THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?Revolution. He is one of the few thinkers of his day to recognize the symbolic function
of power in shaping social relations. Anyone who doubts that this is so has only to read
or reread the introduction toThe French Revolution, a veritable essay in political philoso-
phy, whose major insight seems to me to have lost none of its acuity, despite the fragility
of the historical reconstruction. Compared with that made by Tocqueville, Michelet’s
analysis of the ancien re ́gime may, of course, seem summary and sociologically poor. But
we do not have to choose between them, and the difference between them is not that
between an ideological history and a conceptual history. In fact, Michelet sees and tries
to conceptualize something that escapes Tocqueville’s thought. The latter notes every sign
of the gradual centralization of the state and of the increasing equality of condition, and
interprets them as proof that society is indeed being transformed, despite the seeming
permanence of its order. It could not be said that he is insensitive to the symbolic dimen-
sion of the social. In one sense, it does not escape him, for, rather than the de facto
growth of equality and centralization, it is, I believe, the establishment of a principle of
similarity governing both conduct and morals and the establishment of thepoint of view
of the statethat attracts his attention. But it is precisely because he erects this into a
model—an ideal model whose coordinates in time and space are never defined—that he
loses interest in the figure of power and tends to reduce the history of the ancien re ́gime
to the breakup of aristocratic society to such an extent that the new society appears to be
no more than the final product of that process, and the Revolution becomes unintelligible
except insofar as it designates the moment of a flight into the imaginary. Michelet, by
contrast, decodes the symbolic by transposing it onto another register; within this register,
the mainspring behind domination and behind the organization of institutions is, as he
puts it, the mostobscureand the mostintimateelement in the position and representation
of power (and let me repeat that one cannot exist without the other). He expresses his
views most clearly when, having drawn up a balance sheet of the state of France on the
eve of 1789, having noted that ‘‘I see the Revolution everywhere, even at Versailles,’’
having judged inevitable and visible to all ‘‘the defeat of the nobility and the clergy,’’ and
having described the boldness and blindness of Calonne, he concludes: ‘‘The only obscure
question was that of royalty. This is not, as it has so often been said, a question of pure
form, but a fundamental question, a question more intimate and more perennial than
any other question in France, a question not only of politics, but of love and of religion.
No other people so loved their kings.’’ This interest in the obscure, the profound, and the
primal, which inspires all Michelet’s works fromThe Origins of French LawtoThe Sor-
cerer, helps him to discover something that Tocqueville fails to see: the mystery of the
monarchical incarnation. Beyond the conscious representation of a divine-right king
whose power restores something of the presence of Christ and thereby makes justice
appear in his person, there lies an unconscious representation of a society embodied in a
king, of a society whose political institutions are not simply ordered in accordance with a
‘‘carnal principle’’ but whose members are so captivated by the image of a body that
PAGE 175175.................16224$ $CH6 10-13-06 12:35:04 PS