The gilded balustrade: The Architecture of the Ban at the Court of Louis XIV

This proposal aims to explore the role that the balustrade of Louis XIV’s bed-chamber played as a social regulator within the private ceremonial of the lever du Roi in Versailles from 1683 to 1715.

As demonstrated by Kantorowicz, the lever was the Western acme of the solar imagery’s long evolution: adopted in Roman times, assimilated by the Byzantines emperors, re-enacted in Christian liturgy, before emerging in late Middle Ages when the French kings “were adorned with the customary epithet of Christ himself, Sol iustitiae”

However, what was the arcana imperii at stake in the daily celebration of the lever? What is the mystery of the ceremonial performed by the sovereign in front of the court?

Unlike any other insignia, the balustrade embedded a prohibition in the form of the ban: it was forbidden to approach and to touch it, and according to several sources, who spoke behind it, it did on behalf of the sovereign.

This ban seemingly did not follow an explicit norm, uttered by the king or any officer. Conversely, the ban emerged as rooted in the very arché of the king’s balustrade, as if the architectural feature could not perform except through a negation of an agency.

This paper attempts to read Louis XIV’s balustrade as the counter-apofantico element, whose arché must be traced back to the proximity to the language’s ‘originary’ separation. According to Benveniste and Agamben, this separation involved the ontology governed by the indicative (which defined the philosophy and the science) and the imperative that is at the base of the law, religion, and magic.
This latter is the field in which the lever founded its liturgy through the performative ritual of the monarch, who adopted the balustrade as the medium to stage its authority and sovereignty.