CLAUDE LEFORTand the idea of redemption, and thus makes tangible the historical dimension of the
divine. All these themes lend themselves to political elaborations, but their meaning is in
itself uncertain. It is when a definite relationship is established between a certain type of
political institution and a certain type of religious institution that the religious basis of
the political order becomes legible, as does the political basis of the Church, for the
Church ceases to merge with Christian humanity and is circumscribed within a space,
organized under the aegis of a power, and imprinted on a territory.
Let us now, then, qualify a formula that appeared to take us to the heart of the
problem. We asked ourselves whether religious belief might not have been transferred
onto philosophical thought at the very moment when the latter claimed to be able to
discern the persistence of the religious in the political; whether, in short, it might not
have misrecognized itself by misrecognizing the meaning of the new society that began to
take shape in the last century. It might be more accurate to ask: Does not this thought
bear the imprint of a theologico-political schema? Is it not because it is secretly governed
by a curious identification with theroyalty of the spiritthat it is drawn to the One?
The work of Michelet appears to me to provide the perfect justification for asking this
question. He is not, of course, a ‘‘philosopher’’ in the sense in which scholars understand
that term, but the reader has already been warned that we are not using it in its restrictive
sense. The fact is that he does not belong to the species ‘‘scientific historian,’’ which had
yet to come into being; his history is interpretive and is bound up with an investigation
into the meaning of humanity’s development and, more specifically, into the political and
religious revolution that he thought was going on before his very eyes, despite the forces
that were trying to hinder it or to reverse its course. I find his thought exemplary because
it testifies to a debate that we rarely see taking place within the mind of one man. His
initial stance is to espouse and combine two conceptions that see the Revolution as being
heir to the work already accomplished by Christianity and by the monarchy, respectively.
Breaking with this inspiration, he then makes a radical critique of the ancien re ́gime as a
theologico-political formation, whose destruction was inaugurated by the Revolution. But
his critique is such that it re-exploits seemingly discredited theologico-political categories
to make an apologia for modernity. Yet this very operation, and we may well wonder to
what extent it is conscious or unconscious, brings him up against the idea of a right or a
freedom that can found itself, the idea of a humanity that displays signs of its self-tran-
scendence, of a heroism of the spirit (the expression is an early borrowing from Vico), of
an infinite questioning of any given configuration of knowledge.
The movement that takes us from theIntroduction to a Universal Historyor theOri-
gins of French Law [droit]to theBible of Humanityor the 1869 Preface to theHistory of
FranceviaThe French Revolutiondescribes a trajectory in which we find a constant tension
PAGE 170170.................16224$ $CH6 10-13-06 12:35:02 PS