TRIBUNE – No more war in Ukraine, no more energy crisis, even the advertising screens disappeared last night on the non-stop news channels, everything is suspended like a freeze frame, a “freeze frame”, a pause in the frenetic unfolding of the uninterrupted flow of information.
What strikes me and challenges me is the unanimity around the person of the Queen, whether royalist or republican, left or right, poor or rich, countless people in the world are moved and sometimes to tears on all continents.
And yet, his life was not free from dark areas, I will not talk about it here, because it is neither the moment nor the object of my talk today.
What interests me is to understand why so much emotion.
First of all, there is the thesis of “Two Corps of the King“, essay on political theology in the Middle Ages (The King’s Two Bodies. A study on medieval political theology) a classic of medieval history, legal history and political philosophy published in 1957 by Ernst Kantorowicz, then a teacher at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
By focusing on the study of the Tudors, on the French monarchy and on Shakespeare’s play Richard II, Kantorowicz shows how historians, theologians and canonists of the Middle Ages conceived and constructed the royal person and office.
The king, he writes, possesses an earthly and mortal body, while embodying the political and immortal body, the community constituted by the kingdom. ” The king is dead, long live the king ! “, an adage that appeared late during the burial of Louis XII in 1515, illustrates and explains this dual human and sovereign nature, the ” king’s body ”, human and mortal and the body of the sovereign being able neither to die nor to fish.
Two registers which coexist, but which oppose each other, the symbolic and the real, the infinite and the finitude, the spiritual and the temporal, the eternal and the temporary, the sky and the Earth, horizontality and verticality.
What moves many people probably relates more to the body of the sovereign than to the body of the Queen.
Because it is not so much the disappearance of the woman, the wife, the mother or the grandmother that affects people, but the incarnation of the sovereign, that is what she represented, a community national, but also an idea, a concept extended to the category of the universal.
By disappearing, it is also the 20ᵉ century which never stops dying, Gorbachev preceded him by a little, others of this generation will soon follow.
But, Elizabeth II, by the longevity of her life and her reign as well as by her singular personality, discreet, upright, solid, orderly, dignified, mischievous, and her simple lifestyle and without worldly ostentation, probably surpasses them all symbolically. as a universal Sovereign and probably also as a universal mother, because she was an example and a model for many people.
With its disappearance, it is therefore a whole world that is leaving, but it is also a whole universe and an era that are ending in the endless upheavals of the aftershocks of the multiple geopolitical, health, economic and energy earthquakes.
Then this wave of emotional shock amplifies like the wave of a tsunami fueled by the collapse of the traditional benchmarks that underpinned the International Order and the balance of forces put in place after 1945.
Thus, the relative geopolitical stability of the Cold War having been shattered since February 24 and the emergence of an unforeseeable armed conflict on the borders of the European Union has generated feelings of concern, fear, anxiety and anxiety among a population already very affected since 2020 by the health crisis.
In a world lacking in sovereignty, hypermaterialist, governed by men and women politicians lacking in stature and charisma, also weakened by a growing lack of legitimacy, in a world in which reign indeterminacy and instability, the Conflicts are no longer settled by law (national and international) and negotiation, but by force, coercion, intimidation, recourse to non-concerted and “un”democratic decisions, by threat, violence, and by the war. The death of the body of Queen Elizabeth II now gives way to the void left by the death of the body of the Sovereign whose symbolic succession is no longer ensured by the mortal body of the King.
It follows that the double body of the King, and therefore of the Queen, today finds itself orphaned of its essential, sovereign, symbolic, sacred, eternal, immortal, spiritual, mystical and religious function, religion being what connects the human beings with each other by a sacred, invisible, mysterious and universal link.
In other words, the old adage that perpetuated symbolic Order, “The king is dead, long live the king” has become obsolete and this is felt in the social body in an unconscious way.
It didn’t matter if the king died, his double was immortal.
The Queen may be dead, but there is no Queen or King living to take over, not just in Britain, but anywhere else in the West.
What the “subjects of his Gracious Majesty” mourn today, like all those affected by his death, does not necessarily relate to the loss of a person and a body by definition mortal (96 years old is a canonical age) , a mother, a sister, a grandmother, but indeed the loss of the foundations and structuring symbolic landmarks which made the world habitable by the almost mineral stability embodied by Queen Elizabeth for 96 years, including 70 years of reign, it is that is, at least three generations.
Yesterday Queen Elisabeth died twice.
What to be moved to tears for some.
The king’s body double was transcendental in nature, as it stood above earthly and human laws. As soon as the transcendental dimension is lacking, the whole social body feels lost, abandoned and losing meaning.
An urban and worldly legend falsely attributes to André Malraux having said that “21ᵉ century will be religious or will not be”.
This is not the case since he declared during an interview given to Le Point in 1975:
“I have been told that the 21st century will be religious. I never said that, of course, because I don’t know. What I say is more uncertain. I do not exclude the possibility of a spiritual event on a planetary scale“.
Could the death of Queen Elizabeth II be of this nature?