This paper analyses the political languages that are in dispute over the definition of sovereign body, before the French revolution, through Guillaume de Saige’s Catéchisme du Citoyen . Written in the year of 1775 (reedited in 1787) and banished by the Parliament, this work (as pamphlets and brochures of certain “patriotes”) is interpreted as a response to the problem of political legitimacy, which became an issue during the last royal ordination, in Rheims. As trifling that a change in the liturgy of the ceremony of ordination may seem, the suppression of the moment in which the king demands the consent of the people to rule reveals the intention of Louis XVI to resort to the conventional monarchic rhetoric, dispensing with that consent of the people. It is up to political theory to analyse these pamphlets and brochures – still largely unknown and scarcely commented upon – without abstaining from articulate them with the more systematic works of the eighteenth century France, in order to, first of all, constitute the “linguistic conventions” of the period, and second, to achieve a critical disposition concerning the past. That is to say, it is not the case of a reconstruction of the discourses of a specific historical period just for the sake of dilettantism, but precisely because the comprehension of the distance that separates us from that period sheds light upon the foundation of our own political languages.
Authority; Political languages; 18th Century – France