Marc Dugain

Marc Dugain's "Légitime violence" (2025) appears as the author's triumphant return to historical narrative, simultaneously encapsulating the entirety of his political thought. In the France of Louis XIV, Dugain intertwines the "Affaire des poisons" with an anatomy of power, whose structures extend from courtly ceremony to the most intimate relationships. The novel portrays the court as a micropolitical system of permanent control: rituals, language, and architecture transform submission into admiration, violence into order. In the figure of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who seeks to break free from patriarchal constraints, Dugain intensifies the tension between gender, body, and power—her "crimes" are acts of revolt against a divinely legitimized social order. The courtly world thus emerges as a laboratory of modern power, in which beauty and discipline become indistinguishable. Dugain deconstructs Baroque aesthetics as a political technique: Versailles itself becomes a symbol of an “alchemy of power” that transforms oppression into splendor. The essay reads the novel as the historical endpoint of a thirty-year “chronicle of power,” ranging from the guules cassées of the First World War (in “La Chambre des officiers”) through intelligence manipulation in “L’Emprise” to digital surveillance in “Transparence.” “Légitime violence” traces this line genealogically back to its origin: the invention of “legitimate” violence in absolutism. Dugain shows that the compulsion for order and the legitimation of rule—whether by crown, state, or algorithm—change only in their forms. The king, who stabilizes his power through splendor, is the precursor of the modern technocrat, who declares transparency a virtue. Thus, in Dugain's work, the 17th century becomes a mirror of the 21st: the visible violence of the sword is replaced by the invisible violence of the system. "Légitime violence" is less historical fiction than political archaeology – the novel lays bare the deep layer in which power, aesthetics, and legitimacy continue to mutually generate each other.