1
The Body Politics of French Absolutism

Jeffrey Merrick

During his childhood Valentin Jamerey, born into a peasant family in 1695, heard fantastic stories about the city of Paris, which reportedly had paved streets lined with houses almost as big as the church in his village. He assumed that the people who lived in these oversized dwellings were larger than his own neighbors. He also assumed that the king, who was responsible for the administration of justice throughout the country, was even taller than the local judge, who was himself noticeably taller than the villagers under his jurisdiction. The child knew that the judge had an imposing voice, so he imagined that the king, who exercised "absolute power," commanded respect by means of his thunderous speech. He wondered, furthermore, if the monarch was invisible and immortal, like the Divinity, or in fact accessible to ordinary subjects.^[1] No matter what peasants like Jamerey might have suspected, Louis XIV was no giant or god. Heels and wigs made him look taller than he really was. He outlived most of his contemporaries, not to mention his own son and grandson, but he eventually died from gangrene, after having survived smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, blennorrhagia, dysentery, intestinal parasites, respiratory infections, gravel, gout, rheumatism, skin diseases, oral abscesses, and the celebrated anal fistula. During his seventy years on the throne the Sun King, like other mortals, suffered from headaches, dizziness, palpitations, indigestion, flatulence, and nightmares.^[2]

[1] Valentin Jamerey-Duval, Mémoires: Enfance et éducation d'un paysan au XVIIIe siècle , ed. Jean-Marie Goulemot (Paris: Sycomore, 1981), 117.

[2] See Michelle Caroly, Le Corps du roi-soleil: Grandeurs et misères de Sa Majesté Louis XIV (Paris: Imago, 1991). On the physical and psychological history of his predecessor, documented in the remarkable journal of Jean Héroard, see Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, Louis XIII: The Making of a King (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII, the Just (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Madeleine Foisil, "Le Corps de l'adolescent royal," in Le Corps à la Renaissance: Actes du XXXe Colloque de Tours 1987 , ed. Jean Céard, Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, and Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), 309–20.

The young Jamerey made sense of the concept of sovereignty by projecting suitable physical characteristics onto the person of the sovereign he had never seen with his own eyes or heard with his own ears. The doctors who scrutinized Louis XIV's flesh and feces day after day periodically attempted to discipline his gargantuan appetite and tactfully refrained from documenting his sexual athletics. They recorded his numerous afflictions in private journals and used their limited skills to help him preserve public appearances. The material body of the king, which hungered, lusted, and suffered, was connected with the figurative body of the kingdom through ritual, representation, and rhetoric. State ceremonies transformed the monarch, outfitted with all the trappings of majesty, into the visible image of monarchy. Writers and artists camouflaged his foibles and failures by clothing him, with Olympian or imperial apparel, in heroic style. The metaphorical traditions of the French crown, elaborated and emended over the course of centuries, structured the political culture of the kingdom around the sacralized and symbolized body of the king. The Bourbons did not simply ride the juggernaut constructed by apologists of absolutism across the country, which resisted centralization in many ways. The principles of absolutism, by the same token, did not constitute an inflexible ideology that precluded opposition, because they remained susceptible to conflicting interpretations throughout the ancien régime. This essay outlines the ways in which the sovereign embodied these principles and, like those by Abby Zanger and Thomas Kaiser in this volume, explores the tensions within the body politics of French absolutism.

Rituals and Representations

The French monarch, according to generations of jurists and clerics who stated and restated the tenets of absolutism under the Bourbon dynasty, inherited his crown from his predecessor and derived his authority from the Deity, not from the people. He was therefore ac-

countable only to God, who commanded the heterogeneous population entrusted to his care to obey him but also charged him to rule them justly. Differentiated, like the organs and limbs that composed the human body, by the distinctive but complementary functions assigned to them by the Creator, subjects were subordinated, for their own good as well as the general welfare, to their divinely ordained ruler. Divided by their disparate loyalties as members of multitudinous and contentious corporate groups, they were united by their common allegiance to the sovereign, who, unlike them, had no selfish interests of his own and recognized the needs of the realm as a whole. He maintained public order by adjudicating conflicts and restoring harmony among the various parts of the body politic, which could not collaborate or survive without a head to direct them or, for that matter, with more than one head in charge. The king and the kingdom were distinguished in principle, because the one effectively limited the prerogatives and inevitably outlasted the reign of the other, but they could not be separated in practice, because the state had no other collective incarnation and no constitutional initiative of its own.

Apologists of absolutism characterized the king as "the head of his state" and the state as "the body of its king."^[3] The monarch, also described as the soul, mind, heart, or spirit that animated and sustained the people, ruled his subjects in the way a responsible father ruled children connected to him through love, as opposed to the way an irresponsible despot ruled slaves alienated from him through fear. In dispensing royal justice and promulgating royal declarations, the king used his authority to secure the general welfare without misusing it in an arbitrary or tyrannical manner. He was not restricted by contractual obligations or restrained by institutionalized checks and balances, but he respected the precepts of divine and natural law, the fundamental laws of the realm, and the customary privileges of estates, provinces, cities, professions, guilds, and so forth. The sovereign did not share the plenitude of power annexed to the hereditary crown, but he necessarily relied on the services of administrative agents and willingly listened to the grievances of corporate groups. With the example of his ancestors in mind and the advice of his counselors in hand, he fulfilled the mission of the monarchy, in theory at least, by preserving the established order of things. In reality, of course, the Bourbons tampered with the religious, social, and political structures of the ancien régime. They routinely found themselves involved in negotiations as well as contestations with their unruly subjects,

[3] Jean-François Senault, Le Monarque, ou les devoirs du souverain (Paris, 1661), 250.

and they regularly exercised their prerogatives in ways that belied their fatherly pretensions.

The king, needless to say, played the starring role in the state rituals that embodied the principles of the unwritten constitution of the kingdom.^[4] During the royal coronation ceremony at Reims he was anointed in several locations, including the head and hands, with the miraculous oil conserved in the Holy Ampulla. Following this consecration of wisdom and strength, he was invested with the glorious regalia accumulated by his predecessors. Visibly ordained by God, visibly identified with Clovis, Charlemagne, and Saint Louis, he released prisoners, distributed alms, and cured scrofulous men and women with his thaumaturgic touch, subsequently exercised on major religious holidays. Having vowed at Reims to defend orthodoxy and punish iniquity, the sovereign traditionally confirmed the privileges of the corporate groups that acted out their submission by parading before his person during royal entrées in the capital and the provinces. Municipalities extolled his virtues and celebrated his victories in his presence, and eulogists remembered them after his death. The royal funeral ceremony, as elaborated during the sixteenth century, involved a life-size and lifelike effigy of the deceased monarch, which effectively prolonged his reign until the next coronation and thereby ensured the corporeal and juridical continuity of the monarchy. The individual, physical, and mortal body of the king ended up in the ancestral crypt at

[4] See Ralph E. Giesey, Cérémonial et puissance souveraine: France, XVe–XVIIe siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1987); Alain Boureau, Le Simple Corps du roi: L'Impossible Sacralité des souverains français (Paris: Editions de Paris, 1989). On the coronation, see Richard A. Jackson, Vive le Roi! A History of the French Coronation from, Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and Marina Valensise, "Le Sacre du roi: Stratégie symbolique et doctrine politique de la monarchie française," Annales E.S.C. 41 (1986): 543–78. On the entry, see Lawrence M. Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1986); idem, "Politics, Ceremonies, and Embodiments of Majesty in Henry II's France," in European Monarchy: Its Evolution and Practice from, Roman Antiquity to Modern Times , ed. Heinz Duchhardt, Richard A. Jackson, and David Sturdy (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992), 127–54; and François Moureau, "Les Entrées royales ou le plaisir du prince," XVIIIe Siècle 17 (1985): 195–208. On the funeral, see Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1960); and Robert N. Nicolich, "Sunset: The Spectacle of the Royal Funeral and Memorial Services at the End of the Reign of Louis XIV," 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), 45–72. On the lit de justice , see Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Mack P. Holt, "The King in Parlement: The Problem of the Lit de Justice in Sixteenth-Century France," Historical Journal 31 (1988): 507–23; and Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Richard C. Famiglietti, The Lit de Justice: Semantics, Ceremonial, and the Parlement of Paris, 1300–1600 (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1994).

Saint-Denis (except for the heart and bowels, consigned as a matter of course to various Parisian churches), but the collective, intangible, and immortal body of kingship lived on in the person of his successor.

The programs and meanings of these rituals changed after 1610, when Henry IV was assassinated by Ravaillac and the underage dauphin was recognized as king by the Parlement of Paris during a lit de justice . This unprecedented method of inauguration, replayed when five-year-olds inherited the crown in 1643 and 1715, eclipsed the constitutional significance of the funeral and coronation ceremonies. The effigy of the deceased monarch disappeared from the funeral because it was no longer necessary for the purpose of assuring dynastic succession. The popular acclamation preceding the royal oaths disappeared from the coronation because it suggested a measure of popular consent incompatible with absolutist ideology. Intent on consolidating royal sovereignty over their realm, still divided by countless legal and fiscal distinctions, the Bourbons reworked the ritualistic resources of the monarchy. They downplayed the practice of collaboration between ruler and ruled and emphasized the principle of the concentration of authority in their own hands. By the time of Louis XIV they used entrées , staged less frequently than before, to promote royal power at the expense of local privileges. By the time of Louis XV they used lits de justice , staged more frequently than before, to force registration of royal declarations by the troublesome parlementaires, who led the resistance to absolutism in the eighteenth century. They largely abandoned journeys through the provinces, undertaken by their predecessors to pacify or unify the country, and constructed a microcosmic model of religious, social, and political order around themselves at Versailles.^[5]

Louis XIV, who traveled through the Midi after the conclusion of the prolonged war with Spain and entered Paris triumphantly with his bride in 1660, settled at Versailles some two decades later.^[6] The elaborate etiquette regulating language, gestures, and conduct demonstrated his sovereignty more effectively than impressive but infrequent rituals invested with constitutional significance. The theatrical life of the French court collapsed the mystical into the physical body of the king, who played the role

[5] On royal journeys, see Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe, and Daniel Nordman, Un Tour de France royal: Le Voyage de Charles IX, 1564–1566 (Paris: Aubier, 1984).

[6] On the Parisian entry, see Karl Mösender, Zeremoniell und monumentale Poesie: Die Entrée solonnelle Ludwigs IV. 1600 in Paris (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1983). On the royal court, see Giesey, Cérémonial et puissance souveraine; Norbert Elias, The Court Society , trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); and Jean-François Solnon, La Cour de France (Paris: Fayard, 1987).

of the sun not only when costumed as such in allegorical ballets but also during the daily cycle from lever to coucher . The palace and gardens, decorated with Apollonian imagery, manifested and reinforced his authority. They provided a stage for plays and pageants that celebrated his mastery over self and subjects as well as external enemies and forces of disorder in the natural and human worlds.^[7] Quotidian routines and extravagant spectacles focused the attention of the domesticated aristocracy—and by extension, the corporate kingdom as a whole—on the figure of the monarch, who dispensed sinecures and pensions to the courtiers congregated around him and distributed favors by controlling proximity to his person.^[8] Louis XIV, who distinguished France from servile countries in which rulers assumed that majesty required them to conceal themselves from their people, dressed, dined, and even defecated with an audience.^[9] He generally avoided Paris, which had rebelled against the regency government during his childhood, but did make himself accessible to ordinary subjects at times during the regular course of events at Versailles.

The Bourbon withdrawal from public view accelerated during the reign of Louis XV, who frequented the private quarters of his mistresses and stopped exercising the royal touch on religious holidays.^[10] Parisians acclaimed him as Louis "the Beloved" after his miraculous recovery from an illness at Metz and his glorious victory on the battlefield at Fontenoy in 1744.^[11] They shouted "Long live the king!" when he laid the cornerstone of the church of Saint Geneviève and kneeled in the mud before the holy sacrament on the Pont Neuf.^[12] More detached from this less vis-

[7] See Abby Zanger's essay in this volume, as well as her "Making Sweat: Sex and the Gender of National Reproduction in the Marriage of Louis XIII," Yale French Studies 86 (1994): 187–205.

[8] On festivals, see Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981); Marie-Christine Moine, Les Fêtes à la cour du Roi-soleil, 1653–1715 (Paris: Editions Fernand Lanore, 1984); and Orest Ranum, "Islands and the Self in a Ludovican Fête," and Régine Astier, "Louis XIV, 'Premier Danseur,' " in Rubin (ed.), Sun King , 17–34 and 73–102, respectively.

[9] Mémoires de Louis XIV , ed. Jean Longnon, rev. and corrected ed. (Paris: Librairie Jean Tallandier, 1978), 133.

[10] See Jean de Viguerie, "Le Roi et le public: L'Exemple de Louis XV," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 34 (1987): 23–35.

[11] See Thomas Kaiser's essay in this volume, as well as his "Madame de Pompadour and the Theaters of Power," French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 1025–44.

[12] Siméon-Prosper Hardy, "Mes Loisirs, on journal des événements tels qu'ils parviennent à ma connaissance," Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. fonds français 6680, fol. 52; Anne-Emmanuel-Ferdinand-François de Croy, Journal inédit , ed. Emmanuel-Henry de Grouchy and Paul Cottin, 4 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1906), 2:227.

ible sovereign, they confronted him with damning silence on many other occasions, especially when he traversed the capital in order to discipline the popular parlementaires, widely regarded as defenders of liberty against despotism. The royal body, in the spotlight during the lit de justice , projected not health, courage, or piety, but rather brutality. It was reported that Louis XV not only "sat down" on the bed of Lady Justice but also "raped" her.^[13] Prolonged conflicts concerning religious, fiscal, and administrative issues during the 1750s suggested that the king, apparently blind to the misery of his people and deaf to the protests of his magistrates, did not have the interests of the kingdom at heart or in mind.^[14] These conflicts motivated Damiens to strike the sacred person of the monarch—who seemed figuratively, if not literally, inaccessible—in the courtyard at Versailles in 1757. The public executioners dismembered this regicide, like Ravaillac before him, for attacking the divinely ordained sovereign and thereby endangering the body politic as a whole.^[15]

The parlementaires, who claimed to speak for the body politic, had already staked out more independence for it, and for themselves, than absolutist ideology allowed. During the so-called session of the flagellation in 1766, the king had to remind them that "the public order as a whole" emanated from his person and that "the interests of the nation," which they had dared to describe as a corporate body differentiated from the crown, remained inseparable from his own and rested in his hands alone.^[16] The increasingly unpopular Louis XV exerted royal authority in a patriarchal manner by suppressing the parlements, and the initially popular Louis XVI exercised royal prerogatives in a paternalistic style by recalling them. As late as 1786, when he made his only substantial trip away from Versailles, ordinary people flocked to see him. He allowed his "children," as he called them, to approach his unguarded person and did not take offense when one woman spontaneously kissed him "like a

[13] Correspondance secrète, politique, et littéraire , 18 vols. (London, 1787–90), 1:69.

[14] On public opinion, see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991); and Arlette Farge, Dire et mal dire: L'Opinion publique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992).

[15] See Dale K. Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime, 1750–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Pierre Rétat, ed., L'Attentat de Damiens: Discours sur l'événement au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions du CNRS; Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1979). On regicide more generally, see also Roland Mousnier, L'Assassinat d'Henri IV, 14 mai 1610 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); Jacques Hennequin, Henri IV dans ses oraisons funèbres, ou la naissance d'une légende (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977); and Pierre Chevallier, Les Régicides: Clément, Ravaillac, Damiens (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

[16] Les Remontrances du parlement de Paris au XVIIIe siecle , ed. Jules Flammermont, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1888–98), 2:558.

father."^[17] He distinguished himself, during this voyage "in the midst of his family," from "despots" who "hide in the depths of their palaces," and many of the cahiers de doléances drafted in 1789 addressed him in affectionate and respectful terms.^[18] By that time, however, the monarchy had lost control of its ritualistic and representational resources, as well as political culture more generally. The "nation," more disengaged from the royal body and less infantilized by the royal father, expressed its sentiments on the occasion of the funeral of Louis XV in 1774 and the coronation of Louis XVI in 1775, not to mention the lits de justice of 1787–88 and the ceremonies culminating in the royal excursion to Paris just days after the assault on the Bastille.^[19]

French sovereigns may have confined themselves more and more to Versailles, but they dispatched representatives and disseminated representations throughout the country. The royal name, inscribed on laws and invoked in public prayers, and the royal image, stamped on coins and sculpted in public squares, identified the largely invisible king as the embodiment of the kingdom and gave kingship real presence in the daily lives of his subjects, who celebrated the births of his children and the victories of his armies.^[20] Writers and artists commonly described and depicted the monarch in stylized form by glorifying his piety, prowess, prudence, and patronage. They disguised, or at least embellished, his person with classical, Christian, and historical references and symbols that illuminated his royal mission and illustrated his royal virtues.^[21] They regularly asso-

[17] Le Voyage de Louis XVI en Normandie, 21–29 juin 1786 , ed. Jeanne-Marie Gaudillot (Caen: Société d'Impression Caron, 1967), 50, 35.

[18] L'Espion anglais, ou correspondance secrète entre Milord All'Eye et Milord All'Ear , 10 vols. (London, 1784–86), 2:54. On the cahiers , see John Markoff, "Images du roi an début de la Révolution," in L'Image de la Révolution française , ed. Michel Vovelle, 4 vols. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1990), 1:237–45.

[19] See Jeffrey Merrick, "Politics in the Pulpit: Ecclesiastical Discourse on the Death of Louis XV," History of European Ideas 7 (1988): 149–60; Martin Papenheim, Erinnerung und Unsterblichkeit: Semantische Studien zum Totenkult in Frankreich, 1715–1794 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992); Alain-Charles Gruber, Les Grandes Fêtes et leurs décors à l'époque de Lout's XVI (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1972); Hermann Weber, "Das Sacre Ludwigs XVI. vom 11. Juni 1775 und die Krise des Ancien Regime, in Vom Ancien Regime zum Französischen Revolution: Forschungen und Perspektiven , ed. Ernst Hinrichs, Eberhard Schmitt, and Rudolf Vierhaus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 539–65; and Lawrence M. Bryant, "Royal Ceremony and the Revolutionary Strategies of the Third Estate," Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1989): 413–50.

[20] On the diffusion of royal news, see Michèle Fogel, Les Cérémonies de l'information dans la France du XYIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

[21] On royal symbolism in general, see Jean Céard, "Les Visages de la royauté en France à la Renaissance," in Les Monarchies , ed. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 73–90; Anne-Marie Lecoq, "La Symbolique de l'état: Les Images de la monarchie des premiers Valois à Louis XIV," in Les Lieux de mémoire , ed. Pierre Nora, 2 vols. in 4. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–86), 2/2:145–92; Gérard Sabatier, "Les Rois de représentation: Image et pouvoir (XVIe–XVIIe siècle)," Revue de synthèse , 4th ser., 3–4 (1991): 387–422. On representations of Louis XIV in particular, see Nicole Ferrier-Caverivière, L'Image de Louis XIV dans la littérature française de 1660 à 1715 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981); Louis Marin, Portrait of the King , trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Michel Martin, Les Monuments équestres de Louis XIV: Une Grande Entreprise de propagande monarchique (Paris: Picard, 1986); Jean-Pierre Néradeau, L'Olympe du roi-soleil: Mythologie et idéologie royale au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986); Guy Walton, Louis XIV's Versailles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Chantall Grell and Christian Michel, L'Ecole des princes ou Alexandre disgracié: Essai sur la mythologie monarchique de la France absolue (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988); Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Robert W. Berger, The Palace of the Sun: The Louvre of Louis XIV (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); and idem, A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

ciated him with Hebrew kings and Roman emperors, as well as with Hercules, Apollo, and Jupiter. Representations of monarchy repeated traditional themes but also reflected changing sensibilities. In the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, royal monuments shed some of their mythological and military attributes and emphasized the ruler's fatherly concern for the welfare of his people. Subjects applauded the installation of the monuments but sometimes desecrated these surrogate figures of Louis XV that reigned over urban spaces. Defamatory placards deposited on the pedestals rewrote effusive inscriptions in much less flattering terms. The menacing stick planted in the outstretched hand of the Pigalle statue in Reims one night in 1772, a year after the suppression of the parlements, made the bronze body of the sovereign reveal the despotic sentiments attributed to him by "patriotic" critics.^[22] Images, as well as ceremonies, registered the impact of prolonged political conflicts by the time of Louis XVI, who was portrayed in prints not only as the worthy descendant of Henry IV but also as a pig.^[23]

Rhetoric and Resistance

The rituals of the French monarchy and representations of French monarchs employed verbal and visual versions of a conventional rhetoric of order and disorder. This rhetoric located the crown within con-

[22] See Jeffrey Merrick, "Politics on Pedestals: Royal Monuments in Eighteenth-Century France," French History 5 (1991): 234–64.

[23] See Annie Duprat, "La Dégradation de l'image royale dans la caricature révolutionnaire," in Les Images de la Révolution française , ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988), 168–75; and idem, "Du 'roi-père' au 'roi-cochon,' " in Saint-Denis ou le dernier jugement des rois (La Garenne-Colombes: Editions de l'Espace Européen, 1992), 81–90.

centric structures of authority and subordination, routinely embodied by cosmological, familial, and corporeal metaphors that naturalized politics and politicized nature.^[24] Like the sun in the heavens, the father in the household, and the mind in the self, the sovereign unified, guided, and disciplined the country. In principle, at least, the sun did not scorch the planets, the father did not abuse his wife or children, the mind did not endanger the limbs, and the sovereign did not misuse his prerogatives, intended to preserve the privileges of his subjects and secure the welfare of the realm as a whole. The corporate kingdom, insofar as it resembled the human body, was composed of a multitude of interdependent parts with a variety of functions to perform. Some texts worked out the comparison in detail, for example by identifying magistrates, soldiers, and artisans and peasants as eyes and ears, arms and hands, and legs and feet, respectively.^[25] As long as all of its parts, including its figurative head, cooperated, the body politic remained healthy. If the organs and limbs rebelled—as they did in La Fontaine's fable about the stomach—or if the head ignored their needs, the state fell sick.^[26] If not cured, through purgation or some other appropriate treatment," it eventually perished.

According to the natural order of things, the mind, which associated humans with the suprahuman Creator and entitled them to dominion over the earth, ruled, or at least should rule, the body, which associated humans with the subhuman animals and involved them in disruptive misconduct. Husbands, fathers, and kings, by the same token, were supposed to rule wives, children, and subjects, all of whom were ruled by their instincts and therefore incapable of ruling themselves.^[27] Endowed with ra-

[24] On political metaphors in general, see James Daly, Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1979); George Armstrong Kelly, "Mortal Man, Immortal Society: Political Metaphors in Eighteenth-Century France," Political Theory 14 (1986): 5–29; Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

[25] François de Gravelle, Politiques royales (Lyon, 1596), 118. On the body and the state, see Paul Archambault, "The Analogy of the Body in Renaissance Political Literature," Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 29 (1967): 21–53; D. G. Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (Hague: Mouton, 1971); and Anne-Marie Brenot, "Le Corps pour royaume: Le Langage politique de la fin du XVIe siècle et du début du XVIIe," Histoire, Economie, Société 10 (1991): 441–66.

[26] Jean de La Fontaine, "Les Membres et l'estomac," in Oeuvres complètes , ed. René Groos and Jacques Schiffrin, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1:74–5.

[27] On the household and the state, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973),134–51; Pierre Ronzeaud, "La Femme au pouvoir ou le monde à l'envers," XVIIe siècle , no. 108 (1975): 9–33; Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16 (1989): 4–27; idem, "The Monarchic State in Early Modern France: Marital Regime, Government, and Male Right," in Politics, Ideology, and Law in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of J.H.M. Salmon , ed. Adrianna Bakos (Rochester, N.Y: University of Rochester Press, 1994), 107–26; Robert Descimon, "Les Fonctions de la métaphore du mariage politique du roi et de la république: France, XVe–XVIIe siècles," Annales E.S.C. 47 (1992): 1127–47; and Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

tionality and invested with authority, patriarchal figures preserved domestic and public order by correcting the errors and curbing the passions of the unreasoning and unruly characters subordinated to them. Thanks to the progress of reformed Catholicism and royal absolutism, they consolidated their disciplinary powers over the disorderly bodies of their dependents.^[28] The crown regulated female waywardness by punishing illegitimacy and adultery, checked youthful recklessness by strengthening paternal control of marriage, and bridled popular forwardness by suppressing rural and urban rebellions.^[29] Bodily and familial metaphors provided a way of describing, connecting, and maintaining social and political order. These familiar but versatile tropes, at the same time, did not have just one fixed configuration or one fixed signification during the period from the Renaissance to the Revolution. At different times, in different circumstances, jurists and pamphleteers used them in different ways for different purposes, not only to justify but also to challenge the official version of absolutism.

In their classic expositions of the principles of French absolutism, written in the 1570s, 1670s, and 1770s, respectively, Jean Bodin, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and Jacob-Nicolas Moreau linked order in the kingdom with order in the cosmos, the family, and the self. Bodin subordinated kings to God, magistrates to kings, subjects to magistrates, wives to husbands, children to fathers, servants to masters, and "bestial" appetites to

[28] See Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites, XVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); idem, L'Invention de l'homme moderne: Sensibilités, moeurs, et comportements collectifs sous l'ancien régime (Paris: Fayard, 1988); and James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 1550–1730 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

[29] On "the people," see Pierre Ronzeaud, Peuple et représentations sous le règne de Louis XIV: Les Représentations du peuple dans la littérature politique en France sous le règne de Louis XIV (Aix: Université de Provence, 1988); and Benoît Garnot, Le Peuple au siècle des lumières: Echec d'un dressage culturel (Paris: Imago, 1990).

"divine" reason.^[30] The members of the household and the population of the realm obeyed their superiors, just as organs and limbs obeyed the head, because they embodied the dictates of reason, "always in conformity with the will of God."^[31] These superiors, who deserved to rule others because they managed to rule themselves, restrained the cupidity of women, curbed the excesses of sons and daughters, and repressed the license of the populace, described as an unreasoning "beast with several heads."^[32] They ruled their subordinates, of course, justly and not despotically. Bodin distinguished the "royal" monarch, devoted to public welfare and visible to subjects who loved him, from the "tyrannical" monarch, preoccupied with selfish pleasures and inaccessible to subjects who feared him.^[33] Against the background of the civil wars, which he compared to self-destructive fighting among parts of the human body, he condemned rebellion within the body politic, but he also qualified the obligations of subordinates.^[34] Wives did not have to comply with "illicit" orders of their spouses. Fathers who squandered their estates, abused their children, or lost their senses deserved to be deprived of their powers over others, "inasmuch as they have none over themselves."^[35] Subjects were not obliged to obey their sovereign in things "contrary to the law of God or nature."^[36] Bodin scorned unmanly husbands dominated by their wives and effeminate monarchs dominated by their passions (like Sardanapalus, who spent more time "among women than among men") because they betrayed the standard of reason and degraded the authority entrusted to them.^[37]

Bossuet excluded planets, climates, and humors from his analysis of politics, based on "the very words of Holy Scripture" alone, but he endorsed the patriarchal vision of the interconnected state, household, and body outlined by Bodin. In the 1670s, as in the 1570s, the Creator invested husbands, fathers, and kings with authority over various categories of irrational subordinates identified with the passions that disrupted human society. "The whole state exists in the person of the ruler," according to Bossuet, because "the reason that guides the state" resided only in the ruler,

[30] Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la république , 6 vols. (Lyon, 1593; repr. Paris: Fayard, 1986),1:34.

[31] Ibid., 52.

[32] Ibid., 6:149.

[33] Ibid., 2:35.

[34] Ibid., 1:54.

[35] Ibid., 75.

[36] Ibid., 2:80.

[37] Ibid., 4:17.

who embodied and administered justice.^[38] The divinely ordained sovereign, with "eyes and hands everywhere," preserved order throughout the body politic by restraining the "natural indocility" of the people, who were obligated to obey his commands provided "they contain nothing contrary to the commands of God."^[39] He respected the lives and property of his subjects, whom he treated like children, not slaves, and they, in return, loved him like a solicitous father instead of hating him like "a ferocious beast."^[40] The paternalistic monarch, whose mastery of the realm depended on his mastery of the self, "the foundation of all authority," did not allow whims, resentments, or desires to confound his intelligence or weaken his resolve.^[41] In this regard at least, he shunned the Old Testament examples of David, who, despite his prowess, failed to discipline his own children, and Solomon, who, despite his wisdom, surrendered to slackness and dissipation.^[42]

Moreau, who, like Bossuet, composed his text at the behest of the crown for the instruction of the dauphin, restated many of the same lessons a century later, in more modern and less metaphorical language. He attributed the authority of husbands over wives, which supposedly ensured the preservation of morals in most countries, to the laws of nature and the difference established by the Creator between the "strengths" (presumably in multiple senses of the word—physical, mental, and moral) of the two sexes.^[43] He described the family as the foundation of the state because it inculcated "domestic docility," "the model for political sub-ordination," among the younger generation.^[44] Nature, according to Moreau, made humans sociable, by making them dependent upon each other for the satisfaction of their needs, and also made them something other than animals, by giving them the faculty of reason to regulate their conduct. Nature granted rights but also imposed obligations, which the multitude, inclined "to let itself be led astray" by unruly passions, could

[38] Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte , ed. Jacques Le Brun (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1967), 185.

[39] Ibid., 170, 99, 194.

[40] Ibid., 90.

[41] Ibid., III.

[42] On the shortcomings of these kings, see ibid., 429 and 435, respectively.

[43] Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, Les Devoirs du prince réduits à un seul principe (Versailles, 1775), 312. On Moreau, see Dieter Gembecki, Histoire et politique à la fin de l'ancien régime: Jacob-Nicolas Morreau, 1717–1803 (Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1979); and Keith Michael Baker, "Controlling French History: The Ideological Arsenal of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau," in Inventing the French Revolution: Esays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59–85.

[44] Moreau, Devoirs du prince , 313

not fulfill unless coerced into doing so.^[45] The royal father, responsible for "protecting us against our own license," subjected "all our passions and all our interests" to the rule of justice, without translating all of his own desires into decrees.^[46] He was not required to negotiate with his people, but he was expected to promulgate reasonable laws, after consultation and deliberation, that served the collective welfare.

Bodin, Bossuet, and Moreau, writing in different centuries and different circumstances, explicated the body politics of French absolutism in somewhat different terms. They agreed, nevertheless, that husbands, fathers, and especially kings, in order to prevent the blindness and brutality of their ignorant and irresponsible dependents from turning the world upside down, must, in their persons and their policies, embody the dominance of reason over the passions. Richelieu incorporated this exhortation into his political testament, addressed to the temperamental Louis XIII. He declared that humans, as a species, should obey the faculty that distinguished them from beasts and specified that kings "more than all others should be motivated by reason," both because God made them responsible for enforcing its authority and because subjects automatically loved rulers who were guided by its dictates.^[47] Women were excluded from government, he explained, because "the disorderly ascendency of their emotions" deprived them of "the masculine virtue of making decisions rationally" along with "the masculine vigor necessary to public administration."^[48] The cardinal warned the monarch against the weakness and indolence characteristic of women, which disposed them to injustice and cruelty. He urged Louis XIII to exercise foresight, avoid precipitousness, weigh the judicious advice of male counselors, and shun the destructive influence of female favorites, who inevitably subordinated "public interest" to "private affections."^[49]

The masculinist myth of royal rationality, like other types of gendered discourse identified by Joan Scott, articulated relationships of power.^[50] Given its mixed or at least multiple messages, which were acknowledged by exponents of the official version of absolutism, this myth turned out

[45] Ibid., 36.

[46] Ibid., xvii, 63.

[47] The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu: The Significant Chapters and Supporting Selections , ed. Henry Bertram Hill (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 39 (excerpted and translated from the French edition of Louis André [Paris, 1947]).

[48] Richelieu, Political Testament , 75, 45.

[49] Ibid., 108.

[50] See Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28–50.

to be one of several ideological sites in which debates about the unwritten constitution were played out in figurative form. Bodin, Bossuet, Moreau, and Richelieu all supported royal authority in prescriptive literature by linking personal order in the male self with public order in the lawful state, which was peopled by infantilized subjects. They insisted that kings, like husbands and fathers, must discipline themselves, as well as their subordinates, because they recognized that the passions of these patriarchal figures, if not carefully regulated, might cause injustice and legitimize disobedience. Critics of royal policies throughout the early modern period fixated on the dangerous consequences of the fallibility of ministers and monarchs. They challenged royal authority, or at least abuses of royal authority, in polemical literature by linking personal disorder in the feminized and animalized self with public disorder in the lawless state, which was reduced to slavery or even savagery. During the sixteenth-century civil wars, for example, pamphleteers accused Catherine de Medici and Henry III of tyranny not only by cataloguing their misdeeds but also by characterizing them as diseased, depraved, and diabolical.^[51]

During the Fronde critics of the regency government denounced Anne of Austria and, even more aggressively, Jules Mazarin for mismanaging their own bodies as well as the body politic.^[52] The authors of the Mazarinades (some five thousand tracts published between 164.8 and 1653) made extensive use of cosmological, familial, and corporeal rhetoric in condemning Louis XIII's widow and minister for ruling the country in an ungodly and unjust manner. Working within the flexible framework of conventional principles outlined above, pamphleteers blamed misrule on the disruptive passions of the Spanish queen, who corroborated traditional stereotypes about female indiscipline, and the Italian cardinal, who betrayed traditional expectations about male discipline. The disorderly couple, allegedly obsessed with the pleasures of the flesh, effectively repudi-

[51] See David L. Teasley, "Legends of the Last Valois: A New Look at Propaganda Attacking the French Monarchs During the Wars of Religion, 1559–1589," Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1985; and idem, "The Charge of Sodomy as a Political Weapon in Early Modern France: The Case of Henry III in Catholic League Polemics, 1585–1589," Maryland Historian 18 (1987): 17–30.

[52] On the Mazarinades, see Marie-Noëlle Grand-Mesnil, Mazarin, la Fronde, et la presse, 1647–49 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967); Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades: La Fronde des mots (Paris: Aubier, 1985); and Hubert Carrier, La Presse de la Fronde, 1648–1653: Les Mazarinades , 2 vols. (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1989–91). On the theme of the undisciplined body in these texts, see Jeffrey Merrick, "The Cardinal and the Queen: Sexual and Political Disorders in the Mazarinades," French Historical Studies 18 (1994): 667–99; and Lewis C. Seifert, "Eroticizing the Fronde: Sexual Deviance and Political Disorder in the Mazarinades," L'Esprit Créateur 35 (1995): 22–36.

ated the young Louis XIV's fatherly obligation to defend the persons, property, and privileges of the men and women entrusted to his care. Instead of preserving "the legitimate liberty that makes kings reign in the hearts of the people," they surrendered themselves to debased and despotic appetites that degraded the monarchy and alienated the affections of the population.^[53] Instead of consulting the faculty of reason, which should have guided their policies, and cultivating the spirit of love, which should have united the country, the selfish and licentious foreigners spread discord, violence, and fear throughout the realm.

Pamphleteers, who blamed Mazarin, more often than not, for the mis-government of the country, inscribed his many offenses on his disfigured body and in his perverted biography. One of them anatomized his monstrous person, described as a sewer full of refuse, from head to foot—or rather, the other way around. His feet guided him into "sordid places" and directed him toward prey and booty. His hands, "completely crooked," were suitable only for grabbing and pillaging. His stomach consumed "enough food to provision a well-ordered kingdom." His liver produced an overabundance of bile that fueled his rage. His lungs filled him with pride and presumption that choked his heart, which engendered thoughts "darker than hell." His tongue pronounced nothing but contradictions and curses. His eyes, like those of the legendary basilisk, emitted deadly vapors. His physiognomy, marked by ferocious veins, revealed his tyrannical disposition. His head, full of devious and malicious spirits, plotted the despoliation of the French people and misled all the other parts of his body into "the most enormous crimes."^[54] Another pamphleteer, recounting one of the king's nightmares, represented the rapacious cardinal as a snarling monster with huge teeth and a body composed of vermin and vultures.^[55] The Mazarinades condemned "this animal who is the cause of our problems" by describing him as a veritable menagerie of parasitic and predatory creatures: leech, serpent, wolf, panther, tiger, dragon, harpy.^[56]

The diabolical minister, animalized or at least feminized by his destructive and debilitating appetites, disrupted and disintegrated the state. In his case the body, which should have been the "slave," instead usurped the role of "master," such that he spent his entire life in the state of sat-

[53] Journal de ce qui s'est fait ès assemblées du Parlement (Paris, 1649), 28.

[54] L'Effroyable Accouchement d'un monstre dans Paris (Paris, 1649).

[55] Songe du roi admirable et prophétique pour la consolation de la France (Paris, 1649).

[56] Recueil général de toutes les chansons mazarinistes (Paris, 1649), 6.

urnalian disorder that the Romans celebrated only once a year.^[57] Wallowing in sensory pandemonium, the "Sardanapalian" cardinal squandered royal revenues, extorted from overtaxed and oppressed subjects, on expensive perfumes, exquisite sauces, and exotic pets.^[58] Addicted to "the most immoderate pleasures," he used or rather misused his genitals, like his prerogatives, in a lawless and unnatural manner, by committing sodomy throughout his meteoric career.^[59] During his adolescent years in Rome, the effeminate Mazarin adopted the passive role in anal intercourse in order to manipulate his superiors and advance his fortunes. He graduated to the active role, without losing his feminine characteristics, by the time he settled in Paris, where he reportedly buggered numberless pages and priests, as well as Anne of Austria herself, who was quickly seduced by and completely infatuated with him. Enslaved by "the passion that tyrannizes her," she allowed him to enslave the country.^[60] Since his ministry supplied the realm with "so much p[rick] and so little cash," the devious and dissolute cardinal had the perverse satisfaction of sodomizing and dominating the entire French population as well as the regent herself.^[61] His oversized and undisciplined penis, the synecdochical "tool that makes its master rule," not only degraded her but also disordered the kingdom as a whole.^[62]

By exposing his grotesque body and carnivalesque biography, the Mazarinades condemned "the Italian sausage" for inverting and corrupting the divine and natural order of things in the cosmos, household, self, and state.^[63] He gained rank and wealth incommensurate with his lowly antecedents and meager talents, they charged, through collusion with Satan, whose rebellion against God he reenacted. He ran away from home to escape the beneficial discipline imposed by his father and later disunited households throughout France by turning "the father against the son, the brother against the sister, the uncle against the nephew, the wife against the husband, and the servant against the master."^[64] He "kidnapped" Louis XIV from the capital, thereby depriving the realm of its figurative sun, father, and head, and did his best to deaden the young king's

[57] Apparition du cardinal de Saint-Cécile à Jules Mazarin (Paris, 1649), 3.

[58] La Mazarinade (Brussels, 1651), 10.

[59] Requête civil contre la conclusion de la paix (n.p., 1649), 3.

[60] L'Admirable Harmonie des perfections, qualités et reproches de Mazarin (Paris, 1649), 4.

[61] La Pure Vérité cachée (n.p., n. d.), 4.

[62] Satire ou imprécation contre l'engin du surnommé Mazarin (n.p., 1652), 4.

[63] Les Logements de la cour à Saint-Germain-en-Laye (n.p., 1649), reprinted in Choix des Mazarinades , ed. Célestin Moreau, 2 vols. (Paris, 1853), 1:173.

[64] Le Flambeau d'état (n.p., n.d.), 14

solicitude for the extended family composed of French subjects. He renounced the rule of reason, identified with men, and embraced the yoke of passion, associated with women and animals. Having acquired unnatural authority through unnatural means, the minister ruled his ruler but not himself. Out of place and out of control, he could not embody royal rationality or dispense royal justice. In doing "whatever he wants with his body," he left the country littered with the bodies of his victims.^[65] Emasculated by his appetites, the deformed, depraved, and despotic foreigner prolonged the dissension that poisoned and plagued the body politic. Some pamphleteers, speaking like doctors, prescribed purgation to cure the sickness caused by the kingdom's ingestion of "abominable monsters," one of which, "all red with her blood" (a reference to the sanguinary cardinal's scarlet robes), lacerated her entrails.^[66] Others, speaking like magistrates, prescribed corporal punishments, including dismemberment and castration, to make Mazarin's body expiate his sexual and political transgressions.

The Mazarinades projected the disobedience of the Frondeurs as well as the chaos of the Fronde onto the fictionalized figure of their namesake ("you who govern yourself according to your passions"), whose unruly genitals broke down the distinctions between law and license that regulated both sexuality and politics.^[67] Unlike attacks on Henry III, who was allegedly ruled by his minions, and Louis XV, who was allegedly ruled by his mistresses, they did not incriminate the sovereign himself, who was too young, after all, to rule or misrule in his own name. In denouncing the heartless and mindless cardinal, whose body was not, of course, linked with the body politic through ceremonial and symbolic traditions, they nevertheless articulated standards of accountability for monarchs as well as ministers. Mazarin's critics reminded Louis XIV that he must regard his people as "the members of the body of which he is the head" and that he, unlike Mazarin, must subordinate his own desires to the collective welfare.^[68] He must not have "any greater passion" than that of ruling the population "with every kind of justice."^[69] He must not, in fact, have any "passions that are not thoroughly just," because unjust

[65] Le Gouvernement présent ou éloge de Son Eminence (n.p., 1649), 5.

[66] Consultation et ordonnance des médecins de l'état pour la purgation de la France malade (Paris, 1649), 5.

[67] Fiction: L'Heureux Succàs du voyage que le cardinal Mazarin a fait aux enfers (Paris, 1649), 7.

[68] Le Zèle et l'amour des parisiens envers leur roi (Paris, 164.9), 2.

[69] Instruction royale ou paradoxe sur le gouvernement de l'état (n.p., n.d.), 3.

passions like greed, anger, and lust caused not only misconduct at court but also misfortune throughout the kingdom.^[70] According to one pamphleteer, who stated the point more bluntly than Bodin, Bossuet, or Moreau, subjects did not have to obey kings who were themselves "subject to their passions," because passions made kings forget their divine, natural, and constitutional obligations.^[71]

Having rebelled against the monstrous minister who embodied rebellion in so many ways, French men and women clamored for the underage monarch to restore the health of the metaphorical body and the unity of the metaphorical family. Their sovereign, moved by his "paternal affection" for the people subjected to him by God, chastised and then forgave them. As the head of the figurative body and the collective household, he also instructed them to obey him unconditionally in the future.^[72] In the wake of the Fronde, jurists, clerics, writers, and artists systematically distanced Louis XIV from the sexual and political irregularities associated with the Rabelaisian villain of the Mazarinades. They turned the world right side up again by reasserting the authority of the crown and repossessing the rhetoric of cosmological, familial, and corporeal order. They represented the Sun King, on paper and canvas, as the incarnation of "masculine" virtues, as opposed to "feminine" vices. The royal Apollo included many of their lessons, which he could not have learned from the Mazarin portrayed by the pamphleteers, in memoirs addressed to his son. He condemned rebellion in no uncertain terms but denied that divine ordination, which exempted the sovereign from accountability to his subjects, entitled him to conduct his life "in a more disorderly way."^[73] As "the head of a body of which they are the members," the king must master himself and never let himself be mastered by passions, women, or ministers.^[74] In governing the people, who could not govern themselves, he must shun both unmanly indolence and unseemly agitations and also stifle or at least conceal "vulgar feelings," "as soon as they cause harm to public welfare."^[75]

Through ritual, representation, and rhetoric, the Bourbon monarchy reaffirmed the principle that the head of the monarch, who served as the

[70] La Prospérité malheureuse ou le parfait abrégé de l'histoire du cardinal Mazarin (Paris, 1652),13.

[71] Ambassadeur extraordinaire apportant à la reine des nouvelles certaines de son royaume et de ce qui s'y passe (Paris, 1649), 5.

[72] Lettre du roi écrite à son parlement de Paris sur les affaires présentes le 11 février 1652 (Paris, 1652), 4.

[73] Mémoires de Louis XIV , 256.

[74] Ibid., 90.

[75] Ibid., 159.

head of the body politic, must rule the royal body in order to prevent any divergence between the interests of the king and the kingdom. Louis XIV, perpetually on stage at Versailles, subjected himself, as well as his entourage, to rules and routines intended to promote and preserve religious, social, and political order at court and throughout the country. He disciplined parlementaires, peasants, and Protestants but failed, at least according to domestic and foreign critics, to live up to his own prescriptions. Unlike poets and painters in the service of the crown, these critics did not disguise or decorate the mortal body of the Sun King with classical, Christian, and historical trappings. They portrayed him, on the contrary, as debauched, diseased, defeated, and despotic.^[76] The authors of slanderous texts published during the eighteenth century recycled the charges about sexual and political disorders against his successors. They defamed the profligate Louis XV, who evidently could not control his unruly libido, and the impotent Louis XVI, who apparently could not control his unruly wife.^[77] Both kings, dominated by women, betrayed "the spirit of counsel, justice, and reason" that supposedly distinguished "the sovereign power" residing in the person of the male sovereign.^[78] Royal ideology itself, which connected order in the royal body with order in the body politic, supplied much of the raw material for gendered accusations about the disruptive effects of royal sexuality on royal rationality and, by extension, the welfare of the French people.

In the eighteenth century, as during the Fronde, critics of royal policies reprimanded ministers and monarchs for violating in practice obligations that apologists of absolutism like Bodin, Bossuet, and Moreau acknowledged in principle. Parlementaires legitimized resistance by expropriating the religious and familial language deployed by the monar-

[76] See Ferrier-Caverivière, Image de Louis XIV , pt. 2, chap. 5; and Burke, Fabrication of Louis XIV , chap. 10.

[77] On criticism of Louis XV (and his mistresses), Louis XVI (and Marie Antoinette), and the privileged orders in general, see Jean-Pierre Guicciardi, "Between the Licit and the Illicit: The Sexuality of the King," in 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment , ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 88–97; Antoine de Baecque, "Pamphlets: Libel and Political Mythology," in Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800 , ed. Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 165–76; Chantal Thomas, La Reine scélérate: Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989); Jeffrey Merrick, "Sexual Politics and Public Order in Late-Eighteenth-Century France: The Mémoires Secrets and the Correspondance Secrète," Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 (1990): 68–84; Hunt, Family Romance; Antoine de Baecque, Le Corps de l'histoire: Métaphores et politique, 1770–1800 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993); and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Books of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

[78] Remontrances du Parlement de Paris , 2:557.

chy to consolidate the sovereignty of the crown.^[79] They not only reminded the king that he must rule in a godly and fatherly manner, as he himself claimed to do, but also deplored and even denounced departures from the standards of godliness and fatherliness. These standards turned out to be much more ambiguous and flexible than they looked in prescriptive sources, especially during constitutional conflicts, when the deceptive consensus about figurative ways of describing relations of authority and subordination broke down. The magistrates generally interpreted them in such a way as to justify their own political pretensions, without discarding the traditional metaphorology and reconstructing the state in disembodied style as some of their "patriotic" and "philosophic" contemporaries did. Pamphleteers, meanwhile, supported parlementary opposition to despotism by exposing and exaggerating depravity at court and throughout French society. They suggested that the bodies of Louis XV and his grandson, who seemed less visible and also less reliable than their predecessors, actually endangered the realm, instead of unifying, guiding, and disciplining it. Lawyers reinforced the message by publicizing the sexual politics of dissension within households during the last decades of the ancien régime.^[80] As long as kingship remained entangled with corporeal order, as well as divine purposes and domestic authority, kings remained vulnerable to charges formulated within the framework of traditional principles. The conventional rhetoric, in the last analysis, was largely reversible, and critics of the official version of absolutism, even before 1789, manipulated it more effectively than the monarchy itself did.

[79] See Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); and idem "Fathers and Kings: Patriarchalism and Absolutism in Eighteenth-Century French Politics," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , no. 308 (1993): 281–303.

[80] See Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jeffrey Merrick, "Domestic Politics: Divorce and Despotism in Eighteenth-Century France," in The Past as Prologue: Essays to Celebrate the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of ASECS , ed. Carla Hay and Syndy Conger (New York: AMS Press, 1995), 373–86; and idem, "Impotence in Court and at Court," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 25 (1995): 199–215.