omslag Monarch 31-10-2006 11:04 Pagina 1 Mystifying the Monarch The monarchy: no other political institution proved to be so durable and flexible through its age-long history. Despite the modernization, seculari- zation, and bureaucratization of power, the affective, archaic, and almost timeless relationship between sovereigns and their ‘subjects’ still prevails in several countries. Though troubled by the many recent scandals of their royals, many courts continue to perceive that the perennial maxim ‘the King can do no wrong’ has lost none of its strength. Yet the staging and sacralization of the monarchy in Western Europe have always been interwoven with practices of subversion and banalization. The different discourses aiming at the symbolic construction of royal power can not be studied without considering at the same time the popular appropriation of the official rhetoric. Hence, this collection of essays does not propose a strictly linear narrative from medieval sacralization to postmodern demystification of kingship. Choosing the perspective of the long run between the twelfth and the first half of the twentieth century, it clearly shows how the mystification and demystification of the monarch have always been two sides of the same coin. The contributors are Alain Boureau, Gita Deneckere, Jeroen Deploige, Lisa Jane Graham, Maria Grever, Marc Jacobs, Gilles Lecuppre, Elodie DENECKERE GITA JEROEN DEPLOIGE Lecuppre-Desjardin, Jürgen Pieters, Alexander Roose, Kevin Sharpe, Henk te Velde, Maarten Van Ginderachter, and Jaap van Osta. JEROEN DEPLOIGE The editors are Jeroen Deploige (Associate Professor of Medieval Cultural GITA DENECKERE [ EDS.] History, Ghent University) and Gita Deneckere (Associate Professor of Modern History, Ghent University). Mystifying [ EDS. ] 9 789053 567678 the Monarch Studies on Discourse, isbn-13 978 90 5356 767 8 isbn-10 90 5356 767 4 www.aup.nl Power, and History Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam University Press Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 1 Mystifying the Monarch Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 2 Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 3 Mystifying the Monarch Studies on Discourse, Power, and History edited by Jeroen Deploige and Gita Deneckere Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 4 Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Layout: PROgrafici, Goes Illustration front cover: Jacob Jordaens, Le roi boit. Repas de famille le jour de la Fête des Rois [The King Drinks, Family Meal on the Feast of Epiphany] (c. 1638-1640). Paris, Musée du Louvre, (© Photo: RMN – © Jean-Gilles Berizzi). Painting, depicting a popular ritual of inversion, acquired in Holland in 1787 by the last French king Louis xvi (1754-1793). On 20 June 1792, during an attack by a Parisian mob, Louis xvi was forced to play the role of the mock king in a ‘king drinks’ rite. In 1793, the year of Louis xvi’s decapitation, the Jordaens’s painting became part of the collection of the Musée du Louvre. ISBN-13 978 90 5356 767 8 ISBN-10 90 5356 767 4 NUR 680/698 © Amsterdam University Press, 2006 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retriev- al system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the authors of the book. Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 5 Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction The Monarchy: A Crossroads of Trajectories 9 Jeroen Deploige and Gita Deneckere monarchy’s medieval monologism? 23 1 How Christian Was the Sacralization of 25 Monarchy in Western Europe (Twelfth-Fifteenth Centuries)? Alain Boureau 2 Political Assassination and Sanctification. 35 Transforming Discursive Customs after the Murder of the Flemish Count Charles the Good (1127) Jeroen Deploige 3 ‘Et le prince respondit de par sa bouche.’ 55 Monarchal Speech Habits in Late Medieval Europe Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin 4 Ideal Kingship against Oppressive Monarchy. 65 Discourses and Practices of Royal Imposture at the Close of the Middle Ages Gilles Lecuppre monarchy and the emergence of the public sphere 77 5 The Art of Saying ‘No’. Premonitions of 79 Foucault’s ‘Governmentality’ in Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire Jürgen Pieters and Alexander Roose 6 Sacralization and Demystification. 99 The Publicization of Monarchy in Early Modern England Kevin Sharpe 5 Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 6 7 King for a Day. Games of Inversion, 117 Representation, and Appropriation in Ancient Regime Europe Marc Jacobs 8 Fiction, Kingship, and the Politics of 139 Character in Eighteenth-Century France Lisa Jane Graham popular monarchy in the age of mass media 159 9 Staging Modern Monarchs. Royalty at the 161 World Exhibitions of 1851 and 1867 Maria Grever 10 The Emperor’s New Clothes. 181 The Reappearance of the Performing Monarchy in Europe, c. 1870-1914 Jaap van Osta 11 Cannadine, Twenty Years on. Monarchy 193 and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Netherlands Henk te Velde 12 The Impossible Neutrality of the Speech 205 from the Throne. A Ritual between National Unity and Political Dispute. Belgium, 1831-1918 Gita Deneckere 13 Public Transcripts of Royalism. Pauper 223 Letters to the Belgian Royal Family (1880-1940) Maarten Van Ginderachter Notes 235 Notes on Contributors 285 List of Illustrations 289 Index 291 6 Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 7 Acknowledgements This book constitutes one of the main results of a research project entitled ‘The Sovereign as Father Figure. Towards Practical Linguistic and Text Analytical Methods for Historians’, executed between 2001 and 2004 at Ghent University, the Catholic University of Leuven and the Free University of Brussels. We would like to thank our academic partners Jan Blommaert, Jo Tollebeek, Patricia Van den Eeckhout, and Tom Verschaffel for their commitment to this project and the many intellectual stimuli we enjoyed from them. Special gratitude goes to John Barrell, Marc Boone, Luc Duerloo, Jaap van Ginneken, and Ruth Wodak for their contributions to the success of a pleasant, small conference organized in November 2003 as a preparatory step to this volume and hosted by the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature in Ghent. We also feel honoured that Willem Frijhoff, Dominick LaCapra, Joep Leerssen, Gabrielle Spiegel, and Gareth Stedman Jones were willing to take part in the Scientific Committee to this enterprise. The realization of our project and of this volume took extensive advantage of the practical assistance of Claudine Colyn, Margot De Smaele, Greet Donckers, and Linde Vandevelde; of transla- tions offered by Jill Corner, Ingrid Piron, and Donald Pistolesi; and of the meticulous editorial assistance of Juleen Audrey Eichinger. For financial sup- port we could rely comfortably on grants from the Research Foundation – Flanders and from the Faculty of Humanities of Ghent University. Last but not least, we extend our deepest gratitude to the authors who were willing to con- tribute to this volume and share with us their unparalleled expertise. Jeroen Deploige and Gita Deneckere June 2006 7 Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 8 Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 9 Introduction The Monarchy: A Crossroads of Trajectories Jeroen Deploige and Gita Deneckere After the invasion of the humanities and the social sciences by the ‘linguistic turn’ in the 1980s, a book in which the three concepts of discourse, power, and history are combined can no longer cause surprise. Particularly the work of Michel Foucault has placed its stamp incontrovertibly on this triangle. And it still does so, even after the heyday of the linguistic turn. As Gabrielle Spiegel pointed out recently, Foucault’s use of the term discourse and his elaboration of the notion of knowledge/power also fostered new currents of historical work in which especially questions of ‘practices’ come to the fore.1 If it is true that the major discussions and dissatisfactions engendered by the linguistic turn remain basically at a theoretical level, concrete historical work benefits from Foucauldian theories that emphasize the ways in which discourse is tied to institutions and social practices. Even historians who are reluctant to assume the non-referentiality of language and discourse may well endorse the de-essen- tializing agenda of the linguistic turn and the abandonment of the positivist idea that discourse is a form of expression. The linguistic turn is in a sense giv- ing way to a ‘historical turn’ that remains informed by discourse theory but draws the attention away from questions of representation and back to sites of social practice, conceptualized as the effect of discursive formations that them- selves undergo constant processes of change. Spiegel sees the new perspectives on the dialectical interplay between discourse and practice as a rediscovery and even rehabilitation of ‘the social’ that had been weakened and obliterated by poststructuralism.2 Insofar as Foucault himself ventured into concrete historical research, one cannot deny that his results were received with considerable criticism, particu- larly by traditional historians. Those criticisms not only relate to the many his- torical inaccuracies and doubtful interpretations in Foucault’s empirical research, but are also inspired often by a dislike of his denigration of the ideals of the Enlightenment.3 Yet from a rather unexpected angle, the many-sided French historian Michel de Certeau has made some fascinating annotations on Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ research into the relationship between discursive strategies and the ‘microphysics of power’, as described for example in Sur- veiller et punir, Foucault’s study of nineteenth-century disciplinary procedures in prisons, schools, and hospitals.4 From Certeau’s comments two fundamen- 9 Mystifying the monarch 02-11-2006 09:18 Pagina 10 tal, mutually coherent critical observations can be deduced.