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.
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