In the salons that softly, tenderly surrounded the Congress of Vienna for one last time, the conversations heard in window recesses and immediately noted down by the secret police didn’t just concern amorous intrigues and what the history books would call the new balance of Europe. One question arose before every other and behind every other: that of transforming once and for all the ṛta, the articulation between heaven and earth that makes life possible and gives it order. It had all begun one day, when the gods, tired perhaps of the solid, opaque primordial turmoil, “wished: ‘What can we do to separate these worlds of ours a little further?² How can we have more space?’ And then they breathed into those worlds, uttering the three syllables ‘vī-ta-ye,’ and the worlds distanced themselves from each other and there was more space for the gods.” And, later, for human beings. It was certainly no longer appropriate to talk about it now. Indeed no one had any clear memory of it. And yet there was still a pressing need to resolve one family matter that harked back to ṛta: legitimizing Legitimacy as its heir. There was a certain embarrassment when talking about Law. But the true word of the moment was the other one: Legitimacy—and the person to grasp this could only be Talleyrand, the man who had always kept a discreet distance from the law. The step was enormous, and therefore needed to be sensed as little as possible, it had to be submerged beneath the surface of society balls and tiresome dynastic (sometimes domestic) quarrels. Legitimacy was the least reassuring word, a picnic among grassy ruins. But hidden behind legitimacy was another word, another realm: the realm of Convention, which was finally leading to absolute power. Until then, Convention had been the eternal cadet branch of the psyche, its power had constantly grown in an unnamable shadow, precisely because it had no legitimacy. In order to become legitimate, it would have to drain legitimacy and dress in its clothes. Now it needed to be recognized effectively, while command was given to facts. This had clearly been reached through political necessity. With the Russian campaign, Napoleon had stirred the ghost of unlimited war, attracted by the land that in itself evokes limitlessness, uncontrollability, hopeless turmoil, Europe’s exit from itself, far from civilization and its douceur. That same limitlessness was already about to show itself in Europe: a diplomatic euphemism would call it “the social question.” The moment had therefore come to give authority to the only power that promised to negotiate on equal terms with the limitless, perhaps even to grasp hold of it (though few at that time were sure about that): Convention as Legitimacy. Time would tell, it would bleach the bones of meaning. Pol Pot and his men roamed the jungle between Thailand and Cambodia. For most of the surrounding world, he was still his country’s sole legitimate authority. The temples turned upside down by his sovereign rule stretched into large numbers of mass graves, dug deep into the ground. The layers of those dead bodies epitomize our own Canonical Phases: the corpses at the lowest level reveal scraps of colored clothing and are the followers of Lon Nol (the ancien régime); they are followed, higher up, by the Buddhist monks (refractory priests); then various civilians (the Public Safety police turn against anyone); and finally the dark rags of the Khmer Rouge themselves (the true Jacobins, the true Bolsheviks, conspirators and renegades). Grave diggers heaped piles of skulls into the forms that Cambodian peasants had used from times immemorial to stack their annual pineapple harvest. In the face of mass graves, history returns to being natural history.