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Article Dans Une Revue Deshima. Revue d'histoire globale des Pays du Nord Année : 2020

Exécutions. Les corps de Christian VII dans la politique danoise, 1749-1808

Résumé

According to the famous study of royal transubstantiation by Ernst Kantorowicz, a king incarnates “two bodies”: the body natural and the body politic, the perishable body of the human individual and the eternal body of the institution. The obligation to personify this duality – which ideally forms a perfect unity – seems to be at the root of the misery felt by Christian VII during the entirety of his reign. King of Denmark-Norway from 1766 to 1808, the mentally unstable monarch considered himself profoundly out of place, being in his own eyes an impostor, an intruder, a “false” king. Consequently, he spent his whole life trying to escape his own role. Through a consideration of Christian VII’s relation to representation – theatrical and political – and of his strange need to physically and emotionally re-enact certain capital punishments officially carried out on his own orders, I examine the itinerary of this singularly unfree admirer of the Enlightenment’s thoughts on individual freedom; an itinerary that throws an interesting light on the institution of the Danish royalty at the end of the eighteenth century.
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hal-04035564 , version 1 (18-03-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04035564 , version 1

Citer

Christian Bank Pedersen. Exécutions. Les corps de Christian VII dans la politique danoise, 1749-1808. Deshima. Revue d'histoire globale des Pays du Nord, 2020, Géographies et imaginaires, 14, pp.285-306. ⟨hal-04035564⟩
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