CHANTAL GRELL the Sacre of Louis XVI: the End of a Myth
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CHANTAL GRELL The sacre of Louis XVI: The End of a Myth in MICHAEL SCHAICH (ed.), Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 345–366 ISBN: 978 0 19 921472 3 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 12 The sacre of Louis XVI: The End of a Myth CHANTAL GRELL The sacre of Louis XVI (1774-g3) is not a new subject. Although Edgard Faure has previously spoken of the ceremony as a mere anecdote when compared to the dramatic events that the king- dom of France had recently experienced, 1 the German historian Hermann Weber has done justice to the episode. The sacre of Louis XVI in 1775 was not an ordinary sacre, even if the ritual established by long-standing tradition was, to all appearances, respected.2 In Weber's opinion it was as if this much-debated ceremony brought to light the deep transformations which had touched the kingdom since the middle of the century, 3 particu- larly in the spheres of politics and religion. However, there have been many analyses of the 'desacralization' of the monarchy and of the image of the king at the end of the ancien régime which do not pause to consider the event. 4 Nevertheless, on the occasion of This essay is translated into English by Damien Hall. 1 Principally because of the Hour War (27 April-10 May 1775), which he regards as a key stage in the sequence of events which would eventually precipitate the downfall of the ancien regime. See Edgard Faure, I2 mai 1776: la disgriice de Turgot (Paris, 1961). See also Steven .L. Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1982). 2 Hermann Weber, 'Das Sacre Ludwigs XVI. vom 11. Juni 1775 und die Krise des Ancien Regime', in Ernst Hinrichs, Eberhard Schmitt, and RudolfVierhaus (eds.), Vom Ancien Rigime zur.ftan;;iisischen Revolution: Forschungen und Perspekt:wen (Gottingen, 1978), 539--65, quotation at 543; Hermann Weber, 'Le Sacre de Louis XVI', in Le Regne de Louis XVI et la guerre d'independo:nce americaine: actes du colwque international de Sorreze (n.p., 1977), 11-22.Jacques Le Goff, 'Reims, ville du sacre', in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de Memoire, 3 vols. in 7 parts (Paris, 1984~2), ii. pt. r: La.Nation, Sg-184, acknowledges Hermann Weber's work. 3 The American historian Dale Van Kley takes the line that Damiens's assassination attempt on the King constitutes a major turning point in the process of secularization. See Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling ef the Ancien Rigime, I750-I770 (Princeton, 1984). 4 This is especially true of Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges: etude sur le caractere suma- turel attribui a la puissance Tl/)lale particulierement en France et en Angleterre (Paris, 1923; repr. Paris, CHANTAL GRELL the sacre, the questions of symbolic representation and national legends invite consideration of the links between myth, history, and politics. The sacre Debated The sacre is an ancient ceremony. The first king to be anointed was Pepin the Short (751-68) in 751. 5 Pepin wanted the support of the Pope and the church at a time of dynastic change to legit- imize the power he had usurped. He received unction in the biblical tradition of Moses, Saul, and David; unction was then coupled with coronation by Louis the Pious (814-40) in 816. The ceremony of the consensus populi was a sixteenth-century addition. The ritual thus became gradually more elaborate in the course of time. The same can be said of the symbolic dimension: in the beginning, Clovis was only baptized. From the ninth century, thanks to Hincmar, Archbishop ofReims, the baptism of Clovis was lumped together with the sacre: in his Vita Remigii (877-81), the Archbishop says explicitly that St Remigius gave the unction of baptism and the unction of the sacre to the Frankish king, whether simultaneously or consecutively. Official historiography came to echo this confusion, so fortunate for the French monarchy. The ceremonial of the sacre was reorganized in the thirteenth century in Reims, in commemoration of the baptism of Clovis by St Remigius. The new cathedral provided a sumptuous setting for the ceremonies of the sacre, established by tradition. 6 The rituals 1961); reference is made here to the 1961 edn. Neither Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturelles de la Revolution Fra7'lfaise (Paris, 1990) nor Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins efthe French Revolution: From Catuin to the Civil Constitution, r56<r-179r (New Haven, 1996) refer to the sacre. 5 He was probably first anointed in 751 by St Boniface and then a second time in 754, with his two sons Charles and Carloman, at Saint-Denis by Pope Stephen II (III) (7521 ). 6 The foundation stone of the cathedral was laid in 1211, the choir finished in 1241, and the west fai;ade in 1260; the entire building was completed in 1287 for the sacre of Philip the Fair. Louis VIII (in 1223), Louis IX (1226), and Philip III (1271) were anointed in an unfinished cathedral. The first detailed account is of the sacre of Philip I in 1059; the first known manual for the sacre is Bibliotheque Nationale, Manuscrit latin 1246, which includes sixteen miniatures; cf. Jacques Le Goff et al. (eds.), Le Sacre royal a l'epoque de Saint Louis: d'apres le manuscript latin 1246 de la BNF (Paris, 2001). The ordo and the liturgy of the sacre were fixed during the reign of St Louis (12261 0). The sacre of Louis XVI: End of a Myth 347 and ceremonies were the subject of detailed descriptions, some- times illustrated, which are a mine of information for historians. 7 As well as general treatises, such as Theodore and Denis Godefroy's Ceremonial François(1649), there were new publications, along with some official ones, at each sacre. The sacre of Louis XVI was no exception. Apart from personal memoirs, we have numerous accounts published in the aftermath of the cere- monies. 8 The abundance of publications is clear evidence of the unending interest that the people of France continued to have in this symbolic ceremony. As Hermann Weber has shown, the sacre was also the subject of a debate which inevitably aroused public curiosity. Since Louis XVI had come to the throne in May 1774, the ceremony had been in preparation. As he was of age (21), and had been married for four years, there was no reason to put it off. At the end of that month, the intendant of the menus plaisirs, Papillon de la Ferté, was given the task of planning the work to fit out the cathedral. From the beginning, it was planned to limit costs, and Papillon de la Ferté paid special attention to this aspect. 9 In August 1774, Turgot, the Controller-General of Finances, asked him for a summary of costs, and a memorandum was presented to the King on II November 1774. According to Papillon, the cost of all the work had been calculated at 830,000 livres, a figure confirmed by the accounts of the menus plaisirs which have been kept for those years in the Archi:oes Nationales.10What, then, is the origin of the inflated figure of seven million li:ores put forward by 7 Exploited by Anton Haueter, Du Kriinungen der .franz:/isischen Konige im Zeitalter des Ahsoluti.smus und in der Restauration (Zurich, 1975), and by Richard A. Jackson, Vwat R.e%: Histoire des sacres et couronnements en France, r364-r825 (Strasburg, 1984), English edn.: Vwe le Roil A History ef lk French Coronation.from Charles V to Charles X(Chapel Hill, NC, 1984). 8 Examples are: Rela!ion de la ceremonie du Sacre et couronnement du roi,fait en l'eglise metro- poliiaine de Rheims le diman&he mjour dejuin r775 (Paris, n.d) and Du Sacre et couronnement de Louis XVI, roi de France et de NQ1Jarre, a Rheims le r r juin 1775, 2 vols. (Paris, 1775J, which is preceded by Nicholas Gobet's Recherches sur le sacre des rois de France depuis Clovis jusqu'a uuis XV, and followed by Abbe Thomas Pichon's Journal historique de ce qui s'est passe a cette august.e ceremonie, enrichi d'un tres grand nomhre de figures en taille-douce, grQ1Jees par le sieur Patas, avec leurs explications. Interested readers may also refer to /tecis historique de ce qui s'est passe depuis l'arrivee ® roi aRheims jusqu'au jour de son depart, published by the Journal Encyclopedi(Jue in August 1775. Pons Augustin Alletz edited another Ceremonial ® sacre des rois de France (Paris, 1775). 9 Papillon left a diary: Denis-Pierre:Jean Papillon de Ja Ferte, Journal des menus plaisirs du RJJi: r756-r780 (Clermont-Ferrand, 2002). 10 I refer here to Alain Lestini, 'L'administration des Menus-Plaisirs sous Louis XVI' (unpublished Master's thesis, Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin, 2002).