CLAUDE LEFORTfact that the monarchical reference is combined with a Christological reference. Michelet
does not simply adopt the notion of a duality between the temporal and the nontemporal,
transpose it onto a new register, and link it to an event that allows the nontemporal to be
read within the temporal; he reappropriates the image of the king and the idea of the
sovereignty of the One in order to celebrate the people, spirit or reason, and justice or
right. Like the Revolution, the people are divided in their existence. Insofar as the people
exist within time and space, they can appear fallible, divided, or even despicable, as when
they take on the features of ‘‘mob rule’’ or ‘‘popular caprice,’’ as when they adopt the
gross gesticulations of the parvenus of the Paris Commune, and as when they grotesquely
allow themselves to be ruled by ‘‘buffoons’’: they can become ‘‘the most dangerous of
judges’’ when they are ‘‘in ferment’’ (the references are to the chapter on the trial of Louis
XVI). In their atemporal existence, they win their true identity and reveal themselves to
be infallible and at one with themselves, to be in legitimate possession of an absolute
right. And when they take on this status, they occupy the position of the king. Michelet
is not indulging in rhetoric when he says that, as a historian, he has taken the ‘‘royal
road’’ and comments that: ‘‘to me, that word means popular’’ (book 3); in raising the
question of the legitimacy of the condemnation of Louis XVI, he is asserting that ‘‘the
people are all’’ and designating ‘‘the true King: the people.’’ One cannot fail to see in
certain of these formulas a resurgence of the theologico-political myth of the double
nature of the king.
The repeated eulogies to right as the sovereign of the world (a formula borrowed
from Rousseau) are equally significant, as is the moment when, in the course of his pitiless
description of the wrong-doings of the priestly monarchy, Michelet elevates Buffon, Mon-
tesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau to the status of the founding fathers of the new humanity
(he even calls them ‘‘the great doctors of the new Church’’) and when, reappropriating
an expression whose illusory effects he never ceases to denounce, he elevates ‘‘royalty of
spirit’’ above the world. We see here the workings of the transference to which we referred
earlier. ‘‘Until then, unity had been based upon the idea of a religious or political incarna-
tion. A human God, a God made flesh, was required to unite Church and State. Humanity
was still weak, and placed its union under the sign, the visible sign, of a man, an individ-
ual. From now on, unity will be purer, and will be freed from this material condition; it
will lie in the union of hearts, in the community of the spirit, in the profound marriage
of feelings that joins each to all.’’ A more detailed analysis of Michelet’s language would
further reveal a symbolic architecture which is very similar to that elaborated at the end
of the Middle Ages, an architecture which placed the king in a position to be a sovereign
mediator between justice and people, and justice in a position to be a sovereign mediator
between reason and equity.
As we have already said, the fact that we find in Michelet’s thought the imprint of
the theologico-political he is so determined to destroy does not, however, discredit his
interpretation of the mutation that occurred in the transition from ancien re ́gime to
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