Part II - The regime
2 - Proof through history: three figures, one structure
French political history reveals a constant that the partisans of elective regimes prefer to ignore: moments of national refoundation have never emerged from ordinary procedures. They have emerged from figures of incarnation who arose at the precise moment when existing institutions no longer sufficed. Three major cases illustrate this with particular clarity, and they all share the same structure.
Joan of Arc arises in a France that is militarily collapsed, politically divided, whose legitimate king is not yet crowned and whose large swathes of territory are under English occupation. She possesses no pre-existing institutional legitimacy: no title, no office, no formal mandate. Her legitimacy is of another nature: she incarnates the continuity of the nation at a moment when all the structures that should have incarnated it have failed. She does not govern, but allows the State to reconstitute itself around a fixed point. This is the purest form of the function of incarnation: a legitimacy that does not come from institutions, but that makes them possible once more.
Napoleon Bonaparte intervenes in a structurally analogous context. The Revolution destroyed the Ancien Regime without managing to build a stable order: ten years of institutional chaos, political violence, wars, and governmental instability had left France exhausted and vulnerable. Napoleon does not merely incarnate the State, he rebuilds it. The Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the prefectures, the lycées, the Legion of Honor: the essential institutions that still structure contemporary France are born in this period. What the function of incarnation produces here is a lasting refoundation, structures that outlive their creator and serve the nation for two centuries.
Charles de Gaulle embodies this phenomenon twice, in distinct contexts that illustrate two different modalities of the same function. In 1940, appointed temporary brigadier general on June 1st - a rank that Vichy would strip him of four days after the Appeal - he acts without any stable formal legitimacy: a mere senior officer, he refuses capitulation in the name of the continuity of the State when all those who hold institutional authority have chosen submission. His legitimacy is built through action, progressively, by the sole force of incarnation. In 1958, the context is different: the Fourth Republic collapses under the weight of its own powerlessness: twenty-four governments in twelve years, inability to settle the Algerian question, open institutional crisis. De Gaulle is this time called upon, with explicit popular legitimacy, to refound the institutions. He does so, and steps back when the 1969 referendum withdraws popular confidence from him. It is precisely this withdrawal that retrospectively validates the legitimacy of his action: he who exercises the function of incarnation does not cling to power, he returns it.
These three figures, so different in their era, their means, and their situations, share one decisive common trait: they arise when existing institutions no longer suffice, they allow the nation to refound itself, and they have real legitimacy only insofar as they serve something greater than themselves.
This is precisely the chance that this project refuses. The difference between a system that hopes the figure of incarnation will arise at the right moment and a system that organizes itself so that it is always available, is the difference between sovereign foresight and institutional superstition.