Public Ritual

Following the research of Kantorowicz, twenty-first-century scholars, foremost scholars of French ritual, have proposed a model of ritual that draws inspiration from antique sources. The effect of the scholarship on ceremonial has invigorated the association of classical and modern use of allegory and mythology in burnishing the royal prerogative of the heirs of Charles V of France. By the late fifteenth century, the history of royal presentations of majesty was predicated on the performance of four rituals associated with the king's advent: celebration of the royal coronation rite; the staging of an elaborate post-coronation entry ceremony into the city of Paris; the sporadic attendance of the kings of France within the chambers of judicial institutions (the lits de justice); and the orchestration of emotions associated with a king's death and the drama of the royal funeral ceremony. For each ritual, the medieval origins of the ceremony have been noted. The continuity in ritual enactment reveals a new tenor in kingship expressed through elaborate protocol, processional order, and the hierarchy of rulership; these qualities became defining characteristics of the modern, "absolute" ritual of Louis XIV's court that treated ritual as performance theater. The full resources of the crown of France were evoked through constitutional metaphor of the "king's two bodies," yet ritual performance underlined the gravitas of the physical presence of a king's body amidst the collected members of the body politic. Both the festivities and participants increasingly eulogized the glory and prowess of hereditary monarchy at the juncture in history when ritual became a pejorative term for many communities who fought the resources of the crown and church in order to defend the Protestant faith.

Although the model of "state" ceremonial is grounded in study of Kantorowicz's seminal work and Geertz's research, the theory introduces critical elements of an antinominalism that limit the empirical and normative elements of ritual study. First, the public presentations of majesty in Renaissance and Reformation Europe also included adventitious ceremonies. For example, both civic and religious processions were staged throughout each realm to honor the presence of members of the royal family or the arrival of royal officials. The celebrations of royal births and marriages, as well as military and diplomatic victories, encouraged the invocation of ceremonial and rituals that paralleled the protocol of "state" ceremonial. The pageantry and orchestration of a processional order predicated on office and privilege reveals a vested interest in ceremonial robes and emblems of office. Yet, while the articulation of "state" ceremonial is defined through the pursuit of order among hierarchies of elites, the records of many of the adventitious celebrations demonstrate considerable dispute among contemporary office-holders regarding the past history of ritual, protocol, the privileges of office; even the history of gift-exchange was rigorously debated. Second, the model of "state" ceremonial is wholly royal and excludes the presence of royal women at critical moments of dynastic change. The result has been a celebration of royal prerogative that has been encoded in legal metaphors of power as a "canon of law" based on the promotion of misogyny. Yet, the full records of state and adventitious celebrations staged to honor the queens of France reveal a profuse culture of affective topoi based on the emotional elements of kinship and community evident in discourse and gesture that both acknowledged and celebrated the queens' authority within communities throughout the realm. Thus, if the model of "state" ceremonial is exclusively royal, the combined study of ritual and ceremonial suggests a fully gendered model that is at odds with social and political history of early modern monarchies and the rise of nation-states. The confluence of religion and political aspirations is especially striking in study of the acts of regicide enacted against Louis XVI of France and Charles I of England. The history of festivals during the French Revolution offers insight into the transformation of state-building based on the incorporation of republican models of citizenship that has transformed the process of government in Western communities.