1658: Lim(b)inal Images

The first almanac image considered here, The Magnificent Triumph (fig. 2.1), does not broach the issue of an upcoming marriage but refers only to the king's military victories. It presents a topos common to military triumph: a monarch in his chariot crushing what is out of control or disorderly, here represented by the allegorical images of Rage, Envy, and Sedition.^[9] The engraving's depiction of these passions

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Figure 2.1
The Magnificent Triumph , 1658. By permission of the
Bibliothèque Nationale.

is traditional, based on widely accepted images from the manuals of iconology.^[10] Barely visible, Rage, Envy, and Sedition are reduced largely to sinewy limbs (arms and legs) wrapped with equally powerful serpents emerging from under the wheels of the chariot that is crushing them, as well as from under the hooves of the horses pulling that chariot. These limbs and snakes suggest the powerful and predatory nature of passions. They are sexualized images of potency and penetration, the kind Jeffrey Merrick links to personal disorder and state lawlessness in the political pamphlets of the Fronde he discusses in this volume. It is not surprising that the king is figured above these problematic passions. He is placed on a higher plane, surrounded by higher-order images, the historical figures of the court situated behind him to the right and the other trophies of his victories off to the left. These trophies are to be contrasted with Rage, Sedition, and Envy; they are not invidious limbs being crushed, but cities, controlled not by dismemberment but by containment. Put into relief, they are miniaturized, immobilized, and placed on a portable surface carried high above the heads of the soldiers in the fashion of a Roman triumph. If disorder and movement mark the limbs of Rage, Envy, and Sedition, the cities are the model of civic order and constraint, as are the neatly covered limbs of the soldiers who carry them.

The prose text at the top center of the engraving offers further indices for reading the figures below. Interestingly, the prose does not open with a reference to the moral victory over the disorderly allegorical limbs. Nor does it refer to the military victory over the now ordered, contained cities. Instead the text speaks of another kind of triumph, one not figured visually in the engraving: the celebration of the king's own self-mastery, his triumph over his (disorderly) passion. It announces:

THE MAGNIFICENT TRIUMPH

Where our august monarch is seen mastering himself and his enemies because he places his passions among his war trophies.

LE TRIOMPHE MAGNIFIQUE

Ou l'on voit Nostre Auguste Monarque triomphant de soi mesme et de ses ennemis puis qu'il met ses passions an nombre de ses Trophées.^[11]

Invoking a king's self-mastery is not an unusual rhetorical move in this sort of celebratory material.^[12] Such stoic self-control was a desirable trait in a king, and lack of royal self-control was, as Jeffrey Merrick points out,

often cited as a reason for civil disobedience.^[13] The implication of the statement in the almanac is that the king's visible mastery over others is causally related to his unseen and perhaps unrepresentable mastery over himself. It seems a bit paradoxical, however, to draw attention to an invisible kind of mastery in the heading over an image that is meant to make the king's authority visible. It also seems paradoxical to attempt to make authority visible by drawing attention to the king's mastery over passions he should not have. Suggesting that the king may have had uncontrollable urges would, one might think, only emphasize his humanness. As the work of Ernst Kantorowicz has demonstrated, an early modern European king's constitutional entitlement rested largely on his ability to repress the fact of his humanness via elaborately ritualized fictions of his divine status. It would seem that underlining a dimension of the king such as his passions—a dimension he is not supposed to have—might serve not only to fit the king into a traditional stoic framework, but also to arouse the viewer's curiosity by drawing him or her outside the fixed moral and military boundaries to reflect on the passions and personal disorder edging those boundaries, in particular a king's own potentially disordering passions: the unspoken, liminal, disorderly, invisible side of monarchy. The prose text thus invites the viewer to comb the image for residues of such disarray emerging from the vision of domination and reordering. And indeed, if the dismembered limbs of Rage, Envy, and Sedition suggest a world of such lawlessness, the curious viewer can also find traces of the potentially unfixed passions of the king by easily matching the limbs of defeated passions first to those of the horses, and then, moving higher, to those of the king, as muscled and sinewy as the legs of the animals.

Of course, all limbs in the picture are always lower-order members. One goal of the image seems to be to reprocess lower-order images into containable trophies. The diorama as trophy epitomizes this movement, for, as the text notes, the king placed his passions "among his war trophies." Reading these images after the age of Freud, it is easy to recognize both the repression and condensation at work in the image. The work of Michel Foucault has made critics aware, furthermore, that exclusion and policing, framing sexuality out of the picture (which is what often happens in the representation of a monarch's body), are methods for deal-

ing with the sticky issues of sexuality.^[14] But Foucault also characterized such an exclusion as a manner of keeping jouissance —gratuitous, ephemeral, nonutilitarian pleasure—and the power that contains it, in the picture.^[15] This play between exclusion and exhibition is evident in the treatment of Rage, Sedition, and Envy. Although in pieces, these figures, objects to be crushed by military and visual mastery, are nonetheless always hovering at the edge, as if it is their energy that keeps the wheels of the king's machinery of domination moving forward. Like the burlesque king discussed by Mark Franko in this volume, the king mastering these liminal forces makes royal power, both political and personal, visible.

If The Magnificent Triumph leaves the viewer more interested in the king's disorderly and uncontrolled ephemeral passions than in the parading of his permanent military control, other almanac images from the same year bring these passions into relief, containing them in a manner that makes them more visually available, if perhaps less powerful and interesting. Consider, for example, another 1658 almanac engraving, The Legitimate Wishes of Victorious France for the Marriage of the King (fig. 2.2). This image more overtly organizes the relation between disorderly affairs of passion and the (ideally) more stable affairs of state, legitimizing the king's passions, which had been, so to speak, rolled under the bed—or under the triumphal chariot of the previous image. Indeed, "legitimation" is the first modifier in the descriptive heading:

THE LEGITIMATE WISHES OF VICTORIOUS FRANCE FOR THE MARRIAGE OF THE KING , dedicated and presented by the love of virtue and by that of France itself to our invincible monarch Louis XIIII.

LES JUSTES SOUHAITS DE LA FRANCE VICTORIEUSE POUR LE MARIAGE DU ROY , dedies et presentes par l'amour de la vertu et par celui de la France mesme a nostre invincible monarque Louis XIIII.^[16]

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Figure 2.2
The Legitimate Wishes of Victorious France for the Marriage of the King ,
1658. By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

As the prose text states, the legitimized wishes or hopes for (the legitimate passion of) marriage are placed center-stage in this engraving, displayed in the middle of the image in a framed picture of the king holding out his hand to a woman dressed in the French queen's traditional wedding garb. A banner inside this interior image reads, "Great King place

yourself henceforth under Hymen / Upon this sacred bond depends the holy bond of peace" (Grand Roy dessouz hymen metez vous desormais / De ce saint noeud Depend le sainct noeud de la paix). Note as well that the interior picture is being presented to the king by the allegorical figure France, and that each of the two central figures, France and the king, is surrounded by similar characters: grouped around France on the left are the three (actually four) allegorical female figures, the Joy of the People, the Desires for Peace, and the Wishes of Renown (the fourth figure, barely seen, is not referred to), and grouped around the king on the right are five historical persons, the king's brother, his mother Anne of Austria, the minister Mazarin, and two other figures, perhaps Le Tellier and Le Marechal de Créqui.^[17]

This combination of right and left imagery (allegorical and historical) echoes the visual play seen in The Magnificent Triumph (see fig. 2.1) between the domain of unregulated allegory as passion and that of regulating military victory. Here, however, the allegorical emerges not as dismembered Rage, Sedition, and Envy, but as full-bodied Peace, Joy, and Renown, legitimate passions carrying legitimate wishes for a Bourbon heir, for reconciliation between Philip IV and Louis XIV, and for an agreement with the Electors not to interfere in the events in Flanders. As such, these allegorical figures and their passions can be revealed and advertised. Particularly important is how this meeting of now-legitimated allegorical figures and the historical personages allows the entry of the king's passion into the scenario. Or rather, how it allows the emergence of a legitimated and civilized form of the king's passion, the royal and regulated (productive, heterosocial) marriage represented within the framed image as if in an equation: Wishes (Allegory) + Royal Family (History) = The Scene of Marriage.

To understand more fully how this equation factors passion into the scenario (albeit now a stable and contained passion because set apart, legitimized and sanitized), it is necessary to find a way to re-bisect this image, shifting from the grid set out to frame our gaze, that is the division between left (allegory) and right (history), to a different split between top and bottom (high and low). To do so, one must resist the temptations of the framing scene and look at details or limits—in this case, limbs.

In adopting this perspective, it is evident that even legitimized sexuality (that is, the framed image) is a lower-order member, occupying the domain of the king's own lower-order member, his iconic leg.^[18] Visually positioned at the same level as the picture, the leg seems to counterbalance or suggest the limit of the interior image's framed, legitimized sexuality. A similar tension can be seen between the king's regal upper body, draped in, or framed by, formal robes, and the lower, more functional part of himself that is involved in the less regal but equally important (and tempting) aspects of kingship, not just walking, but coming together in a "holy bond/saint noeud " to make babies (indeed, one definition of the word noeud is erect phallus). The idea that procreation, and therefore sexual bodies (erect penises or women), are a necessary if knotty (or naughty) aspect of monarchy is also reinforced by the fact that the king's limb is situated opposite the medallion held by the Wishes of the people: an iconic scene of Anne of Austria invoking God's help to become pregnant after nearly two decades of childlessness. The restrained, legitimized, framed scenario of heterosociality that the allegorical figure France offers the king thus plays off the less restrained sexuality of the leg. Both elements work together, however, to reinforce what is announced in the last line of the heading, that "abundance and victory"—in bed and on the battlefield—are "the firm and solid support of the French monarchy" (labondance [sic ] et la victoire fermes et solides appuye de la monarchie françoise).^[19] This description—actually of two caryatids in the bottom, missing half of the engraving—suggests once again that the monarchical body rests on the lower order, either in its liminal (unstable and ephemeral) form or in its framed (fixed and monumental) form ... or as the two work together.

The status of framed images as a basis or limb of the monarch's power can be more fully examined in another almanac engraving in which the king is being shown a collection of portraits of potential queens (fig. 2.3). In this image, where the issue of marriage takes center stage, the passion eliminated from (or crushed in) The Magnificent Tirumph and allowed,

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Figure 2.3
The Gifts Offered to the Very Christian King Louis XIV by, All the
Virtues , 1659. By permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

framed, into The Legitimate Wishes as a necessary component has exploded and multiplied to assert its presence more fully in the king's scenario. The history/allegory division now corresponds to that between upper and lower, with historical figures—the king, his family, and his advisors—situated on the top of the image, and allegorical ones—Virtues holding portraits of potential candidates for queen—situated below.^[20] The occasion of this display is given in the title of the almanac, The Gifts Offered to the Very Christian King Louis XIV by All the Virtues (Les Estrennes presentees au Roy tres Chrestien Louis 14e Par touttes les Vertus). The gifts (estrennes ) are probably those given on the New Year, a theme in keeping with the almanac, although a second possibility might be that these are gifts offered at the beginning of a new undertaking, a foretaste of things to come. As such they would mark the king's maturity and potential entry into matrimony upon the successful completion of the military campaigns. The latter, figured in the top corners of the graphic, recede into the margins or frame of the page, acting as pendants to the cameos below depicting the king's new field of action. The banner above focuses exclusively on the field of the portraits, the scene within the proscenium arch, emphasizing that the king will make a choice from among the offered gifts, women chosen by the Virtues from "all the provinces of Europe." According to the text, the king will make a "happy choice which will raise to the height of the highest grandeur ... the one his Majesty will wish to honor with his love":

The virtues, charmed by the merit of our great monarch, after having chosen from all the provinces of Europe, those they found the most perfect and accomplished, come to present to him whom they consider their protector, ex-

pecting this happy choice which will raise to the height of the highest grandeur and the most charming fidelity, the one His Majesty will wish to honor with his love.

Les vertus charmées du merite de nostre grand Monarque apres avoir choisi dans touttes les Provinces de l'Europe, ce qu'elles ont peu trouver de plus parfait et de plus accompli, le viennent presenter a celuy quelles [sic ] regardent comme leur Protecteur, attendant ce choix heureux qui doi eslever au comble de la plus haute grand et de la plus charmante fidelité, celle que sa Majesté voudra honorer de son amour.

The emphasis on choice here is important and can be understood in terms of the framework provided by Marcel Mauss's observations about the activity of gift exchange as a practice in which relations of submission transform the physical violence of the battlefield into symbolic interaction.^[21] In exchanging gifts, the recipient, and not the giver of the gift, ultimately finds himself in a position of submission, since he is the one who will have to reciprocate. One possible action, albeit a dangerous one, is for the recipient to choose not to reply with a gift in turn. According to Mauss, such behavior is the strongest possible response, for it is a display of independence (and this is the sovereign position). Here the king adopts a version of that posture by not accepting just any gift, but by choosing among gifts, in a kind of fairy-tale fantasy of the king choosing from the fairest in the land. Thus, if there is a veritable explosion of choice in this image, that multiplicity does not privilege the possibility of royal disorder because of either submission, sexual excess, or polygamy. Rather, it offers the king the possibility of displaying his power over his passions and over the allegorical women who present him with gifts, in that it shows him exercising his power to make "a happy choice."

Looking at the image, one cannot help but recognize that a choice has already been made. Only one of the five cameos is completely visible, the one suggestively situated to the right of the king's leg, as if ready to slide up along the limb—the limit separating the allegorical and historical registers—to join the royal family. Even if the king does not look directly at his chosen princess, she is the choice displayed for the viewer

of the almanac. Situated diagonally opposite an unframed image of her predecessor, Louis XIV's mother, Anne of Austria, the cameo is the only image that might compete with the king's for the viewer's interest. The other portraits are partly obscured by plants and by the bodies of the Virtues holding them. Something is also missing from the portrait of the chosen princess: her body. Indeed, the dissonance between the king's full body and the truncated, framed, cameo image of the queen is striking. Her body seems to be another version of the truncated historical figures surrounding the king, although in the case of the queen the truncation echoes the tension of the gift-exchange paradigm. Just as gift exchange abbreviates and reprocesses potential social violence into a containable, symbolic activity, so too does the cameo "police" the potentially disruptive parts of the woman. If an unmarried woman has been allowed to enter into the picture, it is only insofar as she is framed and contained in a form as easily distributed among the courts of Europe as the almanac engraving could have been passed around among the streets of the realm. There is no danger of this female image walking around: she has been crippled, desexualized, cut in pieces like the disorderly Rage, Envy, and Sedition seen in The Magnificent Triumph .^[22] But there is no denying that her excluded parts (breasts, womb, and so on) will be the origin of the dynastic continuity, just as the gift-exchange dynamic is the foundation of social interaction, or, on another level, just as kinship exchange, the paradigmatic model of gift exchange for Lévi-Strauss, serves as a basis for civil accord. In both cases (gift exchange and kinship exchange), tension over the unseen (social aggression) does not disappear; it is simply policed by the structure. So, too, the almanac engraving has found a way to circumscribe the necessity of the limbs (sexual body parts) supporting the sovereign performance by making them at once visible and invisible.