The Deaths of Louis XVI

Regicide and the French Political Imaginations

Susan Dunn

"The Deaths of Louis XVI is an acute and sensitive exploration of a profoundly important theme...It will be read with a peculiar interest by scholars concerned with French literature, among whom Professor Dunn herself occupies a distinguished place which will be notably enhanced by the publication of the present study."

-from the Foreword by Conor Cruise O'Brien

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, Arend, Rawls, Walzer, and others. Dunn explores the transformation of violent regicidal politics into 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 defied nation, and the notion of his sacrifice contributed to the disquieting myth of a mystical community of self-sacrificing citizens.

"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 countervoice, which modulates into her own voice, to nineteenth-century French intellectuals."

- Michael Walzer, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Read the review in "Political Psychology"

Read the review in "Nineteenth-Century French Studies"

Read the review in the "Revue d'Histoire litteraire de la France"

Read the review in the "Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire"