The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial―and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries. From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an exploration of the surprising relationship between history and madness. She uncovers countless stories of patients whose delusions seem to be rooted in the historical or political traumas of their time, like the watchmaker who believed he lived with a new head, his original having been removed at the guillotine. In the troubled wake of the Revolution, meanwhile, French physicians diagnosed a number of mental illnesses tied to current events, from “revolutionary neuroses” and “democratic disease” to the “ambitious monomania” of the Restoration. How, Murat asks, do history and psychiatry, the nation and the individual psyche, interface? A fascinating history of psychiatry―but of a wholly new sort―The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon offers the first sustained analysis of the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry, history, and political theory.

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Toward a Political History of Madness

Literature & Fiction

Murat, Laure

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

La Maison du docteur Blanche

History

Europe

Hachette Littérature

Qui annule quoi ?: Sur la cancel culture

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

SEUIL

Passage de L Odeon (Folio) (French Edition)

Contemporary

Gallimard Education

Relire: Enquête sur une passion littéraire

Essays & Correspondence

Flammarion

"J'ai aimé Los Angeles tout de suite, dès la sortie de l'avion. Tout m'a plu, la lumière, l'horizon, les palmiers, les voitures, l'urbanisme improbable, la langueur du paysage, la couleur d'or rose de l'atmosphère. Los Angeles, cité dépourvue de centre et de monuments, propice à l'errance et à la rêverie, défaisait d'un coup tous mes préjugés et m'offrait ce que je n'avais jamais su faire : lâcher prise.Que signifie tomber amoureux d'une ville ? Quel est le rapport érotique qui nous lie à certains lieux et pas à d'autres ? Pourquoi Los Angeles, ville sans bords qui ne se laisse ni définir ni saisir ?"Née à Paris où elle a vécu la majeure partie de sa vie, Laure Murat s'est installée à Los Angeles il y a dix ans. Elle pose sur cette ville un regard singulier et libre, composé d'expériences intimes et de réflexions subjectives.

Ceci n'est pas une ville

Literary

Passage de l'Odéon: Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier et la vie littéraire à Paris dans l'entre-deux-guerres

FAYARD

Proust, roman familial - Prix Médicis essai 2023

Genre Fiction

ROBERT LAFFONT

Une révolution sexuelle ?: Réflexions sur l'après-Weinstein

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