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Two Inaugural Aspects of French Royal Ceremonials
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Entrée

The triumphal entry of the new king of France into Paris usually took place not long after the coronation. From the point of view of Parisians (then as now I daresay) nothing that happened out in the provinces really counted until its impact was felt in Paris. For Parisians the royal entry was the ultimate phase of the inauguration process in terms both of time and significance. The crowned king was coming for the first time into the capital city to exercise his sovereign powers. The pageantry was splendid. The people of Paris welcoming the king was all France welcoming him.[10]

Porte Saint-Denis was always the entry point, and the route through the city to Notre Dame was absolutely traditional. It happens that the same route in the other direction is the one always taken by the royal funeral cortège on its way to the royal necropolis in St. Denis. Therefore, the last


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crowned king the Parisians had seen before the new king made his first entry was his predecessor (in effigy) making his final exit. Did the Parisians appreciate this symmetry between the funeral and the entry? Were the masters of ceremony trying to convey the notion of continuity, or renewal, of rulership? Alas there is no evidence.

It needs to be mentioned that the entry of a prince into his capital could be an explicitly inaugural event in the fourteenth century. I refer to the famous Entrée-joyeuse of the Duke of Brabant into Brussels, when the ruler and the ruled performed a ceremonial of great constitutional import: he got keys to the city; they got confirmation of rights. Something of this is evident in the later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century royal entries into Paris, as the kings stopped at Châtelet and vowed to maintain certain established privileges, but in general this element tended to fade away as the aspects of pageantry grew more abundant.

The full-blown Renaissance royal entry consisted much less of acts performed by the king than of acts—tableaux vivants especially—performed for him as he rode from station to station. The guilds and other corporations of the city that prepared the station tried to flatter and to edify the king. The theme of royal continuity was a mainstay. Having the live new king gaze upon representations of his illustrious forebears supplied an historicizing counterpart to the royal funeral's acting out of the juristic abstraction that the king never died.

Other cities offered the king formal ceremonies of entry upon the occasion of his first visit. Lyons and Rouen excelled in magnificence, but for our present concern the most important—perhaps more important than the Parisian entry—was Reims. Since this entry was made before the king was crowned, its iconographical aspects had to be (or so it seems to me) carefully scrutinized. I am not aware of any comprehensive study of these entries, or whether a complete series of them was performed and has survived. The few I do know about have very interesting pictoral tableaux relevant for the inauguration.[11] (We shall look at one of them at the end.) Indeed, was not the entry into Reims the first stage of the "official" inauguration?


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Two Inaugural Aspects of French Royal Ceremonials
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