Chronicle of power from Versailles to Silicon Valley: Marc Dugain

For B.

Courtly Society

the novel Legitimate violence Marc Dugain's (2025) combines historical fiction with a multifaceted analysis of political power. The plot structure and constellation of characters are closely intertwined, illustrating in an exemplary way the mechanisms of rule, control, and social violence in 17th-century France.

The novel is set during the reign of Louis XIV and draws on the historical Affair of the Poisons. At its center is the Marquise de Brinvilliers, an aristocratic woman who seeks to break free from the restrictive patriarchal order. Her rebellious quest for autonomy—emotional, sexual, and social—leads her into a world of intrigue, poisoning, and moral decadence. A complex cast of characters forms around her: Sainte-Croix, her lover and alchemist, who experiments with poison and power; Madame de Warnens, a Protestant countess whose relationship with the Marquise oscillates between love, political solidarity, and revenge; Pennautier, a financier and symbol of economic calculation; and the Prévôt d'Aubray, the patriarchal father who embodies religious and social power.

The plot structure follows the pattern of a rise-and-fall narrative: Dugain intertwines romantic entanglements with political conspiracies that extend from the private sphere to the vicinity of the royal court. The story unfolds like a mosaic from multiple perspectives, between drawing-rooms, prisons, and courtrooms, with the line between personal crime and raison d'état becoming increasingly blurred. The motif of poison serves as a metaphor for a thoroughly corrupt social order—the violence institutionalized in marriage, religion, and power politics is literally "internalized" and chemically enacted.

This passage reveals the intricate hierarchy and often bleak reality behind the facade of courtly splendor. The court's power structure was directly reflected in its architecture and living conditions. The main parts of the building were reserved for the high-ranking members of the royal family. For those of lower rank, such as the hundreds of servants and visitors like Briancourt, access to power consisted of a labyrinth of empty corridors and dark staircases. The higher one ascended these labyrinths, the colder it became, and the more the splendor vanished, bringing visitors back to a reality quite different from the splendor they might have glimpsed. This reality was characterized by extremely poor hygiene, leaving behind constant, pervasive odors as people relieved themselves in corners or in what appeared to be a cesspool. Only the cold alleviated this stench. Briancourt's long search for his employers' modest apartment (which differed only in name) illustrates that courtly splendor was accessible only to an elite, while most lived in leaky, unclean, and cold conditions.

Norbert Elias's theses on courtly society in absolutist France, particularly during the reign of Louis XIV, portray it as a specific network of interdependent individuals, whose central characteristic is the entanglement of political power centralization and the profound disciplining of the nobility. Elias describes how the absolute monarch strategically exploited the balance of power between the rising bourgeoisie and the traditional nobility to secure and consolidate his own central position: He excluded the nobility from the direct exercise of military and fiscal power. These instruments of power (the monopoly of force and the monopoly of taxation) were concentrated in the hands of the central ruler. The nobility was bound to the court and made dependent on royal favor within a tightly woven web of mutual dependencies. While the court nobility was effectively stripped of power, they received privileges and prestige (honors, ranks, benefices) as compensation. The king guaranteed his position by neither completely destroying the nobility nor granting the rising bourgeoisie excessive power. He distributed "favor" and "prestige" in such a way that he always remained the indispensable center, whose decisions determined rise and fall.

The spatial and social constraints of the court, combined with dependence on royal favor, led to comprehensive behavioral regulation and disciplining of court society, which Elias considers part of the civilizing process: To survive at court, nobles had to rigorously control and refine their emotions, aggressions, and spontaneous impulses. Open conflicts were replaced by more subtle struggles for status and recognition. The highly complex and rigid court ceremonial served as an instrument of discipline. It prescribed every detail of behavior and functioned as a kind of social mechanism that compelled nobles to constantly pay attention to their surroundings and their own appearance. The initial external constraint (the need to conform in order to avoid falling out of favor) was internalized over time and shaped a new habitus—a second nature—for courtly individuals. This self-control and refinement of manners was the condition of survival in the courtly power game. Elias saw courtly society as a sociogenetic intermediate stage in which the political centralization of power led directly to the psychogenesis of a new, more civilized and affect-controlled type of human being.

Dugain describes here Louis XIV's political strategy of using splendor and magnificence to centralize power. The king's reign was designed to create an unprecedented brilliance ("lustre sans précédent"), a glory in which everyone wanted to share. The core of this power structure lay in the deliberate political manipulation of the aristocratic classes. He diligently recruited personnel from the lesser nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie to transfer responsibility to these strata. The main goal of this strategy was to keep the high nobility ("grande noblesse") away from positions of responsibility. The source explains this step as a direct consequence of the historical trauma of the Fronde. Louis XIV remembered those years of the powerful's rebellion against royal authority, during which, as a child, he was forced to wander from castle to castle like an outlaw. Moreover, this high nobility had also challenged the king's legitimacy. Therefore, the creation of this unprecedented splendor served not only to display royal power (“lustre”), but also to strategically disempower and control those who could potentially threaten his authority.

The narrative structure of Legitimate violence Dugain's political analysis is supported: The novel presents a model of absolutist power in which any form of personal emancipation is simultaneously considered a threat to the established order. The king remains a distant, almost invisible presence, but his system permeates every social relationship—from the bedroom to the courtroom. Dugain demonstrates how the early modern state legitimizes itself through religious and moral discourses, while its representatives (clergy, judiciary, police) themselves act corruptly and violently. The Marquise's female empowerment is thus interpreted politically: Her "crime" is less the killing than the transgression of the boundaries of male dominance.

Overall, the novel unfolds a dual movement: it tells a historical crime story—intrigues, murders, affairs—and simultaneously an allegory of the structural violence of power. The characters embody social roles within the system of control: the ambitious technocrat (Pennautier), the opportunistic scientist (Sainte-Croix), the heretical woman (Brinvilliers), and the Protestant outsider (Warnens). Together, they form a tableau of political energies that Dugain uses to show how private passions, religious fanaticism, and state authority mutually legitimize each other—a “legitimate violence” in a twofold sense.

A semantic field of alchemy permeates the novel, originating from Sainte-Croix's experiments but penetrating the entire text. The alchemical represents the attempt to transform matter (and fate) – a parallel to the characters who seek to transcend their social structure. But the "transmutation" never succeeds: instead of gold, poison is created; instead of salvation, ruin. This metaphor indirectly comments on the political ideology of the Sun King: the state, too, attempts to "ennoble" society through splendor, order, and architecture (Versailles and Fontainebleau). alchimie du pouvoir Thus, the principle of domination itself is a transformation of oppression into splendor, of violence into beauty.

Chronicle of modern power in Dugain's work

Marc Dugain frequently addresses contemporary or recent historical questions of power (war, intelligence services, digital capitalism, modern politics) in novel or essay form. His novels examine structures that shape, oppress, or instrumentalize individuals. His books span history—from the First World War to the digital future—and demonstrate that power in all its forms shares the same core: the subjugation of the individual to an invisible yet effective order. Dugain is a chronicler of these orders, a chronicler of the violence that survives in institutions, technologies, and ideologies.

The latest novel Legitimate violence (2025) shifts these perspectives to the absolutist past at the court of Louis XIV. Politically, the theme of power and its legitimation remains central, but the focus is historical and social: the architecture of power, gender and class constraints, dynastic and inheritance issues, and the violence that underpins systems of rule. This time, Dugain uses historical distance to make mechanisms of power (such as coercive legitimation and the social sanctioning of deviation) visible—a different mode of power analysis than the contemporary warnings in Transparency, L'Homme nu or the modern power politics of The influence-Trilogy. Formally, Dugain thus switches from the contemporary political thriller, from essay and dystopia back to historical narrative as a political instrument.

Our preview of La Chambre des officiers Dugain's work begins in 1998 under the sign of injury. This anti-war novel about the "broken faces" of the First World War exposes the heroic pathos of patriotism as bodily destruction. Politics here appears not as a discourse of ideas, but as the administration of suffering. The state organizes violence, national pride replaces empathy. The mutilated, the faceless, become symbols of a society that has disfigured itself. In this sense, the novel is Dugain's first commentary on a "politics of alienation"—the price of believing in collective greatness. English Campagne (2000) and Happy as God in France (2002) continue this analysis of social and political hierarchies: while the former makes visible the subtle power relations between classes and nations in personal relationships, the latter examines local forms of collaboration and resistance during the German occupation and shows how moral and political decisions shape identity and community.

From the mid-2000s onwards, Dugain shifted his focus from the European experience of war to the mechanisms of modern power structures. Edgar's Curse (2005) he examines FBI Director Hoover as an archetype of the modern power broker: a man who instrumentalizes security as a pretext for control. Hoover is a precursor to the digital surveillance society – Dugain portrays him not as a monster, but as a function: a human being who finds his justification for existence within the system of fear. Une exécution ordinaire In 2007, Dugain broadened this perspective to include Russia. The novel, which blends Stalinism and Putinism, reveals the structural continuity of authoritarian power, independent of the political system. For Dugain, Russian power is a reflection of the Western will to power – only less disguised. L'Insomnie des étoiles (2010) interprets historical traumas as a reflection of ideological delusion. The narratives in En bas, les nuages (2008) address these issues by making visible the interfaces between private experience and social power.

In the 2010s, Dugain increasingly focused on the interrelationship of political, economic and media power. Avenue des géants (2012) combines a critique of American capitalism with a reflection on cultural dominance and manipulation by the media. Between 2014 and 2016, Dugain published The influence, Five year term and Ultimate Match He presented his trilogy about French power. These three novels form the core of his political thought. This trilogy The influence (2014–2016) ultimately unfolds a panorama of political intrigue in which intelligence services, business, and government merge into a single system of influence. It portrays the modern politician as driven and analyzes the creeping erosion of democratic processes in a country whose decisions are steered by lobbyists, intelligence agencies, media networks, and financial interests. Politics appears as a game of chess with interchangeable pieces; morality is merely rhetorical equipment. Dugain thus writes an anatomy of modern cynicism: power as a fiction of autonomy within a system of economic dependence. The emprise (the “influence,” but also the “obsession”) refers to the web in which individuals are trapped—a term that later reappears in his essays on digital control. In collaboration with the journalist Christophe Labbé, Dugain develops in L'Homme nu (2016) and L'Homme sans contact (2022) this analysis continues: Here the focus is on the power of tech companies, digital surveillance and the loss of individual autonomy in the age of the data economy.

His more recent works expand this perspective into dystopian and geopolitical directions. Ils vont tuer Robert Kennedy (2017) sheds light on political violence and the power of hidden interests in US history, while Transparency (2019) imagines a future in which total transparency and algorithmic control replace all forms of political freedom.

This is about the "dictatorship of convenience"—the voluntary submission of humans to digital systems that know everything, feel nothing, and are accountable to no one. Dugain analyzes the transition from visible violence (state, war, repression) to invisible violence (algorithm, data, self-surveillance). From this perspective, Google, Meta, or surveillance software are not mere technical phenomena, but new political regimes: post-democratic, affect-driven orders that buy consent through convenience. Tsunami (2023) Dugain finally addresses the loneliness of executive power in crisis mode and the fragility of democratic order under pressure. Dugain confronts the reader with the isolation of a president trying to create meaning in a media-saturated world. The catastrophe the title refers to is as psychological as it is political: a wave of disorientation that overwhelms all ideology. Transparency Ultimately, Dugain conceives of power as digital metaphysics – total visibility as a new form of control. The person who reveals everything has nothing left to hide, but also nothing left to be. Here, Dugain's political thought reaches its philosophical maturity: politics becomes the anthropology of fear, power the religion of data.

Overall, Dugain's work can be read as a multi-layered chronicle of modern power—a movement from the physical violence of war, through the institutional control of democracy, to the invisible rule of digital systems. His novels combine historical precision with political diagnosis, painting a compelling panorama of the transformation of power: from the body to information, from the state to the platform, from visible violence to the algorithmic control of life.

Return to history: Legitimate violence (2025)

Our preview of Legitimate violence While Dugain formally returns to historical narrative, thematically he remains true to his central theme: the legitimation of violence. The setting—France during the reign of Louis XIV—allows him to explore the roots of those power structures that his earlier novels depict in a modern form. Court, succession, patriarchy, divine order: here, power is not explained, but sacralized. Yet Dugain also uses history to illuminate the present. Absolutism is not merely a backdrop, but a mirror: the mechanisms by which the Sun King stabilizes his system—control over information, the staging of splendor, the disciplining of bodies—bear a striking resemblance to those of 21st-century digital and political systems.

For nearly thirty years, Dugain's work has shown a path from visible to subtle violence:

1. Physical destruction (La Chambre des officiers);
2. Institutional control (Edgar's Curse, Une exécution ordinaire);
3. Systemic manipulation (The influence);
4. Digital Subjugation (L'Homme nu, Transparency);
5. Ideological justification (Legitimate violence).

In all these stages, humanity remains subservient to power because it experiences power not as something external, but as something within itself. Dugain describes not revolutions, but adaptations – the continuous refinement of domination through consensus, habit, or belief.

Dugain exposes the court's communication structure as a system of ritualized speech acts. At court, a language of indirectness, compliments, and ellipsis prevails. Words serve not to communicate, but to conceal. Whoever "speaks" loses; whoever "remains silent" survives. Thus, conversation, denunciation, and confession become the three dominant forms of communication: Conversation is aesthetic and empty, a form of social dance. Denunciation (reports, espionage, inquisition) is the political language of power—information becomes currency. Confession (religious or erotic) is the intimate form of control—confession as an instrument of subjugation. The young Briancourt, as narrator and observer, is entangled in these networks of communication: as a spy and simultaneously as a lover, he represents the contradiction between truth and survival in a world where every word is potentially deadly.

The “legitimate violence” the title refers to is not raw brutality, but the institutionalization of coercion as normality. This is the point where Dugain brings together all his themes: war, surveillance, domination, the religion of progress. In every era, people find reasons to justify violence—in the name of the king, the nation, security, or data.

Dugain is not an ideologue, but a moralist in the classical sense: he observes how power shapes the human soul. His work spans from the trenches to the server room, from Versailles to Silicon Valley. Where other political writers agitate, he analyzes. Where others criticize the present, he reveals its historical reflections. Legitimate violence Therefore, it is not a break, but a conclusion: the historical depth layer of his previous power analyses.

Archaeology and the Aesthetics of Power at Court

Marc Dugain's new work Legitimate violence (2025) marks a return to historical fiction, without, however, abandoning the political line of his previous work. As in Edgar's Curse (2005) Une exécution ordinaire (2007), the trilogy The influence (2014-2016) and Transparency (2019) Dugain analyzes power as a system of social control that changes over time but never disappears. In Legitimate violence The setting shifts to the time of Louis XIV – to a world where violence was still considered divinely legitimized. Dugain uses historical distance not for reconstruction, but as an analytical mirror to modern power mechanisms.

Already in the first chapter of Legitimate violence Dugain depicts a society in which every action is determined by hierarchy: the court as a microcosm of the state, gender as a dispositif of social power, and the king as the metaphysical center of order. The young Briancourt, caught between servant and observer, moves through a system of surveillance and opportunism: he becomes not only an educator but also a spy—a micro-model of what Foucault described as “panopticism.”

The violence Dugain describes here is not excessive, but structural. It circulates in secret: “Cumuler les fonctions de précepteur d'enfants et d'informateur au service du prévôt de Paris…” (Chapter 1). This constellation—education, information, control—is paradigmatic for Dugain's political novels: knowledge is always simultaneously power. The “legitimate” violence of the title refers precisely to this form of institutionalized violence, which is based not on physical brutality, but on symbolic subjugation.

Dugain does not construct power as a theme, but as a structure of the narrative itself. As in The influence, where intrigue and manipulation shape the political process (see my Review of Dugain's trilogy (in the context of the presidential novel), organized in Legitimate violence The courtly system and the narrative movement: relationships, intrigues, and desires reflect the political mechanisms of absolutism. The novel is simultaneously a social panorama and a political allegory. The "affaire des poisons," to which Dugain refers, stands as a metaphor for the poisoning by power—a motif that pervades his works. La Chambre des officiers Transparency It pervades: Power leaves traces on the body and in language.

In the courtly sphere of the 17th century, violence appears not as an exception, but as an aesthetic necessity: splendor, architecture, etiquette – all are forms of discipline. Dugain deconstructs the magnificence of the Baroque to expose the authoritarian principle of order.

Dugain's court society is a stage – thoroughly theatrical. Clothing, facial expressions, gestures, and ceremonies are all in place. Legitimate violence Not mere decoration, but techniques of domination. The figures "play" their roles in the social drama; aesthetics replaces ethics. The king himself appears less as a human being than as an aesthetic principle—the "astre" whose splendor blinds reason. Dugain analyzes this over-aestheticization as a political weapon: beauty, etiquette, and architecture transform obedience into admiration. Versailles (still under construction) is repeatedly described as a place where "millions of workers live and die"—the violence of power is embedded in the marble. The courtly style is thus a form of legitimate violenceViolence that is subsumed by aesthetics, but is internalized precisely through this. The novel thus reveals ritual as a dual structure: it secures power by aesthetically depoliticizing it. Yet at the same time, Dugain's language—rich in sensual descriptions, irony, and distance—makes this masking transparent.

In Legitimate violence The 17th century becomes an allegory for the present: Dugain shows how power is rendered invisible through language, beauty, and ritual. The novel's semantic system (poison – body – word – ornament – ​​judgment) forms a closed network in which violence is always already "legitimate" because it appears beautiful, refined, or divine. Thus, the courtly world becomes a metaphor for modern political systems: an aestheticization of power that conceals horror in its splendor—and in doing so, unfolds its deepest form of violence.

Gender, the body, and the path from visible to invisible violence

The novel is permeated by a consistent vocabulary of bodily dissolution and contamination. Terms such as chair, poison, corruption, fièvre, odeur, saignée, cloporte They form a system in which the human body appears as a political and moral projection surface.

The Gift It functions as a central metaphor for power: it represents a violence that does not manifest openly, but rather insidiously, invisibly, yet irreversibly establishes itself – like power itself. The intrigues at court, Colbert's manipulations, the Marquise's desires, and the religious zealots share a common semantic logic: power operates chemically, as a slow infiltration. Dugain stages the characters' bodies as arenas of power. Illness, lust, and death are not merely biological conditions, but political symbols. The female body – in its sexuality and fragility – becomes the battleground of social control. In doing so, Dugain alludes to Foucault's concept of biopolitical power: the disciplining of bodies by church, state, and morality.

A central element of the political narrative in Legitimate violence The gender order is central. The Marquise de Brinvilliers and the Comtesse de Verne exemplify a double oppression: by the patriarchy and by the monarchical structure. Dugain shows how sexuality functions as a currency of political power – a motif already present in La Chambre des officiers (1998) was negotiated in the form of physical injury. Here, the female figure transforms into a subject of revolt. The "affranchie," which rebels against the social order, simultaneously becomes a threat to the state. Dugain's political narrative thus links gender and government: the control of the female body reflects the king's control of his subjects.

Legitimate violence In light of Dugain's complete works, it can be read as a return to the origin of power. To reiterate: In Edgar's Curse He analyzes the power of the state in the information age. The influence and Five year term He dismantles the mechanisms of the political class of the Fifth Republic. In L'Homme nu and Transparency He diagnoses digital surveillance as a new form of subjugation. Legitimate violence Finally, Dugain brings these lines together: He shows that every modern form of power is based on pre-modern structures. Absolutism is not a thing of the past, but rather the origin of technocracy. Louis XIV becomes the matrix of today's president, Colbert the precursor of neoliberal rationality, and the surveillance of the court the model for the algorithmic panopticon.

Theoretically, Dugain's novel can be situated between Foucault's genealogy of power and Arendt's analysis of authority. For Foucault, power is not possession but a network of practices—precisely what Dugain demonstrates when he describes courtly ritual as a political machine. For Arendt, on the other hand, violence is always a sign of a loss of power. The title Legitimate violence Dugain plays with this paradox: the more the king has to legitimize his rule, the more apparent the fragility of his authority becomes. “Legitimate force” is therefore not a natural right, but a rhetorical construct. Dugain’s political narrative exposes it as an ideological act—an attempt to stabilize order through fear.

As in Transparency is language in Legitimate violence An instrument of power. Courtly speech, riddled with euphemisms, flatters, obscures, and controls. Dugain uses this archaic style to imitate—and thereby expose—the discourse of power. Courtly French becomes a symbol of a political grammar: everything is coded, regulated, and controlled. In doing so, Dugain creates a form of "linguistic archaeology" that simultaneously problematizes the relationship between language and power in the 17th and 21st centuries.

Legitimate violence This is not a departure from Dugain's political work, but rather its historical depth. The novel shows that every modern form of legitimation—whether democratic, technocratic, or digital—is based on the same logic: the transformation of violence into order. Thus, the circle of La Chambre des officiers (the disfigurement of the body) about The influence (the distortion of democracy) until Legitimate violence (the aestheticization of violence). Dugain thus develops a comprehensive anthropology of power: from the trenches to the secret service to the royal court, man remains the place where violence is justified.

Dissolution of the conspiracy and Edict of Nantes

The novel's conclusion offers a political interpretation of the absolutist power mechanisms under Louis XIV, where state justice serves not the truth but political expediency. The unraveling of the poisoning plot reveals how the king and his ministers manipulate the truth to further their own agenda. Glory to protect the crown and maintain control over the elites.

The decisive moment in which political truth is constructed is the interrogation of La Chaussée by the Lieutenant général de la police, La Reynie:

The most politically explosive aspect of the affair, the attempted regicide by La Chaussée on behalf of Madame de Warnens (an agent of the Protestant Netherlands), is completely erased from the official record. Louis XIV did not want it known how close poisons could have come to him. La Reynie decides that there would be more harm than good in discussing a conspiracy whose ramifications cannot be controlled ("cut the branch of the plot"). The state's highest priority is to preserve the king's inviolability and divinity, even at the expense of judicial truth. The king, informed by Louvois, demands that the "designated culprits" be swiftly eliminated in order to turn the page.

La Reynie, although described as a man of integrity, acts as a political pragmatist. He proposes a deal to La Chaussée: the valet will only be convicted of three murders (that of the Prévôt and his sons), whose sole motive is the Marquise's greed for the inheritance. In return, the murders of the prelate and his servant will be dropped, as these murders imply political connections to Pennautier and Colbert.

The Marquise de Brinvilliers, who actually poisoned her father and brothers, is declared the "greatest murderer of her time" and serves as a perfect example of how justice can also reach the nobility. Her execution by beheading (instead of hanging) symbolically preserves her noble status until death. Her true motivation—revenge for the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father and brothers—is ignored.

Pierre-Louis Reich de Pennautier, who paid for La Chaussée's murder and used the prelate's poisoning to replenish state coffers (and his own pockets), remains untouchable. His crimes are excused by his service to the state (financing the war). legitimized and are subject to state secrecy ("opération de haute politique"). He ends his relationship with Warnens when she becomes politically dangerous and physically disfigured, confirming his purely opportunistic nature.

The novel's ending broadens the perspective beyond individual fate to encompass the historical fate of the Huguenots (Protestants). Leonor de Warnens fled to escape the investigation that would have exposed her as a potential conspirator against the king. Ultimately, however, she dies not for her involvement in the poisonings or the conspiracy, but as a result of state violence against her religious community.

Louis XIV's final political decision was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes a few years later. The king, whose reign had been characterized by unprecedented splendor (Louis XIV wanted the Glory (for himself), no longer tolerates any religious dissent, especially from Calvinists, who were rumored to have republican sympathies. Warnens is killed by the king's dragoons while attempting to cross the border into Switzerland, demonstrating the brutal and bloody suppression of the Protestant minority by the state. The personal tragedy of the protagonists is thus embedded in the larger political tragedy of French absolutism.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.