ABSTRACT
The discourses of the family that surrounded the Revolution bring out the implications of the absent mother and the king-as-father in a blaze of clarity. As Lynn Hunt argues, French society moved in the later eighteenth century from imagining its rulers as fathers to condemning the fathers of the ancien régime with near-pathological fear. By the latter half of the century both France and Italy were awash with tales of renegade fathers, errant and absent mothers, and orphaned children conveyed in both sentimental literature and opera semiseria. Familar examples of the latter include Paisiello's Nina, ossia la pazza per amore and Paer's Camilla, both based on libretti by Marsollier des Vivetieres and both objects of frenzied popularity on Italian soil. The absent mother, banished by Metastasio, had thus returned as a twin to those representations of Marie Antoinette emerging around the same time across the Alps.
