Willingly and with Pleasure: Desiring Politics in the <i>Couronnement de Louis</i>

This essay describes how the aristocratic hero’s loyalty toward his king and lord is produced, sustained, and put to politically effective use in the chanson de geste the Couronnement de Louis by reading the twelfth-century poem for evidence of its hero’s desire. In providing Charlemagne with an unwilling heir in the form of the titular Louis, I argue, the Couronnement breaks open the ideology of lineal inheritance and hereditary monarchy and lays bare a field of political culture crisscrossed by the desires of powerful men: desires for titles and power, land and wealth, certainly; but also desires that constitute their relationships with one another. In taking Charlemagne’s unwilling heir Louis as the object of his continual devotion, the hero Guillaume d’Orange must necessarily subordinate his own interests as such (political, economic, lineal, and indeed sexual), to the interests of the younger man, ultimately coordinating his desires relative to those of his lord. Reading Guillaume’s loyalty as Freudian libido—and therefore as alterable, reversible, and re-arrangeable in terms of quantity, intensity, attachment, and aim—defamiliarizes the familiar, structural image of the lord-vassal bond, producing a finer-grained understanding of how power and politics work at the level of what men want for themselves and from one another.