CLAUDE LEFORTillusion that they were imprinted upon a real body. Such, then, are ‘‘the terrible effects of
the legend of the Temple,’’ of the legends that were unleashed by the execution:
The kings of the scripture are called Christs; Christ is called a king. There was not a
single incident in the king’s captivity that was not seized upon and translated into an
episode in the Passion. The Passion of Louis XVI became a sort of traditional poem
that peasants and women passed on by word of mouth: the poem of Barbarian
France.How can the thinker who is so devoted to rooting out beliefs that give rise to, sustain,
or restore the mystery of the monarchical incarnation consent to their being transferred
onto the sacred image of the People, the Nation, Humanity, and the Spirit? The problem
would become more complex if we were to follow a further strand in Michelet’s interpre-
tation of the Revolution, but to do so would be beyond the scope of the present essay.
These all too brief remarks must suffice: although he posits an antithesis between the
ancien re ́gime and the Revolution, Michelet is still blind to the internal contradictions of
the Revolution. He sees Robespierre’s acquisition of power as a resurrection of the monar-
chy (a process that began with the death of Danton, he notes in the 1868 Preface); he
attacks the Jacobin doctrine of public safety by comparing it to the absolutist idea of
reason of state and the Christian doctrine of salvation. He denounces both the Monta-
gnards and the Girondins as arrogant intellectual elites (‘‘There is a terrible aristocracy
among these democrats’’); he even goes so far as to say of Robespierre that ‘‘On the day
that the director was revealed to be the future king of the priests [after the trial of the
Mother of God], a reawakened France set him at the side of Louis XVI’’ (book 3). He
wishes, we said, to ensure that the Revolution will not be confused with any one of its
episodes, and to prevent it from being appropriated by any one clan; but, while he tempo-
ralizes it in one sense, in another he restores to it a temporality that cannot be mastered
and describes its progress in such a way that the creation and destruction of men and
ideas become indissociable; although he asserts the unity of the spirit of the Revolution,
he sees it as being deployed in different places and as stirring up so many currents that
he makes a distinction between a truly peasant revolution and an embryonic socialist
revolution.
Perhaps the contrast between two of his formulas reveals just how ambiguous his
conception of the Revolution is. Both, as it happens, have become famous: ‘‘History is
resurrection’’ and ‘‘History is time.’’
The reader of the rapid sketch we have outlined cannot have failed to sense the weakness
in Michelet’s argument. When he derives the human monarchy from the divine monarchy
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