CLAUDE LEFORTis pointless to dwell upon precisely how the Roman notions ofpatria,communitas, and
populusare reactivated and reshaped within a religious symbolic; I would simply like to
draw attention to what is by now a well-known phenomenon: the installation of represen-
tations of the People, the Nation, the Fatherland, of Holy War and of the salvationor
safety [salut] of the state, within the theological configuration of the medieval monarchy.
With reference to Kantorowicz’s analyzes, it would be no less instructive to examine the
process inaugurated in the twelfth century whereby a public domain becomes detached
from the person of the king and is defined as a domain of inalienable property, and
whereby a further division is introduced between reference to an objective order and
reference to a sacred order: theres publicabecomes ares sacramodeled on the possessions
of the Church, which are themselves the property of Christ. The crown and the treasury
are placed beneath a pole of impersonality that will later become the pole of the state and,
thanks to the same inversion of signs, are defined as persons, as mystical bodies. (Bracton
even ventures to define the king as the Vicar of the Treasury, in accordance with the
model of the Vicar of Christ.)
Finally, it would also be appropriate to re-examine the relationship that was estab-
lished between the notion of a power that is confined to a limited territory and a restricted
community (a notion unknown in the period of the empire), and the notion of a power
that has a vocation for universal domination. And it would be appropriate to re-examine
the symmetrical relationship that was established between the notion of a kingdom, a
nation, and a people that are accorded a definite identity, and the notion of a land and a
community in which humanity is imprinted and embodied in a privileged manner. The
formula that makes the king an emperor in his own kingdom contains a contradiction: it
makes a gesture toward both an unlimited authority and a limited authority; it indicates
that modern monarchs’ tacit acceptance that their might is restricted by the might of
others has not done away with the fantasy of imperial might—a fantasy that has been
revived again and again throughout the ages. And this contradiction drifts into the frame-
work of the kingdom; it is as though empirical frontiers are conceivable only if the king-
dom finds itself to be entrusted with universal values. In order to appreciate its full
import, we would perhaps have to elucidate it further by re-examining the role played by
the idea—which receives its initial impetus from Dante—that humanity will becomeone
and will live in peace under the sole authority of theOne, an idea that combines the power
of the spirit or sovereign reason with political power. This idea was strongly challenged by
those who saw humanism as providing the basis for a critique of the temporal monar-
chy—a critique that began to be formulated by the end of the fourteenth century in
Florence and that spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth—but it may also be worth
asking whether it might not have retained its theologico-political efficacy in the realm of
philosophy, and whether it might not resurface whenever philosophy attempts to reform-
ulate the principle of what, following Michelet, we have termed the royalty of spirit.
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