2
Lim(b)inal Images
"Betwixt and Between" Louis XIV's Martial and Marital Bodies
Abby Zanger
Most studies of the representation of Louis XIV focus on the absolutist king at the height of his power, portraying a king who was largely autonomous.[1] This essay examines images of Louis XIV from an earlier, more tentative moment in his reign, before his prise de pouvoir or personal rule: the period following France's successful military campaigns in Spanish-occupied Flanders in 1657 and 1658.[2] At this point in his reign the king was still under the tutelage of Mazarin, and his portrayal reflects his connection both to the minister and to the players in the larger political arena. Indeed, portraits of the king that were associated with military triumph relied heavily on the depiction of other bodies: his ministers and generals, his family, French soldiers, and the allegories of vanquished disorder. As a marriage treaty was negotiated, and images of kingship moved toward what Thomas Kaiser describes in this volume as "the pastoral image of monarchy based on love, harmony, and
[1] See, for example, Louis Marin, The Portrait of the King , trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolls: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981). Consider as well Roberto Rossellini's The Rise to Power of Louis XIV , a film that has served to anchor many clichés, true and false, about the symbolic power of Louis XIV.
[2] This preliminary stage in the performance of Bourbon absolutism was a period of military victories in which the French conquest of territory in Spanish-Hapsburg—occupied Flanders provided the French minister Mazarin with the leverage to negotiate a treaty, the Treaty of the Pyrenees, that turned the balance of power in Europe away from Spain and toward France. The main clauses of this treaty forged a marital alliance that reflected the larger political issues in its terms for the exchange of territory, the infanta's dowry, her rights of succession to the Spanish throne, and the repatriation of the Fronde rebel Prince of Condé.
peace," Louis XIV's power was promoted by displaying his marital (and hence mortal qua sexual) body. In this shift, Louis XIV's political body was further framed and complemented by supporting characters and props.
It is important to note that the images of the young Louis XIV examined in this essay emerged from a period of transition and flux. Even though it is accepted today that the events in Flanders in 1657 and 1658 occasioned the marriage of Louis XIV and lay the groundwork for the political stability on which Louis XIV would begin his personal rule after the death of Mazarin, during the campaigns proper the outcome of the military engagements was of course an unknown. As late as early 1659 the treaty marriage, with its attendant political triumphs, was only a goal coming into view, a fantasy of the fixed, socially and politically stable state to which the French aspired. Images of the king's body produced during this transitional time differ significantly from the now canonical fictions of "the king's two bodies" elucidated by Ernst Kantorowicz and Ralph Glesey.[3] Such fictions of a body split between mortality and divinity arose in response to a specific political crisis: the death of the monarch. It was the aim of these conceptions of sovereignty to attenuate that crisis by downplaying the importance of the king's mortal body and by creating the conditions in which one ruler's body could be substituted for another. It was the aim of these conceptions to reduce multiplicity (multiple bodies or rulers) to divine unity.
Fictions of the king's body produced during the period between war and marriage were not primarily a response to the threat of a monarch's death. They arose out of the activity of diplomatic interaction and emphasized how adjudication of territorial disputes and the exchange of kin could stabilize power in a period of change. Representations of the king during such flux depended on his interaction with other bodies—courtiers, generals, the queen mother, the minister, a future queen—and with the props of sovereign performance—clothing, royal limbs, even the frames that surround and highlight such performances or representations. These images of sovereignty relied heavily on the perception that the king's mortal body was vigorous, not to counter fears of his death, but to counter questions about his viril-
[3] Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); and Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funerary Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1960). For a more specific critique of the paradigm of the "king's two bodies," see Abby Zanger, "Making Sweat: Sex and the Gender of National Reproduction in the Marriage of Louis XIII," Yale French Studies 86 (1994): 187–205.
ity. Born under the cloud of Louis XIII's impotency, Louis XIV would have had to demonstrate his own sexual potency to project the strength of his political body. Indeed, in the years before he took power, images of the king's virile—hence mortal—body were fundamental to relaying the potential strength of his rule. It was thus that in the period before his prise de pouvoir , the king's sexual body was not seen as detrimental to displays of his power, but as constitutive of it. The representation of other bodies around him was necessary to drive home that potency.
Almanac engravings from 1658 and 1659 depicting the king's military triumphs and suggesting the possibility of royal military and matrimonial success provide an example of the visual and rhetorical strategies of representing kingship (and its bodies) on the as yet unstabilized stage of Louis XIV's absolutist reign. Projecting images of long-desired peace and prosperity, the almanacs shift between visions of war and marriage. Their fictions emerge from what the anthropologist Victor Turner termed the "betwixt and between," the liminal, the neither here nor there: undefinable and uncontrollable, often chaotic, moments of transition, becoming, or transformation.[4] According to Turner, such periods have "cultural properties" that are distinct from those that characterize definable states such as marriage; for Turner, liminal periods are transforming, whereas states are confirmatory. As such, liminal periods are often marked by ambiguity and paradox, by a confusion of customary categories and divisions and by the unknown, unbounded, limitless. In such moments of flux, many fixed ideas are open to interrogation, oppositions—such as high/low, history/allegory, divine body/mortal body, male/female, and war/marriage—tend to dissolve and collapse, and liminal persons or phenomena tend toward structural invisibility. Despite this general tendency toward disorder and dissolution, it must be understood that liminality is linked to reordering. Preceding or bordering stable, familiar states, liminal periods help transform and reformulate old elements into new patterns. As Turner noted, if "liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions," it must also be seen as, "in some sense, the source of them all, and more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise."[5]
[4] In "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Periods in Rites de Passage ," in The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), Turner focuses on other writings about liminality: Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; reprint, London: ARK, 1988) ; and Arnold Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960).
[5] Turner, "Betwixt and Between," 97.
It is the uneasy yet productive relation between the flux of liminality and the fixity of established, stable, recurrent states or conditions that is of particular interest for this discussion. For such images of military triumph that point toward the dream of a stable state emerging out of military victory and out of the empire building of royal marriage were efforts on the part of the representational apparatus of the absolutist state under Mazarin to freeze the flux of historic events, to contain their unknowns and uncertainties and reestablish the fundamental oppositions and hierarchies on which the performance of sovereign power rested. These images thus offer a unique glimpse into the struggle of representational forms to maintain fixity in a situation of liminality or flux, of betwixt and between. This struggle is especially evident in an iconography whose two most salient images are of legs and frames—most particularly, but not exclusively, of the king's legs, and most particularly, but also not exclusively, of frames that contain cameo images of potential queens.
The play between the visual role of the leg or limb as a space of demarcation, a limit (indeed limb and liminal share a common etymology in the Latin limes , limit, and limen , threshold), on the one hand, and the nature of what is being demarcated, limited, encircled, and framed (i.e., ordered), on the other, illustrates in particular the dialectic between disorder and containment so characteristic of the fictions from this period. For limits and frames appear in these almanac images precisely where fixed boundaries (and the order they imply) are threatened, that is, at the meeting of the liminal and the fixed, what Turner characterized as "that realm of pure possibility." This realm is also, paradoxically, the place where boundaries and order may be fixed. It is precisely that play between fixing and unfixing evidenced on the microscopic level of iconography and reproducing the larger historic movement from war (before marriage) to marriage (after war) that is pertinent to an analysis of these almanac images. The properties of the representation of this "realm of pure possibility," a realm stirred up and constructed from this encounter, differ significantly from the characteristics of the portrait of the mature king.
Before examining the almanac images, it is important to note that the genre of almanac engravings itself engages in the mediation of flux and stability on two levels. Almanacs incarnated both the transitory nature of time and the attempt to foretell and fix that ephemerality. They encapsulated both recovery and anticipation, insofar as their upper register recaptures and freezes images of a year recently completed, while their lower half lays out and projects the as yet unknown year ahead in a grid of num-
bers and lines. Often almanacs made elaborate observations about planets and such conditions as their eclipses,[6] although the almanacs studied here simply list saints' days or predict the weather. The first set examined, produced to mark the year 1658, refers to events that occurred during the summer of 1657: the battles between Turenne and Condé that resulted in French victories at St. Venant, Montmédy, and Mardyck, and the first rumors of a possible marriage for the king. The second set, produced to mark the year 1659, pertains to events from 1658: the French victories at Dunes, Dunkerque, Gravelines, and Ypres that culminated in the Peace of the Pyrenees. They also allude to the agreement of nonintervention negotiated with the Electors of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire, the king's recovery from a near-fatal illness contracted while on a military campaign in July, and again—much more specifically this time—to the possibility of a marriage match for the young monarch. Looking back, they also look toward and claim to predict the future.
This play between past and future (as well as the condensation of several events from throughout the year into one image) that seems to freeze the flux of time may also be seen to function more generally for the status of the almanac in the larger sphere of print culture. These one-page broadsides covered with visual images and numbers were in fact a par-ticularly potent medium for fixing ideas in the public imagination.[7] As almanac specialist Geneviève Bollême has noted, the mission of historic almanacs in particular was not to give facts to their "readers," but to form their opinions (122). Produced by engravers according to a system of permissions, or privilèges , like that which organized the print trade more generally, and sold in shops and by peddlers (colporteurs ) on the streets of Paris and the provinces, such broadsides widely and easily disseminated authorized (legitimized) images to the largest public possible, one made up of both readers and nonreaders. Bollême gives impressive figures for the
[6] One example of such an almanac is the often-reproduced Le Jansénisme foudroyé , Bib-liothèque Nationale [hereafter cited as BN], Cabinet des Estampes, Qb5P68493.
[7] All the almanac engravings discussed in this section can be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale's Cabinet des Estampcs. For information on the commerce of engravings in the seventeenth century, and in particular for a discussion of almanacs, see Marianne Grivel, Le Commerce de l'estampe à Paris au XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1986). For general information about almanacs, see Victor Champier, Les Anciens Almanachs illustrés (Paris: Bibliothèque des Deux Mondes, 1886); G. Saffoy, Bibliographie des almanachs et annuaires (Paris: Librairie G. Saffoy, 1959); John Grand-Carteret, Les Almanachs français (Paris: J. Alisié, 1896); Jean Adhémar, Michèle Hébert, J. P. Seguin, Elise Seguin, and Philippe Siguret, Imagerie populaire française (Milan: Electa, 1968); and Geneviève Bollême, Les Almanachs populaires aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Essaie d'histoire sociale (Paris: Mouton, 1969) [subsequent page references in the text are to this last book].
numbers of almanacs published and their broad social reach (13–17), calling them "the books of people who hardly read" (les livres des gens qui lisent peu; 16).
Seen in this light, almanacs participated in the very flux of events; by anchoring these events in the French field of vision, that is, by moving the stage of the king's out-of-sight battlefield activities onto the streets and into the households of the kingdom, they served the machinery of symbolic power. The term stage is used literally here, because the various scenes shown in the almanacs are often depicted on the Italian proscenium-arch stage. Richelieu had promoted this design in a rationalization of the space of illusion that is now understood as founding the performance of absolutist power by organizing and controlling the gaze of the spectator. With their combination of iconography, information, prognostication, and political allegory, these 50-by-80-centimeter sheets cut a broad swath across a large audience of viewers and readers. It is perhaps for this reason that the French historian of publishing, Henri-Jean Martin, echoes the 1690 Dictionnaire universel of Antoine Furetière in referring to these almanacs as feuilles volantes —loose or, more exactly, flying sheets, because they were able to literally fly in and out of the public eye, fixing images, then disappearing when they were no longer timely.[8]
1658: Lim(b)inal Images
The first almanac image considered here, The Magnificent Triumph (fig. 2.1), does not broach the issue of an upcoming marriage but refers only to the king's military victories. It presents a topos common to military triumph: a monarch in his chariot crushing what is out of control or disorderly, here represented by the allegorical images of Rage, Envy, and Sedition.[9] The engraving's depiction of these passions
[8] Henri-Jean Martin, "Information et actualité: De la feuille volante au journal," in Livre, pouvoirs, et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle, 1598–1701 (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969), 1:253–75. Martin uses the term feuille volante to refer to broadsides as well as short livrets such as factums , occasional pamphlets reporting on natural wonders, and almanacs. He thus uses the term as it was defined by Antoine Furetière in his Dictionnaire universel (The Hague: Arnout & Renier Leers, 1690).
[9] The image of the king in his chariot is a common topos linked to triumph and peace, as, for example, in the Belgian painter Pierre Claeissens Le Jeune's 1577 Allégorie de la paix aux Pays-Bas (Groeninge Museum, Bruges, Belgium). Dating from the period of Philip II's occupation of Flanders, the painting features a chariot (of allegorical women) crushing Envy. This imagery is also available in images from the marriage of Louis XIII such as the engraving "Le Roi conduit par les vertus terrasse la discorde et l'envie de ceux qui avoient traversé son Manage" (BN, Cabinet des Estampes, Qb1M89113). It can also be found in images from after the marriage of Louis XIV, such as in the engraving "Le Triomphe de la Paix et du Mariage" (Qb4P69268), as well as throughout the preceding battles in such engravings as "Le Triomphe royal de la Victoire obtenue par les armes de sa Majesté à la Bataille de lens" (Qb1M9I723).
Figure 2.1
The Magnificent Triumph , 1658. By permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale.
is traditional, based on widely accepted images from the manuals of iconology.[10] Barely visible, Rage, Envy, and Sedition are reduced largely to sinewy limbs (arms and legs) wrapped with equally powerful serpents emerging from under the wheels of the chariot that is crushing them, as well as from under the hooves of the horses pulling that chariot. These limbs and snakes suggest the powerful and predatory nature of passions. They are sexualized images of potency and penetration, the kind Jeffrey Merrick links to personal disorder and state lawlessness in the political pamphlets of the Fronde he discusses in this volume. It is not surprising that the king is figured above these problematic passions. He is placed on a higher plane, surrounded by higher-order images, the historical figures of the court situated behind him to the right and the other trophies of his victories off to the left. These trophies are to be contrasted with Rage, Sedition, and Envy; they are not invidious limbs being crushed, but cities, controlled not by dismemberment but by containment. Put into relief, they are miniaturized, immobilized, and placed on a portable surface carried high above the heads of the soldiers in the fashion of a Roman triumph. If disorder and movement mark the limbs of Rage, Envy, and Sedition, the cities are the model of civic order and constraint, as are the neatly covered limbs of the soldiers who carry them.
The prose text at the top center of the engraving offers further indices for reading the figures below. Interestingly, the prose does not open with a reference to the moral victory over the disorderly allegorical limbs. Nor does it refer to the military victory over the now ordered, contained cities. Instead the text speaks of another kind of triumph, one not figured visually in the engraving: the celebration of the king's own self-mastery, his triumph over his (disorderly) passion. It announces:
THE MAGNIFICENT TRIUMPH
Where our august monarch is seen mastering himself and his enemies because he places his passions among his war trophies.
[10] Cesare Ripa, Iconologia in Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery , trans. and ed. Edward A. Maser (New York: Dover, 1971).
LE TRIOMPHE MAGNIFIQUE
Ou l'on voit Nostre Auguste Monarque triomphant de soi mesme et de ses ennemis puis qu'il met ses passions an nombre de ses Trophées.[11]
Invoking a king's self-mastery is not an unusual rhetorical move in this sort of celebratory material.[12] Such stoic self-control was a desirable trait in a king, and lack of royal self-control was, as Jeffrey Merrick points out,
[11] The full text is as follows:
Where our august monarch is seen mastering himself and his enemies because he places his passions among his war trophies. The duke of Anjou his brother, the prince of Conti, his eminence, Monsieur de Turenne and Monsieur de la Ferté increase the brilliance of this triumph by their presence. One sees as well the soldiers who march in front, laden with the spoils of the enemies and carrying on their shoulders in the Roman manner the cities of Montmedy, St. Venant, Bourbourg, and Mardic represented in relief, which has been conquered by the very great king with all the [military] standards carried off in the various battles with the Spaniards as well as their shameful retreat from Ardre.
Ou l'on voit Nostre Auguste Monarque triomphant de soi mesme et de ses ennemis puts qu'il met ses passions au nomber de ses Trophées. Le due d'Anjou son frere, Le Prince de Conty, Son Eminence, M de Turenne et le M de la Ferté augmentent de leur presence l'eclat de ce Triomphe. on y voit en suite les Soldats qui marchent devant, chargez des depouilles des ennemis, et portant sur leurs espaules à la maniere des Romains, les Villes de Montmedy, St Venant, Bourbourg, et Mardic representées en relief, qui ont esté la conqueste de Tre grand Roy avec tous les estandars remportez en divers combatz sur les Espagnols comme aussi leur hontse retraite devant Ardre.
All translations of texts in engravings are by the author of this essay. Original French spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are retained throughout.
[12] The topos appears, for example, in Puget de la Serre's Panégyrique de Louis Quartième, Roy de France et de Navarre (n.p., n.d.), a pamphlet that, Judging by references in the text, probably dates to the same period as the almanac. The text's frontispiece is an engraving in which the king's portrait in a medallion is held by an angel in a chariot. The third engraving in the text shows the king on a throne and is accompanied by the following verse:
Who would be able to oppose the illustrious projects
Of a Prince to whom heaven has promised all glory:
He prevails over himself [in] his first victory,
And devotes his passions to his subjects.
Qui pourroit s'opposer aux Illustres projets
D'un Prince à qui le ciel a promis tout le gloire:
Il emporte sur luy la première victoire,
Et met ses passions au rang de ses sujets.
In reading the text, it seems that this verse refers to the king's tireless military endeavors. See, for example, page 19 of the Panégyrique : "Et certes ce grand Roy nous fit bien connoistre qu'il preferoit le repos de ses peuples an sien, puis que dés le lendemain de son arrivée dans son Louvre il prefere les fatigues d'un nouveau voyage, aux delices de sa Cour sans considerer l'incomodité qu'il pourroit courre" (And certainly this great king has made us understand that he would prefer the repose of his people to his own, because since the day after his arrival in the Louvre he prefers the fatigues of a new voyage to the pleasures of his court without considering the inconvenience that he could risk).
often cited as a reason for civil disobedience.[13] The implication of the statement in the almanac is that the king's visible mastery over others is causally related to his unseen and perhaps unrepresentable mastery over himself. It seems a bit paradoxical, however, to draw attention to an invisible kind of mastery in the heading over an image that is meant to make the king's authority visible. It also seems paradoxical to attempt to make authority visible by drawing attention to the king's mastery over passions he should not have. Suggesting that the king may have had uncontrollable urges would, one might think, only emphasize his humanness. As the work of Ernst Kantorowicz has demonstrated, an early modern European king's constitutional entitlement rested largely on his ability to repress the fact of his humanness via elaborately ritualized fictions of his divine status. It would seem that underlining a dimension of the king such as his passions—a dimension he is not supposed to have—might serve not only to fit the king into a traditional stoic framework, but also to arouse the viewer's curiosity by drawing him or her outside the fixed moral and military boundaries to reflect on the passions and personal disorder edging those boundaries, in particular a king's own potentially disordering passions: the unspoken, liminal, disorderly, invisible side of monarchy. The prose text thus invites the viewer to comb the image for residues of such disarray emerging from the vision of domination and reordering. And indeed, if the dismembered limbs of Rage, Envy, and Sedition suggest a world of such lawlessness, the curious viewer can also find traces of the potentially unfixed passions of the king by easily matching the limbs of defeated passions first to those of the horses, and then, moving higher, to those of the king, as muscled and sinewy as the legs of the animals.
Of course, all limbs in the picture are always lower-order members. One goal of the image seems to be to reprocess lower-order images into containable trophies. The diorama as trophy epitomizes this movement, for, as the text notes, the king placed his passions "among his war trophies." Reading these images after the age of Freud, it is easy to recognize both the repression and condensation at work in the image. The work of Michel Foucault has made critics aware, furthermore, that exclusion and policing, framing sexuality out of the picture (which is what often happens in the representation of a monarch's body), are methods for deal-
[13] Merrick, in his essay in this volume, cites Bodin, Bossuet, and Moreau, as well as a 1649 Mazarinade, Ambassadeur extraordinaire apportant à la reine des nouvelles certaines de son royaumc et de ce qui s'y passe .
ing with the sticky issues of sexuality.[14] But Foucault also characterized such an exclusion as a manner of keeping jouissance —gratuitous, ephemeral, nonutilitarian pleasure—and the power that contains it, in the picture.[15] This play between exclusion and exhibition is evident in the treatment of Rage, Sedition, and Envy. Although in pieces, these figures, objects to be crushed by military and visual mastery, are nonetheless always hovering at the edge, as if it is their energy that keeps the wheels of the king's machinery of domination moving forward. Like the burlesque king discussed by Mark Franko in this volume, the king mastering these liminal forces makes royal power, both political and personal, visible.
If The Magnificent Triumph leaves the viewer more interested in the king's disorderly and uncontrolled ephemeral passions than in the parading of his permanent military control, other almanac images from the same year bring these passions into relief, containing them in a manner that makes them more visually available, if perhaps less powerful and interesting. Consider, for example, another 1658 almanac engraving, The Legitimate Wishes of Victorious France for the Marriage of the King (fig. 2.2). This image more overtly organizes the relation between disorderly affairs of passion and the (ideally) more stable affairs of state, legitimizing the king's passions, which had been, so to speak, rolled under the bed—or under the triumphal chariot of the previous image. Indeed, "legitimation" is the first modifier in the descriptive heading:
THE LEGITIMATE WISHES OF VICTORIOUS FRANCE FOR THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING , dedicated and presented by the love of virtue and by that of France itself to our invincible monarch Louis XIIII.
LES JUSTES SOUHAITS DE LA FRANCE VICTORIEUSE POUR LE MARIAGE DU ROY , dedies et presentes par l'amour de la vertu et par celui de la France mesme a nostre invincible monarque Louis XIIII.[16]
[14] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality , vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
[15] Michel Foucault, "Power and Sex," an interview from the Nouvel Observateur , 12 March 1977, translated and republished in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews, and Other Writings, 1977–1984 , ed. Lawrence Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1988), 110–124.
[16] The full text is as follows:
The legitimate wishes of France for the marriage of the king, dedicated and presented by the love of virtue and by that of France itself to our invincible monarch Louis XIIII followed by the joy of the people, the desires for peace, and the wishes of renown, one in the hope of one day seeing a dauphin born, the other of soon seeing the Christian princes in perfect harmony, and the third the empire united to the crown of France; and below, the conquests of Monmedie, Mardic, St. Venant, the shameful flight of the Spaniards from Ardres with the representation and victory, firm and solid support of the French monarchy.
LES JUSTES SOUHAITS DE LA FRANCE VICTORIEUSE POUR LE MARIAGE DU ROY , dedies et presentes par l'amour de la vertu et par celui de la France mesme a nostre invincible monarque Louis XIIII suivis de la Joye des peuples des desires de la paix et des voeux de la Renommee, l'une dans lesperance de voir un jour naistre un dauphin l'autre de voir bien tost les princes chrestiens dans une parfaitte concorde Et celle cy lempyre unie a la couronne DE FRANCE et plus bas les conquestes de MONMEDY MARDIC ST VENANT la fuitte honteuse des Espagnoles de devant ARDRES avec la representation de labondance et la victoire fermes et solides appuye de la monarchie françoise.
On the term appuye , see note 19 below.
Figure 2.2
The Legitimate Wishes of Victorious France for the Marriage of the King ,
1658. By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
As the prose text states, the legitimized wishes or hopes for (the legitimate passion of) marriage are placed center-stage in this engraving, displayed in the middle of the image in a framed picture of the king holding out his hand to a woman dressed in the French queen's traditional wedding garb. A banner inside this interior image reads, "Great King place
yourself henceforth under Hymen / Upon this sacred bond depends the holy bond of peace" (Grand Roy dessouz hymen metez vous desormais / De ce saint noeud Depend le sainct noeud de la paix). Note as well that the interior picture is being presented to the king by the allegorical figure France, and that each of the two central figures, France and the king, is surrounded by similar characters: grouped around France on the left are the three (actually four) allegorical female figures, the Joy of the People, the Desires for Peace, and the Wishes of Renown (the fourth figure, barely seen, is not referred to), and grouped around the king on the right are five historical persons, the king's brother, his mother Anne of Austria, the minister Mazarin, and two other figures, perhaps Le Tellier and Le Marechal de Créqui.[17]
This combination of right and left imagery (allegorical and historical) echoes the visual play seen in The Magnificent Triumph (see fig. 2.1) between the domain of unregulated allegory as passion and that of regulating military victory. Here, however, the allegorical emerges not as dismembered Rage, Sedition, and Envy, but as full-bodied Peace, Joy, and Renown, legitimate passions carrying legitimate wishes for a Bourbon heir, for reconciliation between Philip IV and Louis XIV, and for an agreement with the Electors not to interfere in the events in Flanders. As such, these allegorical figures and their passions can be revealed and advertised. Particularly important is how this meeting of now-legitimated allegorical figures and the historical personages allows the entry of the king's passion into the scenario. Or rather, how it allows the emergence of a legitimated and civilized form of the king's passion, the royal and regulated (productive, heterosocial) marriage represented within the framed image as if in an equation: Wishes (Allegory) + Royal Family (History) = The Scene of Marriage.
To understand more fully how this equation factors passion into the scenario (albeit now a stable and contained passion because set apart, legitimized and sanitized), it is necessary to find a way to re-bisect this image, shifting from the grid set out to frame our gaze, that is the division between left (allegory) and right (history), to a different split between top and bottom (high and low). To do so, one must resist the temptations of the framing scene and look at details or limits—in this case, limbs.
[17] I thank my research assistant Elizabeth Hyde for helping to speculate on who the other two courtiers might be. Despite examining a large number of engraved images, however, we found it difficult to be sure of exactly who is in the picture. Note, as well, the addition of Anne of Austria to the group. She was not present in the battle scene of Le Triomphe Magnifique .
In adopting this perspective, it is evident that even legitimized sexuality (that is, the framed image) is a lower-order member, occupying the domain of the king's own lower-order member, his iconic leg.[18] Visually positioned at the same level as the picture, the leg seems to counterbalance or suggest the limit of the interior image's framed, legitimized sexuality. A similar tension can be seen between the king's regal upper body, draped in, or framed by, formal robes, and the lower, more functional part of himself that is involved in the less regal but equally important (and tempting) aspects of kingship, not just walking, but coming together in a "holy bond/saint noeud " to make babies (indeed, one definition of the word noeud is erect phallus). The idea that procreation, and therefore sexual bodies (erect penises or women), are a necessary if knotty (or naughty) aspect of monarchy is also reinforced by the fact that the king's limb is situated opposite the medallion held by the Wishes of the people: an iconic scene of Anne of Austria invoking God's help to become pregnant after nearly two decades of childlessness. The restrained, legitimized, framed scenario of heterosociality that the allegorical figure France offers the king thus plays off the less restrained sexuality of the leg. Both elements work together, however, to reinforce what is announced in the last line of the heading, that "abundance and victory"—in bed and on the battlefield—are "the firm and solid support of the French monarchy" (labondance [sic ] et la victoire fermes et solides appuye de la monarchie françoise).[19] This description—actually of two caryatids in the bottom, missing half of the engraving—suggests once again that the monarchical body rests on the lower order, either in its liminal (unstable and ephemeral) form or in its framed (fixed and monumental) form ... or as the two work together.
The status of framed images as a basis or limb of the monarch's power can be more fully examined in another almanac engraving in which the king is being shown a collection of portraits of potential queens (fig. 2.3). In this image, where the issue of marriage takes center stage, the passion eliminated from (or crushed in) The Magnificent Tirumph and allowed,
[18] Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 433–34. Schama notes that legs are seen as lower order, a sign of a fallen woman and wantonness in Dutch painting of the period.
[19] The term appuye may be a misprint and should be in the plural like fermes and solides , because I suspect the two allegorical figures Abundance and Victory were caryatids, holding up the bottom portion of the image. Misprints are not uncommon in these images, and, of course, the rules of grammar were not conventionally followed or even in existence as we know them today.
Figure 2.3
The Gifts Offered to the Very Christian King Louis XIV by, All the
Virtues , 1659. By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
framed, into The Legitimate Wishes as a necessary component has exploded and multiplied to assert its presence more fully in the king's scenario. The history/allegory division now corresponds to that between upper and lower, with historical figures—the king, his family, and his advisors—situated on the top of the image, and allegorical ones—Virtues holding portraits of potential candidates for queen—situated below.[20] The occasion of this display is given in the title of the almanac, The Gifts Offered to the Very Christian King Louis XIV by All the Virtues (Les Estrennes presentees au Roy tres Chrestien Louis 14e Par touttes les Vertus). The gifts (estrennes ) are probably those given on the New Year, a theme in keeping with the almanac, although a second possibility might be that these are gifts offered at the beginning of a new undertaking, a foretaste of things to come. As such they would mark the king's maturity and potential entry into matrimony upon the successful completion of the military campaigns. The latter, figured in the top corners of the graphic, recede into the margins or frame of the page, acting as pendants to the cameos below depicting the king's new field of action. The banner above focuses exclusively on the field of the portraits, the scene within the proscenium arch, emphasizing that the king will make a choice from among the offered gifts, women chosen by the Virtues from "all the provinces of Europe." According to the text, the king will make a "happy choice which will raise to the height of the highest grandeur ... the one his Majesty will wish to honor with his love":
The virtues, charmed by the merit of our great monarch, after having chosen from all the provinces of Europe, those they found the most perfect and accomplished, come to present to him whom they consider their protector, ex-
[20] There has not been a great deal of work done on portraits of this period. Perhaps the most useful overview of the genre of the portrait-within-an-engraving is the chapter on portraiture in Erica Harth's Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). For an interesting discussion of the nature of portraits of women in Renaissance Italy, see Patricia Simons, "Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, and the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture," History Workshop , no. 25 (1988): 4–30. Although it is disappointing that Simons does not actually fulfill her proposed agenda to offer not only a social and historical analysis of the female gaze but also a psycho-sexual one, her readings of portraits of women, particularly her analysis of the use of such portraits for dynastic purposes (marriage, displaying riches) and of the way women were positioned within the portraits, are quite suggestive for understanding the portraits within almanac engravings. For information on portraiture in classical France that is not specifically concerned with the issue of portraying women, see Francis Dowley, "French Portraits of Ladies as Minerva," Gazette des beaux arts , May–June 1955, 261–86; and Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait Painting in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
pecting this happy choice which will raise to the height of the highest grandeur and the most charming fidelity, the one His Majesty will wish to honor with his love.
Les vertus charmées du merite de nostre grand Monarque apres avoir choisi dans touttes les Provinces de l'Europe, ce qu'elles ont peu trouver de plus parfait et de plus accompli, le viennent presenter a celuy quelles [sic ] regardent comme leur Protecteur, attendant ce choix heureux qui doi eslever au comble de la plus haute grand et de la plus charmante fidelité, celle que sa Majesté voudra honorer de son amour.
The emphasis on choice here is important and can be understood in terms of the framework provided by Marcel Mauss's observations about the activity of gift exchange as a practice in which relations of submission transform the physical violence of the battlefield into symbolic interaction.[21] In exchanging gifts, the recipient, and not the giver of the gift, ultimately finds himself in a position of submission, since he is the one who will have to reciprocate. One possible action, albeit a dangerous one, is for the recipient to choose not to reply with a gift in turn. According to Mauss, such behavior is the strongest possible response, for it is a display of independence (and this is the sovereign position). Here the king adopts a version of that posture by not accepting just any gift, but by choosing among gifts, in a kind of fairy-tale fantasy of the king choosing from the fairest in the land. Thus, if there is a veritable explosion of choice in this image, that multiplicity does not privilege the possibility of royal disorder because of either submission, sexual excess, or polygamy. Rather, it offers the king the possibility of displaying his power over his passions and over the allegorical women who present him with gifts, in that it shows him exercising his power to make "a happy choice."
Looking at the image, one cannot help but recognize that a choice has already been made. Only one of the five cameos is completely visible, the one suggestively situated to the right of the king's leg, as if ready to slide up along the limb—the limit separating the allegorical and historical registers—to join the royal family. Even if the king does not look directly at his chosen princess, she is the choice displayed for the viewer
[21] Marcel Mauss, The Gift , trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). For Mauss, gift exchange functions similarly to kinship exchange as presented by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship , trans. and ed. James H. Bell, John R. Von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
of the almanac. Situated diagonally opposite an unframed image of her predecessor, Louis XIV's mother, Anne of Austria, the cameo is the only image that might compete with the king's for the viewer's interest. The other portraits are partly obscured by plants and by the bodies of the Virtues holding them. Something is also missing from the portrait of the chosen princess: her body. Indeed, the dissonance between the king's full body and the truncated, framed, cameo image of the queen is striking. Her body seems to be another version of the truncated historical figures surrounding the king, although in the case of the queen the truncation echoes the tension of the gift-exchange paradigm. Just as gift exchange abbreviates and reprocesses potential social violence into a containable, symbolic activity, so too does the cameo "police" the potentially disruptive parts of the woman. If an unmarried woman has been allowed to enter into the picture, it is only insofar as she is framed and contained in a form as easily distributed among the courts of Europe as the almanac engraving could have been passed around among the streets of the realm. There is no danger of this female image walking around: she has been crippled, desexualized, cut in pieces like the disorderly Rage, Envy, and Sedition seen in The Magnificent Triumph .[22] But there is no denying that her excluded parts (breasts, womb, and so on) will be the origin of the dynastic continuity, just as the gift-exchange dynamic is the foundation of social interaction, or, on another level, just as kinship exchange, the paradigmatic model of gift exchange for Lévi-Strauss, serves as a basis for civil accord. In both cases (gift exchange and kinship exchange), tension over the unseen (social aggression) does not disappear; it is simply policed by the structure. So, too, the almanac engraving has found a way to circumscribe the necessity of the limbs (sexual body parts) supporting the sovereign performance by making them at once visible and invisible.
[22] In this light it is interesting to consider a contrasting image of woman circulating in France in roughly the same period, that is, the illustration of a proverb about a woman without a head. This image was brought to my attention in a talk by Sarah Hanley given at Harvard in March 1993. She showed several images illustrating the adage "femme sans teste tout en est bon," including one by Jacques Lagnet that dates to 1657 (BN, Cabinet des Estampes, Collection Hennin, no. 3819), discussed by Roger-Armand Weigert in Inventaire du fonds français, graveurs du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1939), 55. The illustrated proverb seems to suggest that if you can separate women's bodies from their heads they will be rendered harmless. In the image, however, the idea seems to be to get rid of the head. In the almanacs it is the bodies that are missing. Since no other information is available about this proverb, it is impossible to comment further except to suggest that the contrast merits further consideration.
1659: Framing the Body's Politics
The iconographic topoi of The Gifts are not new to the marriage of Louis XIV, but actually repeat and popularize an image predicated on many of the same dynamics between war and marriage, framing and curiosity, politics and sexuality, seen in the almanac images: Rubens's painting of Henri IV receiving the portrait of his intended bride (fig. 2.4), produced approximately thirty-five years earlier in a series depicting the life of Marie de Médicis. In the Rubcns image, illustrated here by an eighteenth-century engraved reproduction, Henri IV has discarded the trappings of war at the sight of his intended wife. In The Gifts of 1659 (see fig. 2.43), while there are wishes for peace, the process of marriage is one not of playful relaxation, but of herculean labor. Is it possible that The Gifts makes a subtle pun on Rubens's painting by replacing the cheerful cherubs at the bottom with two caryatid-like figures straining to support the proscenium arch? The lion's skin between them underlines their herculean effort, reminding the viewer of at least two forms of labor behind making a royal alliance: that of skinning the Spaniards in Flanders (the lion being the symbol of Flanders), and that of holding up (and together) the stage of the king's passions.[23] There are also cherubs in the almanac engraving, but they are located at the top, not the bottom, of the visual field. And they are not playing with the trappings of war, but seriously displaying them, exhibiting the lion's head-helmet on the right and tail-helmet on the left along with the medallions of the battlefield. Rubens's image also includes the battlefield in the distance, evaporating in a wisp of smokc.[24] Finally, in Rubens's painting, the allegorical and the historical figures mingle; they are not separated. Indeed, in the Rubens it seems as if there is no need for any boundary between the allegorical and the historical images. Likewise, there seems to be no need to place the object of desire (the framed image) on a lower register than the king.
Of course, Rubens's painting and the almanac engraving are different genres with different formats. The first is a large, 3.94-by-2.95-meter history painting done in oils and meant to be hung in the palace, while the second is an 80-by-50-centimeter engraving intended for popular circu-
[23] See Schama, Embarrassment of Riches , 52 and 55, for examples of the iconography of Flanders.
[24] Ronald Rofsyth Millen and Robert Erich Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens' Life of Maria de Medicis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), offers the most recent, comprehensive study of Rubens's Médicis cycle.
Figure 2.4
Henri IV Deliberating on His Future Marriage , after Rubens,
eighteenth century. By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
lation. The works are also the product of two distinct historical moments: Rubens's piece was painted in the 1620s to describe earlier events, and the almanacs were printed in the late 1650s contemporaneous with the events they depict. One might, nonetheless, pause over the way sexuality seems less fraught, more noble, in the portrayal of Henri IV looking at Marie
de Médicis. Perhaps that is because the image was painted after the king's death and his establishment as the virile Roi vert gallant . Another reason for the elevation of the queen might be that Rubens's painting was not underwritten by the king but by Marie de Médicis herself, who emerged full-bodied in the ensuing paintings in the series. María Teresa also emerged full-bodied onto the scene of the almanacs, but not until after her marriage. It seems as if queens are allowed out of their frame only after the consummation of marriage and of the accords on which it was founded.[25]
The relation between the full-bodied king and framed queen is clarified when Rubens's painting is juxtaposed with another almanac from the year 1659, "The Celebrated Assembly of the Court." In it, Rubens's iconographic topoi are once again reworked (fig. 2-5). This engraving illustrates both the similarities with and differences from Rubens's image, most particularly in the position of the cameo portrait as it is being shown to the king, but also in the relation between the registers of history and allegory and in the juxtaposition of the images of war and passion, all of which affect the presentation of the potentially disorderly political bodies' roles in the (it is to be hoped) more ordered affairs of the body politic.
Once again, it is the banner over the image that guides our reading: "THE CELEBRATED ASSEMBLY OF THE COURT UPON THE CONVALESCENCE OF HIS MAJESTY AND UPON THE SUCCESSFUL OUTCOME OF HIS ARMS" (LA CELEBRE ASSEMBLEE DE LA COUR SUR LA CONVALESCENCE DE SA MAJESTE ET L'HEUREUX SUCCEZ DE SES ARMES ). A new element in the staging of the period between war and marriage appears in this heading: the acknowledgment (after the fact, of course) of the king's nearfatal illness in late June 1658 just after the surrender of the Spanish at Dunes that turned the tide of the war irrevocably toward the French triumph and occasioned the marriage. He had fallen victim to what his own physician Vallot characterized as "a hidden venom" (un venin caché) caused by "the corruption of the Air, the infection of waters, and the large number of ill people, of several dead bodies, and many other circumstances" (la corruption de l'Air, de l'infection des eaux, du grand nombre des malades, de plusieurs corps morts sur la place, et de mille autres circonstances).[26] If the king is shown to be convalescing in this image, it is because his ill-
[25] See images of the king and queen during the marriage from the Qb1 series in BN, Cabinet des Estampes.
[26] Journal de la santé du roi Louis XIV de l'année 1647 à l'année 1711 écrit Vallot, D'Acquin, et Fagon , ed. J.-A. Le Roi (Paris: Auguste Durand, 1862), 52.
Figure 2.5
The Celebrated Assembly of the Court , 1659.
By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
ness was so serious that even though it occurred in Calais, outside the French field of vision, it could not help but occupy the French imaginary. During the course of the illness, the king almost died: his physicians recorded that the king's body was purple and swollen, he was feverish and convulsive, and, at one moment of crisis, the king was unable to breathe.[27] According to Madame de Montpensier, Louis XIV was even given last rites in the expectation of his death.[28] It is not surprising, therefore, that in announcing the king's convalescence, the Gazette acknowledged that
[27] Ibid., 54–57.
[28] Madame de Montpensier, Mémoires , vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie Fontaine, 1985), 53.
the illness "appeared to threaten France with the most noticeable and distressing loss possible" (semblait ménacer la France de la plus sensible et de la plus désolante perte qu'elle ait pût faire). Of course, in recording the progression of the ailment, the king's physician Vallot was understandably reluctant to suggest that the illness was in any way connected to the monarch's being a weak physical specimen. Indeed, Vallot's notes underline that it was the king's own courage, the "too great impatience and keenness that he had to be present at opportunities, without sparing his life or health" (trop grande impatience et âpreté qu'il avait de se trouver aux occasions, sans ménager ni sa vie ni sa santé), and not any bodily weakness, that caused his malady.[29] Despite these gestures to the immortal body of the king, however, Vallot's journal, Montpensier's memoirs, the Gazette , and even popular almanac engravings all leave no doubt that the illness that threatened the king's body in the summer of 1658 also threatened the body politic.[30]
Concern expressed for the young king during the crisis and convalescence was, therefore, also concern expressed for the health of the Bourbon dynasty. Less than a decade after the crises of the Fronde, and in the midst of victories against the long-time enemy, Hapsburg Spain, the tide seemed to be turning in favor of the Bourbon dynasty, which could at last look forward to the assumption of power by a young and virile king. Were Louis XIV to have succumbed to his illness in July 1658, the vigor of the body politic would have been far less certain. For the crown would have passed to his younger brother, the duke of Anjou. He would have been a less compelling monarch in the French imaginary, since there were already grave reservations about his ability to procreate, let alone rule. It was apparently no secret that the duke of Anjou took after his father, Louis XIII, a king more interested in the bodies of other men than in the more manly affairs of the body politic or state.[31] Indeed, Louis XIII's lack of interest in women had left his marriage barren for many years, underlining the dynasty's dependence on mortal urges for its continuity: if a king sired no heirs to the throne, succession would move laterally to the monarch's brother.
[29] La Gazette, no. 82: 642; Journal de la santé du roi , 52.
[30] For a more complete analysis of the passages about the 1658 illness, see Abby Zanger and Elizabeth Goldsmith, "The Politics and Poetics of the Mancini Romance: Visions and Revisions of the Life of Louis XIV," in The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Casssandra Fedele to Louis XIV , ed. Thomas E Mayer and D. R. Woolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 341–72.
[31] Jean-Claude Pascal, L'Amant du roi (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1991).
In this context it seems likely that Louis XIV's "scandalous" romance with Marie Mancini, begun during the king's convalescence and coming to an end only with his marriage in 1660, may have been utilized or even staged by Mazarin to demonstrate to the country that the king's body was once again in good working order after his brush with death.[32] With broadside almanacs widely circulating grim images in late 1658 and early 1659—for example, "FRANCE RESUSCITATED by the remedy sent from the heavens to the greatest monarch in the world for the peace of his people and the confusion of his enemies" (LA FRANCE RESSUCITEE par le remede Envoyé du Ciel au plus grand monarque de la terre pour la paix de son peuple et la confusion de ses ennemis; fig. 2.6)—the idea of a young king giving into passion, that is, lusting after a politically inappropriate or even potentially threatening consort, may have offered an indication of the king's (and France's) ability to erect himself (itself) from the sick bed (or the turmoil of civil war), escaping the shadow or frame of Thanatos to move into the full, fertile field of Eros. Note how, in figure 2.6, the king himself has been relegated to a cameo image, framed by the bed, in a representation resembling the kind of portrait-within-a-portrait noted earlier as a form of containment. Such usage is not surprising in a genre popular in this period not only as a way to introduce potential queens, but also as a way to memorialize dead persons.[33]
In the face of such dire events, it is not surprising that he king's mortal body, framed (or missing) in France Resuscitated , is the very first focus of The Celebrated Assembly (see fig. 2.5). There the descriptive banner that tells the reader/viewer:
Our august monarch is admired on his throne, adorned only by his healthy appearance, because the brilliance of it is so beautiful that it takes away the luster of the richest clothing that he wears. The queen his mother, the duke of Anjou his brother, the duke of Orleans, and the prince of Conty are regarded with the respect owed to the Majesty of one and the conditions of the others. His Eminence the chancellor, Messieurs Turraine, La Ferté, Grammont, Villeroi, augment by their presence the pomp of this assembly, where France is seen presenting the king with the portrait of a princess, who is unnamed, as a certain omen of his future marriage. Flanders, reduced to his mercy, expresses simultaneously by her silence both her admiration and astonishment,
[32] This is the argument I make in "The Politics and Poetics of the Mancini Romance."
[33] The ill king's image, however, is placed in a masculine square frame, which should be contrasted to the round cameo in which the living queen candidates were portrayed. On the commemorative convention of portraits within portraits, see Erica Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 83.
Figure 2.6
France Resuscitated by the Remedy Sent from the Heavens , 1659.
By permission of the Bibliothéque Nationale.
not being able to comprehend the wonders that this great monarch performed in his last campaign, and by the sound of his renown and by the force of his arms, the four elements represented at the four corners, the four successful battles, the great victories of this young conqueror, and the taking of the cities with the ceremonies of the alliance of France with the Elector princes of the empire, as well as the actions of thanks rendered by his majesty upon his convalescence in order to move his people to follow his example.
Nostre Auguste MONARQUE s'y fait admirer sur son Trosne Paré de sa bonne mine Seulement, puis que l'eclat en est si beau qu'il oste le lustre aux Plus Riches habits qu'il porte. la Reyne Sa Mere, le Duc d'anjou son Frere, le Duc D'orleans, et le Prince de Conty, s'y font considerer avec le respect Qu'on doit a la Majeste de l'Une et aux conditions des autres. Son Eminence, le Chancelier, les M.aux de Turaine, de la Ferté, de Grammont, et de Villeroy augmentent de leur Presence la Pompe de Cette ASSEMBLEE , Ou la France se fait Voir en Action de Presenter au ROY le Portrait d'une Princesse qui na point de Nom, Pour un presage certain de son future Himenée. La FLANDRE , Reduitte a sa mercy, Exprime tout a la fois par son Silence, et son admiration, et son Estonnement, ne pouvant comprendre les Merveilles que ce Grand MONARQUE a faittes clans cette derniere Campaigne, et par le bruit de son Renom et par la force de ses Armes, les quatres Elemens Representent aux quatre coings les heureux Combats, les Grandes Victoires de ce Jeune Conquerant et les prises des villes, avec les Ceremonies des Alliances de la France et les Princes Electeurs de Lempire, Comme aussy les Actions de graces Rendues par sa Majesté de sa Convalescence afin d'animer ses peuples a suivre son Exemple.
This image and its prose heading underscore the relation between the health of the king's body and that of the state; in so doing, they legitimize curiosity about the king's mortal body. Indeed, in its insistence that the king is adorned only by his healthy appearance (bonne mine ), the heading focuses attention on the monarch's mortal body. But although the king's power or health is supposed to be discerned by looking at his body alone, a large number of accouterments establish his power qua health in the picture more forcefully. In fact, one perceives the king's "bonne mine" (meaning not just face, but countenance or bearing) in large part from what drapes it, since most of the healthy body is obliterated by clothing. Only the face, the hands, and a leg are visible. The last item, the leg, is actually covered by a silk stocking, although its contour is emphasized, not effaced, by that clinging material. And yet, despite the encasing garments, the eye is drawn to the royal body not just because of the words over the image but because of what one is supposed to admire. The real object of our interest, while covered over, is also exposed, or signified by the leg and scepter rising from it, both now clearly identified with power, sexual
as well as political. The phallic dimension of that martial/marital power is underscored by a new addition to the iconography: the fashionably wide petticoat breeches (wide enough to contain the master's absolutist genitalia) and even the fleur-de-lys motif strewn over the royal robes (the fleur-de-lys being not only the royal emblem of France, but also the emblem of male genitalia and semen).[34]
The healthy appearance that indicates the victory over the disorder of disease is thus a celebration of successful arms (or legs)—or rather tools—the most successful of all being the king's sexual potency (his ability to stay erect) on the battlefield, in his sickbed, and in the marital chamber. In it, the king's mortal-sexual body is an asset to state-building and not the liability it has been too often categorically deemed when evaluated within the framework of constitutional fictions of monarchy generated around funerary symbolism. It may not be the king's sexuality that is a problem in this image, but rather the fact that displaying sexuality requires other images and props (stockings, women, and so on). Indeed, in later representations of Louis XIV the king's sexual power would be one of his icons, as for example in Hyacinthe Rigaud's 1701 Louis XIV en habit de sacré (fig. 2.7), which displays the sixty-two-year-old king as still virile. Louis Marin and Claude Reichler both note the tension in this painting between the sexuality of Louis XIV's leg and the aging face, a tension they argue undermines the power of the image. Their interpretations are clearly inspired by the Kantorowicz-Giesey paradigm, internalizing the funeral ritual's (logical) lack of focus on the king's sexuality. Indeed, in their analyses of this painting both Marin and Reichler focus on sexuality only in terms of decay, the dissonance between Louis XIV's iconic leg and his aging face as portrayed in the painting.[35] Looking at figure 2.7 in terms of the
[34] For information on the petticoat breech and other aspects of men's fashions, see François Boucher, 2000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967). One important point to make here is that although this costuming may seem quite effeminate by our standards, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes were the norm at Louis XIV's court. It is generally accepted that the adoption of such excessive style helped Louis XIV to transform his noble class into a court society (from a warrior class).
[35] Claude Reichler, "La Jambe du roi," in L'Age libertin (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987); and Louis Marin, "Le Corps glorieux du roi et son portrait," in La Parole mangée et autres essais théologico-politiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1986). In both cases the critics follow Kantorowicz's formula, focusing on the tension between the king's aging upper body and the iconic sexuality of the leg. Marin has also written on the rhetoric of the king's physicians in discussing his mortal body, in "Le Corps pathétique et son médecin: Sur le Journal de santé de Louis XIV ," in La Parole mangée; also published in a slightly different version in 1985 in Revue des sciences humaines , no. 198. Again, Marin focuses on the mortal body as decaying, not victorious.
Figure 2.7
Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV en habit de sacré , 1701. By permission
of the Blbliothéque Nationale.
images discussed in this essay, however, it is particularly striking that the king is the only human figure on the canvas. Portrayed alone, it is as if Louis XIV's potency were innate and eternal, rising like the phoenix out of its own ashes in a vision of absolute, onanistic masculinity. Therefore, as Marin and Reichler suggest, the image is ultimately about decay, for the king alone is sterile. In The Celebrated Assembly , however, as well as in the other almanac engravings considered here, the young virile king is posed (or framed) not just by his royal robes and by the usual lines of the architectural backdrop or stage, but by the group setting that includes those with whom he still shares the spotlight: in the upper register, his mother, his brother, and the duke, and in the lower register, the now legitimate allegorical female supporters, the conquered and awed Flanders and France, seen offering what the prose text refers to as the portrait of an unnamed princess as a sure omen of his marriage, an object labeled in the actual image as "the picture of his desires" (le tableau de ses souhaits).
The dichotomy between allegorical figures paying tribute to historical ones, the gift-exchange model, the equation between submissive cities and submissive women, the unnamed, framed princess, the leg leading to her portrait as libido or drive to its object, Mazarin's hand pointing out and legitimizing his protégé's leg, and the opposition between high and low can now be read as familiar elements of the iconography that merged images of war with those of marriage. Here, however, the potential threats to the king's power—ill health, sexuality, military insubordination—are contained by the various enclosures, of which frames and clothing are two examples. The display of the king's healthy body as evidence of his military/sexual prowess is always dependent on these framing images. As such, the process of celebrating the king is that of celebrating the assembly around him as well as the assembled images and objects. This process plays out the etymological meaning of allegory: from allos , meaning other, and agorein , to speak publicly, as well as agora , assembly, which can be combined, meaning to speak of the other in public assembly. Here the figurative other is not just the king's masculine power or his prospective bride, but also his dependence on other limen : the limbs of the royal entourage—the celebrated assembly of the court, an assemblage of family, courtiers, a cameo female, conquered territories, an implied viewing public, frames, and so forth. Without these elements, would the king's power be secure? Such dependence is nowhere to be seen in Riguad's image of the mature, well-ensconced Sun King.
Indeed, it is the other assembled "bodies," liminal to the king's centering image, that finally attract the viewer's attention in a picture where
passion has been enrobed, conquered, framed, and stabilized for display. These other bodies highlight this passion and offer an acceptable field on which to display or stand the king's desires. Just as the drape of clothing serves to enhance interest in the real site of his male power, so too do modestly dressed and submissive allegorical figures and cameo images with missing bodies (Rage, Envy, and Sedition's limbs amputated and framed into submission) also safely pique our interest first in the king's own well-wrapped limb, and then in the process of peace. But this process of allegoresis, or speaking of the (unspeakable) other in a manner suitable to public assembly, is more complex. For if the unspeakable urges are wrapped up, might they not reemerge in the engraving to disrupt the happy family picture of the successful, virile, and healthy king on his throne, a king with appropriate political and sexual fantasies? Indeed, could not some alternate, competitive desires lurk in the hearts of those happily assembled family members and courtiers? Could disordering fantasies or bodies transgress this scene of family romance?
Answers to these questions may be found by considering the figure on the far left edge of The Celebrated Assembly , the king's younger brother, the duke of Anjou. As previously noted, he was next in line for the throne should Louis XIV die or his projected marriage prove sterile. This potential pretender is the only member of the assembly whose full body is portrayed in the upright position. Interestingly, the frame around the image cuts off the duke's right leg, the very member so prominently displayed by the king on his throne. Does the duke's walking stick, an object longer than the king's scepter, compensate for the elimination of his leg? Note as well that although it totters at the edge of the focal field, the body of the duke of Anjou nonetheless occupies a unique position or site: he straddles the two registers of the engraving, the upper zone of mimetic portrayal of historical characters and the lower, allegorical field of women. Is it perhaps because of the brother's own liminal position that he, like the potential queen, stands in the register of the king's limb? For in 1658 he was the least significant (smallest and youngest) in the royal family, but also crucial because next in line for the throne. Or might his position be, rather, a function of his well-known effeminate tendencies, an urge apparently encouraged in order to further enhance the power of Louis XIV and yet also elided when the duke was married off twice to safeguard the continuity of the Bourbon dynasty. The duke's position is parallel to that of the "imagined" queen who is also necessary yet peripheral, hopefully fertile yet visually castrated. In the engraving, Louis XIV seems to cast his glance more in his brother's direction than in that of the "picture
of his desires," suggesting that in this scenario of precarious health the duke may be a source of anxiety about the virility and power of members or limbs supporting the Bourbon family and thus about the permanence of the titular monarch. As the king recovers his health and the marriage treaty is negotiated and signed, the new queen will replace the prince as the object of such anxiety, being seen in contemporary terms as the vessel necessary for the Bourbon dynastic procreation, but also invoking the memory of the enemy, Philip IV, her father, and his coveted Spanish-Hapsburg throne. It is at this point that she will become the central propping (and anxiety-provoking) image of the fictions generated on the eve of the treaty marriage.[36]
In 1659, however, it is another female figure who visually mediates such unspeakable fantasies, again in the form of a disembodied female head, this time of another former Spanish infanta who became a French queen, Louis XIV's mother, Anne of Austria, a woman intimately acquainted with all sorts of disorders or liminal phenomena: the vagaries of Bourbon homosexuality from her years of marriage to Louis XIII, the nature of competition among the blood princes from her experiences during the Fronde uprisings in the late 1640s and early 1650s, as well as the necessity of the female liminal position to the representation of sovereign masculinity within those dynamics.[37] Positioned unframed between her two sons, she is a reminder that liminality is always lurking at the edge of the absolutist state, since it is, so to speak, the limbs on which the monarchy rests, or the female body that breeds and bears those limbs. As a still-present trace of such liminality, however, she is also the visual proof that if disorderly, ephemeral passions (or props) cannot be fully contained by representational frames, they can at least be utilized and fashioned—shaped—to fit into the larger image of, or frame for, a stable, absolutist, body politic.
In recognizing the role of such liminal images in state-building, one begins to recognize how such fictions have been groomed out of the picture by scholars who examine the portrayal of the king's body solely from the perspective of the political fiction of "the king's two bodies." That
[36] These fictions are the subject of my book Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XV. Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
[37] Sarah Hanley describes the ritual of the lit de justice ceremony in which, upon the king's death and in the case of a regency, the young minor king took the throne publicly in Parlement. Hanley's discussion of Anne of Austria's transgressive role in Louis XIV's own lit de justice is particularly interesting in light of the idea that she understood the possible symbolic impact she could have on legitimizing her son's ritual activities. See Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
paradigm, rooted in the discourses and rituals of death, can account better for the decay of the king's mortal body than for its sexuality. The images examined in this essay were not generated from the funereal model, but were created out of the fictions of marriage. In such a context, highlighting the king's mortality would not be detrimental to, but rather fundamental to, making the ruler (and his rule) seem strong. In the almanac images considered here, display of the king's mortal body as healthy and virile plays a crucial role in state-building, as do all the props and players—persons, limbs, and frames—that work with him to project his (and the state's) vitality. Of course, as the king moves beyond the liminal period between war and marriage, such props and bodies may no longer profitably serve to structure his image. Rather, they become distractions, divertissements , in a symbolic logic predicated on promoting his divine autonomy and authority. The representations of this later period have been productively accounted for by scholars working from the Kantorowicz paradigm precisely because these images do not contain and display liminal. passions, but rather battle against them to produce a portrait of the king alone on his stage, staving off death (real or political) in a struggle to obliterate the many frames and limbs supporting him, to move beyond the liminal moment and toward (the fantasy of) absolute unity and stability.