https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=688 According to the famous study on royal transubstantiation by Ernst Kantorowicz, a king incarnates “two bodies”: the body natural and the body politic, the perishable body of the human individual and the eternal body of the institution. The obligation to personify this duality—which ideally forms a perfect unity—seems to be at the root of the misery felt by Christian VII during the entirety of his reign. King of Denmark-Norway from 1766 to 1808, the mentally unstable monarch considered himself profoundly out of place, being in his own eyes an impostor, an intruder, a “false” king. Consequently, he spent his whole life trying to escape his own role. Through a consideration of Christian VII’s relation to representation—theatrical and political—and of his strange need to physically and emotionally re-enact certain capital punishments officially carried out on his own orders, I examine the itinerary of this singularly unfree admirer of the Enlightenment’s thoughts on individual freedom; an itinerary that throws an interesting light on the institution of the Danish royalty at the end of the eighteenth century. Numéros en texte intégral Géographies et imaginaires Savants mélanges fr jeu., 02 oct. 2025 12:01:33 +0200 mer., 03 déc. 2025 10:58:55 +0100 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=688 0