DUNN, Susan, The Deaths of Louis XVI. Regicide and the French Political Imagination, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008, 192 p.
ISBN 978-0-691-14155-8
RÉSUMÉ
The public beheading of Louis XVI was a unique and troubling eventthat scarred French collective memory for two centuries. To Jacobins,the king's decapitation was the people's coronation. To royalists, itwas deicide. Nineteenth-century historians considered it an alarmingmiscalculation, a symbol of the Terror and the moral bankruptcy of theRevolution. By the twentieth century, Camus judged that the killingstood at the "crux of our contemporary history." In this book, SusanDunn investigates the regicide's pivotal role in French intellectualhistory and political mythology. She examines how thinkers on the rightand left repudiated regicide and terror, while articulating acompassionate, humanitarian vision, which became the moral basis forthe modern French nation.Their credo of fraternity and unity,however, strangely depoliticized this supremely political act ofregicide. Using theoretical insights from Tocqueville, Arendt, Rawls,Walzer, and others, Dunn explores the transformation of violentregicidal politics into an apolitical cult of ethical purity and anantidemocratic nationalist religion. Her book focuses on the fluidityof political myths. The figure of Louis XVI was transmuted into a Joanof Arc and a deified nation, and the notion of his sacrificecontributed to the disquieting myth of a mystical community of self-sacrificing citizens.
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction 3
Political Myths
Louis XVI and the Cult of Human Sacrifice 15
Louis XVI and Joan of Arc 38
Michelet and Lamartine: Regicide, Passion, and Compassion 67
Literary Myths
Louis XVI and His Executioners 95
Victor Hugo, Kingship, and Louis XVI 116
Camus and Louis XVI: A Modern Elegy for the Martyred King 140
Conclusion 165
Index 171
BIOGRAPHIE
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).