THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?this pseudo-visible entity have to be destroyed; he must be laid low and torn to pieces.
That action alone will ensure that the living individual loses his life. The empty head of
Louis XVI appears in the empty crown. If, on the other hand, Louis XVI is struck, and if
his blood is shed in the belief that this will annihilate his body, it will be found that we
have here a living man, and, given that this living man represents eternal life, royalty will
be resurrected. In general terms, Michelet is trying to explain that, because royalty is
embodied in a man, the royal phantasmagoria is revived when the man is turned into a
spectacle. Hence his bitter commentary on the detention of Louis XVI in the Temple. It
was believed, he suggests, that the deposition of the individual would have the effect of
desanctifying him. On the contrary: ‘‘The most serious and the cruelest blow that could
have been struck against the Revolution was the ineptitude of those who constantly kept
Louis XVI before the eyes of the population, and who allowed him to relate to the popula-
tion both as a man and as a prisoner.’’ Why? Because the more he was revealed in his
human singularity, and the more visible the living individual became, the more he re-
mained a king. His sufferings inspired love even before he was executed, but beyond that
love there lay, so to speak,the attraction of the unique object of every gaze. Michelet suc-
ceeds admirably in showing that Louis XVI appears to be unique precisely because he is
so commonplace, because he is seen in the bosom of his family, a mere man amongst
mere people, caught up in the insignificance of everyday life. All the signs that designate
him to be a man restore his kingship.
I cannot refrain from pointing out the remarkable manner in which the writer por-
trays Louis XVI. He shows him to his readers, but he does so in order to prevent him
from delighting the eye. He describes him as ‘‘ruddy-faced and replete,’’ as eating too
much over-rich food, as walking along with ‘‘the myopic gaze, the abstracted expression,
the heavy gait, and the typical swaying walk of the Bourbons,’’ and as giving the impres-
sion that he is ‘‘a fat farmer from the Beauce.’’ By doing so, he does not make him
any less commonplace, but his neutral observations do tend, as it were, to dissolve his
individuality into a genre painting.
The crucial moment in the interpretation, however, concerns the execution. Michelet
is not insensitive to the arguments of the Montagne, as it believes that it did have the
merit of recognizing the imperative need to destroy the incarnation. The Montagne be-
lieved, ‘‘not without reason,’’ he adds, that ‘‘a man is as much a body as a spirit, and that
one could never be certain of the death of the monarchy until one had touched, felt, and
handled it in the shape of the dead body of Louis XVI and his severed head.’’ He suggests,
in a sense, that if the people were to be elevated to the rank of royalty, they needed,
perhaps, more than the image of the Law; they needed, perhaps, an image of punishment.
But he also suggests that, while the imagination is not extinguished by the light of justice,
nothing stimulates it more than the sight of a corpse. The blood of the dead man does
not destroy the incarnation; it revives it. Royalty and religion are reborn at the very
moment when the revolutionaries lapse into the illusion that sustained them: namely the
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