<i>Le Roi ne meurt jamais</i>: On the Permanence of the Theologico-Political in Revolutionary France

This article examines the permanence of the theological-political doctrine of the king’s two bodies in the French Revolution. The analysis is structured in two parts. The first section presents a critique of the dominant view of the adoption of the principle of national sovereignty in 1789 and offers in its place an interpretation inscribed in the horizon of meaning shaped by the monarchical tradition in the longue durée . The second section highlights the theological-political nature of the Revolution and traces the symbolic operation performed on the concept of sovereignty in order to show the organizational and representational schemes of the fiction of the king’s two bodies as it was translated into the Constitution of 1791 and preserved in the collective imagination after the execution of Louis XVI.