The Deaths of Louis XVI

Regicide and the French Political Imagination
Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-691-14155-8
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 192 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 293 g

Reihe: Literature in History

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dunn, Susan

Weitere Mitwirkende

O'Brien, Connor Cruise

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ForewordAcknowledgmentsIntroduction3Pt. IPolitical MythsCh. 1Louis XVI and the Cult of Human Sacrifice15Ch. 2Louis XVI and Joan of Arc38Ch. 3Michelet and Lamartine: Regicide, Passion, and Compassion67Pt. IILiterary MythsCh. 4Louis XVI and His Executioners95Ch. 5Victor Hugo, Kingship, and Louis XVI116Ch. 6Camus and Louis XVI: A Modern Elegy for the Martyred King140Conclusion165Index171

Über Autor(innen)

Susan Dunn is Professor of French Literature and the History of Ideas at Williams College. She is author of "Nerval et le roman historique" (Minard).