The Family Romance of the French Revolution

Reviews

"Entertaining, original and provocative. . . . [Hunt] is interested in what historians have always thought were the central political issues of the period (power, authority, legitimacy), but she approaches them by ingenious indirection. She is also a scrupulous scholar."—New York Times

"This study will definitely challenge many a complacent historian."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Not just for French specialists, this difficult yet fascinating book should also interest psychohistorians, cultural-intellectual scholars and political scientists. Recognizing that absolutism rested on a model of patriarchal authority, cultural historian Hunt uses Freudian terminology to explore what the killing of the father-king Louis XVI meant to the revolutionaries creating a new political order. Examining contemporary painting, literature, and iconography to see how those meanings are expressed, she uncovers the 'collective unconscious images of the familial order' underlying revolutionary beliefs."—Library Journal