Calhoun, Alison. "Affective Sovereignty in Louis XIII's Royal Ballet."

Calhoun, Alison. "Affective Sovereignty in Louis XIII's Royal Ballet." Nottingham French Studies 55, no. 3 (2016): 343-361.


Abstract:
In early modern France, there was a critical tension between monarchical conduct, the development of Absolutism and a concurrent emergence of what the anglophone world would today call ‘emotion’. This article would like to explore this tension from the perspective of performance studies by looking at royal ballet as a form of affective sovereignty. Although royal ballet provided the perfect conditions for kings and their court members to stage sovereignty, under Louis XIII there is an unusual disruption of this view of the ballet as the public transmission of an ideal crown. In an alarming break from ideals of royal dignity, Louis and his fellow dancers surprise the court with their attachment to dance and their affection (and repulsion) for each other, leaving the ballet librettist scrambling to spin the ballet programnes into politically viable expressions of sovereign sentiment.