Family Romance of the French Revolution

Hunt, Lynn

doi:10.4324/9781315003306

Cited by 37 publications

(21 citation statements)

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“…In Le blanc et le noir , the problem of political order is approached as a question of paternal authority. Paternal authority, as noticed by Lynn Hunt, is addressed from the very first scene of the play (Hunt , 172–174). Greeting Télémaque and commenting on the morning's fine weather, Beauval fils is met with the retort that only the privileged few can enjoy the warmth of the Caribbean island.…”

Section: Political Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

What Are Robespierre and Télémaque Doing in Saint‐Domingue?

Kjærgård

2018

Orbis Litterarum

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Charles Pigault‐Lebrun's play Le blanc et le noir (1795) is one of only a handful of French revolutionary plays to stage the Saint‐Domingue slave rebellion, a rebellion today better known as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). I argue that Pigault‐Lebrun uses early melodramatic generic traits to develop a theatrical thought experiment revolving around three main themes: humanness, revolutionary legitimacy, and political order. Crucially, Pigault‐Lebrun does so by transporting French revolutionary figures and themes to the colonial setting, which means that his depiction of Caribbean revolt is seen through a distinctly Parisian lens. The first consequence of this framing is an omission of specifically Haitian concerns. The second is a particular infusion of colonial problems into metropolitan discussions. In analyzing this reciprocal transportation of figures and discourse, the article shows how the colonies not only affected the material lives of millions of Europeans but also influenced crucial questions of humanness, societal change, and political order.

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Section: Political Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

What Are Robespierre and Télémaque Doing in Saint‐Domingue?

Kjærgård

2018

Orbis Litterarum

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“…92 According to Hunt, the breakdown of political hierarchies was discursively produced and performed as parricide and incest; the re-establishment of central authority under Napoleon was possible only after fraternal infighting had ended. Such interest in the reform of paternal power, as well as anxiety over its compatibility with brotherly egalitarianism, characterised much of Enlightenment fiction, journalism and political philosophy.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…17 For this purpose, I will briefly discuss the use of breast milk for therapeutic purposes in early modern medicine; trace the popularity of iconographies of lactation in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century art; point to métissage as a governing trope of both plot and style in Marmontel's novel; discuss nursing in all its varieties -maternal, commercial and charitable -as a supposedly asexual practice; mention the revolutionary requirement of breastfeeding to signify immediacy and transparency; situate Hersent's classicising painting among Romantic colonial narratives and art works; and conclude with an outlook on fatherdaughter incest and other forms of miscegenation as yet another failed 'family romance' of the French Revolution. 18 Marmontel's and Hersent's depictions of Las Casas's milk cure played on ancient recommendations of breast milk as a cure for eye disease, gout, tuberculosis and fatigue, primarily in old men. 19 In Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1765), breast milk was recommended as a highly efficient remedy against consumption in men, provided that its rather tempting mode of presentation did not lead to sexual arousal.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In her book The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), Lynn Hunt argues that the revolutionary dynamic unfolded as an oedipal tragedy, in which the fraternal killing of the father, Louis XVI, was followed by the delirious gang-rape of the mother, Marie-Antoinette, who, subject to pornographic slandering even before the revolution, was executed in 1793 for having committed incest with her son. 92 According to Hunt, the breakdown of political hierarchies was discursively produced and performed as parricide and incest; the re-establishment of central authority under Napoleon was possible only after fraternal infighting had ended. Such interest in the reform of paternal power, as well as anxiety over its compatibility with brotherly egalitarianism, characterised much of Enlightenment fiction, journalism and political philosophy.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Las Casas and His Amerindian Nurse: Tropes of Lactation in the French Colonial Imaginary (c.1770-1815)

Sperling

2011

Gender &Amp; History

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This article investigates Marmontel's reworking of the ancient legend of Pero and Cimone in his bestselling novel Les Incas (1777). According to an anecdote in Valerius Maximus's Memorable Doings and Sayings (c.30 CE), Pero saves her father, condemned to death by starvation, by breastfeeding him in prison. In Les Incas, it is Bartolomé de las Casas who is being cured from a fatal illness through the milk of an Amerindian princess. Jean‐Michel Moreau the Younger illustrated this lactation scene in the first edition of Marmontel's novel; his engraving inspired Louis Hersent to render the topic in oil three decades later. My article explores the ways in which French Enlightenment writers and artists employed lactation imagery to propose a utopian reform of colonial relations – the voluntary offering of America's riches to benevolent white patriarchs – at a time when the nature of government authority, paternity, maternity, race and kinship were being redefined. In 1808, Hersent's painting of ‘Las Casas Cured by Savages’ appears curiously anachronistic in the context of contemporary novels and paintings that portray colonial relationships as inundated by death and bloodshed. In Chateaubriand's Atala (1801), lactation imagery is employed to signify white men's necrophilic desire, genocide and loss.

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“…por extenso en Baudin, 1932: 117-122. Asimismo en relación a obras narrativas, roBert, 1972narrativas, roBert, , 1994hunt, 1994, y fowler, 2000 (diderot, 1969(diderot, -1973.…”

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Le Fils naturel (1757), de Diderot, o la espectacularidad de una «condition» jurídico-familiar

González¹

2014

DOXA

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Resumen. Estudio interdisciplinario de «Derecho y Literatura» sobre Le fils naturel con análisis de la categoría dramática y jurídica de «condition». Referencia a la posición jurídica del «hijo natural» en el derecho francés de la época y el Code civil, así como al valor de su espectacularidad escé-nica en la teoría del drama burgués diderotiano, y posterior excursus jurídico-literario en Honoré BAlzAc y Alejandro DumAs (hijo).Palabras clave: derecho y literatura, teatro, Denis DiDerot, nuevo «contrato social» y derecho de familia, relaciones paterno-filiales. Keywords: law and literature, theatre, Denis DiDerot, new «social contract» and family law, parent-child relationship. Derecho, 37 (2014) Diderot's Le DOXA, Cuadernos de Filosofía del

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Family Romance of the French Revolution

Cited by 37 publications

References 0 publications

What Are Robespierre and Télémaque Doing in Saint‐Domingue?

What Are Robespierre and Télémaque Doing in Saint‐Domingue?

Las Casas and His Amerindian Nurse: Tropes of Lactation in the French Colonial Imaginary (c.1770-1815)

Le Fils naturel (1757), de Diderot, o la espectacularidad de una «condition» jurídico-familiar

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