Introduction
Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg
Few states were as body centered as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. The rhetoric, rites, and rhythm of political life derived from bodies. Political discourse abounded in body metaphors. Under the Bourbon monarchs, guildsmen spoke of their "corporation," and magistrates, of their "corps." Legal theorists talked about the "body politic," while royal apologists described the king as the "head" and his subjects as "members." The Jacobin republicans were no less body minded. Even though they rejected the king and replaced him with the nation, they still needed to embody authority (as either Hercules or Marianne), and they still talked about the "great body of the nation."
The most important rituals of the state also centered on bodies. At the coronation ceremony, the bishop of Reims anointed the king's body with the holy chrism. The king in turn touched, and supposedly cured, the bodies of scrofula sufferers.[1] The royal entry allowed city dwellers to glimpse the king as he passed under triumphal arches that celebrated the corporal themes of Bourbon fertility and potency.[2] Engagements, weddings,
[1] Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France , trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1973); Richard Jackson, Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Le Sacre des rois: Actes du colloque international d'histoire sur les sacres et couronnements royaux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985).
[2] See Lawrence Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1986). The ritual of the lit de justice also focused on the body—the king's body; see Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Abby Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981).
and births of royal family members occasioned public festivals and regular celebration of Bourbon fecundity. Of course, the revolutionary republicans despised these monarchical rites and abolished them. But they created new rituals in which bodies played just as important a role. Bare-breasted statues embodied the state at the great Jacobin celebrations, and the nude portraits David did of Marat and Lepelletier de St. Fargeau became icons of the Jacobin regime.[3]
Under the monarchy, however, the body had a special resonance. Bourbon absolutism invested power not in anonymous institutions, as today, but in a body, that of the king. All authority flowed from the royal person, and proximity to the king equaled power. Consequently, at Versailles courtiers competed to be near his royal presence. They vied to participate in the ceremony of the levée, especially in the sixth entrée, during which they might have the enormous privilege of standing close enough to the king to hold his candle.[4]
Outside Versailles, French subjects had little hope of physical contact with the king, but his body was still a subject of speculation and concern. Was the king ill? Did he drink too much? Did he suffer from impotence, or was he too promiscuous?[5] The monarch's appetites had political significance, for a sudden death or an interruption in the royal line could bring on civil disturbances or foreign war. Frenchmen believed that the king's health reflected on, perhaps even determined, the welfare of the realm. If the king were fertile, agriculture and commerce would prosper; if he were impotent, the kingdom too would be unproductive.[6]
Clearly, a special affinity existed between the king's body and his king-
[3] Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). On the paintings of Marat and Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 74–75. Marat's nude image also figured in revolutionary pageantry; see Marie-Hélène Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death , trans. Robert Hurley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
[4] This ceremony is examined in Norbert Elias, The Court Society , trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 78–85.
[5] On speculation concerning the king's health, see Thomas Kaiser's essay "Louis le Bien-Almé and the Rhetoric of the Royal Body" in this volume.
[6] In her forthcoming book on depopulationist delusions in eighteenth-century France, Carol Blum explores the connections believed to exist between the king's health and the material well-being of the country. On speculation regarding Louis XVI's potency, see Antoine de Baecque, Le Corps de l'histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993).
dom, an affinity promoted by the legal fiction of the king's "two bodies." According to medieval law, the king had a material or "natural" body and an invisible or "sacred" body. The material body died, but the sacred body lived on, for it consisted of all the king's subjects, united harmoniously in the fiction of an immaterial, figurative "body politic."[7] The sacred body was the incarnation of the realm, just as the Host was the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The relationship between the king's two bodies was made visible at the king's funeral. When he died, not one but two bodies—the second an effigy—were displayed before his mourners.[8] They cried, "The king is dead; long live the king," seeing in the "natural" body being buried the immortality of the "sacred" body of the state.
Imaging the state in terms of the king's body made it difficult to conceive of the state as a separate entity. King Louis XIV articulated this fusion when he said, "In France, the nation is not a separate body but resides entirely in the person of the King"; and as Louis XV announced to the rebellious Parisian magistrates, "The rights and interests of the nation, which you dare to render as a body separate from the Monarch, are, of necessity, united with mine and remain uniquely in my hands."[9] Small wonder, then, that the defining gesture of the Jacobin republic would be the beheading of the king, an act that signified the end not just of the monarchy but of a certain kind of society as well.[10]
If the king's body had great political significance, so too did the bodies of his subjects. As sites of signification and symbolization, subject bodies constituted a valuable "political resource," one that neither the old nor the new regime could afford to ignore.[11] By disciplining the body, the monarchy mastered the mind—and nowhere did it do this more effectively than at Versailles. The noble who longed to hold the candle at the
[7] See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). For a very useful analysis of Kantorowicz's influence on French history, see Ralph E. Giesey, Cérémonial et puissance souveraine: France, XVe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1987), 9–19.
[8] See Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in France (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1960). An extensive bibliography exists, and the studies of Giesey, Lawrence Bryant, Sarah Hanley, and Richard Jackson provide meticulous and insightful analyses of the key ceremonies.
[9] Cited in Pierre Goubert, L'Ancien Régime, vol. 1 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1969), 11.
[10] Many historians have argued that the great novelty of the Revolution was the trial of the monarch. Like Lynn Hunt, we tend to believe that the significant event was not the trial but the king's execution; see Hunt, Family Romance , 12, 53–67. On the king's trial and execution, see David P. Jordan, The King's Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
[11] The expression is Dorinda Outram's in The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 1.
sixth entrée of the levéde had been effectively harnessed to Bourbon absolutism. The aristocrat who learned to bow, speak, and dance in accordance with court (that is, royal) protocol had learned to obey. Courtiers' bodies became symbolic surfaces upon which Bourbon rule was inscribed. Their flesh bore the marks—the elaborate wigs, the high heels, the restrained demeanor—of royal will. Their movements—patterned and precise—recreated the disciplined designs of Versailles's music, dance, and architecture.
Eventually, the Jacobin republicans rejected this courtly body and tried to construct a new, republican body. They banished the marks of absolutism—the nobles' swords, the priests' collars, the aristocrats' knee breeches, and the courtly vous form of address—replacing them with egalitarian, tricolored sashes, workingmen's knee-breeches, and the fraternal tu . By these means, the Jacobins hoped to inscribe bodies instead with the marks of republican virtue.
Considering the centrality of the body in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, it is not surprising that the first scholars to study body politics—Norbert Elias, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Michel Foucault—all focused on this period.[12] The essays in this volume build on this work. Some, following Kantorowicz, examine the transformation of the king's body into a royal spectacle, one that commanded the vast resources of art, ceremony, and ritual. Others, using Foucault, analyze how state power inscribed itself on the bodies of French subjects through performance, ritual, and text. The influence of Elias is seen in analyses of etiquette as a disciplinary tool of court society and its impact on the body. All of the essays collected here add to our understanding of body politics by refining our conception of state power and by enlarging our definition of the body.
If Foucault located state power on the scaffold, many of our authors
[12] Key studies by these scholars that have particular relevance to our project include Elias, Court Society; idem, Power and Civility: The Civilizing Process , trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies; and Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). For a critical assessment of Elias's work, see Outram, The Body and the French Revolution , 6–26; and Roger Chartier, "Social Figuration and Habitus: Reading Elias," in Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (New York: Polity Press, 1988), 71–95. Of course, not all analyses of the political significance of the body focus on Bourbon France. Body history has centered on many different periods, times, and places, as an important collection of essays, Fragments for the History of the Body , ed. M. Feher, 3 vols. (New York: Zone Books, 1989), amply demonstrates.
find it on the stage.[13] Versailles, they demonstrate, was a vast theater, where discipline was expressed in the form of social ritual, music, dance, and drama.[14] Dance occupies an unusually large place in this collection because it played an unusually important role at Versailles. At the court, everyone danced: the king himself took dance lessons for twenty-five years and starred in the ballets that punctuated court life.[15] His performances constituted the premier spectacle at Versailles, and his courtiers struggled to dance with the same self-control and grace. This was a struggle not simply in terms of technique and practice; for in courtly dancing, from elaborate ballets to social dance, the only music permitted by the king was a stiff, regimented French music. Both literally and figuratively, therefore, the king called the tune and the courtiers danced to it.
The performing arts were, to use Foucault's phrase, one of the premier "technologies of power" of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Foucault, indeed, implies that the state is invincible and omnipotent, always successful in disciplining bodies; in his reading, there is little room for resistance or change.[16] In fact, however, these "technologies of power" were not always effective; sometimes they encouraged not obedience, but active resistance. Which leads us to the overriding question addressed in this volume: When do bodies change? How can "new" bodies—that is, new gestures, dress, dance, behaviors—ever emerge? By exploring the flaws and contradictions inherent in Bourbon body politics, the essays in this collection show how the incomplete and inconsistent inscription of Bourbon power on bodies permitted the emergence of a new kind of body in the late eighteenth century.
Just as these essays paint a more nuanced picture of state power, so
[13] See Foucault, Surveiller et punir , 3–4; and idem, "The Subject and Power," Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 777–96.
[14] Clifford Geertz's work on the politics of display is relevant to an understanding of the grand but fundamentally weak monarchy of Louis XIV; see his Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Also relevant is Guy Debord's notion of a "société de spectacle." Versailles was indeed a society where social relations were mediated through spectacle, through the great pageants such as the Carrousel of 1662 or the Enchanted Island. See Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Champ Libre, 1967).
[15] See Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); also Régine Astier, "Louis XIV, 'Premier Danseur,' " in Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture During the Reign of Louis XIV , ed. David Lee Rubin (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992); and Apostolidès, Roi-machine .
[16] For a good summary and critique of Foucault's views on power, see Mark Cousins and Althar Hussain, Michel Foucault (London: Macmillan, 1984), 225–52. For a more complete critique of Foucault's work, see the three-volume collection of essays on Foucault edited by Barry Smart, Michel Foucault: Assessments (London: Routledge, 1995).
they also explore a more complicated notion of bodies. When Foucault and Elias wrote, race and gender were not important categories of scholarly inquiry. No one thought to include (as do our contributors) Louisiana slaves or Caribbean women among French subjects. Nor did anyone think to describe Louis XIV's body politics as inherently gendered, even though Bourbon propaganda relied almost entirely on symbols of virility and potency.[17]
In "The Body Politics of French Absolutism," Jeffrey Merrick argues that Bourbon absolutism painted the monarch as a strong, virile, self-sufficient father. In an analysis of three theorists of Bourbon absolutism, Jean Bodin, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Merrick shows that all three linked "personal order in the male self with public order in ... the state." They compared the king to a male head of household who ruled over a potentially unruly extended family. This patriarchal image, Merrick argues, enhanced the king's legitimacy, but it could also undermine authority, for it opened the monarchy to charges of effeminacy, irrationality, and lust.
When the young Louis XIV took power, royal propagandists laid particular stress on the virile, masculine nature of the monarch. In "Lim(b)inal Images: 'Betwixt and Between' Louis XIV's Martial and Marital Bodies," Abby Zanger focuses on the "preliminary stage in the performance of Bourbon absolutism," the years 1658 and 1659 when the young king had triumphed in Flanders and made a politically advantageous marriage to a Spanish princess. At this time, Zanger reminds us, Louis's rule was still "unstable"; as a remedy, his propaganda apparatus strove to create images of virility. This visual strategy, however, created its own instability, as Zanger shows, by evoking the very thing it sought to dispel: disrupted female passions or sexuality.
Mark Franko's essay, "The King Cross-Dressed: Power and Force in Royal Ballets," also analyzes the gendering of the royal person, this time in dance. Between 1651 and 1668 Louis performed regularly as an androgynous figure. One might assume that these cross-dressed performances would subvert the royal person, but Franko demonstrates that in fact just the opposite occurred: this open androgyny dramatized the self-
[17] For insights into how Louis XIV manipulated his physical image, see Louis Marin, Portrait of the King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Apostolidès. Roi-machine; and, most recently, Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
sufficiency of the king's body. Moreover, it reasserted one of the key tenets of Bourbon absolutism, the duality of the king's body.
Like dance, music also promoted the state's agenda. In "Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances: Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music," Susan McClary argues that music constituted a key "technology of the body," able to colonize interiority and harness the flesh to its rhythms. Because music risked unleashing the passions, and with it rebellion, McClary argues, the French state sought to censor the unruly rhythms of Italian music and replace them with the cultivated Platonic order and strict detachment of the French idiom. In this way music was made to serve the state—but always at some risk, for although the passionate nature of music could be shunted aside, it could not be obliterated.
In "Body of Law: The Sun King and the Code Noir," Joseph Roach also analyzes the effects—some unintended—of the performing arts cultivated at Versailles. Roach shows how Louis XIV sought to "extend his body" to the black slaves in Louisiana, who were subject to his patriarchal rule as defined in the Code Noir, a body of law "Concerning the Discipline and the Commerce of Negro Slaves of the Islands of French America." As Roach shows, one of the means for effecting this "transatlantic incorporation" was through enactment of such spectacles as Les Plaisirs de l'ile enchantée (1664). However, certain provisions of the Code Noir also left the door open to Senegambian rituals of celebration and performance that cemented African-American identity. In this way, the Sun King fostered subversion and helped create a body that did not dance to his rhythms.
The essays in the second half of the volume describe how the eighteenth-century monarchs lost control not only of their subjects' bodies, but of their own as well. Antoine de Baecque's question "How did the King lose his body?"[18] is not merely facetious, for if we can understand how the king's body became desacralized, we can understand why Louis XVI lost his head. Thomas Kaiser's essay "Louis le Bien-Aimé and the Rhetoric of the Royal Body" locates the crucial moment in the demystification of the royal body in August 1744. At that time, royal image makers dubbed Louis "the well-loved," a public relations ploy that backfired almost from the start. First, it made royal legitimacy dangerously dependent on popularity. Was the king head of state only because he was loved? Second, it proved immediately ironic as Louis returned to his philandering ways, sparking stories of self-indulgence and indecision that only fu-
[18] De Baecque, Corps de l'histoire , 45.
eled a growing un popularity. If Louis XV could not govern his own body, how could he rule the body politic?
Just as notions of the king's sacred body were being undermined, so was the old aristocratic comportment promoted at Versailles disappearing. With Susan Leigh Foster's "Dancing the Body Politic: Manner and Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Ballet" we return to that crucial site of body politics, the dance. Foster describes the birth of a new dance genre in 1734, when ballerina Marie Sallé danced the story of Pygmalion without either corset or mask. Using pantomime, Sallé developed a vocabulary of gesture based not on social status but on personal identity. "Pantomime ballets," Susan Foster argues, "embodied a new conception of individuality as discrete and bounded by individuated bodies." Bodies previously "enmeshed ... in social protocol" were now freed to express "an autonomous identity." Drawn from performances at "fair theaters," which arose in opposition to the three authorized theatrical establishments of Paris, Sallé's ballet reflected a "new social world," one in which individuals—not kings—would call the tune.
If on the dance stage bodies were beginning to move autonomously and take on meanings outside the great royal themes, a new drama was emerging in the courtroom as well. In "The Theater of Punishment: Melodrama and Judicial Reform in Prerevolutionary France," Sarah Maza shows how the authors of judicial briefs, or mémoires judiciaires , of the 1780s employed the same conventions—pathos and melodramatic expression—as the playwrights working within the genre sérieux or bourgeois drama. Both groups sought to make their audience—whether readers of briefs or viewers of plays—into active spectators of the events described. Their aim was to reflect the moral dilemma of ordinary people, not some "eternal truth" of a transcendent monarchical order. In both kinds of drama, then, individuals became the visual embodiment of the secular ideals of the Enlightenment.
To a certain degree, bourgeois theater was a forerunner of the great revolutionary pageants staged during the Terror and the Directory.[19] The festivals of Federation (1790–92) and of Reason (1793) were in effect morality plays, where the drama of the revolution was acted out for a popular audience. Here, abstract moral principles like reason, equality, and fraternity found bodily expression in the form of bare-chested goddesses or hardy féderés . As de Baecque right observes, we are wrong to consider the revolutionaries highly abstract or legalistic thinkers.[20] The new regime,
[19] Ozouf, Fête révolutionnaire , 118–21.
[20] De Baecque, Corps de l'histoire , 12.
like the old one, needed to manifest power in a physical, bodily form; it therefore chose Hercules and Marianne to represent the invisible "nation."[21] Such embodiment of the abstract and new was a necessity in the first republic, but it also posed a terrible problem, for it raised the most bothersome question of the time: precisely which bodies would be included in the renewed body politic? We know how the revolutionaries answered this question when it came to gender: women would not be full participants in the new democracy. But the issue of race has been much less clearly delineated.
In her essay "Sex, Savagery, and Slavery in the Shaping of the French Body Politic," Elizabeth Colwill explores this neglected aspect of the revolution and shows how feminism and abolitionism entered into the revolutionaries' definition of the new body politic. "Sexual hierarchy and the slave regime," she argues, "posed interrelated moral and practical dilemmas for the revolutionaries," bringing "the promise of universal rights into conflict with the Republicans' struggle to obtain political legitimacy at home and retain control of their empire abroad." Misogyny further complicated their response, for any discussion of political participation in the new body politic inevitably raised the issue of women's enfranchisement. As late as 1794, the question of which bodies—male or female, white or black—would be included in the new body politic remained unresolved.
Equally charged for the revolutionaries was the question of dress. Indeed, argues Lynn Hunt in her essay "Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France," it was one of the "most hotly contested arenas" of the revolution, for it raised the question of what the body would signify in the new political order, and how. Certainly the revolutionaries were united when it came to condemning the old sumptuary legislation. No distinctions in dress, like the noble sword or the clerical collar, would be allowed to undermine the equality of men. But "dressing for equality" foundered in practice, first on gender and then on politics. Revolutionaries never really wanted to sweep away all distinction of dress. Bodies, they believed, needed to bear visible signs that conveyed political allegiance. Bodies without signs were unreadable and therefore suspect or dangerous.
The political pressures of the revolution made such signs imperative. With democracy the concept of the nation replaced the monarch and sovereignty was dispersed from the king's body to all bodies. Suddenly every
[21] On body metaphors in revolutionary France, see ibid., 99–161. On Hercules and the Marianne, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
body bore political weight; clear, visible codes were more necessary than ever before. This transparency was difficult to achieve, however, for a new kind of body had emerged in the eighteenth century as well. On the stage, bodies wept, gestured, and declaimed in ways that revealed personality and expressed individuality. In dance and in fashion, bodies became more individualistic and idiosyncratic. With the old sartorial and behavioral codes gone, bodies were less legible, and a person's place in the nation was unclear.
The task of developing a new relationship between the body and the state fell now to the revolutionaries.[22] Just how they envisioned the political role of the body is beyond the scope of this volume. Suffice it to say that power would henceforth be embodied differently: the body would cease to bear the signs of absolutism and would assume new forms and roles.
This collection of essays is drawn from the papers presented at a series of conferences, "Constructing the Body," organized by Anne Mellor, Sara Melzer, and Kathryn Norberg at UCLA in 1992–93, sponsored by UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Peter Reill, director of the Center, and Lori Stein, assistant director, helped inspire us to create a new, interdisciplinary vision and to make that vision a reality. At every step of the conference and publication process they were our steady support. We also wish to thank the Center's staff for their masterful organizational skills. Debbie Handren was a wizard at coordinating all the details of the conferences; Marina Romani and Candis Snowddy were the backbone of the sturdy support staff. We are particularly grateful to the Center for providing funds for illustrations and clerical costs.
We were most fortunate to have as our trusty editor Sheila Levine, whose knowledge of French culture and history helped shape the body of the text.
[22] On the revolutionary body, see Outram, The Body and the French Revolution .