CLAUDE LEFORTsymbols change place in the construction he himself built and of how that construction
survives despite inversions of meaning.
HisHistory of Francehad, he tells us in the Preface, brought him to the threshold of
the ‘‘monarchical ages’’ when an ‘‘accident’’ upset his plans.
One day when I was passing through Reims, I saw the magnificent cathedral, the
splendid Coronation Church, in great detail. When one walks around the internal
gallery eighty feet above the ground, one sees the ravishing wealth of its flowery
beauty as a permanent alleluia. In this empty immensity, one always seems to be able
to hear the great official clamor that was once called the voice of the people... I
reached the last little tower. There, I found a spectacle that astonished me greatly.
The round tower was garlanded with sacrificial victims. One has a rope around his
neck; another has lost an ear. The mutilated are sadder than the dead. How right
they are! What a terrifying contrast! The church of festivals, the bride, has adopted
that lugubrious ornament for her wedding necklace! The pillory of the people has
been placed above the altar. But might not those tears have fallen down through the
vaults and onto the heads of the kings? The tearful unction of the Revolution, of the
wrath of God. ‘‘I will not understand the monarchical ages,’’ I said to myself, ‘‘unless
I first establish within me the soul and the faith of the people, and, afterLouis XI,I
wrote myRevolution.(1845–53)This astonishing description is more eloquent than many historically or theoretically
based arguments, and it does more than they ever could to help us understand the posi-
tion Michelet adopts to mount his attack on the theologico-political. Where is his posi-
tion? Inside the cathedral of the coronation, the very place where Christian France was
shaped and then reshaped. It is there that he takes up his position; indeed, he explores it
thoroughly. He ascends its heights, just as the souls of the kings were believed to ascend
to take their place at the side of God, to the acclamation of the people, and, in this new
liturgy, his thought takes its place at the side of the people. Michelet moves through the
church like an actor. He makes it undergo a true metamorphosis, but he is still there. He
watches the king being crowned, but he secretly transforms the coronation into a deposi-
tion so as to reveal a second coronation that, so to speak, reduplicates it. He uses all the
old symbols: the coronation, the acclamation that welcomes the elect into the communion
of saints, the marriage between the Church and Christ, between the kingdom and the
king, the sacrificial victim, the cross that stands above the altar, the unction that raises the
king head and shoulders above his assembled subjects. But for Michelet the coronation is
that of the people. It is the true voice of the people that he hears in the nave; he imagines
the celebration of a different marriage; the garland of sacrificial victims replaces the mar-
tyred Christ; the pillory stands above the altar; tears replace the sacred liquor; the Lord’s
anointed becomes the anointed of the Revolution, which becomes God’s epic poem. And,
PAGE 172172.................16224$ $CH6 10-13-06 12:35:03 PS