The Deaths of Louis XVI

by Susan Dunn, Connor Cruise O'Brien (Foreword)

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.

Genres: French Revolution, History

192 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 1994

About the author

Susan Dunn is Professor of Literature and the History of Ideas at Williams College and Senior Scholar and the Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland. She is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed Sister Revolutions

Academic Degrees
* A. B. cum laude, Smith College, 1966. Phi Beta Kappa.
* Ph.D. Harvard University, 1973

Professional Experience
* Williams College, Preston S. Parish '41 Third Century Professor in the Arts and Humanities, 1973 to present
* Wellesley College, Instructor, 1971-1973
* Harvard University, Extension Division, Instructor, 1970-1973
* Harvard University, Teaching Fellow, 1967-1970

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book, I have underlined so many passages of my copy. Apart from the central subject of the French Revolution, this book is about the influence of historiography on events. Or, to rephrase that, the power of the past and its telling on history.