Available From UC Press

The Family Romance of the French Revolution

Lynn Hunt
This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a multidisciplinary investigation of the foundations of modern politics. "Family Romance" was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and joining one of higher social standing. Lynn Hunt uses the term broadly to describe the images of the familial order underlying revolutionary politics. In a wide-ranging account using novels, engravings, paintings, speeches, newspaper editorials, pornographic writing, and revolutionary legislation about the family, Hunt shows that politics were experienced through the grid of the family romance.
Lynn Hunt is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of several books, including Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (California, 1984), and the editor of The New Cultural History (California, 1989).