Hunt, Lynn 1945- (Lynn Avery Hunt)

PERSONAL:

Born November 15, 1945, in Panama City, Panama; daughter of Richard F. (an engineer) and Ruby M. (a politician) Hunt. Education: Carleton College, B.A., 1967; Stanford University, M.A., 1968, Ph.D., 1973.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, University of California—Los Angeles, 6254 Bunche Hall, P.O. Box 951473, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473.

CAREER:

University of California—Berkeley, assistant professor, 1974-79, associate professor, 1979-84, professor of history, 1984-87; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, professor of history, 1987-98; University of California—Los Angeles, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, 1998—. Visiting professor, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes, Beijing University, and Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Society for French Historical Studies, Western Society for French History, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1991; honorary degree, Carleton College, 1991.

WRITINGS:

Revolution and Urban Politics in France, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1978.

Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1984, 20th anniversary edition, 2004.

The Family Romance of the French Revolution, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1992.

(With Joyce Appleby and Margaret Jacob) Telling the Truth about History, Norton (New York, NY), 1994.

(With others) The Challenge of the West: Peoples and Cultures from the Stone Age to the Global Age, D.C. Heath (Lexington, MA), 1995.

(With Jack R. Censer) Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, Pennsylvania State University Press (University Park, PA), 2001.

The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, a Concise History, Bedford/St. Martin's (Boston, MA), 2003, 3rd edition, 2008.

Inventing Human Rights: A History, W.W. Norton & Co. (New York, NY), 2007.

EDITOR

The New Cultural History, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1989.

Eroticism and the Body Politic, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1990.

The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, Zone Books (New York, NY), 1993.

(With Jacques Revel) Histories: French Constructions of the Past, New Press (New York, NY), 1995.

(And translator and author of introduction) The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, Bedford/St. Martin's (Boston, MA), 1996.

(And author of introduction, with Victoria E. Bonnell) Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1999.

(With Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Marilyn B. Young) Human Rights and Revolutions, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

University of California—Los Angeles history professor Lynn Hunt is the author of numerous books on history and culture. "Pre-eminent among historians of the French Revolution," wrote Marilyn Yalom on the Stanford President Lecture Web site, "she is also known for her theoretical work in European cultural studies." Her work emphasizes the primacy of the French Revolution—even more than its American counterpart—in the creation of the modern world, giving rise to such important and varied issues as human rights, the status of women, and the form participation in government should take.

Hunt's most famous work is her study The Family Romance of the French Revolution, an examination of the ways in which debate over the Revolution created and exploited images based on gender rather than on the universal human rights the struggle's leaders claimed to espouse. "The fruitfulness of the French Revolution as the subject for such inquiry," stated Jonathan P. Ribner in Art Journal, "stems from the urgent need, after July of 1789, to reconstruct a new order on the ruins of the Old Regime. The fearsome violence unleashed by the revolutionary attempt to wipe the slate clean had as its counterpart the generation of legitimating fictions of stability and truth."

Hunt points out that those fictions took many shapes, some social, some artistic, some literary. The overarching principle, however, she states, is this: the French state was modeled (by political theorists and statesmen alike) on the concept of the family, with the king as father, the queen as mother, and their subjects as children. By stripping the king and queen first of their power and then of their lives, the citizens symbolically committed an act of parricide—they killed their own parents. Since this was an unspeakably heinous act (again, following the model of the family), the revolutionary parricides had to develop ways to justify their actions and new models on which to construct the new society they were trying to create. "Hunt supports this intriguing and sensible hypothesis by setting forth a history of attitudes toward fathers, mothers, brothers, women, and the family as reflected in public oratory, legislation, satirical prints, novels, plays, and even in pornography," Ribner concluded. "The familiar events of the Revolution are thus subsumed within a fresh narrative in which the execution of Louis XVI—the fundamental, traumatic familial experience of the Revolution—is accompanied by a discrediting of paternal authority in favor of the radical Republic's ‘band of brothers.’"

That "band of brothers" was the fraternityé called for in the Revolution's great rallying cry of liberté, égalité, fraternityé—but, according to Hunt, it was a definition that excluded liberty and equality from anyone not a member of band. Despite the publication of visionary documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the Revolution's leaders for the most part denied rights to women. The reason for this, Hunt suggests, may lie in the image of Queen Marie Antoinette as a "bad mother" to the country. "French queens have often had a bad press, but none experienced the constant sexual criticism directed against Marie Antoinette from the Diamond Necklace Affair in 1785 to her death on the guillotine in 1793," wrote Journal of Interdisciplinary History contributor James F. Traer. "Liberal and republican women from Jeanne Roland to Olympe de Gouges were attacked viciously for seeking rights judged unnatural to their sex. Even during the Radical Republic, women belonged in the private sphere of home and family." It was not until the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte that the traditional image of the patriarchal family was reestablished. "Linking together the private and public, the empirical and the imagined dimensions of the family," declared Katherine A. Lynch in the Journal of Social History, "promises to stimulate a greater dialogue between various approaches to history. Indeed, Lynn Hunt's work—that succeeds so well in exploring how family romances sometimes get played out in very public places—challenges social historians of the family to re-integrate questions of ideology, public life, and politics into their work."

One of the ways in which Marie Antoinette was attacked most viciously was through the medium of pornography. Underground artists, writers, and political theorists assaulted the queen with scurrilous stories and illustrations, claiming that she made free with her body with men and women of all social stations. These accusations were a factor in Marie Antoinette's trial—they underscored the claim that she was a "bad mother"—and they may, says Hunt, have played a part in her eventual execution. After The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Hunt went on to look at the history of the medium in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800. She found that pornography was a relatively recent phenomenon, and that its rise in popularity coincided with the great experiments in democratic government in the eighteenth century. "Hunt's recovery of the ‘ancient regime’ of pornography," wrote Wendy Steiner in Art in America, "helps to explain the contradictions that plague us in contemporary disputes over obscene art. On the one hand, early-modern pornography glorified the liberated individual—the individual who was unconstrained by convention or authority and free to experience pleasure without guilt, to indulge the curiosity and obsessiveness of a scientist in the exploration of the senses." "But on the other hand," Steiner concluded, "this ideology entailed a leveling and a rigorous depersonalization—it assumed that there was no objective basis for discrimination among bodies, all of which were equally interesting as interchangeable holes and plugs."

In Inventing Human Rights: A History, Hunt examines yet another legacy of the French Revolution: the concept of a universal set of entitlements that cannot be taken away by other human beings. "The concept of rights, she claims, followed the rise of a new sensibility," declared Joanna Bourke in Harper's. "Quite literally, people became aware for the first time that other human beings lived autonomous ‘inner’ lives and were capable of moral judgment." Hunt notes that even within the past century, however, that capacity for recognizing the humanity in other people has been ignored more often than it has been acknowledged. "One of the themes of this book is the way deliberations concerning universal, inalienable rights fell silent between the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century and the 1948 United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights," explained Bourke. "During that time, rights did not exactly disappear; they retreated from the universal to the specific." "The tragedy of modernity," Bourke concluded, "was that ruling elites were tempted by biological forms of discrimination, attributing rightlessness to the assumed inferiorities of sex and, most perniciously, to the arbitrary distinction of race."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April 1, 1988, Simon Schama, review of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, p. 427; December 1, 1989, review of The New Cultural History, p. 1520; June 1, 1993, Dorinda Outram, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 882; December 1, 1993, Thomas Laqueur, review of Eroticism and the Body Politic, p. 1596; April 1, 1994, Valerie Steele, review of The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, p. 504; June 1, 1995, Richard T. Vann, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 874; December 1, 2001, Kenneth Pomeranz, review of Human Rights and Revolutions, p. 1754.

American Journal of Sociology, July 1, 2000, Mabel Berezin, review of Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, p. 222.

American Prospect, July 1, 2007, Tara McKelvey, review of Inventing Human Rights: A History, p. 53.

American University Law Review, spring, 1994, Kent Greenfield, review of The Invention of Pornography.

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 1, 1995, Dean Keith Simonton, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 220.

Art Bulletin, September 1, 1993, Sarah Maza, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 535.

Art in America, May 1, 1994, Wendy Steiner, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 31.

Art Journal, fall, 1993, Jonathan P. Ribner, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution.

Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, spring, 1994, Lauren Glen Dunlap, review of The Invention of Pornography.

Book World, April 22, 2007, "Revolutionary Thought," p. 9.

Canadian Journal of History, December 1, 1999, Christopher Kent, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 385.

Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, December 1, 1992, D.C. Baxter, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 677; January 1, 1994, J.T. Rosenthal, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 827; September 1, 1994, J. Alcorn, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 177.

Christian Science Monitor, April 11, 1994, Merle Rubin, review of Telling the Truth about History.

Contemporary Sociology, January 1, 1994, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 71; May 1, 1995, Steven C. Dubin, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 397; January 1, 1996, John Markoff, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 130; March 1, 2002, David O. Friedrichs, review of Human Rights and Revolutions, p. 199.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, winter, 1992, Jeremy D. Popkin, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution; fall, 1995, Stephan K. Schindler, review of The Invention of Pornography.

English Historical Review, April 1, 2002, William Doyle, review of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, p. 482.

Ethics, October 1, 1985, Saguiv Hadari, review of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, p. 214.

European History Quarterly, January 1, 1994, Antony Copley, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 143.

Free Speech Yearbook, January 1, 1995, Susan M. Ross, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 194.

French Studies, April 1, 1993, Jennifer Birkett, review of Eroticism and the Body Politic, p. 241.

Harper's, May 1, 2007, Joanna Bourke, "Sentimental Education: The Invention of Human Rights," p. 89.

Harvard International Law Journal, summer, 2001, B. Dakin, review of Human Rights and Revolutions.

Historian, September 22, 1993, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 133.

Historical Journal, March 1, 1997, Gary Savage, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 241.

History and Theory, January 1, 1993, Laurie Nussdorfer, review of The New Cultural History, p. 74; December 1, 1995, Cushing Strout, Raymond Martin, and Joan W. Scott, reviews of Telling the Truth about History, pp. 320, 329, 334.

History: The Journal of the Historical Association, February 1, 1994, William Doyle, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 155; January 1, 1996, R.A. Burchell, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 67; April 1, 1996, M.O. Grenby, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 261.

History Today, January 1, 1988, Peter Burley, review of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, p. 55; October 1, 1992, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 56; May 1, 1996, F.M.I. Thompson, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 58.

Journal of American Studies, August 1, 1995, Ben Andrews, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 309.

Journal of Communication, spring, 1996, Jonathan L. Crane, review of The Invention of Pornography.

Journal of Historical Geography, October 1, 1990, Charles W.J. Withers, review of The New Cultural History, p. 449.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, spring, 1994, James F. Traer, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution.

Journal of Modern History, March 1, 1988, Ran Halevi, review of Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, p. 159; December 1, 1991, Sander L. Gilman, review of Eroticism and the Body Politic, p. 753; September 1, 1994, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 521; September 1, 1994, Philip Stewart, "This Is Not a Book Review: On Historical Uses of Literature," p. 521; September 1, 1995, Linda G. Zatlin, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 683; December 1, 2006, "The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France," p. 963.

Journal of Social History, summer, 1994, Katherine A. Lynch, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution.

Journal of the History of Ideas, July 1, 1992, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 525.

Journal of the History of Sexuality, October 1, 1995, Karen Newman, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 328.

Journal of Women's History, January 1, 1994, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 170.

Journal of World History, fall, 2002, James Hsiung, review of Human Rights and Revolutions.

Labour/Le Travail, fall, 2002, Alvin Finkel, review of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Lambda Book Report, December 1, 1996, Katherine Raymond, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 28.

Library Journal, April 1, 1992, Marie Marmo Mullaney, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 132; July 1, 1993, Arthur K. Steinberg, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 96; May 15, 1996, R. James Tobin, review of Histories: French Constructions of the Past, p. 71; February 1, 2007, David Keymer, review of Inventing Human Rights, p. 85.

Nation, November 15, 1993, Carlin Romano, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 563; April 16, 2007, Samuel Moyn, review of Inventing Human Rights, p. 25.

New Republic, November 7, 1994, Gordon S. Wood, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 46; May 7, 2007, "Everybody Everywhere," p. 48.

New Yorker, May 21, 2007, review of Inventing Human Rights, p. 79.

New York Review of Books, January 31, 1985, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, p. 21.

New York Times, August 21, 1992, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 24; August 17, 1993, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 18.

New York Times Book Review, July 26, 1992, Tony Judt, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 7; September 26, 1993, Eugen Weber, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 14; March 27, 1994, David A. Hollinger, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 16.

NWSA Journal, summer, 1994, review of The Invention of Pornography.

Political Studies, March 1, 2002, Kannamma Raman, review of Human Rights and Revolutions, p. 198.

Publishers Weekly, May 24, 1993, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 75; February 14, 1994, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 73.

Reference & Research Book News, February 1, 1994, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 27; May 1, 2007, review of Inventing Human Rights.

Science, July 28, 1995, Paul Forman, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 565.

Signs, spring, 1995, Amy J. Ransom, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution.

Social Forces, September 1, 2000, Penny Edgell Becker, review of Beyond the Cultural Turn, p. 349.

Social History, October 1, 1994, Gary Kates, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 405.

Social Science Quarterly, December 1, 1995, Peter Karsten, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 924.

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, summer 1991, Paula R. Backscheider, review of The New Cultural History.

Times Higher Education Supplement, January 14, 1994, Patrick Joyce, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 27; December 2, 1994, John Tosh, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 28.

Times Literary Supplement, June 10, 1994, Gertrude Himmelfarb, review of Telling the Truth about History, p. 8.

Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1991, review of Eroticism and the Body Politic; fall, 1992, review of The Family Romance of the French Revolution, p. 117.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 1994, Jan Morris, review of Telling the Truth about History.

Women's Studies, July 1, 1997, R. Gina Renee, review of The Invention of Pornography, p. 381.

ONLINE

Stanford Presidential Lecture,http://prelectur.stanford.edu/ (September 9, 2007), Marilyn Yalom, "Lynn Hunt," author biography.