The deaths of louis xvi : regicide and the french political imagination / Susan Dunn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dunn, Susan, 1945- author.

Series:

Literature in history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kings and rulers in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (198 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [1994]

Summary:

The public beheading of Louis XVI was a unique and troubling event that scarred French collective memory for two centuries. To Jacobins, the king's decapitation was the people's coronation. To royalists, it was deicide. Nineteenth-century historians considered it an alarming miscalculation, a symbol of the Terror and the moral bankruptcy of the Revolution. By the twentieth century, Camus judged that the killing stood at the "crux of our contemporary history." In this book, Susan Dunn investigates the regicide's pivotal role in French intellectual history and political mythology. She examines how thinkers on the right and left repudiated regicide and terror, while articulating a compassionate, humanitarian vision, which became the moral basis for the modern French nation. Their credo of fraternity and unity, however, strangely depoliticized this supremely political act of regicide. Using theoretical insights from Tocqueville, Arendt, Rawls, Walzer, and others, Dunn explores the transformation of violent regicidal politics into an apolitical cult of ethical purity and an antidemocratic nationalist religion. Her book focuses on the fluidity of political myths. The figure of Louis XVI was transmuted into a Joan of Arc and a deified nation, and the notion of his sacrifice contributed to the disquieting myth of a mystical community of self- sacrificing citizens.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I POLITICAL MYTHS

Chapter One LOUIS XVI AND THE CULT OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

Chapter Two LOUIS XVI AND JOAN OF ARC

Chapter Three MICHELET AND LAMARTINE: REGICIDE, PASSION, AND COMPASSION

PART II LITERARY MYTHS

Chapter Four LOUIS XVI AND HIS EXECUTIONERS

Chapter Five VICTOR HUGO, KINGSHIP, AND LOUIS XVI

Chapter Six CAMUS AND LOUIS XVI: A MODERN ELEGY FOR THE MARTYRED KING

CONCLUSION

INDEX

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

ISBN:

9780691034294

069103429X

OCLC:

1235966126