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.

Proust's In Search of Lost Time is many things. It is a staggering achievement, an evocation of an elite milieu, a literary reckoning with memory; it is also a massive reading challenge, a book more abandoned than read. For Laure Murat - who first read In Search... when she was twenty years old - it was a map to the world of the French aristocracy, the very world into which she had been born. The chateaux and balls of In Search... were, for her, the backdrop of her family story, understood anew through Proust's eyes.In this beautiful book, Murat explores the fixity of the aristocratic life, which codifies everything from speech to dress to movement; and Proust's astonishing seven-volume novel, which, with fluidity and linguistic virtuosity, shifts focus from the codes for behaving to the experience of living. In Proust, A Family Affair, Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature, and the honour of paying close attention to a text that may, in turn, provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.

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.

Proust's In Search of Lost Time is many things. It is a staggering achievement, an evocation of an elite milieu, a literary reckoning with memory; it is also a massive reading challenge, a book more abandoned than read. For Laure Murat - who first read In Search... when she was twenty years old - it was a map to the world of the French aristocracy, the very world into which she had been born. The chateaux and balls of In Search... were, for her, the backdrop of her family story, understood anew through Proust's eyes.In this beautiful book, Murat explores the fixity of the aristocratic life, which codifies everything from speech to dress to movement; and Proust's astonishing seven-volume novel, which, with fluidity and linguistic virtuosity, shifts focus from the codes for behaving to the experience of living. In Proust, A Family Affair, Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature, and the honour of paying close attention to a text that may, in turn, provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.