NONFICTION - June 28, 1992

THE FAMILY ROMANCE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION by Lynn Hunt (University of California: $20; 203 pp.). Just as the guillotine was about to lop off his head in 1793, King Louis XVI looked to his right and saw a huge, empty pedestal, the battered remnant of the statue that had honored his grandfather. Louis died with this image of a void in his mind’s eye, but the French would have to live with it.

They had, after all, literally and symbolically annihilated the patriarchs who had brought order and meaning to French society. The disobedience that ensued in the absence of authority took many forms, but in this lively, lusty psychoanalytic history, University of Pennsylvania history professor Lynn Hunt focuses on the “psychosexual” ones. Hunt is critical of Freud, but in pornographic engravings, essays and other arts of the period she finds credence for his prediction, in “Totem and Taboo,” that “In the absence of the father, the normal laws of legitimacy and social order do not prevail.” Subconscious attractions, particularly homosexual ones, that had been sublimated were celebrated, as in the novels of the Marquis de Sade.

Hunt, of course, is not the first to marvel at France’s social confusion. Robert Darnton’s “The Kiss of Lamourette,” for instance, vividly describes the day in 1792 when the deputies of France’s usually stodgy, contentious Legislative Assembly rose to their feet and started hugging and kissing each other after one deputy gave a ringing speech about brotherly love. But Hunt is one of the few to unabashedly celebrate the experimentation. To aristocratic historians such as Simon Schama, who has scoffed that “revolutionary behavior” is a form of madness, she points out that “the revolutionary family romances (and they were plural) were not neurotic reactions to disappointment--as in Freud’s formulation--but creative efforts to re-imagine the political world, to imagine a polity unhinged from patriarchal authority.”

To feminists who contend that 1789 was a man’s revolution, she says, “Male control of the world never went without saying after the father had been killed.” And to leaders such as President Bush, who think governments are either “free” or “totalitarian,” she points out that the best ones negotiate an extremely delicate balance between Robespierre’s notion of consensus and the general will and Sade’s notion of the pleasure-seeking, self-regarding Hobbesian man.