Résumé
The present study seeks to show that the modern political history - or the history of modern politics, or modern politics tout court - is a construction founded on a relationship of inseparability, although a tensed relationship, or even a conflictual one, between the mechanisms of sovereignty and the strategies of authority. We will therefore try to describe the manner in which "sovereignty" becomes the essential attribute of the modern nation-State, by a political, judicial or, to a larger extent, normative reduction of the sources of power, whereas, on the other hand, the monopoly of the very same State conflicts permanently with the "supplementary", excessive, invading nature of the instances of authority, instances which cannot let themselves be subject to a mere "State control", or to "authority", in the institutional sense of the word.