The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination

Description

Investigates the regicide's pivotal role in French intellectual history and political mythology. This book 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. It focuses on the fluidity of political myths.

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).

"Written 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 counter-voice, which modulates into her own voice, to nineteenth-century French intellectuals."-Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study