with Satan, whose rebellion against God he reenacted. He ran away from home to escape the beneficial discipline imposed by his father and later disunited households throughout France by turning "the father against the son, the brother against the sister, the uncle against the nephew, the wife against the husband, and the servant against the master."[64] He "kidnapped" Louis XIV from the capital, thereby depriving the realm of its figurative sun, father, and head, and did his best to deaden the young king's
[57] Apparition du cardinal de Saint-Cécile à Jules Mazarin (Paris, 1649), 3.
[58] La Mazarinade (Brussels, 1651), 10.
[59] Requête civil contre la conclusion de la paix (n.p., 1649), 3.
[60] L'Admirable Harmonie des perfections, qualités et reproches de Mazarin (Paris, 1649), 4.
[61] La Pure Vérité cachée (n.p., n. d.), 4.
[62] Satire ou imprécation contre l'engin du surnommé Mazarin (n.p., 1652), 4.
[63] Les Logements de la cour à Saint-Germain-en-Laye (n.p., 1649), reprinted in Choix des Mazarinades , ed. Célestin Moreau, 2 vols. (Paris, 1853), 1:173.
[64] Le Flambeau d'état (n.p., n.d.), 14
solicitude for the extended family composed of French subjects. He renounced the rule of reason, identified with men, and embraced the yoke of passion, associated with women and animals. Having acquired unnatural authority through unnatural means, the minister ruled his ruler but not himself. Out of place and out of control, he could not embody royal rationality or dispense royal justice. In doing "whatever he wants with his body," he left the country littered with the bodies of his victims.[65] Emasculated by his appetites, the deformed, depraved, and despotic foreigner prolonged the dissension that poisoned and plagued the body politic. Some pamphleteers, speaking like doctors, prescribed purgation to cure the sickness caused by the kingdom's ingestion of "abominable monsters," one of which, "all red with her blood" (a reference to the sanguinary cardinal's scarlet robes), lacerated her entrails.[66] Others, speaking like magistrates, prescribed corporal punishments, including dismemberment and castration, to make Mazarin's body expiate his sexual and political transgressions.
The Mazarinades projected the disobedience of the Frondeurs as well as the chaos of the Fronde onto the fictionalized figure of their namesake ("you who govern yourself according to your passions"), whose unruly genitals broke down the distinctions between law and license that regulated both sexuality and politics.[67] Unlike attacks on Henry III, who was allegedly ruled by his minions, and Louis XV, who was allegedly ruled by his mistresses, they did not incriminate the sovereign himself, who was too young, after all, to rule or misrule in his own name. In denouncing the heartless and mindless cardinal, whose body was not, of course, linked with the body politic through ceremonial and symbolic traditions, they nevertheless articulated standards of accountability for monarchs as well as ministers. Mazarin's critics reminded Louis XIV that he must regard his people as "the members of the body of which he is the head" and that he, unlike Mazarin, must subordinate his own desires to the collective welfare.[68] He must not have "any greater passion" than that of ruling the population "with every kind of justice."[69] He must not, in fact, have any "passions that are not thoroughly just," because unjust
[65] Le Gouvernement présent ou éloge de Son Eminence (n.p., 1649), 5.
[66] Consultation et ordonnance des médecins de l'état pour la purgation de la France malade (Paris, 1649), 5.
[67] Fiction: L'Heureux Succàs du voyage que le cardinal Mazarin a fait aux enfers (Paris, 1649), 7.
[68] Le Zèle et l'amour des parisiens envers leur roi (Paris, 164.9), 2.
[69] Instruction royale ou paradoxe sur le gouvernement de l'état (n.p., n.d.), 3.
passions like greed, anger, and lust caused not only misconduct at court but also misfortune throughout the kingdom.[70] According to one pamphleteer, who stated the point more bluntly than Bodin, Bossuet, or Moreau, subjects did not have to obey kings who were themselves "subject to their passions," because passions made kings forget their divine, natural, and constitutional obligations.[71]
Having rebelled against the monstrous minister who embodied rebellion in so many ways, French men and women clamored for the underage monarch to restore the health of the metaphorical body and the unity of the metaphorical family. Their sovereign, moved by his "paternal affection" for the people subjected to him by God, chastised and then forgave them. As the head of the figurative body and the collective household, he also instructed them to obey him unconditionally in the future.[72] In the wake of the Fronde, jurists, clerics, writers, and artists systematically distanced Louis XIV from the sexual and political irregularities associated with the Rabelaisian villain of the Mazarinades. They turned the world right side up again by reasserting the authority of the crown and repossessing the rhetoric of cosmological, familial, and corporeal order. They represented the Sun King, on paper and canvas, as the incarnation of "masculine" virtues, as opposed to "feminine" vices. The royal Apollo included many of their lessons, which he could not have learned from the Mazarin portrayed by the pamphleteers, in memoirs addressed to his son. He condemned rebellion in no uncertain terms but denied that divine ordination, which exempted the sovereign from accountability to his subjects, entitled him to conduct his life "in a more disorderly way."[73] As "the head of a body of which they are the members," the king must master himself and never let himself be mastered by passions, women, or ministers.[74] In governing the people, who could not govern themselves, he must shun both unmanly indolence and unseemly agitations and also stifle or at least conceal "vulgar feelings," "as soon as they cause harm to public welfare."[75]
Through ritual, representation, and rhetoric, the Bourbon monarchy reaffirmed the principle that the head of the monarch, who served as the
[70] La Prospérité malheureuse ou le parfait abrégé de l'histoire du cardinal Mazarin (Paris, 1652),13.
[71] Ambassadeur extraordinaire apportant à la reine des nouvelles certaines de son royaume et de ce qui s'y passe (Paris, 1649), 5.
[72] Lettre du roi écrite à son parlement de Paris sur les affaires présentes le 11 février 1652 (Paris, 1652), 4.
[73] Mémoires de Louis XIV , 256.
[74] Ibid., 90.
[75] Ibid., 159.
head of the body politic, must rule the royal body in order to prevent any divergence between the interests of the king and the kingdom. Louis XIV, perpetually on stage at Versailles, subjected himself, as well as his entourage, to rules and routines intended to promote and preserve religious, social, and political order at court and throughout the country. He disciplined parlementaires, peasants, and Protestants but failed, at least according to domestic and foreign critics, to live up to his own prescriptions. Unlike poets and painters in the service of the crown, these critics did not disguise or decorate the mortal body of the Sun King with classical, Christian, and historical trappings. They portrayed him, on the contrary, as debauched, diseased, defeated, and despotic.[76] The authors of slanderous texts published during the eighteenth century recycled the charges about sexual and political disorders against his successors. They defamed the profligate Louis XV, who evidently could not control his unruly libido, and the impotent Louis XVI, who apparently could not control his unruly wife.[77] Both kings, dominated by women, betrayed "the spirit of counsel, justice, and reason" that supposedly distinguished "the sovereign power" residing in the person of the male sovereign.[78] Royal ideology itself, which connected order in the royal body with order in the body politic, supplied much of the raw material for gendered accusations about the disruptive effects of royal sexuality on royal rationality and, by extension, the welfare of the French people.
In the eighteenth century, as during the Fronde, critics of royal policies reprimanded ministers and monarchs for violating in practice obligations that apologists of absolutism like Bodin, Bossuet, and Moreau acknowledged in principle. Parlementaires legitimized resistance by expropriating the religious and familial language deployed by the monar-
[76] See Ferrier-Caverivière, Image de Louis XIV , pt. 2, chap. 5; and Burke, Fabrication of Louis XIV , chap. 10.
[77] On criticism of Louis XV (and his mistresses), Louis XVI (and Marie Antoinette), and the privileged orders in general, see Jean-Pierre Guicciardi, "Between the Licit and the Illicit: The Sexuality of the King," in 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment , ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 88–97; Antoine de Baecque, "Pamphlets: Libel and Political Mythology," in Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800 , ed. Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 165–76; Chantal Thomas, La Reine scélérate: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989); Jeffrey Merrick, "Sexual Politics and Public Order in Late-Eighteenth-Century France: The Mémoires Secrets and the Correspondance Secrète," Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 68–84; Hunt, Family Romance; Antoine de Baecque, Le Corps de l'histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993); and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Books of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
[78] Remontrances du Parlement de Paris , 2:557.
chy to consolidate the sovereignty of the crown.[79] They not only reminded the king that he must rule in a godly and fatherly manner, as he himself claimed to do, but also deplored and even denounced departures from the standards of godliness and fatherliness. These standards turned out to be much more ambiguous and flexible than they looked in prescriptive sources, especially during constitutional conflicts, when the deceptive consensus about figurative ways of describing relations of authority and subordination broke down. The magistrates generally interpreted them in such a way as to justify their own political pretensions, without discarding the traditional metaphorology and reconstructing the state in disembodied style as some of their "patriotic" and "philosophic" contemporaries did. Pamphleteers, meanwhile, supported parlementary opposition to despotism by exposing and exaggerating depravity at court and throughout French society. They suggested that the bodies of Louis XV and his grandson, who seemed less visible and also less reliable than their predecessors, actually endangered the realm, instead of unifying, guiding, and disciplining it. Lawyers reinforced the message by publicizing the sexual politics of dissension within households during the last decades of the ancien régime.[80] As long as kingship remained entangled with corporeal order, as well as divine purposes and domestic authority, kings remained vulnerable to charges formulated within the framework of traditional principles. The conventional rhetoric, in the last analysis, was largely reversible, and critics of the official version of absolutism, even before 1789, manipulated it more effectively than the monarchy itself did.
[79] See Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); and idem "Fathers and Kings: Patriarchalism and Absolutism in Eighteenth-Century French Politics," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , no. 308 (1993): 281–303.
[80] See Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jeffrey Merrick, "Domestic Politics: Divorce and Despotism in Eighteenth-Century France," in The Past as Prologue: Essays to Celebrate the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of ASECS , ed. Carla Hay and Syndy Conger (New York: AMS Press, 1995), 373–86; and idem, "Impotence in Court and at Court," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 25 (1995): 199–215.