Ronald Paulson, Lynn Hunt, and Françoise Vergès have described many literary, visual, and political inscriptions of revolution as having had the kind of inherently Oedipal representational structures that we have seen in Victor Séjour's ‘Le Mulâtre.’ Lynn Hunt has written that Oedipal metaphors of revolution were abundant in the early modern world because ‘most Europeans in the eighteenth century thought of their rulers as fathers and of their nations as families writ large’ (xiv). In the mind of the populace of ancien régime France, she suggests, the French Revolution necessarily entailed overthrowing the father-king, much the same way that for those who wrote about the Haitian Revolution, a slave rebellion metaphorically and often literally entailed overthrowing the father-master. Hunt calls these Oedipal fantasies of rebellion against the state, ‘family romances,’ and tells us that they were essentially ‘metaphors for political life, metaphors that developed in response to changing events … but also metaphors that drove the revolutionary process forward’ (199).

Vergès, like Garraway after her (2005a, 224), borrows the term ‘family romance’ from Hunt to describe the Oedipal significations of colonial revolutions. According to Vergès, it was Sigmund Freud who had used the term ‘family romance’ to evoke ‘the fiction developed by children about imagined parents,’ whom they imagine replacing their own parents (Vergès, 3; see also Freud, 2003, 39). In Vergès's adaptation of both Freud and Hunt's usage of the term, what she calls the ‘colonial family romance’ in Africa and the Caribbean, helped government officials to create a ‘fable’ about France being ‘La Mère-Patrie’ and the slaves being her colonized, rebellious, and ungrateful children (4).