Emmanuel Legeard

En 600 av. J.-C., les Bituriges, « rois du monde », dominent la Celtique sous l’autorité d’Ambigat. Leur territoire est uni par le contrôle des bassins versants de la Loire et l’occupation d’une grande clairière céréalière, la Champagne, cernée par les forêts. Le chef-lieu est Avaricum, que Vercingétorix choisira pour venir à bout des légions de César. L’issue est tragique. Malgré Gergovie, la Gaule devient romaine. Commence alors l’histoire du Berry, qui sera pendant 1700 ans le théâtre d’événements majeurs. Parce que le Berry n’a jamais été une province, son destin se fond dans le roman national. Pourtant, c’est en Berry que s’effondre l’Empire romain. C’est en Berry qu’après la double trahison d’Aliénor se joue l’unité de la France. C’est en Berry que Charles VII assure la survie du royaume quand il est chassé de Paris. De Bourges, le duc Jean fait rayonner le gothique international. Puis la seconde renaissance du droit illumine l’Europe des humanistes. C’est sur le Berry que Sully compte pour exalter sa gloire, en Berry que Condé organise la Fronde. Le Berry s’étiole ensuite, et la Révolution l’effacera des cartes. Mais en 1913, le Grand Meaulnes le fait entrer dans la littérature mondiale comme ce paradis perdu, bordé de bois et d’étangs, qui s’est à jamais retiré du temps.

In 12th-Century France, political Augustinianism inherited from Gregory and Isidore was based on the absolute supremacy of spiritual power over temporal power in the name of the absolute primacy of grace over fallen nature. This could easily solve the question of what should true dominium be in a society based on Christian values. Just rule was connected with a ruler who was sanctioned by the Church: the king of France, defender of the Pax Dei. The Siege of Germigny shows how cynical realpolitik finds philosophical justification in political Augustinianism.

According to Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, the specific distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. In the Middle Ages, Peter the Venerable (1092-1156), the abbot of Cluny, was the first to conceive the Church as a spatial entity surrounded and contrastively shaped by the the nature of its assailants: Jewish, Muslim, and heterodox religious competitors. From then on, the Ecclesia perceived and established itself as a fortress constantly under siege, but interiorly illuminated by the Sapientia, the inner light of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, the « true social mutation of the year 1100 » (D. Barthélemy) that transformed the old religion based on the cult of relics into the sacramental "religion of new times" began to narrow the acceptation of the word Ecclesia to the clerical elite who had the power to invoke the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Through the Eucharist, the communicant was taken into Christ's mystical body and took part of the supernatural society of the Church. The devil, therefore, was identifiable in all his disguises by his constant blasphemy against the Incarnation of Christ, which is the raison d'être of the Fortress Church, and the condition of possibility of the Eucharist, and therefore of Christian society. At Saint-Gilles du Gard (ca.1160-70), Notre-Dame de Laon (ca.1190-1205) and Notre-Dame de Germigny-l'Exempt (ca.1215), I propose that the Incarnation tympana with their claim of kinship to authoritative Antiquity ("1200 style") emerged and resurfaced as a key, but ephemeral, composition translating this ideology in the transition between Romanesque and Gothic.