ABSTRACT
This chapter provides discussion of the Versailles occasion and foregrounds theoretical issues that engages with the author's ongoing attempt to develop a theory of ‘ritual form’. It argues there that as a roof concept the term ‘ritual’ includes multitude of occasions that have little or nothing in common with one another, apart from being glossed as belonging together. The chapter addresses the Versailles commemoration as a public event of presentation organized through bureaucratic logic by the State to shape the nation-in-arms, the embodiment of the national. The collapse of Versailles and its commemoration expose dynamics that intertwine and knot together in events of presentation of the modern state. Versailles smeared the border between private and public with its entrails. There were rumors of a terrorist attack, and the building indeed had fallen in upon itself. The Versailles performance was intended to convey this imaginary of the nation-in-arms, the nation embodying the state in and as an army.
