The body politic
Subtitle: corporeal metaphor in revolutionary France, 1770-1800
By: Antoine de Baecque ; translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Series: Mestizo spaces =; Espaces métissés; Mestizo spaces.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 363
Subjects: Louis XVI, King of France, 1754-1793 -- Death and burial -- Symbolic aspects; Body, Human -- Symbolic aspects -- France; France -- Politics and government -- 18th century -- Historiography; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Art and the revolution
Description: This is a history of the French Revolution told through the study of images of the body as they appeared in the popular literature of the time, showing how these images were at the very center of the metaphoric language used to describe the revolution in progress.

The author draws upon some 2,000 texts, pamphlets, announcements, opinions, accounts, treatises, and journals to exhume the textual reality of the Revolution, the body of its history. The deployment of bodily images - the degeneracy of the nobility, the impotence of the king, the herculean strength of the citizenry, the goddess of politics appearing naked like Truth, the bleeding wounds of the Republican martyrs - allowed political society to represent itself at a pivotal moment in its history.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [327]-357) and index.