ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates upon strategies implemented precisely in order to exploit the paradoxical nature of the historian's two bodies within the eighteenth-century French discourse of history. It charts the means by which historians and reviewers were enabled to represent past events through a structure of causality that commanded assent for their accounts from their readers. The chapter proceeds by studying the dominant seventeenth-century paradigm of the king as the locus of power and the centre of the national story, followed by a discussion of the historical practice that was necessary to work alongside the structures of power this established. It also introduces the rhetoric of impartiality as a favoured solution to the pessimism caused by the political model. Impartiality would serve as a rhetoric that attempts to place everything on stage, even the critics' own moment of judgement, in order to sort out the true from the false. The masterful historian, as homo scriptans, is judge, jury, and key witness.
