ABSTRACT
Those who undertook to condemn Charles Stuart and Louis Capet I were acutely conscious that they sat in judgment not on particular men but on systems of right and sovereignty. With those deaths, more than a person was cast into oblivion. 1 Yet the death of monarchy came through the death of the person who embodied that system—the end of aristocracy through the ending of aristocrats. Those who carried the title to rule in their bodies, in the blood, surrendered that tide in the same form. “No man can reign innocently,” Saint Just argued. 2 Guilt attached not only to the system in the abstract but to those who were its particular incarnation. Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth commended violence as Saint Just had, but recognized, as Saint Just had not, that the seeming symmetry of regicide and Terror—attacking the bodies of those who claimed to rule in the body—was undone by the semiotics of exchange that sanctioned it.
