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

by Susan Dunn

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 069114155X
• ISBN13: 9780691141558
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"