History writing once served royal legitimacy until the invasion narrative broke it

Evidence

Until then, historical discourse had been inferior to the State’s discourse about itself; its function was to demonstrate the State’s right, to establish its sovereignty, to recount its uninterrupted genealogy, and to use heroes, exploits, and dynasties to illustrate the legitimacy of public right. The disruption of the praise of Rome in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries came about in two ways. One the one hand, we have the recollection, the reactivation, of the fact of the invasion, which, as you will remember, Protestant historiography had already used as an argument against royal absolutism. The evocation of the invasion introduced a major break in time: the Germanic invasion of the fourth to fifth centuries negates right. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 4138

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the module’s interest in how narrative/genealogy constructs political legitimacy — later Islamophobia readings will use analogous critique of state-authored origin stories.