Absolutist Attachments
Emotion, Media, and Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century France

Chloé Hogg (Author)

9780810139411

Paperback / softback, published 15 March 2019

272 pages, 14 black and white illustrations
22.6 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.393 kg

This is a timely, ambitious, and well-executed book project whose publication will reorient the way in which we look at the absolutist culture undergirding the reign of Louis XIV. It is compelling not only in the variety and depth of the archives it explores and the effortlessly merging of insights from very different sources, but also in the author's lightly worn erudition and eloquent pen."" - Hall Bjørnstad, Indiana University

In Absolutist Attachments, Chloé Hogg uncovers the affective and media connections that shaped Louis XIV's absolutism. Studying literature, painting, engravings, correspondence, and the emerging periodic press, Hogg diagnoses the emotions that created absolutism's feeling subjects and publics.

Louis XIV's subjects explored new kinds of affective relations with their sovereign, joining with the king in acts of aesthetic judgment, tender feeling, or the “newsiness” of emerging print news culture. Such alternative modes of adhesion countered the hegemonic model of kingship upheld by divine right, reason of state, or corporate fidelities and privileges with subject-driven attachments and practices. Absolutist Attachments discovers absolutism's alternative political and cultural legacy—not the spectacle of an unbound king but the binding connections of his subjects.

• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Conversation with a King
• Chapter 1: Loving Alexander, or the Emotions of Absolutism
• Chapter 2: Media Wars: Emotion, Information, and the Passage of the Rhine
• Chapter 3: Feeling Newsy: Donneau de Visé
  Writes the Sun King’
  s Wars
• Chapter 4: Boileau’
  s Bad Taste and the Sieges of Namur, 1692-1695
• Chapter 5: The Surgeon King: Wounding and the Body Politic
• Conclusion: A Passion without a Name
• Works Cited