Family Romance of the French Revolution

This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a daring multidisciplinary investigation of the imaginative foundations of modern politics. Hunt uses the term `Family Romance' (coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and belonging to one of higher social standing) in a broader sense to describe the images of the familial order that structured the collective political unconscious. In a wide-ranging account that uses novels engravings paintings speeches newspaper editorials pornographic writing and revolutionary legislation about the family Hunt shows that the politics of the French Revolution were experienced through the network of the family romance.