Daut picks up a line of argument running through Ronald Paulson, Lynn Hunt, and Françoise Vergès, each of whom has found oedipal structures in the way revolution gets represented, whether in writing, in images, or in politics. Victor Séjour's story "Le Mulâtre" has already supplied one instance.

Hunt's explanation for the pattern is historical before it is psychological. Eighteenth-century Europeans were in the habit of picturing a ruler as a father and a nation as a family enlarged, which made such metaphors ready to hand. Under the ancien régime, on her account, ordinary French people could scarcely conceive of revolution except as the overthrow of a father-king. From that premise the chapter moves to a comparison.