De Bruijn Monads We propose an explanation for the success of the de Bruijn encoding of the syntax associated to a (higher-order) signature Sigma. Indeed, we show how it can be viewed as the initial representation of Sigma in relative monads (in the sense of Altenkirch, Chapman, and Uustalu) on a very simple functor. This functor is the embedding into the category Set of its full subcategory with one object N (the set of natural numbers). This high-level point of view allows us to easily extrapolate several useful "fusion laws" which otherwise might be tricky to devise. This is joint work with André Hirschowitz.