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not develop it. Instead he shows the rise of duelling in France in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially at those times when central
authority was weak. Monarchs tergiversated. On occasion they might seek
to parade their authority by presiding over duels, though a graphic vignette
shows Henri II miscalculating badly, and it was to be the Age of the
Enlightenment before kings at their coronations could be prevailed upon to
pronounce formal condemnations of a customary means of defending one’s
honour that remained dear, in principle if not by then very much in practice,
to that group of their subjects with whom they had historically had the
closest affinities. Gradually, though, a set of arguments, which are in fact
stated with characteristic succinctness by Bacon in Of Revenge, won the day
for the modern concept that even the greatest nobles in the land were
subject to its laws. That left only the matter of theocrasy for final solution,
again before onlookers on a public square in a ritual apparently legitimizing
bloodshed, on 21 January 1793.
Billacois presents his case persuasively. Where possible, he uses quantitative
methods, which lead him to be sceptical about certain exaggerations, but in
an investigation of ’mentalities’ he is always aware of the need to go beyond
recorded event through images towards an interpretation of meaning. Thus
the concluding section moves, in what is coming to be recognized as a
characteristic French fashion, away from facts and figures to an exploration
of the resonances of the sword, the blood and all the other characteristic
constituents of the duel. Unproven conclusions? Perhaps. But this illuminating
and, as it comes towards its end, remarkably wide-ranging study provides
some proof of the advantages of the view that ’to write history is not to
make a line-by-line translation of the past ... to write history is to speak in
parables’ .
The English of Trista Selous’s version of the original is generally fluent
and pleasing, though fastidious readers may wonder whether fidelity to
French syntax does not occasionally lead to sentences that betray their
origins. In the rather important quotation on page 146 common sense as
well as historical lexicography could have suggested that ’cowardice against
His Majesty’ was not quite right, and, two pages further on, recollections of
Corneille ought to have suggested that ’generosity’ is a problematic term in
the seventeenth century. ’Sponsor’ might have been better for ’parrain’ than
’godfather’ with its echoes of Christianity, not to say the Mafia. There can be
two views about the propriety of giving English translations of the titles of
books that have only ever been printed in French. All the same, many will
thank Trista Selous for making a fascinating study available to a wider
public outside France.
CHRISTOPHER SMITH

Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France. By Roger Mettam. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1988. Pp. viii + 343. £25.00.
This is a fine book with a major problem of identity. The problem derives

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from the author’s uncertainty as regards his audience. He clearly feels that
the bromides about Louis XIV’s ’absolute’, ’modernizing’ system of
government which A-level students and defective text-book writers still
occasionally churn out need to be scotched once and for all. Yet as most
recent scholarship - citing only some of the Anglo-Saxons on whom
Dr Mettam draws, Beik, Bergin, Bonney, Briggs, Dent, Hamscher and
Parker - has moved well beyond such views, he has to invent an
extraordinarily unfearsome ’straw duo’, namely the long-deceased French
Revolutionary historian Georges Lefebvre and the British literary expert
John Lough, whom he feels he has constantly to mock and deride.
Paradoxically, however, the work is constructed and written in such a way
that it will certainly be more utilized by contemporary scholars than by any
lingering acolytes of Lefebvre and Lough. Once they have got over this
misconception about the audience of the book, scholars will feast on what
Mettam provides us with. What we get is, first, a consistently maintained
vision of early modern politics as a court-centred arena for the interplay of
faction, interest and clientele; and, second, an extremely sensitive and finely
reasoned narrative of those politics from roughly 1610 to 1715. No better
account of politics at the centre over this lengthy period currently exists, nor
one which so consistently obliges us to revise or nuance our views on

political decision-making. Although the density of the argument is such

that prior knowledge of the period is required, students as well as scholars
will welcome a study which well exemplifies the conclusion that absolutism
was a direction travelled rather than a goal ever seriously achieved during
the Ancien Regime. It only remains for us, however, to prevent our
students from perversely going back to re-evaluate Lough and Lefebvre!

COLIN JONES

Political Culture in France and Germany, a Contemporary Perspective. Edited by

John Gaffney and Eva Kolinsky. London: Routledge, 1990. Pp. 262. £35.
Race, Discourse and Power in France. Edited by Max Silverman. Aldershot:
Gower Publishing Group, 1990. Pp. 629.
Since I read books about foreigners mainly to find out why they are so much
richer than we are, the article I found most interesting from the nine
collected in Political Culture in France and Germany was Mark Roseman’s
Political Allegiance and Social Change: The Case of the Workers in the Ruhr. I had
to look in the Commonwealth Universities Year Book to find that Roseman,
clearly a man to follow, works in the German Department at Aston. The
blurb tells us that Eva Kolinskyis Professor of German at Bath and John
Gaffney Senior Lecturer in French at Birmingham. (He is ripe for a
Readership or Personal Chair. His article on French Political Culture and
Republicanism is excellent, and his stylistic analysis of the speech that
Jacques Chirac gave in the Bois de Boulogne on 2 June 1979, the final proof,
of one were needed, that the man whose personal ambition has done more

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