Le sacre du roi : stratégie symbolique et doctrine politique de la monarchie française - article ; n°3 ; vol.41, pg 543-577

Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations - Année 1986 - Volume 41 - Numéro 3 - Pages 543-577
The Royal Coronation: the French Monarchy's Symbolic Strategy and Political Doctrine. M. Valensise.
The unction and crowning ceremony—considered as a synonym of royalty and an ahistorical mystery of royalty's symbolic strenght—nonetheless has a history. Far from being a gesture which was always identical and faithful to itself, the coronation went through incessant transformation in its morphology. We can see in it the work of semantic erosion and continual change which allowed it to adapt to the legal and political evolution of the French monarchy.
A diachronic analysis of its transformations and the controversy it raised at the time of Louis the Sixteenth's coronation in 1775 show the last possible dynamism of this archaic representation of the power incarnated in the king, before the dissolution of the monarchy during the revolution. This analysis points out the inherent limits to the efforts mode to reconstruct an unequivocal and infallible history of the monarchy's political doctrine so as to rationally found the historical rights of kings.
35 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.