The Deaths of Louis XVI; Regicide and the French Political Imagination by Susan Dunn Review by: L. L. Bongie Political Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 2, Special Issue: Culture and Cross-Cultural Dimensions of Political Psychology (Jun., 1997), pp. 519-522 Published by: International Society of Political Psychology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791782 . Accessed: 19/06/2014 14:57

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This content downloaded from 137.165.199.11 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 14:57:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PoliticalPsychology, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1997

BOOK REVIEW

The Deaths ofLouis XVI; Regicideand theFrench Political Imagination. By Susan Dunn.Foreword by ConorCruise O'Brien. Princeton: Princeton Uni- versityPress. 1994. 178pp. $29.95.

Thisbook has greaterambitions than its title suggests. The execution of Louis XVI on 21 January1793, its specific treatment (his various "deaths") in theworks of suchwriters as Michelet,Victor Hugo, and AlbertCamus, serves mainly as a pointof departurefor discussion of such largeissues as revolutionaryjustice, politicsand ethics, idealistic ends and violent means. Throughout is theunderlying assumptionthat the regicide, charged with multiple layers of meaning and woven intoFrench historical narratives and political mythologies, has occupieda critical place in Frenchintellectual history and has shapedFrance's political and social realitiesever since. Both in theForeword by O'Brienand in Dunn's text,we find referencesto such metaphoricalentities as the "Frenchnational psyche," the "collectivememory," and "self-inflicted psychic injury," suggesting the nature and mechanismsof those realities. Louis XVI, it is generallyagreed, was nota "great"king; that is, he was not an effectiveleader. Too liberalfor royalists, too retrogradefor republicans, too indecisiveoverall, he could,in fact, have been the most popular and most powerful ofhis dynasty had he managedto place himselfeffectively atthe head of a regime so providentiallyrenewed by the enlightened principles of 1789. Dunn'ssubject matter, however, begins later, with the king's beheading in the presenceof a hugecrowd gathered at what was thenthe Place de la R6volutionand whathas sincebeen transformed(with predictable symbolic overtones) into the Place de la Concorde.Having botched his life, Louis was at leastcareful to make somethingof his death.Indeed, in thepoet's words,"nothing in his lifebecame him like the leavingit," Louis died a martyr,forgiving his enemies.Like his ancestors,he hadruled by Divine Right. However much disguised by a trumped-up judicialprocess, his political murder was seenby many as an audacioussacrilege, a repudiationof divinely sanctioned authority, a prelude, moreover, to theTerror. The organizingprinciple of an entiresociety was destroyed,leaving in thedebris politicalchaos, moralconfusion, and historicaldiscontinuity. For the extreme revolutionariesthat, of course, had beenall to thegood. French society could get 519

0162-895X? 1997 InternationalSociety of PoliticalPsychology Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

This content downloaded from 137.165.199.11 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 14:57:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 520 BookReview on withprogress, make a properstart in a newlife now thatthe Old Regimewas killedoff at theroot. Regicide was thecondition of thatrenewal. In thewords of Robespierre,the "monster" Louis (demonized,of course, for the occasion) had to die ifthe patrie was to live.Regicide would safeguard the Revolution and make it foreverirreversible. Moreover, it was notsimply a matterof getting rid of a king as theEnglish had donenearly a centuryand a halfbefore; France had abolished kingshipitself and had cleansed with the blood of Louis Capet centuries of criminal tyranny.Kingship was desacralizedand demystified.In itsplace was substituted thesacred republic. But thencame theTerror, perceived as a logical as muchas chronological sequelof regicide. It generatedreaction, revulsion, and, in due course,a mitigated restorationof the monarchy. Louis XVI's "good"death, the image of the sacrificial andredeeming martyr, was ideallysuited to the needs of royalist commentators but itposed an enormouslyawkward problem for the liberal nineteenth-century histo- rianswho, at thesame time as theyvoiced reservations about the Jacobins, sought todefend the Revolution and dissociate it from the Terror. How bestthen to endorse progressand reform, the Rights of Man andthe ideals of 1789? Dunn's expositionof the differentsolutions proposed by variousFrench writersof variouspolitical hues is unevenand, inevitablyperhaps, sometimes becomesrepetitious as ittraces in turnthe many evolving ideological nuances that fither analytical grid. In mostinstances, her starting point of Louis XVI's death fadesrather quickly into the background. Michelet, for example, preferring the less troublingredemption mythology that surrounds the executionof Joanof Arc, managesto subvertLouis's royalistmartyr myth by co-optingher sanctity and martyrdomfor the Revolution. Joan had theadvantage (opinions do differon this point!)of being a martyrwho had diedfor the kingdom, not for the king. She had sacrificedfor the nation whose general will she incarnated. But in theethos of that sacrednationhood lurk the perils of the totalitarian collectivity, of mystic brother- hood,the cult of the fatherland that denigrates the individual and prefers mystical communionover rational communication, and instinct over reason. Here too will be foundthe plagues of emotional indoctrination, uneducated patriotism, contempt foroutsiders, along with civically valorized fear and envy of the inevitable enemy within.We renewacquaintance with Karl Popper's hesitationsregarding the societalvalorization of collectiveemotion: "He who teachesthat not reason but love shouldrule opens the way for those who rule by hate." By theend of the 19th century,Michelet's Joan had, in fact,become much less palatableas she moved fromthe leftto theright in an age thatwitnessed the Dreyfusaffair and the emergenceof the profascist, anti-Semitic Action Frangaise. Thefull force of the dilemmas posed by the issues of political murder, amnesty, and reconciliationis broughtto contemporaryvisibility and relevancein the writingsof Albert Camus, a self-styledmodern "Girondin" who came, finally, to rejectthe politics of expediency,power, and pragmatism,thereby provoking the ire and scornof theequally modern "Jacobin," Jean-Paul Sartre. Shrugging off

This content downloaded from 137.165.199.11 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 14:57:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BookReview 521

Sartre'saccusation that to refusemilitant engagement (including violence in strugglesfor national liberation) was to be on theside of theoppressors, Camus soughtrather to infusepolitics with morality-not always easy or evenpossible (witnesshis personal difficulties with his native Algeria's situation: "I willdefend mymother before justice"). Camus finally withdrew from that scene, leaving it to others"to makehistory." Dunn underlines, in thisrespect, Camus's belief that the "assassination"of Louis XVI was "themost significant and tragic event in French history,a turning point that marked the irrevocable destruction of a worldthat, for a thousandyears, had embraced a sacredorder." With Louis's death,desecularized historyand reasontriumphed. Morality was displacedby expediency.Camus, as Dunnpoints out, belongs to a generationof antitotalitarianwriters, such as Jacob Talmon,Karl Popper,Arthur Koestler, and HannahArendt, who trace a straight pathfrom Rousseau's Social Contractto the1793 regicideto theTerror, through to the 19thcentury's ideologies of historicalnecessity (Hegel and Marx) and, finally,to 20th-centurytotalitarianism. Throughout the debate, the essential ques- tionsremain unresolved: How to reconcilejustice and mercy,ethics and politics? How tobe neithera victimnor an executioner?It is in thisCamus chapter, the last of thebook and the one thatis leastdirectly connected to hertitle, that Dunn hits herbest stride and setsup themost sustained narrative line. But it is heretoo, and in herConclusion, that she introduces perhaps the most controversial argument of herstudy (notwithstanding the contrary assurances of O'Brienin theForeword, Dunn does in factallow herselfto "push an argument").Expounding on the necessityof what might be describedas "creativeconflict" in a mannerthat comes perilouslyclose toequating change with progress and social consensus with moral stagnationor worse, she notes that there is an undesirableside to what some see as the familiarlywarm and cuddlyhumanitarian credo of fraternity,sacrifice, and compassion.Certain aspects of thatcredo, she warns,have contributedlittle to fosteringfreedom and democracy. It is a credothat harbors potentially retrograde elementsthat subvert the ethosof individualidentity, the individual'scritical rationalfaculties and, especially, the individual's inviolability. When we dreamof politicalharmony and stability,when we prizeabove all else nationalunity and seekto curbconflict and dissent, "without which," Dunn assures us, "there can be no meaningfulpolitical activity," we courtgrave dangers! Those who preach reconciliation,those who refuse to judge and punish, who choose to dispel anxiety, whoadvocate fraternity as they design conflict-free politics in warlessrealms, may be sufferingfrom a "flawedunderstanding" of legitimateand peaceful change. In a democracy,progress will not result from unity and consensus.Progressive and innovativelegislation, "significant change," will not arise from consensus located in theall-inclusive center. It arises,rather, from controversial ideological positions on theleft and on theright. Are we to believethat Yeats's celebratedcenter should not "hold" after all? Dunndirects her final thoughts on thematter toward today's United States, voicing suspicionconcerning slogans that preach "family values" (the Jacobin concept of

This content downloaded from 137.165.199.11 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 14:57:04 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 522 Book Review virtue?),JFK's "Ask notwhat your country can do foryou ..." (thecoercion of anti-individualism?the mystical nationalism implicit in Romanticexhortations to self-sacrifice?),and, not surprisingly, "America, love it or leave it" (reminiscent of the antidemocraticnature of politicalconsensus?). Here, surely,are "pushed arguments,"for while it must be admittedthat sacrifice, unity, and consensuscan sometimesamount to a plague,we cannothelp thinking that there are stillmany placesin thistroubled world that would benefit enormously from catching a huge dose ofthem! The Deaths of Louis XVI, thoughnot alwaysan excitingread, is a solid, well-informedpiece of scholarship.(Dunn's manytranslations from the French, by theway, are well done and,in thecase of some lines fromHugo's poetry, positivelyinspired!) Perhaps in the end too much of a historicalwatershed is made of Louis XVI's execution.Other such "watersheds" turn up in thechronicles of Westerncivilization before 1793. Louis's judgesin theConvention, for example, frequentlybrought up theparallel of CharlesI of England(not to mentionthe Tarquinkings and theearly Brutus) and Louis himselfin thelast days of his life meditatedlong and hard on whathe viewedas theclose similarityof his situation withthat of his unfortunate Stuart brother. In thisregard, perhaps one lastcavil is in order:Both O'Brien and Dunnmake a pointof insistingthat the execution of CharlesI leftno "significanttraces in theEnglish national psyche," and thatthe 1649 regicide"has neverbeen consideredan eventfraught with meaning." The pointis debatable.Is it,for example, a "significant"trace that every year to this day,on January30th, the Church of Englandofficially celebrates the memory of "King Charlesthe Martyr"?And, forthat matter, is therenot perhapssome importantresidual significance in theplain factthat the Britishmonarchy has survived,one ofthe few still reigning triumphant and without apology, and that the nextBritish king will in all probabilitybe crownedwith the name of Charles?

L.L. Bongie Universityof British Columbia

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