Cannibal power

The dream of Louis VII recounted by Rigord in his Gesta Philippi Augusti is a disturbing royal Last Supper. It serves as a metaphor and prefiguration, but also as a warning of the ambivalence and inadequacies of royal religion. We propose to study its monstrous inversion, based on biblical glosses of the power of kings, oscillating between ecclesiastical manducation and secular devouring. We'll call cannibalistic power the turning of Eucharistic society against itself. This hypothesis allows us to better understand certain features of the political imaginary of royalty, expressed in the figure of the hunter king, but also its disruption in the ^16th century, when religious conflicts also expressed the sensitive history of the "holy horror" provoked by the Eucharist. The anthropophagic question thus reopens the question of barbarism, and the lecture concludes with an analysis of Montaigne's famous texts on cannibals, which maintain the challenge of the universal while digging up the place of the other through writing.

Contents

• The story of a king who dreams: the dream of Louis VII from Rigord's Gesta Philippi Augusti
• "King Louis, before his birth, had this vision during his sleep: it seemed to him that his son Philip held in his hand a golden chalice full of human blood, which he offered to all his nobles , and they all drank from it "
• The Royal Supper as metaphor and prefiguration
• Giraud de Barri, the Grail myth and its political implications
• Eucharistic society and theological-political encompassment: ambivalences and inadequacies of royal religion
• Louis Marin, The king's portrait and the medal as the "sacramental host of state power
• A counter-evidence of ceremonial subversion: the flight to Varennes (June 1791): "Who would have dared arrest him, if, spreading his clothes, he had shown this habit?" (Michelet)
• Those who pay the price for the weakness of belief: violence against Jews and the murderous imaginary of the desecrated host
• Jewish ritual crime: Paolo Uccello and the Urbino predella (1467-1468), Simon de Trente's Bloody Easter (1475)
• Another royal dream: La faim de Guillaume II le Roux et le cerf ensanglanté after Gautier Map
• Christ the King does not swallow the body of the kingdom, but "injects into the members of the country the life-giving blood" (Jerzy Pysiak, "Philippe Auguste, roi des derniers temps" Annales, 2002)
• Philippe Buc, L'ambiguïté du Livre. Prince, pouvoir et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Âge, Paris, 1994 : les puissances politiques de la glose, ou pourquoi le temps ne périme pas le Livre
• Leo quasi bos comedet paleas, "the lion, like an ox, will eat the chaff of wheat" (Isaiah, 11, 7): ecclesiastical manducation and royal devouring
• Cannibalism as a monstrous reversal of the Eucharistic metaphor
• Why must kings hunt? Frederick II, St. Louis and Francis of Assisi
• Louis XI's passion for hunting as a pathology of power
• Playing the bear: when Danish kings invented an ursine origin (Michel Pastoureau)
• Communion and predation, the test of the 1534 summer controversy between Robert Céneau and Martin Bucer (after Thierry Wanegffelen)
• Disgust versus delight: a sensitive history of the "holy horror" of the Eucharist (Frank Lestringant)
• "They say we share human flesh": anti-Christian polemics and the first accusations of anthropophagy, or the paroxysmal imaginary of Thyestes' feast
• During the Wars of Religion, eating the enemy's filthy heart was "a sacrifice or offering made of oneself, mimetic of the Sacrifice of the one who took upon himself all the sins of the world" (Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu)
• How did the word cannibal come to the ears of Christopher Columbus? The story of a denial (after Frank Lestringant)
• The ritual reading of exo-cannibalism as an anthropological taboo
• "For the day will come when the idea that, to feed themselves, the men of the past raised and slaughtered living beings and complacently displayed their tattered flesh in showcases, will no doubt inspire the same repulsion as the cannibalistic meals of American, Oceanian or African savages did to travelers in the ^16th or ^17th centuries" (Claude Lévi-Strauss, "La leçon de sagesse des vaches folles", 2001)
• Nous sommes les barbares: Montaigne, le lieu de l'autre (Michel de Certeau) et le pari de l'universel (Gérard Lenclud)
• "We can therefore call them barbarians, with respect to the rules of reason, but not with respect to us, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism"