“THE MYSTERIOUS FORCE OF LEGITIMACY”

A vicious circle: legitimacy is the only force that assures lasting government; but for a government to become legitimate it must already have lasted for a long time.

“The revolutionary spirit is correct when it states that the principles of legitimacy are limited, conventional, fluctuating, easily undermined by reason: we, too, admit this. And nor is it wrong when it affirms that such principles appear fair and true only because men, in debating them, never go beyond a certain point, past which their weakness would be revealed. But it deceives itself, and shows an ignorance of the world that it periodically reduces to ruin, when it confuses these principles with all the fragile conventions that fill the life of society. These principles, however fragile, do differ from the others because they contain a magical virtue: as soon as men are tempted by the Devil to break them, they are smitten by fear; the sacred fear of the broken rule.”

“The innermost nature of the principles of legitimacy is the power to exorcise fear.”

On July 25, 1820, Talleyrand wrote to the Duchess of Courland from Valençay, where the legitimate king, whom he had led to the throne, compelled the mind of Talleyrand “not to occupy himself with anything he’s good at doing.” His letter contained an esoteric codicil: “The mysterious force of legitimacy is being lost because it has not been understood. All men of revolution reduce it to being a means for preserving the power of kings, whereas it is most of all a factor necessary for the peace and happiness of the people, whereas it is the most solid and, I would say, the only guarantee for the existence of nations and for their continuance. Legitimacy of kings, or rather legitimacy of governments, is the safeguard of nations and that is why it is sacred…”

At the very moment when Talleyrand is expounding the principle of legitimacy, and measures his whole action upon it, he casually fails to put it into practice. The armistice of April 23, 1814, is signed by him without any authority: the King has not yet reached Paris, and the involvement of the Senate is, in everyone’s view, an extremely fragile gimmick. But Talleyrand wants to move ahead of the King, who would make negotiations more difficult for him. His secret thought is la légitimité, c’est moi. Later, there will always be time for sham diversions, such as when he writes in his Mémoires that he had signed the armistice in his quality as minister appointed by the King.

This secret thought was certainly not far from the truth—and nor did it respond to some sort of dark egomania, which would have been contrary to his style. Instead, once again, it anticipated a simple fact. At the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand realized that Wellington and Castlereagh were indeed finding it difficult to comprehend the meaning of that word “legitimacy.” As for the court of Louis XVIII, it could only resemble that of Ubu, as Bloy would have recognized. But the final confirmation would come a few years later, with the revolution of the parvenus. Louis Philippe, despite being an Orléans, waited nervously to be recognized by the European courts. He had sent Colonel Atthalin to St. Petersburg with a signed letter announcing his accession to the throne. Nicholas I let fifteen days pass before replying. What was all that business about barricades, tocsin bells, and shootings? But one day he read in the Moniteur that Talleyrand had been appointed ambassador to London. And that seemed enough for him. He said: “Since Monsieur Talleyrand has sided with the new French government, this government must necessarily have good prospects of lasting.” Then, at last, Colonel Atthalin was given an answer. The Tsar of all the Russias recognized the new King of the French. He had found his legitimacy in a newspaper article.

The tumultuous history of Western transformation is all a sequence of “theological insurrections.” The narrative of auctoritas and potestas—how they are separated after Melchizedek, how they join forces and then clash with each other, how one subordinates, nourishes, and defines the other in their relationship with the gods of the cosmos or in their relationship to a single god beyond the cosmos, how they divide the earth and heaven between them, how auctoritas is finally absorbed into potestas, but injects it with that spiritual venom that will henceforth make it demonic—is primarily a sequence of theological glosses.

The mechanics who built, oiled, and started up the unwieldy modern machine were theologians. Then they quietly withdrew. All that remained now was to observe its most banal aspect: the transformation into facts, the procession of revolutions. All modern artificialism, which is by far the most effective device for operating on the world and developing power, finds the seal of its tortuous history not in some secular empiricist but in Calvin. According to the definition of Louis Dumont, that artificialism is “the systematic application of an extrinsic, imposed value to the things of the world.” In order to operate on this world with such sharp knives, it is necessary for the action to originate in something that is outside the world: and it is Calvin himself who fixes that element of will as arbitrary power derived from God, who is “the archetype of the will.” Something that does not belong to the world—and will soon wish to ignore its own origin—is placed at the center of the world and rattles, claws, and fumbles around in it. The most devastating effects of this Will tend to happen when no one remembers any longer that the origin of that power is outside the world, since it is no longer customary to talk about something outside the world—and all that remains is to submit to its action without recognizing it. From theology one moves to a kind of black magic whose source cannot be discovered. For that source is in coelestibus. And so, in all his paroxysms, in all his claims for autonomy, in his every peremptory and tentative gesture, “what we call the modern ‘worldly individual’ has within him, concealed in his inner constitution, an unperceived but essential element of extra-worldliness.” And yet everything takes place as if that dazzling crystal, that almond buried deep in the psyche, did not exist. Graecum est, non legitur: but that unread language is the language that remains active.

Talleyrand traces his ancestors back to the legendary Aldebert. Around the year 1000—so the story goes—Hugh Capet asked him: “Who made you a count?” and Aldebert replied: “Who made you king?”—a very early allusion to the particular intimacy the Talleyrand family always enjoyed with the arcana imperii. A dangerous question for every sovereign is his origin. A question that Aldebert answered with impudence, and by doing so he showed himself to be a sovereign. As for the secret of sovereignty, it is alluded to in the motto of the counts of Périgord: Re que Diou, “None other than God” (a different interpretation, but meaning the same in the end, is: “No other king than God”). Sovereignty can be attacked by tracing back to its origin, but sovereignty wins its contest when it refuses to give an account of itself, except to something (“Diou”) on which no one can reckon. This is the origin of that arcane truth formulated by Disraeli: “Never explain.”

The elderly princess Izabela Czartoryska had begun work on the catalogue raisonné of her treasures and curiosities, which included a small book where Vauban had sketched out projects for fortifications, a lock of hair belonging to Agnès Sorel, Madame de la Vallière’s prayer book, and a series of autographs of all the rulers of France from François I to Napoleon. In the evening, after her usual stroll around the park, she allowed the young Countess Potocka to ask her questions. She spoke now of that time when she slipped into the study of Frederick the Great, a few moments after he had left it: “Before a table covered with papers and maps, a plate of cherries with a note in the king’s writing: I am leaving eighteen of them. To one side, an old hussar uniform lying over a chair was waiting for someone to come and repair it. Close to a letter from Voltaire, left open, the bill from a grocer who supplied the Court. A score thrown untidily on a music stand and, not far away from this general disorder, a curule seat, of the sort you would find at the Campidoglio, with the difference that one was painted dark red whereas this is made of rough wood, and nothing could hide its ignoble purpose.” This was the last still-life of absolute power.