Deaths of Louis XVI is an acute and sensitive exploration of
a profoundly important theme...It will be read with a peculiar interest
by scholars concerned with French literature, among whom Professor
Dunn herself occupies a distinguished place which will be notably
enhanced by the publication of the present study."
the Foreword by Conor Cruise O'Brien
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.
of fraternity and unity, however, strangely depoliticized this supremely
political act of regicide. Using theoretical insights from Tocqueville,
Arend, Rawls, Walzer, and others. Dunn explores the transformation
of violent regicidal politics into 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 defied
nation, and the notion of his sacrifice contributed to the disquieting
myth of a mystical community of self-sacrificing citizens.
with a clear focus, a strong narrative line, and a critical tone,
Susan Dunn's book mobilizes an array of contemporary writers and
political theorists to provide a countervoice, which modulates into
her own voice, to nineteenth-century French intellectuals."
Walzer, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Read the review in "The French Review"
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Read the review in "Nineteenth-Century French Studies"
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