Lynn Hunt the Family Romance of the French Revolution Quotes
Books of The Times; A Freudian Theory On France's Revolution
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August 21, 1992
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The Family unit Romance of the French Revolution By Lynn Chase Illustrated. 213 pages. University of California Press. $twenty.
In "Totem and Taboo" (1913), Freud attempted to explain the origins of the social contract through the story of the primal horde. Every bit he told information technology, this prehistoric gathering of man beings was dominated by a fierce, possessive male parent, who kept all the women for himself and drove away his sons every bit soon as they grew upward. "One day the brothers who had been driven out got together, trounce their begetter to death, and devoured him, and thus put an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they dared and managed to do what would take remained incommunicable for the individual."
The brothers subsequently began to feel guilty and renounced the fruit of their crime past denying themselves the women who had been liberated by their male parent's death. Thus, Freud argued, in condign guilty and acknowledging the guilt, flesh created its first laws and taboos; this was the beginning of civilization.
In her provocative new volume, "The Family unit Romance of the French Revolution," Lynn Hunt, the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, reappraises Freud's myth and uses it -- forth with other Freudian concepts -- to re-examine the social dynamics of the French Revolution. It's a risky, innovative approach to writing history, but in Ms. Hunt's capable hands, it yields results that will be fascinating to the scholar and general reader alike.
Equally Ms. Hunt sees it, narratives of family relations helped structure the commonage political unconscious of 18th-century France and "helped organize the political experience of the Revolution." Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries akin, she argues, "had to tell stories most how the republic came to exist and what it meant, and those stories e'er had an element of family unit conflict and resolution."
What Ms. Hunt suggests is that the French, like many other 18th-century Europeans, idea of their rulers equally fathers; and in sending Louis Capet, the quondam Louis XVI, to the guillotine in 1793, they were, in effect, enacting a ritual parricide. Instead of replacing the expressionless king with another father figure (like the Americans, who mythologized George Washington as "the Male parent of His Country"), the French were determined to maintain a collective leadership of the revolution. Fraternity was the watchword of the twenty-four hours; and equality, the revolution's participants agreed, would reign within "the band of brothers."
"All forms of social distinction were suspect," Ms. Hunt writes, "as were all forms of power modeled on patriarchy. If fraternity was to exist the model for a authorities based on equality and pop sovereignty, then any suggestion of a father figure was problematic."
Indeed, this sentiment spread from the country level to the domestic sphere, every bit the revolutionary Government began to institute a serial of laws designed to "protect the rights of children confronting the potentially tyrannical deportment of fathers, families or churches." Paternal authority over children was restricted, primogeniture (the passage of all titles and well-nigh of a family unit'south land to the eldest son) was abolished, and family councils were established to settle disputes between parents and children. "The contractual association of free individuals," Ms. Hunt writes, "was now supposed to replace the patriarchal family despotically controlled by the male parent every bit the cardinal unit of measurement of the new polity."
Novels of the day reflected -- in some cases, anticipated -- this change in attitude. During the 2nd half of the 18th century, fictional fathers began to lose their authorization and power, evolving from stern patriarchs into loving progenitors -- a development that Ms. Chase argues "fatally undermined absolutist purple authority." In other novels of the day, like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's pop "Paul et Virginie," and "Lolotte et Fanfan" and "Alexis" by Francois-Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, the father effigy disappeared birthday, ceding eye stage to children, who are left to brand their own way in the earth at large.
Not only were novels in revolutionary France preoccupied with the fate of orphans (characters readily embraced by the French, who saw themselves every bit political orphans, cut off from all tradition and convention), they were also strangely obsessed with the themes of incest, adultery and confused identity, themes that perhaps reached their most farthermost expression in the work of the Marquis de Sade. Such themes, Ms. Hunt suggests, reflected the confusions of living in a world without fathers, a revolutionary, desacralized world in which every assumption about the social world was challenged, a earth in which, theoretically at least, annihilation was possible.
In drawing upon Freudian theory and using novels, newspapers, pornographic writings, paintings and speeches to illustrate her theories, Ms. Hunt has written a book that illuminates the French Revolution from a fascinating new angle. She has as well written a book that sheds vivid new light on the ways people imagine collectively -- and how that imagination shapes and is shaped by history.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/21/books/books-of-the-times-a-freudian-theory-on-france-s-revolution.html
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