Court ceremonial requalifies the monarch’s daily private acts as sovereign

Evidence

Ancient tragedy, and courtly tragedy. But what is the court, if not—and this is dazzlingly obvious in the case of Louis XIV—yet another lesson in public right? The court’s essential function is to constitute, to organize, a space for the daily and permanent display of royal power in all its splendor. The court is basically a kind of permanent ritual operation that begins again every day and requalifies a man who gets up, goes for a walk, eats, has his loves and his passions, and who is at the same time—thanks to all chat, because of all that, and because none of all that is eliminated—a sovereign. The specific operation of court ritual and court ceremonial is to make his love affairs sovereign, to make his food sovereign, to make his levee and his going-to-bed ritual sovereign. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 191

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘requalification’ of private bodily acts into sovereign acts anticipates Foucauldian discipline/biopolitics; connects to Goffman’s ritual interaction order. — connects to: A ruler who acts by private will forfeits all right to obedience — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 188