Unsolved:Thaumaturgic Kings

Short description: 1924 work by historian Marc Bloch

Les Rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère supernaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Thaumaturgic kings. A study of the supernatural character attributed to royal power, particularly in France and England) is a work by historian Marc Bloch first published in 1924. It deals with the miraculous powers attributed to the Kings of France and the Kings of England, the most famous of which is the healing scrofula by touch. This is a groundbreaking book, as its approach draws on historical anthropology, Marc Bloch introduced anthropology, history of mentalities and comparative history into historical studies, heralding the historiographical revolution of the Annales.

Structure and contents

The fourteen-page bibliography is followed by an introduction explaining Bloch's approach and outlining the difficulties encountered, particularly with regard to sources. The body of the work is then divided into three books of very unequal lengths. The first book, "Les origines" (Origins), comprises two chapters, and shows how the thaumaturgical powers of the kings of France and England came into being. The second book, Grandeur et vicissitudes des royautés thaumaturgiques (Greatness and vicissitudes of thaumaturgical kingdoms), the most extensive with six chapters, analyzes the rites surrounding these powers and presents these elements in chronological sequence, illustrating their evolution until they disappeared. The final book, L'interprétation critique du miracle royal (Critical Interpretation of the Royal Miracle), contains a single chapter outlining attempts to explain miracles rationally, and showing how people came to believe in them. Marc Bloch, a profound rationalist, concludes that it was a collective error.

Five appendices follow: " The royal miracle in French and English accounting books", " An iconographic dossier", " The beginnings of royal anointing and coronations", " Analysis and excerpts from Traité du sacre by Jean Golein" and " The French kings' pilgrimage to Corbeny after the coronation and the transport of saint Marculf's shrine to Reims", plus six pages of additions and corrections.

This is an analysis of the royal figure in the Middle Ages, of all the symbols, values and ideal and material expressions of power that princes used not only to give prestige to the monarch's image, but also to provide a kind of justification for their temporal power. Giving the king a sacred character was a means of consolidating monarchical power over the people, in a feudal system where God's grace was (in theory) the fundamental requirement for ascending the throne. Unlike the Roman pontiff or the Byzantine emperor, heirs to the Church of Christ, directors of spirituality and spokesmen of the Creator's own will, temporal princes had to constantly "reinvent" the concept of their sacred, i.e. God-given, right to rule Christian kingdoms.

Over time, people came to think of the sovereign as a man of exceptional nobility, above the "simple folk", a man touched by divine grace. As such, he manifests the abilities and powers that, in the collective imagination, appear as a true sign of divine benevolence.

Marc Bloch cites more than just the power to cure plague and scrofula. In the introduction to his essay, he recalls Edward III of England's message to Philip VI of France, in which he orders him to abdicate the throne as unworthy of the title, since he is not directly descended from the legitimate line and is therefore not worthy of being consecrated to reign; if he wished to avoid a war (the one that came to be known as the Hundred Years' War), he would have to show the qualities proper to a sovereign: fight the other suitor in a fair duel, where God would judge who deserved the throne, or expose himself to hungry lions inside a cage, because the lion, a proud and noble animal, would never attack a legitimate sovereign. Here, then, is the idea of the king situated above other men manifesting itself once again, in a different form.

Temporal and spiritual power found in these manifestations of supernatural ability and quality a common cement to unite the two powers. Indeed, it was customary for princes to attend the sick during a solemn mass, celebrated by France's highest ecclesiastical dignitaries (the bishops of Chartres, Reims or Le Puy) ; since under the eyes of God and his ministers, in the sacred mystery of communion under both kinds, the healing powers of princes acquired a real form and manifested themselves as true emanations of the divine will, assuming a totally sacred connotation, free from any suspicion of paganism or heresy.

These consecrations nonetheless concealed the fierce struggles between the emerging Gallican Church, which sought above all to recognize the King of France as its true protector, and the Pope of Rome, who wished to prevent any form of autocephaly of the Churches within Christendom and to assert his own exclusive privilege to perform such prodigies and govern Christians according to the will of the Redeemer. Les Rois thaumaturges thus analyzes another aspect of the so-called Investiture Controversy, a profound crisis arising from the antagonism between the various institutions over the legitimacy of their power on Earth and the possibility of directing the life of the Christian people (which often translated into the right to choose bishops and other power-holders in the Church alone, something which, thanks to the administration of state property, guaranteed great opportunities for enrichment).

The origin of this alliance between ruler and bishop was the conversion and consecration of the first great Catholic king of the Franks: Clovis I, of the Merovingian dynasty, baptized with holy oil given by the Holy Spirit to saint Remigius, and proclaimed king by the will of God. It was in this episode that the rulers of France (whose titles included that of "Most Christian King") saw the source of their miraculous powers, an illustration of the constant renewal of the covenant between Christ's Church and the Crown.

In this book, the jurist Jacques Bonaud de Sauzet is considered one of the earliest apologists for the Valois, as he refutes the canonist Felino Maria Sandeo, who refused to recognize the thaumaturgical privilege of the kings of France as miraculous.

Henri IV touchant les écrouelles

Links

Review of the book by Étienne Bloch and Jacques Le Goff on the site of the Association Marc Bloch.

Bibliography

• Freddy Raphaël, « Les Rois Thaumaturges de Marc Bloch et la fondation de l'anthropologie politique et religieuse à Strasbourg », Revue des Sciences Sociales, 2008, Template:Numéro, p. 104-113, read on line, in French.
• Jacques Le Goff, Préface aux « Rois Thaumaturges », p.1121-1154, dans Héros du Moyen Âge, le Saint et le Roi, Éditions Gallimard (collection Quarto), Paris, 2004 ISBN:978-2-07-076844-8 ; p.1344
• Benoît Soubeyran, Un juriste nîmois du XVIe siècle formé à Montpellier, Jacques Bonaud de Sauzet (A 16th century jurist from Nîmes trained in Montpellier), dissertation in medieval history defended in Septembre 2010 at Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3 and reworked in 2015