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Book Reviews
Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. By Peter N.

Miller.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xviⳭ234. $40.00.
Observers of Peter Miller’s output to date will be impressed by his versatility. From
his first book on the changing notion of the common good in eighteenth-century Britain
and the Atlantic world, he now has moved, with a detour into the study of Monteverdi,
to a consideration of the world of late humanistic scholarship in early seventeenth-
century France. His thought-provoking new book shares a similar theme with his earlier
work, however: the conception of the proper relationship between the individual and
the community.
This subject is necessarily confined, in a study of Peiresc and his circle, to a certain
kind of community. Although Miller still conceives of the principal issue as one of
citizenship, now citizenship entails the tension over whether learning was intended to
serve the wider world. This problem had been central in the Renaissance and, as Miller
makes clear, remained alive in the seventeenth century. (Its real heyday was the eigh-
teenth century.) There was, moreover, a concomitant tension over what duties were
owed to one’s scholarly colleagues and friends. Miller chooses deliberately to examine
these issues in a period on the edge of major social and political upheavals, not to
mention the advent of the Scientific Revolution. By looking at this period, he suggests,
we can see more clearly what was old and what was new in the seventeenth-century
learned world. The purpose of this book is to understand what intellectual forces shaped
the practice of scholarship in this time of change.
Miller looks first at the contemporary stress on the individual, and in particular the
search for individual excellence. As he shows by an examination of the life of Nicolas-
Claude Fabri de Peiresc—the center of an enormous web of contacts and correspon-
dence, and yet at the same time a scholar who did not publish—this individual excel-
lence was very much tied up with sociability and its rules. The first half of the book is
taken up with a delineation of the qualities that made a scholar admirable in the sev-
enteenth century; the relationship of these values to aristocratic courtesy literature,
particularly the Italian works that were now being translated into French; and the even-
tual transition from these values to those more focused on display.
This is of course very well-trodden ground, and students of the Republic of Letters
will find much that is familiar here. What is new, and very much in the trend of current
scholarship of this period, is Miller’s linkage of these values with the neo-Stoicism of
Peiresc and his associates. Although for several decades historians and historians of
science have given attention to the idea of scholarship, and of a scholarly community,
as a form of peacemaking or consolation—think of Barbara Shapiro’s work in the
1970s on Latitudinarianism and the Royal Society—Miller for the first time explores
a possible intellectual background to these views. His focus is rather less on the for-
mation of communities than the work of some other historians, but the individual
virtues he describes are ones that also had important communal aspects. By looking at
a variety of texts about the ideal scholar, and in particular at Gassendi’s biography of
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Book Reviews 133
Peiresc from 1641, Miller identifies the neo-Stoic values of asceticism, self-knowledge,
constancy, self-control, and perseverance under adversity as being central to the prac-
tice of scholarship at this time.
The influence of neo-Stoicism, in Miller’s view, also gave shape to seventeenth-
century scholars’ relationship to politics, to religion, and to the study of history. Peiresc
was a parlementaire, much occupied with the business of the Parlement of Aix, and it
is in this context that Miller places a major part of his scholarly activity. One of the
most important works Peiresc never published was a history of parliaments. The role
of neo-Stoicism in this was Peiresc’s evident view that the best government was min-
imal government, leaving much to the conscience of the individual. Reason was the
best foundation for government, and consequently greater knowledge would lead to
better governance. Antiquarian activity could be justified as the quest for this knowl-
edge, and thus as a contribution to the peace of communities governed on the basis of
common denominators. It was thus that Peiresc defended himself in writing during the
Casceveoux riots: his work was for the common good. (Miller could perhaps consider,
incidentally, the ways in which this sort of parlementaire rhetoric was more specific
in its political goals than the Erastianism he describes; for decades the parlements had
been making claims for greater power within the state, and Peiresc’s explicit compar-
ison in his unpublished treatise between the French parlements and the English Parlia-
ment—an institution with just the kind of legislative powers the Parlement of Aix
would have loved to possess—surely owes something to these practical tensions be-
tween local and national politics.) Miller sees a similar conception of society at work
in the religious sphere. Although Peiresc had little to say about theology, his proxy
here, Grotius, again made the claim for minimalism as the best way of avoiding prob-
lems, and the usefulness of scholarship as a means to bring about peace through greater
understanding. The need for this understanding was the chief reason for studying the
past: to serve the public, but also, in a wider sense, to give a perspective on what was
really important in life.
Miller’s book provides a compelling analysis of the way a neo-Stoic vision might
have informed the world of scholarship in the early seventeenth century. We are left,
however, with questions about how widespread this vision actually was. Although this
is essentially an intellectual history, he actually says surprisingly little about the con-
nections between the philosophical position he lays out and the scholars’ subjects of
study. The relationship between the neo-Stoic philosophy and other important themes
of the seventeenth century, such as an encyclopedic curiosity (such as that exhibited
by Peiresc) needs some illumination; politics and religion were not the only areas of
interest to these scholars. Except for the consolation of philosophy, did neo-Stoicism
actually contribute anything to these broader concerns?
This problem is connected to a more general question of definition in the book, one
which, ironically, brings up a problem of the relationship between individual and com-
munity. Miller is somewhat elusive in his claims about the actual subject of the book.
It is not a book about the Republic of Letters in general, though at times it makes
claims to be. It is not a biography of Peiresc, as Miller makes clear, and yet Peiresc is
the main focus of every chapter. Peiresc is demonstrated to be exceptional, in his
position, his contacts, his interests, and yet at the same time he is evidently intended
in some sense to be typical. The question is whether he actually was.
If the book is even partly about Peiresc, one sometimes wonders where he is. For a
man with one of the largest extant collections of correspondence remaining from sev-
enteenth-century scholarly Europe, Peiresc’s voice appears surprisingly rarely here.
Miller consistently uses other people to represent his views; Grotius speaks for him on

134 Book Reviews
religion, Opitz on antiquarianism, and so on, with Gassendi speaking for him on prac-
tically everything. Indeed, the continual use of Gassendi (who in other contexts is
supposed to represent a “new” view of scholarship against the “old” one represented
by Peiresc) as a proxy for Peiresc himself is worrying. This kind of slippage not only
fails to tell us much about Peiresc; it also makes it difficult to decide whether Peiresc
can be taken as an exemplar of more general themes within the Republic of Letters.
Miller assures us that neo-Stoicism was the philosophy on everyone’s lips in the early
seventeenth century, and it is certainly true that some of the themes he describes—
self-sacrifice, asceticism, minimalism in politics and religion—are evident in the schol-
arly community 100 years later. But is this because neo-Stoicism was so popular, or
because these visions of community were not in fact limited to the neo-Stoics? It is
clear from the book that not every scholar shared these views—the quarrel with the
Augustinians is only one example—and thus we are left with unanswered questions
about the degree of significance of this movement.
The use of Gassendi, not to mention eighteenth-century figures such as Jean Bar-
beyrac, to speak for Peiresc also blurs the picture Miller paints about the timing of a
change from old to new styles of scholarship. His view that this change took place in
the 1620s and 1630s places it rather earlier than some other discussions of this subject
(though his use of Voltaire as an example of the new scholarly style appears to return
him to the fold of those seeing a later transition). The fact that many of the themes he
describes sounded familiar to someone better acquainted with the Republic of Letters
in 1700 makes one wonder how much of a transition had really occurred soon after the
death of Peiresc. If Miller wishes to make claims for a new chronology of scholarly
life in the early modern period, he will need to say more about what constituted that
change, and what made it happen.
Peter Miller’s book is an important contribution to the study of intellectual com-
munities in early modern Europe, as well as to the burgeoning field of neo-Stoic studies.
More clarity of definition would make its utility even greater.
ANNE GOLDGAR
King’s College, University of London
Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte. By Christoph

Strupp.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Pp. 352. DM 64.
Johan Huizinga, the Dutch cultural historian, left behind no enduring school but many
influences. His technique of writing cultural history was sometimes “pointillistic,” like
the making of a mosaic, and strikingly aesthetic and literary in tone. These textual
devices were meant to help the reader attain an unmediated confrontation with the past,
a “historical sensation” or Ahnung. Huizinga felt himself to be following in the steps
of Jacob Burckhardt, and his Autumn of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen,
1919) is at the same time a refutation of some of the premises of Burckhardt’s Civili-
zation of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italian, 1860) and
an application of its methodology.
Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte is a revised version
of Christoph Strupp’s 1996 dissertation for the University of Cologne. In spite of
Huizinga’s significance, Strupp’s work is the first large-scale study of his ideas to
appear in German. It is a great boon to English-speaking scholars, as well, as we are

Book Reviews 135
far more likely to read German than the Dutch of the original sources and the archival
collections which the book surveys along with the important studies. Strupp describes
the nature and development of Huizinga’s cultural method and inquires into its rela-
tionship to the “New History” and other currents of Huizinga’s time as well as “post-
modernism” and other developments. The book is a strong contribution to the study of
historiography from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century and fully
deserves its self-designation as “cultural history.” While keeping Huizinga as the cen-
tral focus, it relates the development of ideas about conceptualizing history, the purpose
of historical research, the identification of the consumers of history, and the presentation
of historical works to them in Germany, France, Italy, Britain, and the United States,
and especially in the special circumstances of Holland itself.
Of course, English speakers are already familiar with a good deal of Huizinga: we
know Autumn, Homo Ludens, the biography of Erasmus, the books on America, the
essays on aesthetics in history and the “Problem of the Renaissance,” the cultural
critical works of Huizinga’s last years, and other things. Strupp presents these works
in the context of the lectures, addresses, notes, letters, and documents in the Huizinga
archives at Leiden, the Hague, Groningen, and Harlem to which access is difficult.
Strupp summarizes the most important documents and all the major works and provides
a thoughtful commentary on them. The notes and the large bibliography are in them-
selves a notable contribution to the study of modern historiography.
The book proceeds through five major divisions: the “Biographical, Social and Bib-
liographic Background,” “Cultural History as Method in the Historical Studies of Johan
Huizinga,” “History in Society: Johan Huizinga as Academic and Cultural Politician,”
“Johan Huizinga and the Crisis of Culture,” and “Johan Huizinga and the Development
of Historical Knowledge after 1945.” From the time of the Methodenstreif in the later
nineteenth century through the decade of the 1920s, Huizinga worked to define a con-
cept of cultural history distinct from political or economic history, biography, or the
history of events. The goal was to see an entire epoch, “man in relation to his times,”
from a single point of view, such as the one Burkhardt achieves in Civilization of the
Renaissance and that of Huizinga himself in Autumn of the Middle Ages. Strupp shows
that evidence of the technique of cultural history can already be found in Huizinga’s
early studies about the origins of the legal rights of the city of Harlem and in the history
of the University of Groningen. Though this book is not a full-scale biography (Strupp
refers the reader to the Dutch works), the biographical summary it contains tells us
more about the man than the information previously available, which came primarily
through Huizinga’s short autobiographical sketch, “My Way to History” (in his Dutch
Civilization in the Seventeenth Century, and Other Essays [New York, 1968]), which
is quite cursory. Strupp points out (discreetly, in a footnote) that Anglo-American
historians have never had the facts of Huizinga’s life straight and that all of our standard
reference works are incorrect in one way or another. Here Strupp provides what we
have been missing.
In the decade of the 1930s, Huizinga did less work in history itself and turned
increasingly to the social and academic activism which eventually resulted in the two
books of cultural criticism, In the Shadow of Tomorrow (New York, 1936) and The
Disfigured World (Haarlem, 1945), on which his popular reputation primarily rested at
the time of his death. Even this activism is of significance for historians. Huizinga’s
work in aid of Dutch historical museums, for instance, was directed at the proper
conception of the function of such museums, which is to bring the public into direct
contact with real artifacts, not reproductions, thus making the “historical sensation”
possible for them. Huizinga opposed the separation of the fine arts in separate museums,

136 Book Reviews
arguing that an age or culture had to be seen in all its aspects together. The museum
was to be a mosaic of life itself. His role as editor of De Gids (a still extant weekly
newspaper of literature, history, and opinion) advanced the discussion of the part history
plays in the cultural life of a nation.
Strupp concludes that Huizinga’s work has moved out of the center of historical
focus (but for a different view of Huizinga’s centrality see the bibliographic essay in
William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance [New Haven, Conn., 2001]). None-
theless, it remains of interest as the point where the discussion of historiographic issues
in the “post-modern” context should begin, even though it is not “early post-modern-
ism” in itself, nor is it a prescription for the future.
This is an excellently done and useful work. It is completely self-sufficient, but if it
is read in conjunction with other recent offerings, Thomas Howard’s Religion and the
Rise of Historicism (Cambridge, 2000) and J. W. Burrow’s The Crisis of Reason (New
Haven, 2000), it points to the formulation of a new and nuanced view of the contro-
versies of the discipline of history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It would
be helpful to many if the publisher would authorize an English translation, preferably
by the author himself.
RODNEY PAYTON
Western Washington University
The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721–1794. By Thomas

Munck.
London: Arnold, 2000. Pp. xiiⳭ249. $25.95.
In the preface to the first volume of his The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New
York, 1966), Peter Gay recalled how the project had led him from “intellectual” to
“social” history. Gay’s interpretation may no longer strike us as social, but in the
historiographical context of 1966 the adjective made sense. Gay’s purpose, after all,
was not only to build on Ernst Cassirer’s brilliant essay in philosophical history (The
Philosophy of the Enlightenment [Princeton, N.J., 1979]), first published in 1932, but
also to cast his net well beyond it. Cassirer had sought to understand the Enlightenment
“in the light of the unity of its conceptual origin and of its underlying principle rather
than of the totality of its historical manifestations and results” (p. v). As Gay widened
the scope of inquiry, he gave the French philosophes and like-minded thinkers in other
countries a social profile as a “philosophic family.” Like most large families, Gay
conceded, the group had its latent discords and its open feuds; but its commitment to
modernizing the classical legacy and its antipathy to a common set of enemies none-
theless made it a self-conscious and coherent community. In the ways they turned their
education into a process of self-fashioning and conducted their social intercourse, as
well as in the ideas they advocated, the family members represented a collective as-
sertion of modern paganism.
In 1972, just six years after Gay’s volume appeared, Robert Darnton published “The
High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France” (in
Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime [Cambridge, Mass., 1982], pp.
1–40). Though the article has proved vulnerable to criticism, it remains one of several
markers of a dramatic shift in the “social” approach to the Enlightenment. The emphasis
now is on the larger social (and cultural) movement that the thoughts of Gay’s philo-
sophic family set in motion and sustained; on the modes of communication that cir-

Book Reviews 137
culated the family’s ideas through the many milieus and tiers of a widening audience;
on the broad changes in values and behavior that the movement effected.
Thomas Munck has taken on a daunting task: to make accessible the results of the
vast literature produced by this historiographical shift, and to do so in a way that
characterizes the Enlightenment as a whole without neglecting the many national dif-
ferences in Enlightenment cultures. His book is appropriately wide-ranging, rich in
detail, and judicious in the best sense. Munck pays due attention to several by now
crowded subfields, including the recent scholarship on publishing and on the expansion
of print consumption in an emerging consumer culture; but he is also quite informative
on subjects—public entertainments, for example, and painting—that will be less fa-
miliar to many readers. His contextual approach is meant to avoid two pitfalls: on the
one hand, accepting the philosophic family’s optimism uncritically, and hence exag-
gerating their impact on their societies and polities as well as the degree of consensus
they achieved among themselves; and, on the other, reading back into the eighteenth
century our own standards for gauging enlightened progress, and hence failing to ap-
preciate what the Enlightenment did manage to achieve in the face of the ideological
resistances and the practical obstacles specific to its era. In keeping with recent schol-
arship, he warns against simple dichotomies. There was no clear line dividing “elite”
from “popular” culture. Likewise, arguments about religious issues did not polarize
into a radical skepticism and a counterenlightenment of hardened confessional ortho-
doxies; between these extremes lay a vast middle ground of “enlightened” thinking,
particularly in Protestant cultures.
Two unusual features of Munck’s book are especially noteworthy. Drawing in part
on his own research, he expands our comparative perspective on “national” enlight-
enments with informative discussions of Denmark-Norway and Sweden. And, unlike
most general studies of the Enlightenment, Munck’s extends to 1794, with the result
that, particularly on the subject of the press and politics, we can identify continuities
from the Old Regime through the early years of the French Revolution as well as
changes and reversals of course that the Revolution occasioned.
Munck’s social history of the Enlightenment is more a synthesis than a survey. It
will serve as informative background reading in courses for advanced undergraduates
and graduate students, but it should also invite scholars in Enlightenment studies to
undertake a reckoning. The Enlightenment, Munck argues, was “a real process of eman-
cipation from inherited values and beliefs, with as much potential impact on ordinary
Europeans as traveling had on Montesquieu’s fictional Persian gentleman, Rica.” The
word “potential” keeps open a number of questions. What has the new social history
of the Enlightenment actually told us about the historical significance of the Enlight-
enment as a process of emancipation? What are the limits, and the limitations, of the
new history?
With Munck’s synthesis as a guide, we can break down these huge questions into
several subsets of inquiry. The first has to do with the obvious fact that Enlightenment
ideas inspired reform efforts of various kinds in a wide array of areas, including edu-
cation, law and criminal justice, medical care, and the social problems arising from
mass poverty. Here Munck’s comparative approach and contextual caution prove es-
pecially effective. He is rightly skeptical of the concept of “enlightened absolutism,”
which obscures the fact that by the late eighteenth century enlightened reform was a
“collective enterprise.” As important as the presence of an enlightened ruler may have
been, it was shifting coalitions among government personnel that determined the course
of reform efforts. And, even in “absolutist” continental states, reform could not be a
simple top-down imposition; to be effective it required the support of powerful groups

138 Book Reviews
and interests in the society at large. Partly for this reason, and partly because the
ambitions of governments exceeded their fiscal resources and their administrative grasp,
enlightened reform was spotty, uneven, and subject to reversal. In the many efforts to
reform schools, hospitals, prisons, and a host of other institutions one seldom finds
linear progress. Perhaps more striking, side by side with developments now hailed as
instances of enlightened progress we find tenacious practices now considered benighted
and indeed barbaric. Even as the Danish government experimented with progressive
taxation in 1789, it maintained in Copenhagen a forced labor camp that described its
convict inmates, quite accurately, as “slaves.”
Our second subset concerns the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. Thanks especially
to the burgeoning literature on print and publishing and on new forms of sociability
and association, it is now relatively easy to explain how—that is, by what means, and
in what contexts—ideas were diffused. The going gets much tougher, however, when
we attempt to be precise about the extent of the diffusion, and particularly about the
degree to which enlightened ideas became accessible to the broad mass of the popu-
lation. While duly noting exceptions like Darnton’s work on the Encyclopédie, Munck
emphasizes that the success of such efforts has been limited. The problem is not simply
that the needed data on print runs and buyers are so sparse and fragmentary. The extant
data can be quite slippery and inconclusive, as Munck demonstrates in his summary
of French scholarship on the books mentioned in wills and inventories after death.
If precision about social access to new ideas is rare, precison about reception is
virtually impossible. What meaning did words acquire for the people who read or heard
them? What difference did it make that the reader (or listener) was a merchant in
Bordeaux, or a master artisan in Hildesheim, or a tenant farmer in Suffolk? If the
Enlightenment is to be grasped as a process of emancipation, then we must understand
the extent to which the new ideas generated by its philosophic family became broad
changes in what Munck aptly calls “attitude of mind.” But that is precisely what we
are very rarely in a position to do. Fortunately Munck’s prudence on this issue cuts
both ways. While acknowledging severe limitations, he also cautions against conclud-
ing that, since we have no way of knowing how most readers and listeners received
ideas, we can make no general statements about changes in attitudes. Though the scale
of change eludes us, we can be confident that certain sea changes did occur in the
course of the eighteenth century. There was a broad erosion of religious certainties as
they became “more open to pragmatic revaluation and public scrutiny.” At least from
the 1780s onward, we can trace “a growing public expectation that government could
and should make itself more accountable.” These strike me as safe but significant
conclusions.
Related to questions of diffusion and reception, but best kept distinct from them, is
a third subset of inquiry—what I shall call the question of textual appropriation. What
happened to Enlightenment ideas as they entered new forms of discourse in new con-
texts? Understanding appropriation in this sense does not solve the riddle of reception;
at best it gives us a new point of departure for making arguable inferences. Such
understanding is critical, however, to explaining how the Enlightenment became a
process of articulating an emancipatory social, cultural, and political ethos for a poten-
tially mass audience. It requires an attention to the contextual nuances of language,
and to issues of rhetorical and literary form, that I often find lacking in Munck’s
synthesis. The absence cannot be explained simply by the fact that this kind of research
is only beginning. The kind of social history to which Munck is committed does not
do justice to the work that has been done. Admittedly some aspects of Margaret Jacob’s
research on freemasonry are “controversial”; but surely her extensive analysis of ma-

Book Reviews 139
sonic oratory has demonstrated that many lodges did appropriate, and did “live” within
their walls, the political principles of constitutional and representative government.
Saying that the mémoires judiciaires studied by Sarah Maza “may very well have added
to contemporary awareness of the problems in the [legal] system” falls well short of
conveying the significance of her work. Maza’s approach shows that these texts ac-
quired a political bite in the 1770s and 1780s in part because a theatrical legal rhetoric
gave way to a narrative strategy of autobiography-confession.
My point is that Munck’s social history neglects lines of inquiry that have enhanced
our understanding of the Enlightenment as a social as well as a cultural (and literary)
phenomenon. Nonetheless his book is a timely accomplishment. It brings into focus
the contours of an Enlightenment that has been excavated in a sprawling body of
research over the last several decades. Much of its detail will be, by the very nature of
the project, quite predictable to scholars in the field; but there is also much that lies
off the beaten tracks.
ANTHONY J. LA VOPA
North Carolina State University
The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century

Europe. Edited by Robert Justin Goldstein.
Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000. Pp. xiiiⳭ277. $64.00.
This book offers a comparative overview of “political censorship in nineteenth-century

Europe,” focusing specifically on the continent between 1815 and 1914. Consisting of
six chapters devoted respectively to the major continental powers of the age—Ger-
many, Italy, France, Spain, the Hapsburg Empire, and Russia—the book reads as both
an advanced textbook on the history of censorship and an essay on nineteenth-century
European political culture. The six chapters, all authored by senior historians in their
respective fields, are richly detailed. All six chapters draw on a combination of original
research and lengthy secondary bibliographies. They are also well presented, inter-
weaving political narratives with analytic sections devoted to censorship in a particular
medium and to various forms of resistence to censorship. Particularly impressive are
the lengthy chapters by Robin Lenman on Germany, John A. Davis on Italy, and Robert
Justin Goldstein on France. Most readers will probably be tempted to read first the
chapter or chapters that speak to their national specializations, yet the book is well
worth reading in its entirety for the points that emerge through comparison.
Goldstein’s synthetic introductory essay raises the issues that reappear throughout
the book, notably the link between “liberty” as a right of citizenship and the idea of
“civilization” as an attribute of an individual functioning in society (p. 13). He suggests
that the broadening of rights manifested in the “political emergence of ordinary citi-
zens” in the early nineteenth century must be understood as linked to a more restrictive
sense of “civilization” (p. 6). Moreover, the social category of class became an impor-
tant element of both concepts, citizenship and civilization. Since, he suggests, even
liberals, let alone legitimists, more readily accepted the unpropertied and unlearned as
citizens than as civilized, state censorial authorities became concerned primarily to
establish limits on the visual and spectacular, considered public and visceral experi-
ences, rather than the textual, considered a domestic intellectual activity (in which the
common people were thought to be less likely to engage). This tendency, he argues,
was most evident in French censorship of popular theater. There, press censorship was

140 Book Reviews
not enforced after 1822, yet censorship of caricatures continued until 1881 and cen-
sorship of the theater until 1906; film censorship began in 1916. Thus, Goldstein il-
lustrates one of the book’s main contentions that censorship of popular culture and the
mass media became a more significant enterprise for European states seeking to exercise
political censorship than the control of political speech, strictly speaking, in political
pamphlets and newspapers.
Each of the subsequent chapters in some way supports these claims, with the ex-
pected variations. Germany’s liberals were much more inclined to support state cen-
sorship as a necessary control on popular culture than were French republicans or even
Spanish reformers. Papal and clerical intervention appears much more influential in
Restoration-era Italy (1814–48) than elsewhere. However, Davis demonstrates that the
Catholic Church largely failed to prevent the unified Italian kingdom’s “conservative
liberals” (p. 106) from upholding basic constitutional liberties for all who remained
within the “liberal consensus” (p. 107). The Austrian and Russian censorial bureaucracy
come across as much smaller, less effective, and less powerful than those to the west.
Given the limited opportunities for political dissidence in the empires, especially in
Russia, the main thrust of censorship—and resistance to censorship—seems to have
been in languages and literature (and later, in film).
To consider similarities, the book’s chapters demonstrate the vagueness of censorship
laws across Europe, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, when multiple
systems coexisted in many countries for the policing of books, periodicals, theater,
prints and engravings, and the spoken word. Since these systems were in many cases
created at different times for different purposes, they often contradicted one another,
creating openings in which clever writers and publishers could disseminate political
dissidence. Moreover, the censors themselves, often drawn from among the middle
ranks of the intelligentsia, perceived themselves not necessarily as a political police
but rather as the upholders of good taste and propriety. Thus, most of the chapters
illustrate in some way how censorial authorities, especially after the legitimist crack-
downs that swept Europe in the 1810s and 1820s, struggled both to support the civi-
lized, bourgeois reader and to civilize other forms of cultural appropriation (notably
prints and caricatures, theater, music halls, and later film). In many countries, censors
found a means to resolve this tension by enacting high licensing fees for cultural
producers—publishers and theater owners—rather than policing individual creators
(caricaturists, writers, or actors). With money invested in such fees, publishers were
less likely to take risks by publishing politically sensitive material that might lead to
the loss of a license. Yet readers’ desires for cultural edification could still be satisfied,
or so the censors thought.
Dissidents across Europe saw things differently, especially in the Vormärz period
(1815–48). Liberals and radicals viewed press freedom as a political issue to be re-
solved through political means—perhaps reform, though increasingly through revo-
lution. The truism that Charles X’s suppression of newspapers led to the July Revo-
lution of 1830 in France seems less shopworn in light of what we learn about the
political resistance engendered in the later nineteenth century among liberals and rad-
icals, across Europe, in response to what was perceived as heavy-handed government
interference in publication of any sort.
Two questions remain to be asked of the volume. First, would a chapter on Britain
not have provided a useful contrast to those on the continent? Inclusion of Britain
would have also perhaps afforded an opportunity for more discussion of censorship by
European powers in their colonial and imperial possessions, a topic almost entirely
lacking from these chapters. Second, a conceptual question that comes to mind is why

Book Reviews 141
so many of the authors chose to define political censorship as solely the suppression
of dissident speech. Neither the censoring authorities nor political dissidents themselves
took such a restrictive point of view, and future historians of censorship may well want
to think about whether this narrow sense is appropriate. In later twentieth-century
America, rights-based theories of censorship as state action against dissident individuals
have come to predominate, but historians of Europe before 1900 should be encouraged
to apply alternative models. One hopes the future work that this volume will inspire
might draw on recent tendencies in early modern scholarship, which interprets publi-
cation, state policing, and censorship more broadly.
GREGORY BROWN
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. By Karen Offen.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xviiⳭ554. $19.95.
Karen Offen’s encyclopedic compendium of European feminisms deserves to be on

the bookshelf of all historians interested in feminism, in women’s rights, and in Eu-
ropean political and intellectual history. Based on the printed public debates surround-
ing the challenges that European feminisms made to male hegemony, this densely
detailed political history offers an important roadmap to the relevant people and or-
ganizations who wrote about the struggles for women’s rights. Offen painstakingly
describes the variety of feminisms in their historical context and succinctly defines
feminisms as movements to end “the subordination of women” (pp. xvi, 20). She further
refines this definition, referring to her pathbreaking and controversial 1988 article (“De-
fining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Perspective,” Signs 141 [Autumn 1988]:
119–57) in which she identifies two lines of feminist argument: “relational” feminism,
based on the “companionate, nonhierarchical, male-female couple as the basic unit of
society,” and “individualistic” feminism, which posits the “individual, irrespective of
sex or gender, as the basic unit” (pp. 21–22). Throughout, European Feminisms pro-
vides a balance between individualist feminism with its debates on suffrage and rela-
tional feminism with its debates on motherhood.
As expected from a noted historian of France, Offen prominently features French
feminism, with Paris looming as the epicenter of feminist political thought and pro-
grams. Nevertheless, feminists in England, Germany, and Russia are eminently visible.
Furthermore, one of the major strengths of this book is the close attention Offen pays
to feminist writers in many of the smaller countries and aspiring nations of Europe,
such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Hungary, Belgium,
and Romania. Arguing that individuals and groups involved in political struggles to
end the subordination of women are integral aspects of feminism, Offen relates femi-
nism to national and international political movements. Detailing an active communi-
cation among feminists across national boundaries over 250 years, she shows how
feminists traveled to international conferences, sharing their ideas.
Historians have customarily interpreted the ebb and flow of feminist movements in
terms of waves, describing the first, second, and perhaps third wave of feminism.
Adopting a geological metaphor, Offen offers a unique view of feminist movements
as a series of volcanic outbursts, in which feminist activity steams, boils, and seethes,
becoming volatile beneath the hard, thick crust of male-dominated nations and gov-
ernments. When the “feminist magma” became sufficiently active, and when the thick

142 Book Reviews
crust of patriarchal domination showed some fissures, feminist volcanic movements

erupted, changing the face of the land; but then the patriarchal crust reformed, not quite
the same as before, until the next burst of feminist activity again erupted to change the
face of Europe. Some of these volcanic eruptions were larger than others; some were
obvious to all, but others would be barely seen or felt without Offen’s sensitivity to
these small seismic systems.
This book follows a chronological approach based on the traditional political frame-
work, adding the blood and muscle of feminism to the already familiar skeleton of
European political history. Part 1 shows the “feminist magma” of the Enlightenment
erupting during the French Revolution, followed by a counterrevolutionary backlash.
Part 2, on the nineteenth century, most completely shows the vast variety of feminist
movements, such as the agitation for education, the proliferation of national and inter-
national feminist congresses, the relationship of the 1848 revolutions and their after-
math to feminism (and vice versa), the feminist momentum of the 1850s and 1860s,
the national feminist movements and demands for citizenship and suffrage of the latter
part of the century, and feminism’s relationship with Catholicism, socialism, and other
international movements. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is the discussion of
international feminisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In linking
the variety of feminisms to political history, Offen shows that during the nineteenth
century repressive political climates led to the lack of organized women’s movements.
When fissures occurred, as in the revolutions of 1789, 1839, 1848, and 1870, or with
the empowerment of left-leaning republican governments, feminism erupted. Case stud-
ies of smaller countries help readers understand the European-wide nature of feminisms
and their relationship with patriarchal political history. Offen highlights the importance
of “the woman question” and the competing “solutions” to this question that many
found vexing.
In the turbulent twentieth century, the exigencies of World War I and the Russian
Revolution led to a backlash against the feminist eruptions, which nonetheless contin-
ued. Using Offen’s metaphor, the “molten lava” of feminism flowed into different
crevices as many feminists affiliated with pacifist movements and the Bolshevik pro-
grams called for social reforms on issues concerning the position of women. In the
interwar period, the “feminist magma” managed several eruptions, in different times
and places and with different strengths. With suffrage generally achieved by the 1920s
(except, most notably, in France), feminisms concentrated on the central issues of
politics, work, motherhood, and reproductive freedom. Furthermore, as Offen deftly
demonstrates, in postsuffrage Europe a transformed feminism allied itself with human-
ism, as women’s rights became linked with human rights. The last portion of the book
intriguingly indicates a possible third kind of feminism, a humanist feminism, in ad-
dition to familial and individual feminisms.
Based on the written word, and re-presenting “the knowledge wars,” this book is in
part a celebration of feminists’ accomplishments over 250 years in the face of chal-
lenges. Yet this very emphasis on feminist (and antifeminist) intellectual ideology and
political programs obscures issues of class. Women at the barricades, on strike, in food
riots, or working to survive, most of whom left no published printed words, are missing
from this history. In a book as detailed and comprehensive as this, it is hard to ask for
more. Yet, it would have been useful if Offen had taken several more steps back from
her prodigious research, from which she has provided more than a thousand names of
individuals and organizations, and allowed us to benefit from her expertise by offering
more direct and analytical comparisons of different feminisms. Readers might welcome
some further analysis of the similarities and differences across countries and of the

Book Reviews 143
shifts over time. For example, when and where was familial feminism strong and how
and why did individual feminism gain or lose strength? Political regimes matter; but
perhaps some deeper social and cultural strata, such as religion and the nature of
women’s work, might be equally responsible for the similarities and differences in
European feminisms. Nevertheless, in the tremendous breadth of its coverage, this book
is a tour de force; there is none that compares.
RACHEL G. FUCHS
Arizona State University
Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual

Identity. By Harry Oosterhuis. The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and
Society. Edited by John C. Fout.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xⳭ321. $35.00.
Ah—pity and envy the reviewer of Stepchildren of Nature. Pity me, the reviewer,
being forced to read word after repetitious word to the point of exhaustion, but envy
me the new knowledge and interpretations I am now mulling over (although many
sections of the book contain material that is not new and is widely known). My overall
opinion is that Harry Oosterhuis has written a fine and timely book on the history of
psychiatry in nineteenth-century central Europe. He has impressive goals: to challenge
the dominance of the deconstructionist and poststructural interpretations of medicine
held by Michel Foucault and the many who follow him; to revise our views of the
contribution to modern ideas about sexuality made by the Austrian forensic psychiatrist
Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902); and to show the convergence of some of the
ideas of Krafft-Ebing with those of Sigmund Freud—a remarkable feature of Ooster-
huis’s book, which raises perennial questions about the existence and influence of the
zeitgeist. Oosterhuis also inserts himself in the current controversy over whether there
was a historic attitudinal change in the nineteenth-century middle-class family. Scat-
tered throughout the book is an emphasis on class.
Stepchildren of Nature is one of a few books in the social studies of science openly
willing to challenge—though retaining what is useful—the vise-like grip Michel Fou-
cault has long held on the history of psychiatry in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies. Foucault, as is well known by now, argued that physicians medicalized aberrant
behavior so as to give society control over individuals who were atypical. But it is
Oosterhuis’s contention that Foucault attributed to doctors things they did not do, and,
indeed, could not do. He argues that “the modernization of sexuality cannot be reduced
to such a uniform model of medical stigmatization and control [but rather that] new
ways of understanding sexuality emerged out of a confrontation and intertwining of
professional medical thinking and patients’ self definition. . . . Medicine could be used
to give perversion the stamp of naturalness and to part with the charge of immorality
and illegality” (pp. 211–12). One could argue that psychiatrists did not use patients,
but patients used psychiatrists to bring about changes they themselves desired. In short,
late nineteenth-century psychiatrists, says Oosterhuis, were not “powerful agents of
social control” (p. 13); they barely had any professional standing, but eventually, if so
inclined—as was Krafft-Ebing—they could help their patients navigate the legal sys-
tem.
Krafft-Ebing had careers both as a government-employed psychiatrist and as a pri-
vate practitioner, the latter most informative and enjoyable to him. He was a prolific

144 Book Reviews
writer and established himself as a leader in clinical psychiatry, making hundreds of

new observations and coining several new terms having to do with perversions. He
tried to popularize psychiatry with lectures and clinical demonstrations, as well as with
his writings. His courses attracted a large audience like Jean-Martin Charcot’s in Paris,
and his basic message was that perverts were not responsible for their sexuality, which,
not surprisingly, enraged many. He took a sophisticated view of psychiatry: “Psychiatry
never deals with disease entities, but always with diseased persons” (p. 116). The
psychiatrist had to look at a patient’s whole life, so Krafft-Ebing wrote up very detailed,
comprehensive case histories, over 20,000 of them, based on information from patients
and the large numbers of letters he received from correspondents who were moved by
his sympathetic views.
Oosterhuis relies on works by Randolph Trumbach to ground one of his main con-
tentions, that middle- and upper-class homosexuals had come to expect the same emo-
tional satisfaction from a relationship with another man that married heterosexuals of
those classes expected from each other (see, e.g., Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Rev-
olution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London [Chicago,
1998]). In premodern Europe, according to Trumbach, marriage was based on repro-
duction and on legal, social, and economic ties. At the end of the eighteenth century,
with the rise of a new ideal of romantic love, middle-class families changed. Hence-
forth, marriage was to be based on companionship, affection, and love; a new private
sphere was created. Oosterhuis argues that after Krafft-Ebing came to know the stories
of hundreds of patients and correspondents, he came to the view that same-sex part-
nerships—except those based on pederasty—were just as moral as heterosexual part-
nerships. In other words, a homosexual relationship was more than sexual activity, and
affection was more important than procreation.
From his patients and correspondents, Krafft-Ebing learned that the men did not
consider inversion unhealthy; rather, they believed society and the penal codes could
make them ill by preventing the natural expression of their sexual urges. When upper-
class homosexuals read the autobiographies Krafft-Ebing published, many wrote that
they were greatly relieved to know there were other men just like them. Krafft-Ebing
would then include their stories in the many editions of his masterwork, Psychopathia
Sexualis (fourteen editions between 1886 and 1903). Krafft-Ebing was educated by his
patients, and he “enabled voices to be heard that [at that time] were usually silenced”
(p. 195).
It is fascinating to learn of the overlap of Krafft-Ebing’s and Freud’s ideas. Krafft-
Ebing was just sixteen years older than Freud. They shared the view that there was an
irreconcilable antagonism between people’s sexual needs and the maintenance of civ-
ilization. Both assumed that not only physical traits but also intellectual and moral
traits were hereditary. Regardless of the physiological theories Krafft-Ebing espoused,
his clinical descriptions were psychological. Perversion was determined by individual
character, personal history, inner feelings, dreams, and fantasies. Sexual disorders could
result from unconscious psychological causes. According to Oosterhuis, Krafft-Ebing
foreshadowed Freud in three important ways. First, he psychologized sexuality. Second,
he broke down the barrier between normal and abnormal and abolished a clear boundary
between health and perversion, declaring, for example, that sadism and masochism
were inherent in normal male and female sexuality: “The elements which constitute
psychopathology are the same as those of healthy life” (p. 65). Finally, Krafft-Ebing
had a sublimation theory. The sexual instinct had a constructive role in culture and
society: sexual life was the factor “that discloses [man’s] powers of activity, of ac-
quiring property, of establishing a home, and of awakening altruistic sentiments. . . .

Book Reviews 145
Sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics and probably also of aestheticism and
religion” (p. 68). It must, however, be pointed out that he and Freud differed radically
on the theory of hereditary degeneracy as an explanation for psychological illness.
While Freud considered it totally useless, Krafft-Ebing was perhaps the leading apostle
of degeneration theory in central Europe. Here Foucault’s argument is upheld. With
degeneracy theory, Krafft-Ebing could extend the boundaries of mental pathology to
include alcoholics, kleptomaniacs, sexual perverts, suicidal patients, criminals, violent
people, and even eccentric artists and scholars.
Absent from this review because of space considerations are Oosterhuis’s sometimes
convincing, sometimes ingenious, and sometimes dubious attempts to explain the rise
or increase of perversions in the late nineteenth century. These would include voyeur-
ism, exhibitionism, self-flagellation, fetishism, kleptomania, sadism, and masochism.
Krafft-Ebing’s legacy is considerable. He gave a taxonomy that stands almost intact,
distinguishing four main perversions: sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sex-
ual feeling (by which he meant an “inversion,” a biological and psychological mixture
of masculinity and femininity, not the homosexuality of today). He introduced the
words masochism, sadism, and pedophilia, now standard vocabulary. The words “homo-
sexuality” and “heterosexuality” first entered the English language in an 1892 English
translation of Psychopathia Sexualis. He discovered the psychological meanings of
sadism and masochism, which he argued convincingly were the true significances,
standing quite apart from physical cruelty. His understanding of sexuality remains, in
the West, something no longer connected primarily with reproduction. “Sexual desire
was not only inevitable, its fulfillment was also necessary for mental health, personal
happiness, and social harmony” (p. 284).
HANNAH S. DECKER
University of Houston
Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840. By Jonathan Lamb.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xiiⳭ345. $52.00 (cloth); $18.00
(paper).
Preserving the Self in the South Seas, a lively romp through seventeenth- to nineteenth-
century British travelogues and travel literature, ends up being always, in some sense,
about economics. This recurrence of economics in what is essentially a literary study
effectively links the self through economy to society, thereby bypassing any temptation
to focus on “culture.” This is somewhat astonishing, because studies of the Pacific
islands are usually shot through with cultural anthropology. Although Jonathan Lamb
does not explicitly reject the concept of culture, his book splashes straight into the
geographic arena of some of academe’s most fiercely fought battles over “culture” in
its relation to logic, innovation, and universal (?) rationality. The most recent, most
spectacular round of this debate was the Gananath Obeyesekere/Marshall Sahlins al-
tercation, which produced a number of articles and one book by each of these men
(Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook; European Mythmaking in
the Pacific [Princeton, N.J., 1992]; and Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About
Captain Cook, for Example [Chicago, 1995]). However, the origin of this scholarly
dispute was Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s theorizing of “prelogical” mentality; Edward Evans-
Pritchard’s pithy rejoinder to Lévy-Bruhl endures as a judicious and insightful work
of criticism (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures,

146 Book Reviews
9th ed. [Paris, 1928]; and Edward Evans-Pritchard, Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive
Mentality, Faculty of Arts Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 1 [Cairo, 1934]). In this context, his-
torians as well as anthropologists will benefit from reading Lamb’s book not because
it argues against culture or in favor of universal reason but because it adopts a new
perspective from which the previous debates appear somewhat less pressing.
Lamb’s book covertly attacks the postcolonial disdain for the European imperialist
project by suggesting that the Europeans who embarked on more or less seaworthy
ships for voyages of sometimes lethal duration were not, in fact, such fearsome, al-
mighty conquerors as postcolonialists think. Lamb’s primary example of the mentally
inept European explorer is none other than Mr. James Cook, captain of the Resolution
and subject of furious controversy between Obeyesekere and Sahlins. Lamb contends
that both scholars have overlooked just how unstable Captain Cook was by the time
of his third voyage, and Lamb demonstrates that in the weeks or possibly months before
the Hawaiians killed Cook, he was likely suffering from vitamin B deficiency and
pellagra, itself capable of provoking “infatuation” (p. 122).
Lamb does not pause to give a precise definition of “infatuation” the way a scholar
might an outmoded medical diagnosis, but this seems to be because the term was used
generally by an assortment of people to describe a wide variety of unusual moods and
behaviors. He explains infatuation largely as an effect of nutrition imbalances, whether
an excess of vitamin A or a deficiency of vitamin B or C (the latter now known to be
the chief cause of scurvy). Seemingly, infatuation was a type of psychosis or delirium.
Fits of passion, ecstatic transports, reveries provoked by awesome beauty, and torrid
floods of despair and terror: all of these belonged within the domain of infatuated
behavior. At least one observer hinted at a process of behavioral creolization by linking
infatuation to heiva, “‘the name of the dances of the Souther [sic] Islanders, which
bore so great a resemblance to the violent motions and stampins [sic] on the Deck of
Capt Cook in the paroxysms of passion, into which he often threw himself upon the
slightest occasion’” (p. 123).
The interactions of the Hawaiians with the “infatuated” captain, from Lamb’s per-
spective, should not be assimilated to a historical understanding of sane Europeans
exploring and conquering the islands. These considerations of the mentally debilitating
effect of long voyages and extreme vitamin deficiencies no doubt carry some truth and
can be integrated into our understanding of the experience of the voyages. However,
to discount the imperialist goals of the voyagers because of temporary derangement or
“infatuation” is unwarranted. Although Lamb contends other authors have not ac-
counted for Cook’s derangement, in Obeyesekere’s Apotheosis of Captain Cook the
increasingly bizarre actions of the captain are recounted at length. Moreover, far from
deterring or minimizing a desire for conquest, Obeyesekere provides examples there
(pp. 42–45) of the deranged captain’s heightened drive to claim dominions for England.
The mental debility of Cook and other voyagers is for Lamb an instantiation of a
broader, more systemic disorder that haunted modernizing England. This was the dis-
order of the social realm loosed from moral constraints and the benign oversight of
Providence and left to the cold and impersonal rule of market forces. Anxiety within
this new disorderly order—an anxiety produced by a surfeit of freedom and a loss of
standing before God—was mirrored in the anxiety of voyagers far from home or of
sailors shipwrecked and stranded on uninhabited islands. Englanders thirsty for a cul-
tural grog to warm them against the cold winds of modernity turned to the narratives
of voyagers and fictionalized travel literature. The voyagers had already ventured into
uncharted terrain, had lived through desperately lonely times, and had found the where-
withal to persevere and to return (sometimes, anyway) in triumph. Travel literature,

Book Reviews 147
then, produced a type of cultural map of how to sustain oneself within the alien and
isolating environment of modernity.
At the heart of Lamb’s vision of the birth of modern market society is the difficult
and perilous connection between self and society. If the self is a social, caring, and
responsible individual (an individual situated in, and responsive to, social context) then
how can a self shorn of context, deserted (for instance, on an uninhabited island), and
forced to persist as a living person—how does this displaced, decontextualized, and
isolated self survive? If a contextualized, embedded self is a “dividual,” then an “in-
dividual” is an egoistic self bent on fulfilling singular desires. Lamb concocts a linear
development of material objects as conceived by the emerging individual: gifts (as
most recently theorized by Marilyn Strathern; see, e.g., Property, Substance, and Effect:
Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things [New Brunswick, N.J., 1999]) exem-
plify the object in embedded societies; they transform gradually into commodities, then
curiosities, and finally into fetishes or revered objects of cargo cults (pp. 134–48).
Liberated desire or fancy for goods, in Lamb’s account, denotes the creolization of
identity: Europeans develop desire for islander artifacts whether attained as gifts, com-
modities, or curiosities; islanders develop a greater sense of their own artifacts as
commodities and an intense desire for European goods (p. 146). The market blends the
cultures of voyagers and islanders, integrating worlds that anthropologists and histo-
rians are sometimes at pains to keep distinct. The perilous link of emotion, desire, will,
and reason to “economy” and hence in some sense to the broader “social good” is
worked out in the lives of sailors, of captains, and of numerous fictional characters.
The rise of the modern, mobile, and self-reconstituting individual has been linked
previously to the rise of voyages and the novel in John Bender’s Imagining the Peni-
tentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chi-
cago, 1987). While penal institutions might seem remote from the South Seas, the
figure of Robinson Crusoe—the solitary figure cast upon a deserted island and faced
with the task of recreating a social order—is common to both domains. Bender moves
through his material methodically, demonstrating continuities between the formation
of character in novels and in, and through, penal institutions. The effect, in Bender’s
account, is the creation of a contained, desirous, and controlled individual—a figure
exemplified in the theories of Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith (p. 201).
Lamb is much less concerned with methodical and careful exposition. Rather, he
weaves multitudes of events and stories together to reconstitute a mental world akin,
perhaps, to the mind of a man of the nineteenth century who had spent long years
immersed in any and every book about voyages he could find. The references are thick
and sometimes confusing. Story lines are mixed. Fiction and fact are melded together,
and historical events that he deems important enough for engaged debate (for instance,
Cook’s death) are nonetheless not retold by him in a coherent fashion. This mental
world is vivid, very lively and witty, and at times completely absorbing. The confusion
of the reader might itself mirror the confusion of those sailors adrift at sea for so many
years that their minds become a bit addled and liable to veer into infatuation. If Jonathan
Lamb cannot put us all aboard the Resolution or some other archaic vessel, his prose
comes close to transporting our spirit. In this way, Lamb’s main contention demon-
strates itself in the mind of the reader: at the root of the modern, and the modern
“individual,” was not reason and the urge to dominate but an array of emotions and
desires that sometimes departed thoroughly from reason’s sway.
Does Lamb’s brilliant analysis succeed in lifting us out of the Obeyesekere/Sahlins
dispute? Sahlins contends that the Hawaiians lived within a highly articulated and
tightly woven cosmological system, and he dwells on the argument that Cook’s pres-

148 Book Reviews
ence on and around the islands mirrored actions the Hawaiians, according to their
cosmology, could easily take for those of a reincarnated God. Obeyesekere is convinced
neither that Hawaiian understanding was less subtle nor that it was less labile than that
of Europeans. He convincingly argues against Sahlins that Cook’s actions did not fit
neatly into Hawaiian myth. More important, he contends that the European cosmolog-
ical system (hinging on Europeans’ belief in their superiority and right to conquest)
appropriated the events of Cook’s demise into a “myth model.” Obeyesekere defines
two alternate models of, and for, reality that shaped European understanding of imperial
voyages: “One of the most enduring ideas in Western culture is that of the redoubtable
person coming from Europe to a savage land, a harbinger of civilization who remains
immune to savage ways, maintaining his integrity and identity. I shall give it a label
and call it the ‘Prospero’ syndrome or myth model.” In opposition to the Prospero
model, Obeyesekere identifies the Kurtz model (p. 11). In numerous accounts of his
travels, writers fit Cook nicely into the Prospero model. Obeyesekere, however, sees
Cook as more of a Kurtz-like figure and sets about systematically dismantling the heroic
legacy of Cook.
From Lamb’s point of view, the European crazed in tropical climates is driven not
by hubris or debased desires but by chemical imbalances, vitamin deficiencies, and
consequent mental instability. Similarly, the market system, impersonal and slowly
expanding to encompass all the Pacific island societies, ensnares all within its disorderly
order. Anxiety, value, gifts, fetishes, and commodities become the unifying cultural
code of all humanity. The value of this socioeconomic model is clear in the parts of
Lamb’s book in which he describes the cultural meaning of leprosy or the common
ground between European curiosity cabinets and islander cargo cults.
Lamb is largely unconcerned with Sahlins’s project of establishing a preexisting
islander culture that constrains islanders to minimal innovation, but neither does he
claim, pace Obeyesekere, that islanders possess masterful practical rationality. Like
Obeyesekere, he wants to break down European myths of almighty conquerors who
justly dominate less sophisticated peoples. However, he works at this not by focusing
exclusively on Cook but by demonstrating the fragility of all individuals within the
context of voyages and within the broader “cosmology” of capitalist market forces.
The universal, for Lamb, is the market (not rationality); culture is what people produce
in their attempts to placate their anxieties arising from the market’s sometimes ferocious
vagaries.
ALICE BULLARD
Georgia Institute of Technology
Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. By

Richard Yeo.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiⳭ336. $59.95.
Until the publication of this study by Richard Yeo of Griffith University in Queensland,
Australia, no book on the nature of eighteenth-century British encyclopedias existed.
This was true even though several of these encyclopedias were best-sellers and out-
standing works of knowledge that helped inspire the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot
and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert and reflected the British Enlightenment.
Encyclopaedic Visions places British encyclopedia making in the context of its time
and place. Only a few of the many themes Yeo treats can be discussed here. An im-

Book Reviews 149
portant one concerns the problems editors and publishers faced while trying to produce
an encyclopedia in the eighteenth century. These included how large the book should
be; whether to sell it by subscription and serialization as well as by complete sets; how
to appeal to an expanding and diverse readership; what organizational techniques to
use in order to counteract disorganization engendered by alphabetical arrangement of
entries; what subjects to cover when knowledge was rapidly expanding and being
redefined; how to make the work up-to-date, most notably in the physical and natural
sciences; whether to rely on one or a few generalists or many experts; and how to profit
from the laws of literary property while borrowing from other sources.
Yeo also describes the various types of eighteenth-century encyclopedias, and he is
especially interested in their organization of knowledge. In the first half of the century,
all of them were of moderate size and compiled by no more than a handful of contrib-
utors. On the one hand, there were those that stressed history and biography, like the
English translations of Louis Moréri’s Grand dictionnaire historique and Pierre Bayle’s
Dictionnaire historique et critique. On the other hand, there were dictionaries of the
arts and sciences, also known as scientific dictionaries, such as John Harris’s Lexicon
technicum and Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. Encyclopaedic Visions pays partic-
ular attention to how Chambers attempts to organize knowledge by a tree of knowledge,
cross-references, and other techniques.
From the 1770s, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in successive editions, changed the
conception of an encyclopedia. Even as early as the first edition it appealed to a British
identity rather than cosmopolitanism, and it dispensed with a tree of knowledge and
instead tried to promote unity mostly by long syntheses or treatises on the main
branches of knowledge. By the third edition, published in 1797, it covered history and
biography as well as the arts and sciences; it greatly expanded the traditional size of
the British encyclopedia, reaching eighteen quarto volumes; and it increased the number
of contributors by recruiting specialists.
In the early nineteenth century, most encyclopedias no longer sought to organize and
systematize knowledge. Instead they contented themselves with being repositories of
learning. Some, like the Penny Cyclopaedia, which began publication in 1833, were
designed for a popular audience; others, like Macvey Napier’s Supplement to the
Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannnica, published from
1815 to 1824, appealed to an educated audience and included up-to-date, long, synthetic
articles on branches of knowledge by many specialists. Yeo makes very useful com-
ments about Napier’s editorial practices.
In addition, Yeo provides insights into the eighteenth-century encyclopedia in rela-
tion to earlier encyclopedias and to contemporary reading habits, concepts of author-
ship, definitions of the arts and sciences, and many other subjects. He is especially
knowledgeable on the history of science.
When dealing with a subject as many-sided as encyclopedias, some gaps are inevi-
table. Yeo has chosen not to write surveys of specific individual encyclopedias that
would include the biographies of their editors and publishers, their publication history,
and their contents. However, his work does add to our knowledge of several of them.
Presented here and there, his account of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia is especially infor-
mative. There is no better place than Encyclopaedic Visions to find out about, among
other things, Chambers’s life, the profits of the enterprise, how he was influenced by
John Locke, Isaac Newton, the tradition of the commonplace book, and his conception
of an encyclopedia as more than a storehouse of knowledge. Moreover, Yeo adds much
new information on Harris’s Lexicon Technicum and Abraham Rees’s Cyclopaedia.
One omission in Yeo’s coverage is troubling. He largely ignores the religious and

150 Book Reviews
political thought contained in eighteenth-century British encyclopedias except to say

that they were often dedicated to monarchs. Chambers has been considered a free-
thinker, and the eighteenth-century editions of the Britannica were imbued with an
anti-Catholic, latitudinarian Protestantism in which reason bolstered faith. In addition,
all the British encyclopedias of the time supported the government and, unlike the
Encyclopédie, did not seek to reform it. One wonders whether a discussion of such
matters would confirm Yeo’s view that the British works served as “the epitome of the
European Enlightenment” (p. 242).
Encyclopaedic Visions contains thirty well-chosen illustrations and an extensive in-
dex. It is also very carefully researched in primary and secondary sources. The bibli-
ography, almost forty pages long, will be invaluable to anyone interested in doing
further study on British eighteenth-century encyclopedias and on the history of ency-
clopedias in general. Imaginative and informative, this book shows that British eigh-
teenth-century encyclopedias deserve to be studied in their own right and should not
continue to be eclipsed by the Encyclopédie.
FRANK A. KAFKER
University of Cincinnati
Les Britanniques face à la Révolution française de 1848. By Fabrice Bensimon.

Collection L’Aire Anglophone. Edited by Serge Ricard.
Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Pp. 451. Fr 250.
This is a welcome and wide-ranging study by a French historian of British reactions

to events in France in the first half of 1848, when Britons at all levels congratulated
themselves on escaping the wave of revolutions that swept across the Continent.
The response is examined at a number of levels, which are marshaled to create an
integrated whole. When initial fears of war quickly dispersed, the British government
showed little concern about the establishment of the Second French Republic and felt
reassured over the nature, leaders, orientations, and foreign policy of the new regime.
Realizing that it was very different from the First Republic of 1792, they adopted a
realistic, confident, and fairly benevolent (though vigilant) stance and maintained close
communications with the new French government. Their greatest fear was over the
possible effects of the French Revolution on the United Kingdom. Here, extensive
distress due to the economic crisis and the Irish famine had led to a revival of Chartism,
campaigning for political democracy, and to Young Ireland, seeking Irish self-govern-
ment, both of which were greatly encouraged by the Revolution in France, with Chart-
ism moving in a more social-democratic direction. The British government successfully
exerted itself to prevent any help to them from France, and with the defeat of both
movements within a few months the British ruling class regained its confidence.
Bensimon then shows that the different parties in Parliament generally supported the
government and agreed that Britain should not interfere in French affairs, that a degree
of repression was justified in Britain to check the spread of revolution there, that so-
cialism was bound to fail, and that Britain’s avoidance of revolution was due to the
excellence of its institutions, the moderation of its people, and its traditions of liberty.
Disagreements were mainly over the causes of the French Revolution and the lessons
to be learned from it, and the author sees these stances as, in reality, revealing analyses
of Britain.
Part 3 is the largest and most important section, analyzing the large amount of varied
comment in Britain on developments in France in 1848, the Revolution, Republic,

Book Reviews 151
provisional government, universal suffrage, right to work, National Workshops, and

socialism. A chapter on writers and intellectuals contains a good analysis of a contro-
versy between Baron Brougham and John Stuart Mill but shows that there was in
general much less debate over, and literary engagement with, this revolution than there
had been during the earlier French Revolution of 1789. This is followed by a very
interesting and ambitious general survey of British attitudes in 1848 as revealed in the
press and the large number of works produced concerning developments in France—
there was general support for the government’s foreign and domestic policy. Picking
his way skillfully through the mass of material, Bensimon demonstrates that the fall
of Louis-Philippe, who was very unpopular in Britain because of events in the 1840s,
was broadly welcomed, but the fact that he was deposed through a popular revolt
aroused fears of the mob and rabble, related to fears of Chartist and Irish sedition.
There was little objection to a republic, especially when the initial fear of war passed,
or to the moderate provisional government, but to universal suffrage and equality there
was significant opposition. Particular targets were certain allegedly absurd measures
and policies, such as organization of labor, right to work, and National Workshops,
which were considered not on their merits but as the implementation of socialism and
communism.
In these varied British commentaries there was recourse to old, persistent, negative
(or at least unfavorable) stereotypes of French character, with frequent references to
the Terror of 1793, but these were less virulent than the reaction in the 1790s because
the 1848 revolution was seen as milder and less of a threat. Nevertheless, this revolution
was related to images of French national character, partly influenced by contemporary
French novels. The revolution of 1848 in France resulted from moral decadence, irre-
ligion, extremism, immorality, unchecked passions, and lack of self-control. Bensimon
effectively shows that this was in fact delineating a French “other” in expressing an
image of British national character as virtuous, guided by Protestant faith, restrained
in enjoyments, and moderate in social and political aspirations. Thus the dominant
attitude was a liberal one, of acceptance of the Republic and the provisional government
but of hostility to the spread of revolution and to socialism. In this, British commen-
tators displayed a self-congratulatory sense of the superiority of British society and
institutions and an image of themselves as liberal, loyal, confident, proud of their
traditions, respectful of social divisions, and blessed with an enlightened elite and a
deferential working class. An analysis of satirical cartoons, now mainly to be found in
periodicals, especially Punch, shows that these were not subversive but expounded the
same conservative and conformist views as the British ruling class and such organs as
the Times. Similar views are revealed in works of history later in the century. Thus the
analysis is of much more than attitudes to events in France in one year, being in fact
a wide-ranging survey of mid-Victorian opinion.
This book is very extensively researched, although the first part draws on published
accounts and reprinted diplomatic correspondence and, of the seventeen periodicals
extensively used, the Times and the Northern Star seem the only two newspapers
consulted systematically. But Bensimon has also used parliamentary debates, private
papers and letters, speeches, pamphlets, books, sermons, diaries, pictures, and cartoons.
On the whole, it is a very clear and lively work, with very good use of telling quotations
and many illustrations. Sometimes it seems to have been written with French readers
in mind, with derivative narratives that are familiar to British historians (particularly
early on). It steadily improves, however, to make an original and enlightening survey
and analysis that deserves to be translated and reach a wider readership.
IORWERTH PROTHERO
University of Manchester

152 Book Reviews
Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain.
By Pamela J. Walker.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xiiiⳭ337.
Scarlet-clad Salvationists attempted to effect a religious revolution in nineteenth-cen-

tury Britain; their most recent historian, Pamela J. Walker, calls us not to repentance
but to a fresh and nuanced analysis of this complicated and important movement. The
comparison is not as outlandish as it seems. For its working-class adherents, the Sal-
vation Army transformed their relationship with God and Christian worship; in this
book Pamela Walker transforms and enriches our understanding of both working-class
culture and urban religion in late nineteenth-century Britain.
In so doing, Walker is following in the path of historians such as Hugh McLeod,
Deborah Valenze, Callum Brown, and Sarah Williams, all of whom have rejected any
easy link between urbanization and secularization and demonstrated the creativity,
adaptability, and spirituality of working-class men and women. It is refreshing to see
this approach applied to the history of the Salvation Army, as it gives the book an
analytical focus that is lacking in many purely institutional histories of religion. It is
an ambitious project: Walker aims to write not merely about patterns of religious at-
tendance but also about faith itself. As she says in the introduction, “Understanding
how Salvationists fashioned a religious organization and created meaning within its
boundaries and practices sheds light on this one organization and also more widely on
the question of working-class belief and moral subjectivity” (p. 6).
Each section of the book is aimed at locating the theology and practices of the
Salvation Army (and its predecessor, the East London Christian Mission) in different,
though sometimes overlapping, contexts. The first two chapters provide a short and
lucid introduction to the mental and cultural world of William and Catherine Booth
and explain how their ideas, as well as prevailing social conditions, influenced the early
Mission. The remaining chapters then take up particular themes: conversion, soul-
saving, the public authority of women, converting working-class neighborhoods, and
opposition to the Army. Walker cogently argues that the Salvation Army must be seen
as a “neighborhood religion.” Grounded in the realities of urban working-class life,
including its physicality and belief in providence, it was promoted using new com-
mercial techniques and celebrated its triumphs in working-class spaces. However, Sal-
vationist belief and practice was at many points antithetical to its host culture—it was
critical of the male world of pub and pipe and championed authority for working-class
women. Thus it was neither fully part of the communities it evangelized nor totally
outside them. Chapter 6, “Robbing the Devil of His Choice Tunes: Converting the
Culture of Working-Class Neighborhoods,” is a particularly effective example, and
almost every subheading (e.g., “A Spiritual World,” “The Military Metaphor,” “The
Struggle against Popular Leisure,” “Women and Theater”) deserves fuller treatment in
its own right. Walker’s analysis is less successful in chapter 5, “Authority and Trans-
gression: The Lives of Maud Charlesworth, Effie Anthon, and Rebecca Jarrett.” The
three life stories she presents do not further the central thesis of the book—that of
linking Army practice to wider working-class values—although, in the case of the
section on Jarrett, Walker provides an important rereading of her life.
This book, as an analysis of the Salvation Army’s formation and early years, is
invaluable. However, the story effectively stops at 1890. There are excellent reasons
for this: it is the year of Catherine Booth’s death and of the publication of William
Booth’s vision for Salvation Army social work, In Darkest England and the Way Out,
a definitive turning point in Army practice. But the “darkest England” scheme did not

Book Reviews 153
suddenly appear out of nowhere—the Salvation Army was involved in work among
prostitutes and other “social” work long before this. Indeed, Walker mentions Army
rescue work and the connections it gave the Salvation Army to Josephine Butler and
the National Vigilance Association, yet these links and their possible impact on Sal-
vationist practice remain unexplored. Walker deliberately eschews the term “sect” or
“denomination” when referring to the Christian Mission and Salvation Army in favor
of the more inclusive “movement” or “organization.” This may be a fair description of
the democratic Christian Mission, but it seems inadequate after the transformation to
Salvation Army had been completed. Almost immediately, the Army began to for-
malize training for officers and standardize its methods; later, it adopted new work that
took it more into the orbit of middle-class reformers and began to produce training
programs for the children of its adherents. Walker needs to address how these devel-
opments—which were well under way in the nineteenth century—along with a grow-
ing Army bureaucracy affected relations with working-class communities.
Due to the lack of denominational records (lost to bombing in the Second World
War), Walker makes extensive use of surviving personal papers and of the local peri-
odical press. By going beyond institutional records and asking new questions, Walker
is able to produce a history in which the Salvation Army is located in its social, theo-
logical, and cultural context. While most historians of the Army have been content to
use the third edition of Catherine Booth’s pamphlet on women’s ministry, Walker was
able to locate a much earlier second edition, written before either the Christian Mission
or Salvation Army had been instituted. This discovery reveals important facets of Cath-
erine Booth’s gendered understanding of women’s preaching. Such attention to detail
is not, unfortunately, evidenced in the University of California Press’s layout of the
book: their preference for endnotes distances the reader from the work of other scholars
in the field and lessens the impact of Walker’s original approach. Errors in the pro-
duction process have led to the misspelling of names of such important figures as
Adelaide Cox, “Mother” Pamela Shepherd, and Ira D. Sankey; General Booth’s date
of death is incorrect. This should not happen in a book that can, rightly, claim to be
the best modern study of the early years of the Salvation Army. It would be a service
to historians of religion, of gender, and of popular culture if the University of California
were to remedy these errors so that the quality of production was equal to the quality
of Pamela Walker’s analysis.
L. E. LAUER
Oxford, U.K.
Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor. By Kathleen Burk.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xivⳭ491. $35.00.
A. J. P. Taylor, along with Fernand Braudel and E. P. Thompson, was one of the great
masters of historical writing in the second half of the twentieth century. Whatever one
thinks of their arguments and interpretations, their politics and their personalities, the
works of each are so exuberant in their passion for expressiveness and so exquisite in
their precision of enunciation that they do not just breathe life into bygone times and
places: they make the past reverberate forcefully in the present. Just listen to the open-
ing of Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1957): “In
the state of nature which Hobbes imagined, violence was the only law, and life was
‘nasty, brutish and short’. Though individuals never lived in this state of nature, the

154 Book Reviews
Great Powers of Europe have always done so” (p. xix). Hear how he concludes English
History, 1914–1945 (New York, 1970): “Imperial greatness was on the way out; the
welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined; the condition of the
people improved. Few now sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Few even sang ‘England
Arise’. England had risen all the same” (p. 600).
The life of A. J. P. Taylor has not lacked for tellings. He published two accounts of
it himself, the first in this journal in 1977, as well as a collection of septuagenarian
diary pieces from the early 1980s. His third wife, Éva Haraszti-Taylor, subsequently
printed a collection of Taylor’s letters to her, her diary of their later years together, and
Remembering Alan: A Love Story. In addition, there have been biographies by Adam
Sisman and Robert Cole.1
Kathleen Burk enters the lists of Taylor’s chroniclers with a great deal to recommend
her. She is a prominent historian in her own right, with several studies of the financial
history of international relations to her credit. She wrote her dissertation at Oxford
under Taylor—she was his last research student, he said—and for five years she co-
chaired with him the seminar in twentieth-century British history at the Institute for
Historical Research, London University.
Burk has been industry itself in the production of her mentor’s biography. She has
trawled through no fewer than thirty-six manuscript collections in England and the
United States and ransacked records ranging from those of Taylor’s secondary schools
to those of his publishers and literary agent. She has corresponded with his colleagues
and students and talked with his friends and his enemies, even interviewing his chil-
dren’s nanny. She has visited all of the surviving buildings in which Taylor lived and
made the acquaintance of those who succeeded him in occupying them.
The result is a volume worthy enough in its way. Troublemaker solemnly journeys
though the dense underbrush of Taylor’s marital life. It assiduously amasses the record
of his twenty-three books, the terms, conditions, and speeds of their composition, their
principal arguments and emphases, and their qualitative and quantitative receptions. It
judiciously reviews Taylor’s many academic disagreements, and it heroically con-
structs, out of fragmentary evidence and a welter of assumptions, a year-by-year and
source-by-source estimate of his freelance income, adjusted for inflation, from his first
book review in the Manchester Guardian in 1934 until his death fifty-six years later.
Burk’s way, alas, is a pedestrian one. In contrast to Taylor’s own works, Trouble-
maker is a tedious book, and not just because of the complete excess of documentation.
(At fifty double-columned pages, Burk’s scholarly apparatus is longer than four of her
seven chapters.) Quotations from Taylor’s own prose aside, there is but one memorable
passage in the entire 415 pages of text, and this turns out to be a direct quotation from
Pascal, translated and endnoted but not enclosed in quotation marks—a remarkable
slip of scrupulosity in light of the book’s 876 references. So intent is Burk on setting
straight the record of Taylor’s life that the man himself all but disappears behind the
procession of his activities.
Burk sometimes proceeds as if what made Taylor Taylor is beyond her province as
1
A. J. P. Taylor, “Accident Prone, or What Happened Next,” Journal of Modern History 49
(March 1977): 1–18; A Personal History (London, 1983); and An Old Man’s Diary (London,
1984); Éva Haraszti-Taylor, ed., Letters to Eva, 1969–1983 (London, 1991); A Life with Alan:
The Diary of A. J. P. Taylor’s Wife Eva from 1978 to 1985 (London, 1987); and Remembering
Alan: A Love Story (privately printed, 1995); Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor: A Biography (London,
1994); and Robert Cole, A. J. P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates (New York, 1993).

Book Reviews 155
his biographer. About his relationship with the politician and press baron Lord Bea-
verbrook, whom Taylor acknowledged as one of his two “masters” in life (the historian
Lewis Namier was the other) and his “greatest” friend (A Personal History, pp. 145
and 283), she writes that it “was and remains unfathomable” (p. 315). She simply
declares of Taylor’s attachment to his first wife, Margaret, with whom he continued to
live part of every week for decades after they were divorced, and even while married
to his two later wives, that it was “the great emotional mystery of [his] life” (p. 357).
At other points, it just seems that Taylor’s personality—which Burk counts as one of
the ingredients of his lucrative career as a broadcaster and journalist—does not strike
her as an interesting aspect of her subject. Burk is not, for example, curious in the least
about how Taylor retained the affection of a man no less discriminating than Isaiah
Berlin even as he insulted Berlin and subjected him to his unenlightened views about
Jews and intermarriage. Nor does it occur to her that the ardent devotion of Taylor’s
many highly accomplished students—they presented him with no fewer than three
Festschrifts, and she herself felt filial enough to purchase his writing desk at auction
and to compose her life of him on it—might point to something essential to any
convincing portrait of him. Taking up such necessarily speculative, even subjective,
matters would, of course, have forced Burk to risk readings of the sources that chal-
lenged her empiricist fundamentalism. By adhering to a self-imposed quarantine of the
imagination, however, she succeeds only in frustrating the reader’s desire to know
A. J. P. Taylor the historian, teacher, and public intellectual.
What is most disappointing about Troublemaker is Burk’s inability to do justice to
the “history of A. J. P. Taylor.” Taylor quickened the intellects of high-brow academics
and popular television audiences alike by his verbal artistry, and this literary virtuosity
is a fact about which his biographer is mightily ambivalent. Burk writes appreciatively
of the development of Taylor’s diction from “lucid, elegant and long sentences to lucid,
short and snappy ones” (p. 372) and of his knack for “arresting statements” (p. 411).
She includes English History among the three masterpieces (The Struggle for Mastery
and The Origins of the Second World War [London, 1961] are the others) she thinks
will prove his most “enduring legacy” (p. 415) in part because of “its prose” (ibid.).
And yet, the tale Burk tells of Taylor’s writing is one of seemingly irreversible decline
“from about 1940” (p. 411)—twenty-five years, that is, before the first edition of En-
glish History, when Taylor’s independence from Namier, whom Burk would like to
believe was the policeman of Taylor’s early historical prose, permitted him to indulge
freely the penchant for epigram and paradox that she laments at virtually every turn.
In the end, the best that Burk can say about what she habitually labels, in the dismissive
language of professional historiography, Taylor’s “style” is that it was always “read-
able,” as if this clapped-out cliché, worked so hard that both of its edges now are dull,
suffices to explain what led historians as eminent as Michael Howard, David Marquand,
and Richard Overy to liken Taylor to Thomas Babington Macaulay.
A. J. P. Taylor’s best works crystallized the pivotal moments of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European history, limned the characters of the men at their centers,
and captured the momentum of momentous events. They made history fascinating,
meaningful, and fun. They still do. I recommend them enthusiastically, even if today’s
experts know them, like Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II
(London, 1848–61), to be wrong.
MICHAEL DINTENFASS
University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee

156 Book Reviews
La faveur du roi: Mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois. By

Nicolas Le Roux.
Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2000. Pp. 806. Fr 240.
The reign of Henry III is generally seen as an unmitigated disaster in French history.
Henry’s ineptitude, the standard version goes, produced a transformative political crisis
in which radical Catholics commandeered the government; the king resorted to murder
to get it back and was in turn assassinated. Out of the ashes, Bourbon absolutism was
born; from thence, the Revolution was merely a matter of time. More recently, histo-
rians of sexuality have taken an interest in Henry, intrigued by the polemical storm
around his sexual practices. His reign, in this reading, becomes a locus to examine
colliding discourses and regimes of power described by Michel Foucault. While these
two perspectives are not mutually exclusive, integrating the explanatory underpinnings
of each in an analysis of the monarchy’s response to the prolonged religious crisis has
proved elusive. Nicolas Le Roux’s book La faveur du roi: Mignons et courtisans au
temps des derniers Valois uses Henry’s favorites as a prism through which to analyze
the discursive and material logics of Henry’s reign, arguing that the larger crisis of the
monarchy was integral to those logics.
While Le Roux discusses favorites from the reign of Henry II (1547–59), his study
focuses on the favorites of Henry III. One of Le Roux’s main arguments is that Henry
used the favorites pedagogically, to “refidelize” the nobility. The favorites became
examples of the value of serving the king and part of a formulation of the king’s majesty
as separate and above the noblesse (p. 197). Le Roux situates Henry’s efforts in terms
of the organization of the royal household and relative to contemporary theories of
favor, laying out a central contradiction in Henry’s politics: the king distinguished
himself from the court, but he accomplished this distancing precisely through the use
of intimate relationships. Although Francis I and Henry II did have favorites, they also
mixed comfortably with the old noble families. Henry III altered this pattern in relying
almost exclusively on gentlemen of his household from the secondary noblesse, whose
fortunes depended entirely on his own. Not surprisingly, his reliance after 1580 on two
favorites, the dukes of Epernon and Joyeuse, inspired corrosive jealousy and, by 1587,
destructive competition between the “archmignons” despite Henry’s efforts to balance
the two in honors.
Le Roux does a masterful job of reconstructing Henry’s efforts to utilize favorites
as part of his political strategy to provide order and stability. One of the first problems
Henry faced was his brother and heir, the duke of Alençon, stirring up religious rivalries
and casting aspersions on the king’s ability to govern because he felt underutilized in
the new regime. The rivalry with Alençon was carried out by proxy, with the favorites
of both men battling several times, even in the confines of the Louvre. In April of
1578, the two camps met in a deadly duel that effectively ended Alençon’s challenge.
While the rivalry cost Henry the lives of several of his mignons, the duel allowed him
to start over, distributing patronage through Epernon and Joyeuse instead of utilizing
the traditional families, like the Guise and Montmorency, whose ties to their own clients
had so often threatened the monarchy during the wars of religion. Once in place, the
archmignons were used to provide an alternative to the extremist Catholic League, in
the person of Joyeuse, while Epernon negotiated on Henry’s behalf with the Protestant
Henry, king of Navarre.
One of Le Roux’s surprising discoveries is that the archmignons had a stabilizing
effect after the early years of the reign because Henry was able to deploy them as
intermediaries in the religious conflicts. Henry III’s system worked relatively well until

Book Reviews 157
Joyeuse died in 1587, leaving the king with only his “Protestant” favorite at a moment
when the league was becoming adamant about preventing a Protestant succession to
the throne. This destabilization led to the final crisis, in which the relatively dormant
suspicions about Henry and his religious politics resurfaced with renewed vigor. In Le
Roux’s analysis, the king’s failure to hold Paris against Henry, the second duke of
Guise, in May of 1588 and his subjection to the league program were a result of Guise’s
desire to claim access to royal patronage that Henry insisted on channeling to Epernon
(p. 533). Pushed by Guise into disgracing his remaining favorite and facing a situation
in which Guise and the league would replace the king as the main patron, Henry decided
to assassinate Guise on December 23, 1588. Henry’s assassination in turn, eight months
later, was a product of the collapse of the patronage system Henry had constructed to
operate through his favorites (p. 179).
In addressing the problems—both familiar and more obscure—of Henry’s reign,
this study is exhaustive in the materials its author unearthed and consulted. For instance,
Le Roux deftly repositions the polemics of the late 1580s, usually seen as religious
with incidental political overtones, by examining the implications of Henry’s bypassing
of traditional routes of royal patronage and deliberate situating of favorites to absorb
criticism directed at the monarch. Although historians of sexuality may find his treat-
ment of questions about Henry’s sexuality somewhat tentative, Le Roux suggests how
sexual polemics can take on a persistent quality, bound up as they are with material
concerns.
This is also a very long book, and while it is very readable, some stretches on court
functionaries and biographical sketches are clearly aimed at specialists. For all the vivid
detail, Le Roux touches too briefly on the relationship of these personal ties of favor
to more abstract notions of fidelity to the monarch and the state, leaving an intriguing
skein somewhat undercarded.
These are minor complaints compared to the value of this textured account of court
life and politics in a crucial period in French history. Le Roux’s presentation of the
textual evidence renders coherent the palpable anxieties about favor and a politics based
on it. Both for the sense of how this strange world functioned (and sometimes did not)
and for the dense rendering of how religious and political partisanship operated in
material terms, Le Roux provides crucial information and a fascinating window through
which to view it.
KATHERINE CRAWFORD
Vanderbilt University
Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres.
By Jean-François Dubost and Peter Sahlins.
Paris: Flammarion, 1999. Pp. 477. Fr 149.
In 1697, Louis XIV instituted a new tax on foreigners who had moved to France since
1600 as well as on their descendents and heirs. It immediately affected only about
9,000 people and ultimately brought little revenue into the state’s coffers. Dubost and
Sahlins, however, contend that the tax provides a rare window onto both the social and
geographic profiles of immigrants and the functioning of the absolutist state during a
difficult moment. They argue further that the monarchy’s efforts to apply the tax re-
shaped the distinctions between French and foreign.
Et si on faisait payer combines aspects of political, social, and legal history. While

158 Book Reviews
the tax rolls themselves are at the heart of the study, the authors also draw on other
legislation affecting foreigners, including naturalization and the droit d’aubaine, re-
strictions on foreigners’ ability to inherit or bequeath property in France. They look
not only at how the state treated immigrants but also at the ways foreigners challenged
the categories and restrictions placed upon them.
The first four chapters focus on how the tax was instituted. It was initially justified
in terms of feudal rights but quickly came to be presented instead as a modern fiscal
expedient. It was not racially or ethnically based; it was instead part of a series of
exceptional measures responding to wartime expenses. Instituting it was difficult, for
the monarchy had traditionally prided itself on welcoming foreigners, particularly po-
litical refugees. There were also no systematic distinctions that could readily be used
to identify outsiders; preexisting legislation was riddled with exceptions based on dif-
ferent forms of privilege.
Chapters 5 through 8 use the tax rolls to investigate the sociology, geographical
origins, and distribution of foreigners in France. At least 10 percent of immigrants were
women; there were probably more, because the rolls aimed at identifying taxable
wealth, not conducting an accurate census. Somewhat more than a third of foreigners
taxed were merchants; another third were artisans, perhaps 10 percent were peasants,
and about 20 percent were clergy, nobles, and those in the “liberal professions.” Further
charts show that in a moment of financial distress Louis XIV turned primarily against
a population identified as rich, potentially discouraging those who might contribute
most to the French economy.
As Dubost and Sahlins acknowledge, these statistics are limited. Other sources pro-
vide somewhat different socioeconomic profiles; for example, servants are more visible
in the records of passports issued by the French government to foreigners during the
early eighteenth century. More importantly, tax rolls were often imprecise about im-
migrants’ social status, professions, or geographic origins. The authors exploit this very
slipperiness as they move from compiling statistics to examining how the category of
“foreigner” was invented. For example, they argue that administrators classified people
by the sovereign under whom they had lived, rather than in geographic, ethnic, or
religious terms, especially when they came from distant regions. Officials were also
torn between the desire to apply a universal category of taxable foreigner and the need
to recognize specific political and geographic contexts that could pose possible excep-
tions to the law or could affect the monarchy’s territorial claims.
While a few immigrants came from far afield—including Turkish subjects, Russians,
and North Africans—the majority came from frontier lands. The rolls also show dis-
tinctive geographic patterns of settlement within France. Two-thirds of foreigners were
concentrated around Lille, Metz, Aix-en-Provence, Rennes, and Paris. The tax records
reveal divisions between a northern France of rich merchants and artisans and a south
populated largely by smaller-scale merchants and agricultural laborers, and, second-
arily, between a more dynamic west and a more stagnant east. In this, Dubost and
Sahlins’s maps and charts generally confirm patterns that other historians have ob-
served, both in general divisions of France and in the settlement patterns of immigrants.
Chapters 9 through 11 investigate how the tax was challenged. The process was
different for those seeking a reduction in taxes and those who sought complete ex-
emptions. For the first group, the most important factors were the date when one sought
a moderation (earlier requests were more successful), a moderate social position, coun-
try of origin, and the generalité in France where one lived and hence the intendant
with whom one dealt. Those who sought complete exemptions went beyond the inten-
dant to petition the Conseil du Roi, effectively limiting the group to those with the

Book Reviews 159
financial means to pursue their cases further. Supplicants argued on the basis of explicit
exceptions in the law, like those for military service or for “passing foreigners,” and
for implicit exemptions; for example, manufacturers were not exempted in principle
but often were in practice. The largest number of petitioners claimed to be French or
of French ancestry, aiming to show that earlier letters of naturalization had been su-
perfluous or the result of a mistake; the tax thus contributed to a view of nationality
based on jus sanguinis as well as jus soli.
In the end, the tax was a fiscal failure, and one that showed that the monarchy was
still territorially ill-defined. If it led authorities to “invent foreigners,” it also called into
question the value of French naturalization. Dubost and Sahlins conclude that by shift-
ing the distinction between French and outsider from a judicial to an administrative
realm, the tax may have had an unintended equalizing effect and perhaps contributed
to the sense of the commonality of French citizens politically as well as legally.
The book is an impressive and unusual example of collaborative work between
French and American scholars. The work is also innovative in its focus on foreigners
during Louis XVI’s reign; historians on both sides of the Atlantic have paid remarkably
little attention to immigration policy before the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Sahlins and Dubost are both experts in the field and bring their expertise to bear on
this study: Sahlins has explored the development of the border between France and
Spain and examined naturalization within France, and Dubost is the author of an ar-
chival guide to foreigners in prerevolutionary France. With a few exceptions, existing
studies have also focused primarily on the official legal status of foreigners; Et si on
faisit illuminates the ways in which groups of individuals responded to or challenged
that status and examines the potential impact of such negotiations.
The book’s subtitle is deliberately provocative. The word “immigrés” or immigrants
was not part of the lexicon of absolutist France; indeed, it was not used regularly until
the twentieth century. Sahlins and Dubost chose it to suggest a dialogue between 1700
and 2000. But although they self-consciously invite this dialogue, they do not develop
it. Indeed, the final chapter focuses primarily on attitudes toward foreigners during the
Enlightenment. Similarly, the archival strength of the book is impressive, but the lim-
ited number of references to secondary sources makes it difficult for them to demon-
strate the novelty and importance of the study, or to highlight the connections or con-
trasts with more recent issues. Perhaps this is an opening volley for a more extended
conversation about the social realities and political significance of immigration through-
out early modern European history.
JENNIFER HEUER
Middlebury College
Au tombeau des secrets: Les écrivains publics du Paris populaire, Cimetière des
Saints-Innocents, XVIe–XVIIIe siècle. By Christine Métayer.
Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 2000. Pp. 456. Fr 150.
Christine Métayer’s new book on the écrivains publics (public writers) of early modern
Paris opens several windows onto urban popular culture between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries. Métayer has labored in the archives to identify the scribes who
plied their trade in the once vibrant, now vanished, cemetery of the Saints-Innocents
that flourished on the edge of Paris’s central market, Les Halles. Her chosen informant
is an elusive man since his writings were, by definition, anonymous services offered

160 Book Reviews
for a fee. Unlike their professional superiors, the mâitres écrivains, the public writers
had no official corporate status and therefore cannot be traced through the guild records
of the Old Regime. These archival constraints force Métayer to envisage a more creative
and ambitious historical project: she combs through police files and parish records
relating to the administration of the cemetery and its inhabitants to reconstruct the
microcosm in which these “graveyard writers” (pp. 266–67) worked.
Writing was just one activity that prospered in and around the cemetery walls before
it was destroyed by official decree in 1780. For more than three centuries, the living
shared this space with the dead and their agents. Métayer evokes this lost community
through the various individuals and authorities who competed to define its purpose.
While her efforts to combine different levels of historical analysis are commendable,
they produce a thick and at times unwieldy book that is unwilling to sacrifice hard-
earned evidence for streamlined narrative. The following survey of the book’s orga-
nization highlights the strengths and weaknesses of Métayer’s approach.
The book is divided into four sections that correspond to different angles for viewing
the same historical problem. Part 1 builds on recent work by Armando Petrucci in Italy
and Roger Chartier in France to identify the cultural dislocations triggered by the steady
but uneven encroachment of print into all areas of early modern life. Métayer offers
an original and persuasive contribution to this field. The consolidation of royal authority
generated mounting demand for written documentation at all levels of French society,
leaving vast numbers of men and women culturally disempowered by their technical
incapacity. The public writers met this need by hiring out their pens for tasks ranging
from love letters and official petitions to forgery. This latter set of activities drew the
attention of the Parisian police, who singled them out for surveillance and recruited
them as spies—hence the shady status of these scribes, who were identified with the
ranks of petty criminals, domestic servants, and uneducated workers. Métayer defines
the public writer as a cultural “translator” (p. 59) because he deployed writing in a field
of unequal social relations that required strategic planning to insure proper communi-
cation. Thus, writing could reinforce and undermine the existing political and social
hierarchies that determined the exercise of power under the Old Regime.
By way of transition to the second and third parts of her book, Métayer insists that
the public writers must be approached through the “full sociological dimension of their
practice” (p. 129). She tackles this task in part 2 by reconstructing the cemetery, its
physical contours and diverse occupants, as a site of ongoing social interaction. Métayer
rehearses the rise to prominence of the Saints-Innocents cemetery as both a burial
ground for the Parisian poor and the theater of an intense daily commercial activity (p.
139). The eventual triumph of commercial practices within the sacred walls despite
Counter-Reformation efforts to purge them is the main story of part 3. Religious and
municipal authorities initially singled out the scribes as examples of the threat posed
by secular occupation of the cemetery grounds. By 1670, however, the church decided
to profit from the denizens it had failed to evict by charging rent for the stalls and
apartments. Métayer compares the role of the public writer in these conflicts to those
of two other prominent groups: the vendors of images and the gravediggers. By the
eighteenth century, all three enjoyed privileged status within the cemetery community,
serving as both informants and internal policing force. The reader loses sight of the
scribe in this bulky chapter, if only because Métayer has unearthed rich information
on the gravediggers and the image hawkers whose presence also dominated the place.
The final section aims to integrate the information from the preceding chapters
through the concept of sociability. Métayer’s review of this topic grows tedious, given
its familiarity, and one wishes she had moved to her argument directly. Métayer sug-

Book Reviews 161
gests that the public writers constituted themselves as an unofficial corps within the
cemetery and used these rituals to mitigate violence and regulate their trade. She argues
that the topography of the cemetery provided a substitute corporate framework for the
dregs of the otherwise prestigious writing craft. The public writer was at once an
integral member of the Saints-Innocents community and set apart from it by his tech-
nical capacity (p. 264). This last point highlights the one serious fault line in this
otherwise admirable book: the focus splits between writers and writing practices, on
the one hand, and popular sociability and community identity, on the other. The two
are linked because the act of writing for someone else was necessarily a social gesture
that allowed for interaction, solidarity, and disagreement. Yet, the discussion of the
writers as a social group in part 4 does not systematically revisit the earlier arguments
in part 1 about the strategic uses of writing in a culture of uneven literacy. How does
viewing the public writer through the lens of popular sociability alter our understanding
of the practice of writing and its sociocultural significance?
This book merits translation because it is informative and methodologically sugges-
tive concerning the history of writing and popular culture. The public writer was closer
to the milieu of the laboring populace—literally living among them—than most of the
individuals historians are forced to rely on for evidence. Métayer has a gift for bringing
this lost world to life without skimping on her erudition, which is deftly presented in
a hundred pages worth of appendices and bibliography at the end of her text. The book
abounds in insights large and small, many of which cannot be acknowledged in a short
review but which merit attention from scholars with interests ranging from attitudes
toward death and the profession of gravediggers to the uses and abuses of writing as a
form of power in the early modern period.
LISA JANE GRAHAM

Haverford College
Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-

Century French Intellectual History. Edited by Daniel Gordon.
New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. viⳭ227. $80.00.
Were a latter-day Emmanuel Kant to sketch the intellectual tenor of the age, would the
framing question be not “What is Enlightenment?” but rather “What is Postmodern-
ism”? Perhaps, but the Enlightenment question is a resistant one, not easily supplanted
by (post)modernity’s insistent skepticism regarding foundational narratives and its
brash eagerness to forge new beginnings. The eleven essays in this collection explore
and illustrate that resistance.
Two essays by the volume editor, Daniel Gordon, trace the relationship between the
Enlightenment and postmodernism in intellectual, disciplinary, and historical terms.
As Gordon notes, when these two terms are brought together, the logic joining them
is often an oppositional, conflictual one—“and” actually standing for an implicit “ver-
sus.” Thus, for eighteenth-century specialists, involvement with postmodern theory is
potentially risky, for it leads away from a better understanding of the historical reality
to which texts and other cultural artifacts provide access. But specialists of postmodern
theory view the historian’s belief in the ability to know that reality with erosive skep-
ticism, which extends to the entire Enlightenment. Taken as a universalizing “master
narrative,” if not as the model for all such narratives, the Enlightenment project is
viewed through the lens of postmodernism as the hegemonic attempt to reorder the

162 Book Reviews
world, both epistemologically and materially, disenfranchising and seeking to over-

come all resistance. Sidestepping this predictable and dead-end binary opposition be-
tween the Enlightenment and postmodernism, between “erudition” and “theory,” these
essays collectively illustrate an interpretive practice that is both critically self-reflexive
and historically informed.
The essays treat a wide range of topics: colonial legal theory and strategies of local
self-definition; language theory, temporality, and knowledge production in the Ency-
clopédie; Montesquieu, expenditure, and the notion of modernity; state censorship in
the ancien régime and regulative social control; the Enlighteners’ antisemitism as rhe-
torical strategy; utopian writing, feminism, and the figure of woman as citizen-reformer;
Carl Becker’s idea of the Enlightenment; and Michel Foucault’s interpretation of Nietz-
sche. Yet the essays are bound together by the assumption that the major texts of
eighteenth-century writers cannot be read in isolation from the invigorating and rig-
orous theoretical work of postmodernism. The result in almost all cases is a fresh and
innovative reevaluation of eighteenth-century texts and contexts, as well as of many
of the operative assumptions of postmodern critique.
The lead essay by Malick Ghachem examines the efforts of colonial jurists to codify
French legal theory as it pertained to overseas reality. Influenced by Montesquieu’s
Spirit of the Laws, which they read selectively—especially its critique of slavery—
these jurists sought to construct a theory of colonial society that would underwrite their
demands for autonomy from the metropole. Were these colonial texts viewed through
the prism of postmodernism, suggests Ghachem, they would be read as staging a re-
sistance to centralizing, hegemonic power in the name of a local struggle for autonomy.
Postcolonial studies—which Ghachem elides with postmodernism—often understand
that resistance as a transgressive practice defined by the law and the attempts of mar-
ginalized, subaltern populations to wrest agency from the lawgivers. This dualistic
model may explain later colonial formations, but not the complexity of the Enlight-
enment situation. Referring to a “dialectic of colonial enlightenment,” Ghachem shows
how the jurists borrowed the Enlightenment project’s values of universalism, time-
lessness, and centralization, all the while elaborating “a politics of the local and the
particular, the contingent and the historical” (p. 11). Far from being the exotic “others”
of empire that postmodern theory eagerly endows with an intrinsically positive value,
they reveal the complex set of contradictions that define Enlightenment legal theory.
Ghachem allows that postmodernism has revised our understanding of the eighteenth
century, but only by reducing it simplistically and unhistorically to “a hegemonic,
totalizing effort to construct universal morality and law” (p. 25), a reduction that makes
little historical sense.
Much of postmodernist thinking is marked by the attempt to break free of modern-
ism, understood as the experience of mythical loss set over against the desire for a
normative ideal. Elena Russo proposes an intellectual genealogy of postmodernist
thinking that begins with Montesquieu and extends through the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, comprising figures such as Marcel Mauss, Roger Caillois, Georges
Bataille, and ultimately postmodernism itself. Paradoxically, Russo argues, the Enlight-
enment’s discourse of virtue, “a morality more noble than the bourgeois rational ne-
gotiation of interests,” ends up rejecting reason and the social completely, “taking
refuge in an irrationalist estheticism” (pp. 82–83). Postmodernism, one concludes, can
no more reject the Enlightenment than it can succeed in forgetting the intellectual
history from which it emerges. Sophia Rosenfeld proposes an equally bracing revision
of the liberal interpretation of the Enlightenment as the gradual development of an
autonomous, rational public sphere that triumphs ultimately over a repressive, censor-

Book Reviews 163
ing State. The Enlightenment project, she argues, involves social, “constitutive” cen-
sorship at the level of language practice itself. At issue is not free speech, but rather a
linguistic dirigisme characterizing all liberal societies which calls for modifying lan-
guage in order to modify thinking. Daniel Rosenberg’s essay on the Encyclopédie
explores the new understanding of time that emerges in this text. He demonstrates just
how much the encyclopedists’ reflection on issues central to their project, such as
history, contingency, temporal flux, and action, resonate with the postmodern attempt
to theorize the notion of event. Arthur Goldhammer’s essay on linguistic theory argues
that postmodernism’s reading of Enlightenment texts is based on a self-reflexive model
of language, according to which language is already always about language itself, even
if (and especially when) linguistic self-reference is masked or elided, making it seem
as if language were truly referential, able to communicate knowledge and make state-
ments about things beyond itself. The reading practice that explores how literature
undoes its own claims to referentiality is deconstruction, a term that for Goldhammer
seems to be synonymous with postmodernism. The other model he proposes stresses
the social determination of language, the instrument with which individuals enact them-
selves, negotiate with others, and engage with society. One might argue that these are
linguistic acts, whose interpretation cannot easily sidestep the kind of self-reflexive
questioning deconstruction engages in. But Goldhammer’s objective lies elsewhere. As
one of the most prolific and skillful French translators at work today, his comments
about eighteenth-century translation as resulting from the experience of the breaking
down of barriers—geographic, sociopolitical, and linguistic—are especially fascinat-
ing.
There is a nagging slippage throughout the volume as to just what constitutes post-
modernism. Surely it is more than traditional skepticism unaware of its intellectual
origins, and the telegraphy of proper names—Derrida, Lyotard, de Man, Foucault,
Bataille, Baudrillard—only compounds the problem. Perhaps, as Gordon claims, post-
modernism is not a foreign import but rather a local product, one whose proponents
and opponents alike tend to overlook the extent to which it is shaped by local, U.S.
ideological values—especially because it is insufficiently historical, condemned by its
own paradigm to relive continually “Year One of theory.” This collection provides
compelling examples of how to move beyond that compulsive repetition by historiciz-
ing a critical thought and practice in which the Enlightenment and postmodernism are
productively and persuasively linked.
DANIEL BREWER
University of Minnesota
On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considered as One of the First Authors of the

Revolution. By James Swenson. Atopia: Philosophy, Political Theory, Aesthetics.
Edited by Judith Butler and Frederick M. Dolan.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiiiⳭ320. $55.00.
Did Rousseau invent French Revolutionary ideology, or did French Revolutionary ide-
ology invent Rousseau? The debate was already on the minds of those who lived
through the Revolution. Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote in 1791: “Rousseau’s maxims
have thus formed most of our laws, and our representatives have had both the modesty
and loyalty to declare that the Social Contract was for them the lever with which they
were able to shake and eventually overthrow the enormous colossus of despotism”

164 Book Reviews
(cited by Swenson, p. 11). Yet in 1801, Jean-Joseph Mounier, who had been a leading
figure in the National Assembly, argued that the celebrity of the Social Contract was
an effect rather than a cause: “It was not in the least the influence of these [Rousseauian]
principles that produced the Revolution; on the contrary, it was the Revolution that
produced their influence” (cited on p. 15).
Swenson is partial to Mercier. Indeed, the professor of French at Rutgers makes the
title of Mercier’s 1791 composition—De J. J. Rousseau considéré comme l’un des
premiers auteurs de la Révolution—the name of his own study. For Swenson, Rousseau
was both a revolutionary author (writer) and a crucial author (cause) of the Revolution.
But instead of merely reiterating Mercier’s thesis, Swenson attempts to rethink the
nature of authorship and causality in Rousseau’s case. Swenson’s position, designed
to absorb the insights of both Mercier and Mounier, could be summarized like this: the
paradoxes of Rousseau the writer magnified the impact of Rousseau the cause.
Swenson emphasizes the “discontinuities” that characterize Rousseau’s thought. He
also calls them “impossible transitions” and “fault lines.” These are Rousseau’s con-
fessions of the need to start over, to posit previously unacknowledged premises in order
to sustain an inquiry. An example is the conundrum of the origins of language. Lan-
guage is based on conventions—but how could individuals without language com-
municate in order to formulate conventions? The transition from nature to culture is
unintelligible without discontinuity. In opposition to the gradualism of either Adam
Smith or the Marquis de Condorcet, Rousseau made catastrophe and new beginnings
a formal part of history. He thus made it possible to conceive the paradox of restarting
history as an absolute necessity.
Rousseau’s ideas were inspirational to the revolutionaries, but the fault lines of his
thought inevitably lent themselves to different interpretations and applications. His
incongruities multiplied his influence. He was cited by all parties for all purposes. This
“constitutive instability” (p. 225) explains how Rousseau began as one of the more
popular authors of the Old Regime and became the “first author” of the Revolution.
Swenson is an admirer of Jacques Derrida, but he gives historical sense to Derrida’s
ahistorical preoccupation with textual contradictions. The strength of Swenson’s book
lies not merely in its close reading of Rousseau but also in its rigorous examination of
a historical problem. Swenson’s review of the historiography on the origins of the
Revolution is indeed impressive. Daniel Mornet, author of a classic book on the origins
of the Revolution, stopped his analysis in 1787. “The origins of the Revolution are one
story; the history of the Revolution is another,” he stated (cited on p. 18). Mornet
argued that the growth of Enlightenment ideas and institutions took away the legitimacy
of the monarchy and thus constituted the Revolution’s origins. But these ideas were
not revolutionary—the emergence of the Revolution’s ideology was also “another”
story. As Swenson acutely notes, this professed discontinuity between the origins of
the event and the event itself—or between the origins of revolutionary thinking and
revolutionary thinking itself—is reminiscent of Rousseau’s need to posit discontinui-
ties. “Only a separation or discontinuity between the Revolution and its origins can
define the former as in fact revolutionary,” Swenson writes (p. 18). Swenson goes on
to show how the historiography is plagued by this problem: to explain the origins of
the Revolution runs the risk of making the Revolution nonrevolutionary, which is not
the desired outcome for most who write about the question.
Swenson’s treatment of Robert Darnton (The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revo-
lutionary France [New York, 1995]) and Roger Chartier (The Cultural Origins of the
French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane [Durham, N.C., 1991]) is particularly
acute. Chartier gets around the problem of the Enlightenment’s relationship to the
Revolution simply by denying the existence of one of the terms of the problem. For

Book Reviews 165
him, “the Enlightenment” was a retrospective construction of the revolutionaries. Char-

tier’s position is thus analogous to Mounier’s argument that the Revolution produced
Rousseau’s influence. Chartier argues that to posit Enlightenment ideas as a cause of
the Revolution is to presume that subversive messages were transmitted directly from
authors to readers. Readers have “multiple interpretations” of texts. This makes it “im-
possible to attribute too direct a role to books” (cited on p. 23). Swenson suggests that
Chartier prematurely abandons close textual analysis as a method for tracing the growth
of revolutionary attitudes. Chartier’s rejection of the possibility of any unity between
authorial intention and reader reception leads him to treat books statistically. The quan-
tification of books renders them indistinct from other items receiving statistical treat-
ment, such as contraceptive devices.
Swenson regards Chartier’s use of quantitative methods to illustrate the “desacrali-
zation” of French culture in the eighteenth century as problematic for two reasons. The
first is that the secularization of culture is not tantamount to the creation of a specifically
revolutionary culture—hence, there is still a gap between origins and event. The second
is that Chartier’s mode of cultural history, in spite of its hermeneutical sophistication,
denies “any real role to the activity of interpretation—that is, . . . to any attempt to
identify specifically textual modes of diffusion” of revolutionary ideas (p. 24). Swenson
insists that books can shape the self-conception of readers in ways that the use of
nontextual objects cannot. He also emphasizes that a text can provide a script or model
for its own interpretation. How Rousseau scripted the reception of his own works is
what much of Swenson’s work is about.
Unlike Chartier, Darnton gives a causal role to particular texts and their content.
Swenson suggests, however, that Darnton privileges pornographic literature and po-
litical libelles as the causal agent. One problem here is that Darnton, like Chartier, can
use such texts only to illustrate “desacralization” and not the emergence of an explicitly
revolutionary discourse. The Revolution still lies beyond its origins. Swenson also
rejects Darnton’s contention that conventional historians of the Enlightenment have
overestimated the popularity of the major philosophes such as Rousseau. In a tour de
force demonstration, Swenson suggests that Rousseau was in fact the most popular
author of the eighteenth century. Among other points, Swenson shows that several
scholars have erred in claiming that The Social Contract was not widely published
before the Revolution. Estimating conservatively, there were at least twenty-eight edi-
tions before 1789—and twelve more when we count reprints in Rousseau’s collected
works. From 1790 to 1795, The Social Contract was published separately at least eleven
times and an additional fourteen times with other writings. Swenson also notes that
Darnton, when compiling lists of the most popular books in the Old Regime, places
Rousseau’s Oeuvres in the twenty-third position—an unimpressive showing. But
Swenson emphasizes that orders for the Oeuvres were three times as high as the orders
for any other collected set of writings. “And at over thirty volumes,” he adds, the
Oeuvres “would most likely be at the top of the overall list if calculations were made
in terms of the number of volumes” (p. 170).
There is more to this book than I have indicated. But this summary is enough to
show that Swenson reads Rousseau closely. He also deepens the argument that Rous-
seau and his eighteenth-century readership must be put at the forefront of inquiry into
the origins and nature of the Revolution. To advance the understanding of a major
author and the understanding of a classic historical problem in one book is an admirable
feat.
DANIEL GORDON
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

166 Book Reviews
Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution. By

Emma C. Spary.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xvⳭ321. $70.00 (cloth); $25.00
(paper).
With its ordered paths, greenhouses, and labyrinth, the Jardin des Plantes (Botanical
Garden) seems to stand in the heart of Paris as a tranquil, almost antiquated space that
has oddly escaped history. The apparent timelessness of the place is unique. Founded
in 1635, the Jardin is, in fact, one of the few scientific institutions created by the king
to emerge from the French Revolution unscathed. Transformed into the Muséum
d’Histoire Naturelle (Museum of Natural History) by a June 10, 1793, decree of the
National Convention, the Jardin reached new heights, and in the 1800s it became the
principal institution in the world for natural history. How are we to understand this
lasting transformation of the garden from a monarchical into a republican institution?
The abundant historiography of the Jardin focuses either on its existence as the Jardin
du Roi (Royal Garden) through 1789 or on its incarnation as the Muséum after 1800,
and thus the revolutionary decade remains an enigmatic parenthesis. Conversely, in
studies of the “final days of the Jardin du Roi” (Hamy) and the foundation of the
Muséum, discussions of the Revolution, with its ideological interplay, disputes, crises,
struggles, and solidarities, focus primarily on the short-term. Thus, in order to tackle
the question of the transition from the Old Regime to the French Revolution and beyond
it was necessary to shift perspectives, to depart from both the revolutionary event and
the disciplinary boundaries of the history of the sciences, and to adopt a comprehensive
approach that is sensitive to the interaction of the social, economic, cultural, political,
and symbolic meanings that the garden as a site represented. This is the objective of
Emma C. Spary in Utopia’s Garden: based on impeccable erudition, drawing upon
very diverse primary and secondary sources, and enriched by current approaches in
cultural history, social history, and the sociology of the sciences, the book confidently
opens new perspectives on French natural history of the second half of the eighteenth
century.
The study begins with the arrival of Buffon at the head of the Jardin in 1739 and
the publication, starting in 1749, of the first volumes of his Histoire naturelle. From
this time until his death in 1788, the garden owed its grandeur and reputation to Buffon.
First, in an institutional sense, the intendant knew how to work the system of court
patronage effectively in order to convert his scientific credit into official posts for his
protégés. Second, in an intellectual and cultural sense, the same image of nature—a
nature that was close to man, directly accessible through the senses, and immediately
yielding to man’s influence—both underlay the Histoire naturelle and was manifested
in the garden’s greenhouses and flower beds. The success of Buffon’s book, one of the
best known of the century, proves that this conception of nature resonated to a large
degree with the enlightened public. Further proof of this resonance was the capacity
of Buffon and his collaborators to mobilize a wide network of travelers and corre-
spondents, nobles, merchants and diplomats, administrators, and inhabitants of the
colonies for the development of the garden. In one remarkable chapter dedicated to the
correspondence of André Thouin, who became head gardener in 1764, Spary relates in
detail the system of exchanges, services, and symbolic and material gratification that
structured the relations between the stationary gardener and his distant emissaries.
Drawing upon Bruno Latour’s model of networks using the tools of social history, the
author demonstrates how, in its most material aspects—the disciplined gathering of
specimens and their journey to the garden—natural history became enmeshed in the

Book Reviews 167
social and cultural system of the Old Regime, with its rules of exchange and courtesy,
its rhetoric, and its forms of patronage and subordination.
Finally, the natural history craze and the place it occupied in Old Regime France
may be better understood if they are related to underlying motives and cultural repre-
sentations. Spary rightly emphasizes this: for Buffon and his contemporaries, natural
history, far from being limited to questions of classification, was inseparable from its
application in the domains of agriculture, chemistry, and medicine. In this way, natural
history was directly related to the questions of government and political economy being
debated by liberal ministers and enlightened elites: in their opinion, royal reform de-
pended foremost on governing nature rationally and morally and on transforming the
rural economy through the introduction of new species that would reinvigorate forests,
improve cultivation and farming, and, in the end, regenerate the entire country. Ex-
amples of this include, among other cases, Thouin’s use of the wheels of government
to facilitate the plant trade between the metropole and the colonies, noble agronomists’
and rich landowners’ interest in acclimatization, and Daubenton’s experiments in breed-
ing animals.
This is not to say, however, that at the end of the eighteenth century this type of
utility was the exclusive right of natural history and the Jardin du Roi: other sciences
and institutions—the Royal Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Medicine—
were also able to lay legitimate claim to it. But in the case of natural history—botany
in particular—this vision of the role of science acquired a symbolic and moral reso-
nance that was all the more powerful because it contained a utopian meaning and
included the regeneration of both nature and society. Whether one thinks of Buffon’s
fears about the degeneration of American nature or Thouin’s hopes to acclimatize exotic
trees and plants over the course of several generations, one can see that French natu-
ralists affirmed the ability of humans to transform their constitution quickly by modi-
fying air, climate, and living conditions. Each naturalized plant already seemed to offer
material proof of this proclaimed truth. Spary correctly stresses that from the 1780s
the Jardin existed as a utopian space; the Revolution, likewise short lived, also invested
the garden with the aura of a regenerative utopia. From this time on, the Revolution
legitimized the expertise of naturalists in a new fashion, shifting its domain from nature
to society.
As an institution, the Jardin was the first site where this shift was manifested. During
the Revolution the institution experienced a difficult period of transition: after half a
century of undivided rule, Buffon’s death left the system in shambles. To reform the
Jardin, the officers had to group themselves around his loyal supporters, Daubenton
and Thouin. In the vein of recent works on the political language of the Revolution,
Spary is attentive to discursive forms and linguistic strategies. She analyzes with great
astuteness how the garden’s officers turned away from the language and practices of
patronage and adopted a communal attitude and rhetoric, thus enabling them within
only the first few months of Revolution to adhere quite naturally to the new codes of
representation and patriotism. Naturalists abandoned the relay of royal ministers and
even the king and instead directly addressed the deputies of the nation through repre-
sentatives charged with speaking on their behalf. At the same time, naturalists exploited
their position as men in contact with nature and familiar with its laws and used their
scientific competency to legitimize a discourse that established them as privileged rep-
resentatives and exemplary actors in the new political order. Their rhetoric, therefore,
played not only with the survival of man and the institution but also with the revolu-
tionary project itself.
The emblems chosen in 1793 to represent the Muséum—a Phrygian cap to symbolize

168 Book Reviews
liberty; the vine and wheat for agriculture; a beehive for the collective activity of
scholars—exemplified the direct links between nature, science, and politics that were
needed to lay the foundation for the Jacobin revolution. The revolutionaries of year II
supported a sensualist epistemology, and through festivals and spectacles they devel-
oped a pedagogy that was based on sight and emotion. Thus evolved the role that the
new Muséum could play in the republic: it was an ideal site of harmony and utility, a
space that simultaneously demonstrated and prefigured the future perfection of France,
as was reflected in the gathering of exotic plants, which each day increased the collec-
tions of the Jardin before being redistributed to gardens in the departments. Through
the Muséum and the presentation of nature to citizens in the form of a spectacle, the
revolutionary process became naturalized, and the future of the republican nation ap-
peared to be in keeping with the nature of things.
This alliance between the Muséum and the Republic was necessarily short lived, and
indeed it dissolved soon after Thermidor. In 1795, in order to survive, the institution
had to break free of its republican origins and seek other forms of consensus and
stabilization, as symbolized by the arrival of Cuvier and his later role as the head of
the Muséum. Can we therefore say that, from the Jardin of the eighteenth century to
the Muséum of the nineteenth century, the same institution existed over the years as a
perpetual entity that was independent of the individuals who composed it? Spary’s
whole narrative goes against the grain of such a schema: as much a material space as
a symbolic site, the Jardin du Roi/Muséum was between 1750 and the end of the century
the object and product of constant negotiations between different groups of actors who
found themselves linked to each other and who, each in their own way, attempted to
define or appropriate the use of the garden. It represented for savants a theater of
Nature’s order and riches, for the Jacobins, an image of ideal social harmony, for
citizens invited to stroll its grounds a space of boisterous and uncontrollable liberty.
As the book suggests, the naturalists succeeded in getting a variety of possible meanings
and uses of nature to coexist within the walls of the garden, while at the same time
taking advantage of its versatile institutional structure to create a space to work out a
consensus. In other words, they knew how to establish the garden as a kind of multiple
utopia—a heterotopia. That is why the institution could pass from the Old Regime to
the Revolution and the Jardin du Roi could become the national Muséum.
Finally, beyond being the history of a single institution—the Jardin—and of one
science—natural history—one of the main lessons and strengths of the book is that it
sketches out an extraordinarily rich, complex, and ambiguous account of nature and
what it meant to supporters of the Enlightenment, be they scholars or politicians, gar-
deners or travelers, philosophes or economists. Indeed, as the author suggests, this
history could be further enriched by extending it to the other domains of knowledge
present in the Jardin, such as mineralogy, or by exploring the relationship between
natural history and chemistry, art, and aesthetics. Even with its silences and unexplored
avenues, the book is a splendid demonstration of the benefits and effectiveness of
Spary’s consciously comprehensive and eclectic approach, for she brings together the
tools and methods of the history of science, social history, and cultural history to
examine how science, nature, and society intersected during the Enlightenment and
French Revolution.
Given this, the direction and tone that Spary adopts in the book’s conclusion is a bit
surprising. Whether it be in the few pages that extend the history of the Muséum into
the first decades of the nineteenth century—a discussion which is too allusive and
inconclusive—or in the author’s explanation of her methodological and epistemolog-
ical positions, Spary seems especially anxious to establish a historiographical position,

Book Reviews 169
even at the cost of oversimplification (e.g., she reduces classification—the object of

numerous theoretical debates between eighteenth-century naturalists—to a simple “ep-
iphenomenon” of their economic activities). This approach misrepresents the overall
perspective of the book. Thus it is not in the conclusion but in a middle chapter that
the key to her reading can be found: “Shall the tree of liberty be the only one which
cannot be naturalized at the Jardin des plantes?” the officers of the Jardin asked in a
1790 address to the National Assembly. Two centuries later, Utopia’s Garden answers
this question and interprets what made possible the spectacular role of nature in the
history of the men of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
MARIE NOËLLE BOURGUET

Université Paris 7—Denis Diderot
Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the
French Revolution. By David Andress. Royal Historical Society Studies in
History, New Series. Edited by Martin Daunton et al.
Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. Pp. xⳭ239. $60.00.
Presaged by a series of articles on popular unrest in Paris during 1791, this perceptive
but misleadingly titled study of Parisian reactions to the Champ de Mars massacre is
a welcome addition to the literature of the early Revolution. A reconsideration of the
event was overdue, but research on the Champ de Mars episode is hindered by the
destruction of many pertinent sources by fires set during the Commune in 1871. Using
the archives of the Prefecture of Police, where the records of twenty-two of the forty-
eight sections survive, David Andress seeks to trace events leading to the massacre and
reaction to it afterward.
Andress argues that the catalyst for tension was the January 1791 deadline for clergy
to swear an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Municipal authorities
were concerned that elements of the clergy would attempt to provoke disorder to further
their interests, but in fact popular discontent was more focused on refractory clergy.
Andress also weaves in several other influences that stoked unrest, such as awareness
of the system of police spies, the popular press, political clubs, and others. His chapter
on police spies is particularly illuminating. Indeed, he argues quite convincingly that
the forces of order and the radicals each believed that the other was making use of
elements of the social milieu from which police spies were traditionally drawn. In other
words, each group believed the other to be in collusion with the same third party, but
in light of eighteenth-century perceptions of the masses it was altogether plausible.
Pamphlets and newspapers, as well as those who hawked them, also promoted popular
unrest and sparked official suspicion.
A primary point of contact between the radicals and the forces of order was the
National Guard. Radicals viewed the Guard as an instrument by which the authorities
would restore the position of the aristocracy and the clergy. Conversely, municipal
officials saw the Guard as a bulwark against the masses, who were being manipulated
by counterrevolutionary forces.
The building tensions reached their climax in a violent encounter at the Champ de
Mars on July 17, 1791. Andress argues against imputing social significance to the event,
asserting that there were not two social groups set against each other at the Champ de
Mars and arguing for the need to recognize complexities in understanding popular
attitudes during the French Revolution. Andress contends instead that membership in

170 Book Reviews
what he calls the “revolutionary collective” was determined in an entirely individual

way—in fact, he demonstrates that several future sansculottes of 1793 were aligned
with the forces of order in 1791.
Despite his disavowal of social significance, Andress might have pursued the active/
passive citizen divide in the book. As he clearly demonstrates, police were far less
harsh in their treatment of those who had someone to vouch for them than they were
with those who did not. This was virtually the point of demarcation between active
and passive citizens, and it corresponds with the fact that the direct tax requirement
necessary to qualify as an active citizen was often regarded as less onerous than the
requirement of continuous residence in the same domicile for one year. This is not
inconsistent with Andress’s argument, for future sansculottes leaders were active citi-
zens during 1790–91. Although he briefly touches on the issue of passive citizens (p.
219), more exploration of it would have strengthened his study.
Andress’s book represents the first substantial reexamination of the Champ de Mars
episode in forty years and is to be altogether welcomed. However, what is curiously
absent from his account is a consideration of the event itself. The Champ de Mars
massacre was confusing, and aspects of it remain obscure. Although he does briefly
treat the degree to which the Guard provided warning before opening fire, the book,
despite its title, is less about the massacre at the Champ de Mars than about Parisian
reactions to it. Occasionally, albeit rarely, Andress seems to accept some accounts too
uncritically. Although Andress does indicate that it was offered in a bar, the claim by
one putative victim that Lafayette himself had struck at him with a sword (p. 204)
seems improbable. In addition, at times the catalog of reactions is excessive.
Finally, one wishes that Andress had addressed the general amnesty of September
1791, when both those accused of complicity in the king’s flight and those arrested
after the Champ de Mars massacre were granted amnesty. The National Assembly
intended it to mark a fresh start, but one suspects on the basis of Andress’s account
that the amnesty may have continued or deepened suspicions because each side saw
protagonists from the other side amnestied. As the concluding event to the massacre,
some consideration of the amnesty was in order.
In the final analysis, however, this is a nuanced, multilayered analysis from which
scholars of the Revolution, particularly those interested in its early stage, will benefit.
Topics concerning the history of Revolutionary Paris are difficult to pursue because of
the communards of 1871—although in this regard one wonders why the author avoided
the Archives nationales as a complementary source—and Andress is to be congratu-
lated on broadening our understanding of a pivotal event.
MICHAEL P. FITZSIMMONS
Auburn University Montgomery
Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996. By Avner Ben-

Amos.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiiⳭ425. $95.00.
When François Mitterrand died in January of 1996 his funeral became, in the words
of Avner Ben-Amos, an occasion for “an assessment of French collective identity” (p.
375). Mitterrand’s socialist commitments, evoked at a tribute organized at the Place de
Bastille, were balanced by two religious ceremonies the following day—one held at
the cathedral of Notre Dame, where a eulogy was delivered by the archbishop of Paris,

Book Reviews 171
the other at his native city of Jarnac, in Charente. International leaders gathered in
Paris, but attention was focused as well on the family drama of Jarnac, where Mitter-
rand’s wife and sons were joined in mourning by his mistress and their daughter.
Mitterrand’s funeral, described by Ben-Amos in an epilogue to his new book, captured
the complexity of a socialist who was decorated by the Vichy regime, an agnostic who
was fond of reading St. John of the Cross, a family man who led a double life. In his
careful orchestration of the funeral rituals that expressed the different dimensions of
his personal and public life, Mitterrand was working within a long tradition of state-
sponsored funerals that is the subject of Ben-Amos’s new study.
One of the strengths of Ben-Amos’s study is his careful reconstruction of public
funerals such as Mitterrand’s, starting with the French Revolution. Drawing on archival
sources, political speeches, and the press, he narrates and analyzes the long series of
such events, many of which have taken on iconic status in French history. The funeral
of Marat, as presented by the artist David, used the exposed corpse “as a powerful lever
by which the revolutionaries mobilized and directed the people toward an organized
revenge against the conspirators” (p. 39). Exposed corpses would play a role again in
1848, when a procession of those killed by troops during a demonstration on February
23 helped inspire Parisians to raise the barricades the following day and bring down
the July Monarchy. More typical, however, were funerals that were designed to create
at least an illusion of harmony, in which the remains of the dead were protected by an
elaborately decorated coffin and the focus was shifted away from the corpse itself to
the attributes and achievements of the dead person. Such events have been studied as
“lieux de mémoire” in the famous collection edited by Pierre Nora (Les lieux des
mémoire, 3 vols. [Paris, 1984–92]), which includes an earlier essay by Ben-Amos on
the funeral of Victor Hugo in 1885, as well as Jean Tulard’s analysis of the return of
Napoleon’s ashes to France in 1840. Ben-Amos reviews these famous cases, but he
treats as well dozens of other funeral rites that the different governments used as a
source of legitimization. Through such celebrations, officials aspired both to shape the
feelings of the audience and to associate its sense of gratitude and reverence for the
dead with the current regime.
Ben-Amos organizes his work along both chronological and thematic lines, a choice
that results in some repetitiveness. In part 1 he reviews the origins of the state funeral
in the discourse and ceremonies of the Revolution and traces the tradition of state
funerals through the succeeding regimes. In addition to the funerals of members of the
royal families and political leaders, Ben-Amos analyzes the use of funeral services by
republican dissidents, who took advantage of the respect for their dead heroes as a way
of mobilizing their supporters and demonstrating their power. The funeral of Victor
Noir, the socialist journalist killed by a cousin of Napoleon III in January of 1870, for
example, provided an occasion for public criticism of the Second Empire. The state
funeral achieved its apogee in the Third Republic, when the government organized
eighty-two funeral services. According to Ben-Amos, the official honors accorded the
dead between 1878 and 1940 were a central element in the educational mission of the
Republic, which used them to define and propagate the values of secularism, patriotism,
and republicanism.
In part 2 Ben-Amos moves away from a chronological approach and breaks down
the funerals of the Third Republic according to categories. Politicians were the most
important group, with thirty-two services, followed by military men with twenty-three
services; writers, colonizers, scientists, and musicians complete the list. Ben-Amos
remarks only briefly on the monopoly men held on funeral honors, but his work none-
theless underlines the patriarchal character of the Third Republic. Within each category

172 Book Reviews
he focuses on a number of particular cases without clearly explaining the reason for
his choices. In treating colonizers, for example, three of the eight accorded state honors
are singled out—but why Admiral Courbet, Paul Bert, and Marshal Lyautey, but not
Pierre de Brazza? Ben-Amos’s treatment of the creation of the cult dedicated to Un-
known Soldier in 1920 is exemplary, but the thematic treatment in part 2 makes it hard
to discern the extent to which World War I generated any substantial changes in the
ways in which the dead were honored and remembered.
In part 3 Ben-Amos draws on models from cultural anthropology to present an ideal
type of the state funeral of the Third Republic. Some of the analysis here is intriguing,
as when he explores the shadings of sacrality associated with the Parisian monuments
used in the rituals: the Pantheon, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides, and Notre Dame.
But much of the material covered here already seems familiar from the previous sec-
tions. In part 3 and throughout, Ben-Amos draws consistently on a wide range of
theorists for concepts and categories. Mary Douglas’s contrast between grid and group
and Clifford Geertz’s concept of a sacred center provide some guidance, but these as
well as ideas from Emile Durkheim, Robert Hertz, Maurice Halbwachs, Edward Shils,
Michel Foucault, and many others are generally treated very briefly. Ben-Amos has
read widely in social theory, but he draws few lines between the different models and
concepts, leaving the reader disoriented about which set of ideas might provide the
most satisfying interpretive framework. This lack of focus shows as well in Ben-Amos’s
decision to close with both an epilogue on the state funerals of the Fourth and Fifth
Republics, which makes virtually no reference to theory, and a conclusion that draws
comparisons with funerals in ancient Athens and Rome, Renaissance Florence, and the
United States in the nineteenth century in just nine pages. There are organizational and
methodological problems with Ben-Amos’s book, but it is nonetheless a valuable
source with a great deal of fascinating material about a series of rituals that go to the
heart of French collective identity.
THOMAS KSELMAN
University of Notre Dame
Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism. By
Jonathan Beecher.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xviⳭ584.
$65.00.
This insightful new biography confirms Jonathan Beecher’s standing as the leading
Anglophone historian of “utopian” socialism. Beecher’s earlier study of Charles Fourier
(Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World [Berkeley, 1986]) masterfully illu-
minated the original, if sometimes inscrutable, ideas of the socialist pioneer. The new
work examines the life of Fourier’s most important disciple, Victor Considerant. As
an influential journalist and political organizer, Considerant was pivotal to France’s
romantic politics of the 1830s and 1840s, the Revolution of 1848, and the history of
communal experiments in the United States. In telling his story, Beecher examines
these phenomena in new and interesting ways, while bringing some fascinating Amer-
ican radicals into the picture, especially the Fourierist journalist and businessman Albert
Brisbane.
After graduating from the elite Ecole Polytechnique—a French mixture of West
Point and MIT—Considerant quickly established himself as a leading member of the

Book Reviews 173
generation of 1830. As editor of a series of Fourierist newspapers, including France’s

first socialist daily, the Démocratie pacifique, Considerant helped elaborate what Bee-
cher calls “romantic socialism.” This somewhat diffuse set of ideas was more a political
sensibility than a coherent ideology, but, as Beecher shows, its various proponents
shared a solid core of beliefs. Most important was the notion that the French Revolution
had dissolved the corporate solidarities of the ancien régime without creating new
solidarities to take their place. The Revolution, in this view, had spawned a sort of
Hobbesian individualism ruled by egoism, the profit motive, and ruthless competition.
For early socialists, the antidote to this postrevolutionary war of all against all was to
bring people together through new forms of association, whether mutual aid societies,
producers’ cooperatives, or the ideal communities (Phalanxes) imagined by Charles
Fourier. Most romantic socialists expressed their desire for association in the language
of Christian fraternity, finding in the Gospel the source of all communitarian and so-
cialist belief.
Despite such Romantic and idealistic views, Considerant had, as Beecher shows, an
eminently practical side. He understood that any effort to establish a Phalanx would
involve considerable risk, and until the collapse of the democratic Second Republic in
1851 he discouraged all such experiments. Considerant preferred to devote his energies
to political journalism, especially to the effort to educate people about the perils of
France’s competitive and egoistic society and the need for association. Fourier’s dis-
ciple dismissed the notion that people would naturally come together through the work-
ings of “passionate attraction,” and he suppressed or sanitized Fourier’s ideas about
the social benefits of sexual gratification.
Considerant blunted the most radical features of Fourier’s message, Beecher writes,
because he wanted to make the master’s ideas more accessible and politically palatable.
But these efforts to soften the doctrine were fully consistent with the publicist’s political
temperament. Despite his socialist beliefs, he was cautious, even conservative, in much
of his public life. Until the eve of the 1848 Revolution, Considerant rejected republi-
canism and openly supported the monarchy of Louis-Philippe. He eschewed political
violence and argued that change should be gradual and unthreatening to the rich.
After February 1848, Considerant became a republican and did much to bring the
Fourierist movement into a united democratic and socialist left. But his political meth-
ods, if not always his rhetoric, remained moderate. He opposed the violence of June
1848, sympathizing with rebellious workers but arguing for obedience to the Republic,
despite its increasingly conservative tilt. In June 1849, this moderation shaded over
into an indecisiveness that left him unable to act. As an elected Representative of the
People, Considerant rejected the use of violence to protest the government’s unconsti-
tutional military intervention in Rome. But he lacked the resolve to hold to his belief.
He did nothing to divert leaders of the parliamentary left from the insurrectionary fray.
And though Considerant knew it was political suicide to participate in antigovernment
demonstrations, he did so anyway, with the result that he and most other leaders of the
democratic socialist left had to flee the country to avoid arrest.
The events of June 1849, unjustly neglected in most histories of the period, are
crucial to Beecher’s story. They show Considerant at the height of his political potential
while revealing how ill equipped he was to realize his promise. Had the Fourierist
leader followed through on his nonviolent convictions—and his practical political in-
stincts—he might have been able to convince his fellow left-wing parliamentarians to
abandon a course of action that proved disastrous for France’s democratic opposition.
Considerant’s other notable failure, as Beecher shows, came in August 1855 when
he suffered a new bout of personal and political paralysis. Having long opposed the

174 Book Reviews
creation of Fourierist Phalanxes, Considerant changed his mind after his exile to Bel-
gium in 1849 and the collapse of the French republic two years later. In 1854, he
decided to erect a model community in Texas and to move there with his wife and
mother-in-law. But he established this colony without proper preparation and did so
on inhospitable land and against the wishes of local elites. The new settlement, dubbed
Reunion, found itself in serious trouble from the start, and when its problems came to
a head Considerant was once again paralyzed by indecisiveness. Rather than help dis-
mantle the colony or seek new sources of financial support, he withdrew emotionally,
plagued by the depression that had haunted him all his life. Before long, he abandoned
Reunion altogether, taking refuge with friends elsewhere in Texas. There he scratched
out a living for the next thirteen years before returning to Paris in 1868, a specter from
the past.
This compelling and gracefully written book evokes just two quibbles. Its 450 pages
of densely printed text make it longer (and more expensive) than it needs to be. Bee-
cher’s familiarity with Considerant’s voluminous writings, both journalistic and epis-
tolary, is admirable, but readers would, I think, have appreciated somewhat less detail.
My other minor concern is that, for all this rich documentation, we learn strangely little
about Considerant’s personal life. Beecher tells us hardly anything, for example, about
his forty-three-year marriage and his long cohabitation with both his wife and her
mother, the woman Beecher suggests was the object of Considerant’s first, albeit un-
consummated, love. Perhaps the largest unanswered question about Considerant’s life
is why such a fundamentally moderate, often cautious man embraced a Fourierist doc-
trine so radical that some of its texts could not be published until the 1960s.
EDWARD BERENSON
New York University
French Socialists before Marx: Workers, Women, and the Social Question in
France. By Pamela Pilbeam.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Pp. xⳭ259. $70.00 (cloth);
$29.95 (paper).
Pamela Pilbeam’s French Socialists before Marx is an effort to redeem early nine-
teenth-century French socialists from the obloquy into which they were cast by later
Marxists, who famously dismissed them and their work as “utopian.” Pursuing her
goal, Pilbeam offers two main arguments. First, she portrays leading socialists (from
Charles Fourier to Jean-Pierre Proudhon) as activists, not dreamers, whose various
activities and theories constituted the kind of “plural socialism” called for recently by
Lionel Jospin. In other words, far from living detached from the world of French
workers, Pilbeam’s socialist leaders and thinkers created a variety of grassroots asso-
ciations, educational projects, political bodies, and communities, all of which directly
and actively engaged complex social problems of the period from the Revolution to
the Paris Commune. Pilbeam’s second argument is that women were far more active
within these movements than has usually been recognized. It was primarily the work
of women, she argues, that gave body and substance to socialist ideas.
Pilbeam supports her argument that early French socialists were grounded in the
daily lives of their mostly artisan constituencies by first offering detailed explorations
of the key concepts underlying the major socialist associations, including the Fouri-
erists, the Icarians, and the Saint-Simonians (each of which enjoyed different intellec-

Book Reviews 175
tual roots, and each of which spawned breakaway groups). In three introductory chap-
ters, Pilbeam examines in turn socialist responses to social questions, to the theoretical
and practical legacies of the French Revolution, and to religious belief. In the latter
case, she contends that, far from disdaining religious belief, most of these “plural
socialists” embraced recognizably Christian spiritual ideas.
Each of these chapters is structured as a genealogy. Chapters move from, for ex-
ample, Gracchus Babeuf, to Étienne Cabet, to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to Charles Fou-
rier, and so on, with brief glances at the ideas and practices of each. From time to time,
the author draws parallels (sometimes curious ones) between the ideas of these early
socialists and those promulgated by more recent politicians, from Jospin to Tony Blair.
From these short intellectual histories of the time, Pilbeam then narrates, in separate
chapters, the histories of the various associations, their political efforts, and their edu-
cational projects. One long chapter, “The ‘New Woman,’” offers a particularly rich
portrait of key socialist women leaders and their work. Pauline Roland, Jeanne Deroin,
Flora Tristan, Suzanne Voilquin, Eugénie Niboyet, George Sand, and many others take
center stage here, their work, their lives, their relationships with male leaders, their
early successes and subsequent failures, as well as their ultimate disappearance from
the national scene shaping a fascinating story. Because Pilbeam has read many previ-
ously neglected sources, particularly collections of correspondence between these
women and their male colleagues, this chapter offers much new information. Moreover,
the author makes a brave attempt to bring together all the ideas expressed by these
women, many of them contradictory and (to many later feminist minds) reactionary,
and to argue that they constituted a sort of feminism avant la lettre.
For example, the argument that motherhood was the inescapable pinnacle of a
woman’s achievements, and thus the basis for claims to education, to political and
economic rights equal to those men enjoyed, is portrayed as progressive when articu-
lated by Roland, Deroin, or others. The contradictions inherent in such arguments,
however, ultimately defeat Pilbeam: the resulting narrative is often confusing, leaping
disconcertingly through time. The “jumpy” quality of the narrative will particularly
trouble those not fully knowledgeable about mid-nineteenth-century French history.
(For them, and for most others, I would recommend a much more thoroughgoing
narrative of this story, Claire Moses’s French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century
[New York, 1984].) Nevertheless, Pilbeam’s painstakingly researched portraits of these
remarkable—and often overlooked—women are intriguing, and may well prompt
younger scholars to undertake the work of providing all these women with proper
biographies.
To whom will this work appeal? Readers interested in reconsidering socialist thought
will find that this work provides a wide-ranging and passionately written introduction—
an account of the work of French men and women determined to resist the spreading
world of a cruel and unfettered industrial capitalism by organizing new associations
grounded both in traditional artisan practices (trade associations, workshops, schools)
and in the new political claims (for political and economic equality) made possible by
the Revolution. That the constituents for these “new socialists” remained mostly arti-
sans in the process of being displaced by new systems of production, that socialists’
models remained somewhat anachronistic, did not diminish either their work’s social
impact or its potential as a model for a non-Marxist collective resistance in the con-
temporary world. In Pilbeam’s view, we can all find inspiration and new ideas in the
practical worlds of thousands of early socialists, not least those the author describes,
anachronistically, as “feminist socialists.”
Despite its strengths, however, this book suffers from several difficulties. First, de-

176 Book Reviews
spite its claim to “reground” socialist activities by focusing on the day-to-day work of
the various movements, the book does not in fact accomplish this. Nowhere, except in
brief references to their existence, do we get any picture of how socialist organizations
actually functioned for members. The leaders, male and female, similarly appear in
only short “pocket” biographies, their work mentioned but rarely detailed, their expe-
riences delineated so briefly that even events such as Flora Tristan’s remarkable journey
to Peru to find her paternal family, her sojourn there, and her subsequent return from
Peru when her political activities caused her family to turn her out, penniless, make
no appearance. The lives of other women leaders are similarly abbreviated, so that,
although Pilbeam claims (in a curiously inconclusive concluding paragraph) that “Ro-
land died for her socialism and Deroin spent nearly half her life in exile because she
would not give up her convictions” (p. 205), readers will not learn upon what events
these remarks are based. Moreover, Pilbeam’s conclusions, that post-Commune so-
cialism was hopelessly disunited, even after the founding of the SFIO (Parti Socialiste,
Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière), and that socialist feminism was de-
funct, are both questionable. Directly contradicting both these conclusions are many
books not listed in the bibliography—among them those by Charles Sowerwine and
(modesty aside) me—as well as dozens of works exploring virtually every aspect of
early Third Republic socialism in France, a socialism that was—despite the spread of
Marxist groups—surely as “plural” in its manifestations as was that of earlier times.
PATRICIA PENN HILDEN

University of California, Berkeley
Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891–1918. By

Christopher E. Forth.
De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. Pp. ixⳭ238. $42.00.
Surely no book that prompts its reviewer to become acutely conscious of his or her
own professional location—I write as a professor at a provincial liberal arts college
assessing a younger scholar at an even more provincial institution for a prominent
academic journal—can be all bad. And Christopher Forth’s Zarathustra in Paris, which
seriously entertains the proposition that “careers are made and broken by critical re-
views” (p. 16), is certainly not that. Setting out to trace the rise and fall of Friedrich
Nietzsche’s “vogue” in the French intellectual world between 1891 and 1918, Forth
charts not the German philosopher’s “influence” in any conventional sense so much as
who read him, how, and why. The result is an often revealing sociology of French
intellectual life at the turn of the last century—of those ordinarily invisible groupings,
hierarchies, and networks through which writers and their reputations are constructed.
Forth’s starting point, not surprisingly, is Pierre Bourdieu, whose penetrating, irony-
laden sociology of intellectual “fields” and the “cultural capital” that demarcates them
has steadily accumulated its own capital among intellectual historians over the past
decade. There is much to be said both for Bourdieu’s approach and for how Forth
applies it. While occasionally lapsing into “pomo-speak”—“Nietzsche as a constructed
or epistemic individual refers to a finite set of properties standing in relation to mutually
reinforcing representations on a predefined conceptual space” (p. 8)—Forth’s prose is
not generally freighted with jargon. He clearly explicates, sometimes with surprising
results, how matters of status, political affiliation, and gender were encoded in academic
disputes over his subject. Thus, Forth reports, notwithstanding Nietzsche’s later asso-

Book Reviews 177
ciation with political reaction, not to mention antisemitism, his first French defenders
tended to be Dreyfusards, Jews, and socialists. Then again, as Forth also notes, the
philosopher’s champions characteristically couched the contest over their hero in
“terms of a healthy masculinity versus dangerous effeminacy” (p. 11).
Forth’s central claim, however, is that what most determines a writer’s views is his
or her standing within a given academic field and that Nietzsche was typically appro-
priated by younger, almost invariably “marginalized” writers as opposed to those in
the mainstream. It is here that he runs into trouble. First, there is the problem of
evidence: how, apart from noting the age of one’s subjects and counting their publi-
cations, does one determine their station, individually and collectively, in the “intel-
lectual field”? Forth all too often relies on (unsubstantiated) assessments of Nietzsche’s
readership by such well-known writers as Maurice Barrès or, still more troubling, on
the notorious enquêtes that sprouted regularly from the pages of the fin de siècle Pa-
risian press. While not always accepting these at face value, neither does Forth always
treat them skeptically. Thus he cites the notorious youth survey of 1912, Les jeunes
gens d’aujourd’hui, as an undistorted mirror of “the rising generation of young na-
tionalists” who found Nietzsche “primarily a hero of the previous generation” (p. 152).
Robert Wohl has portrayed the same survey as more the “literary act” of two young
writers (Henri Massis, especially) who “wanted to shape opinion, not to measure it”
(The Generation of 1914 [Cambridge, Mass., 1979], pp. 10, 8)—surely a judgment
more in keeping with Forth’s own postmodern predilections.
Who turns up at the “margins,” moreover, and who in the mainstream, seems at
times predetermined in Forth’s account—or, at least, circularly defined. Thus Forth
cites Charles Andler’s “early radicalism and marginal status in the intellectual world”
of the 1890s to explain why he devoted “extensive scholarly attention” (p. 108) to
Nietzsche and perhaps why he gravitated toward the philosopher’s ideas in the first
place. But Andler, at the time, was maı̂tre de conférences at the École Normale Su-
périeure. How much more prominent could a young professor expect to be? Moreover,
at the risk of sounding naive, could one not find Nietzsche’s ideas compelling regardless
of one’s cultural status? Evidently Andler still did by the 1920s, when he actually
published his six-volume work on the philosopher. Similarly, we find Henri Albert, a
“virtual unknown in the literary world” when he oversaw the first French translations
of Nietzsche in 1894, engaging in a Machiavellian campaign to secure his status as
“guardian of the Nietzschean orthodoxy” (p. 39). But how could Albert have known
that a Nietzsche vogue, no less an “orthodoxy,” would emerge at all? And again, Forth
finds himself obliged to explain the Nietzschean proclivities of socialist politician Jean
Jaurès—hardly a marginal figure by any measure—first as evidence of Nietzsche’s
growing prestige after 1896 and then as an exception to the rule: “most party socialists
would continue to denounce the philosopher,” he writes (p. 117).
Perhaps helping to explain such difficulties is a crucial paradox embedded in Bour-
dieu’s theory: at certain junctures, as Forth seems to recognize, “marginal” assaults on
the established order become immensely prestigious within the French academic field.
Thus, while such latter-day admirers of Nietzsche as “Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault,
and Jacques Derrida” lack “positions of real academic power in France,” he notes, they
nonetheless “enjoy tremendous power within the sphere of cultural production” (p.
182). In fact, for Bourdieu such “heretics” become culturally “consecrated,” achieving
a stature beyond even that of “the philosophical high priests of the Sorbonne” (Homo
Academicus [Stanford, Calif., 1988], pp. 105–6, xviii–xxiv); Forth, however, continues
to consign them to the margins. Indeed, Forth seems to have trouble with such fin de
siècle luminaries as Henri Bergson, Charles Péguy, and Georges Sorel—all “marginal”

178 Book Reviews
in his analysis, yet all surely endowed with more cultural capital even within the aca-
demic field than the high priests of the “mainstream.”
Forth might have benefited from a brief glance at the history of the French intellectual
field at least since Rousseau. Surely Nietzsche is not the first foreign avatar of the
Parisian avant-garde to have “become the topic of conspicuous discussion in bourgeois
literary salons” (p. 132). Might not the Nietzsche vogue have arisen at least in part
from the periodically transcendent prestige of intellectual marginality in modern French
culture? Zarathustra in Paris, in any case, demonstrates both the advantages and the
pitfalls of applying an ironic postmodern sociology in earnest. There is surely much to
be revealed about how academic animals behave in their natural habitats, but one must
bear in mind that on the microhistorical level even academics are less predictable than
they appear, while on the macrohistorical level they are perhaps more so.
PAUL M. COHEN
Lawrence University
Bodies and Souls: Politics and the Professionalization of Nursing in France,

1880–1922. By Katrin Schultheiss. Harvard Historical Studies, volume 139.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. viiⳭ248. $49.95.
The anticlerical politics of the Third Republic provide the central backdrop for this
engaging account of a crucial period of transition in nursing training and practice in
France. Tracing efforts to professionalize and secularize nursing as well as obstacles
to those efforts between 1880 and 1922, Katrin Schultheiss offers a valuable contri-
bution to studies of a “feminine profession” (p. 3) whose French practitioners have
attracted relatively few historians.1 She focuses primarily on aspects of professionali-
zation rather than nurses themselves but does provide telling examples of individual
careers.
Extended case studies from Paris, Lyons, and Bordeaux are the core of Schultheiss’s
research, and each city’s story is different. Highlighting both national policy and local
realities is appropriate, for control of hospital administration and personnel remained
largely with departmental and municipal authorities—a contrast to the education min-
istry’s increasing influence on schools at the expense of local entities. Although the
interior ministry took a step toward greater central control by creating a “direction” of
public assistance in 1887, gaps often remained between local practice and recommen-
dations from the ministry’s director and the advisory Higher Council of Public Assis-
tance.
At the outset of the Third Republic, France still lacked a Florence Nightingale com-
mitted to turning nursing into an attractive career for suitably trained middle-class
women. Hospital nursing was typically the work of religious sisters (often in admin-
istrative capacities), assisted by poorly paid lay men and women service personnel.
The latter were essential because the soeurs were not supposed to see naked male bodies
1
Recent French studies include Yvonne Knibiehler, ed., Cornettes et blouses blanches: Les
infirmières dans la société française (Paris, 1984); Evelyne Diebolt, La maison de santé protes-
tante de Bordeaux (1863–1934): Vers une conception novatrice des soins et de l’hôpital (Tou-
louse, 1990); and Véronique Leroux-Hugon, Des Saintes laı̈ques: Les infirmières à l’aube de la
Troisième République (Paris, 1992).

Book Reviews 179
or witness women giving birth. The term infirmière, the familiar modern equivalent for
“nurse,” then designated various types of service workers and not just skilled care-
givers.
Anticlerical republicans who dominated the Paris city council launched the first local
efforts to replace religious sisters with lay women in some hospitals in 1878, the year
before leadership of the national government became fully republican and education
minister Jules Ferry began implementing policies to secularize the public primary
schools’ curriculum and teaching force. The extended political battles over secularizing
schools are familiar to historians, as are the travails of the first generation of newly
trained lay women teachers who replaced religious sisters and often encountered hos-
tility in remote areas.2 Reformers’ characterizations of both the model lay teacher and
the nurse emphasized their quintessentially feminine nurturing and maternal qualities,
thereby representing each profession as “public motherhood” (p. 6). Yet, Schultheiss
demonstrates, the lay woman became the dominant model for women teachers well
before she did so for nursing.
Why was this the case? For explanations Schultheiss turns to local histories, each
richly documented with archival and published sources, and she draws on studies em-
phasizing the Third Republic’s perpetuation of traditional models of womanhood.3 In
Paris many, but not all, anticlerical republicans and doctors supported secularizing
policies, but the first training courses introduced to improve lay women’s competence
were part-time and of minimal quality. In Lyons, republican as well as Catholic doctors
and politicians supported the existing hospitalières, a “hybrid” group of celibate sisters
who did not belong to religious orders and thus could take orders directly from lay
administrators instead of religious superiors (p. 83). Lyons, not Paris, established the
first full-time professional nursing school after 1899. In Bordeaux, Protestant notables
supported Dr. Anna Hamilton’s creation in 1901 of a training program on the English
Nightingale model, attached to a private hospital, and the republican mayor soon pushed
for a municipal counterpart, spurred on also by more national emphasis on seculari-
zation under premier Emile Combes. Both Bordeaux schools became supply lines for
other cities seeking qualified women to supervise the secularization of nursing staff.
Schultheiss concludes that before 1914 many republican doctors and politicians ech-
oed Catholic resistance to both lay nurses and more scientific nursing training. At first
glance this seems puzzling because anticlericals doing ideological combat with Cath-
olics embraced “science” as an alternative to religion. To account for republicans’
disinterest in reforming nursing, Schultheiss stresses three complementary gender-
based explanations. First, she underscores republicans’ emphasis on women’s domestic
role. Second, she sees that emphasis translated into resistance to creating professional
opportunities that might draw women away from marriage and childbearing at a time
of national preoccupation with falling birthrates. Third, she finds many doctors, them-
selves still working to upgrade their professional image, averse to professional nurses
who might challenge their authority in ways that nursing sisters or the poorly trained
did not. Only in 1922 did France’s new postwar health ministry decree standards for
the training of nurses who wished to obtain a new state certificate. The “Great War,”
2
Jacques Ozouf and Mona Ozouf, La République des instituteurs (Paris, 1992); Sharif Gemie,
Women and Schooling in France, 1815–1914: Gender, Authority, and Identity in the Female
Schooling Sector (Keele, 1995).
3
Elinor A. Accampo, Rachel G. Fuchs, and Mary Lynn Stewart, Gender and the Politics of
Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore, 1995).

180 Book Reviews
which drew thousands of women into nursing on a voluntary or paid basis, had un-
derscored deficiencies in nurses’ training.
Is there more to say about why the professionalization of French nursing lagged, as
compared to the process in England or the United States? Additional analysis of why
reforming nursing lacked the political priority assigned to reforming and secularizing
teaching could broaden Schultheiss’s central explanations. She appropriately notes lay
teachers’ responsibility for imbuing the “minds” of future generations with democratic
and secular, rather than authoritarian and religious, values (p. 10), implicitly suggesting
that French culture valued the care of “minds” over the care of “bodies.” Although
many anticlerical republicans had biases against professional women and wanted men
to teach boys, republican policies favored lay women teachers for girls’ schools, as
inclusion of relevant statistics could demonstrate. In 1876, 13,707 lay women and
19,956 sisters staffed public primary schools; in 1906, 54,961 lay women and only 626
religious did so.4 Paying public schoolteachers’ base salaries also became a national
obligation in 1889, whereas paying hospital staff remained a local matter. Between the
1870s and 1911 the number of hospital soeurs increased from 11,000 to 15,000, and
the lay staff increased dramatically, from 14,500 to nearly 95,000, although how many
of the latter were nurses or women is not indicated (p. 4). The school wars of the 1880s,
plus the storm over laicization of private-school teaching in 1904 and separation of
church and state in 1905, consumed considerable political energies and budgets, thereby
contributing to making investment in nursing training and secularizing staff a lower
and later political priority. Furthermore, nurses and teachers negotiated different work
spaces: women taught in all-female schools, nursery schools, and some one-room
schools enrolling girls and boys, and they encountered male supervision only during
inspectors’ visits, whereas hospitals (as Schultheiss indicates) brought male doctors
and female nurses into routine contact. Such comparative issues are indicative of how
Schultheiss’s important and stimulating study contributes to situating women’s expe-
riences within French political and cultural contexts.
LINDA L. CLARK
Millersville University of Pennsylvania
Le quadrige: Un siècle d’édition universitaire, 1860–1968. By Valérie Tesnière.

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. Pp. 492. Fr 248.
The history of publishing in France, as a field of research, began with a focus on the
early modern period and has only more recently moved into the post-Revolutionary
era. The massive Histoire de l’édition française (ed. Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean
Martin, 4 vols. [Paris, 1982–86]), which was in many ways a culmination of early
modern research, was more of a report on works in progress for the modern period. It
has been followed by a number of monographs on individual publishers (e.g., Jean-
Yves Mollier, Louis Hachette [Paris, 1999]) and specific periods (Pascal Fouché,
L’edition française sous l’Occupation [Paris, 1987]). In Le quadrige, Valérie Tesnière
has provided a welcome contribution to this growing literature with a richly detailed
4
Raymond Grew and Patrick J. Harrigan, School, State, and Society: The Growth of Elementary
Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France—a Quantitative Analysis (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991),
p. 291.

Book Reviews 181
history of the preeminent academic publisher in France, the Presses Universitaires de

France (PUF).
The quadriga of the title refers to the four-horsed chariot of Apollo, the familiar
symbol of the PUF and a less familiar reminder that the present institution is the result
of the merger in 1939 of four independent publishing companies: the PUF itself,
founded in 1921; Ernest Leroux, specializing in linguistics, archaeology, and “orien-
talism”; Editions Rieder, publisher of history; and Félix Alcan, the impresario of the
human sciences in late nineteenth-century France. The history of these antecedent en-
terprises defines the beginning of Tesnière’s study, which is also the beginning of the
rise of the modern university in France. Indeed, the relationship between the French
university and academic publishers, as scholars sought an outlet for their studies and
publishers sought material for their presses, is one of the guiding threads of the book.
The most successful of these publishers, Félix Alcan, managed to recruit a stable of
regular contributors from the highest levels of the university system and provide them
with a publisher who made them feel at home, not least because he too was a product
of the system. Drawing on the papers of the Alcan family, Tesnière recreates the net-
work of personal and professional relationships that enabled Alcan to become the pub-
lisher of such influential thinkers as Pierre Janet in psychology, Emile Durkheim in
sociology, and Henri Bergson in philosophy.
In the process of developing this network, Alcan also solved other problems that
Tesnière takes as guiding threads. One was the extent to which an editor should promote
a specific cause or line of thought to create a distinctive public image and attract a
readership. A press needed on the one hand to distinguish itself from its competitors;
on the other hand, it needed to avoid alienating too many potential contributors and
readers. Alcan struck a balance by promoting debates rather than positions. He pub-
lished Durkheim, but he published Durkheim’s rival Gabriel Tarde as well. Alcan also
managed to solve another perennial problem of academic publishing: how to balance
the products of academic publishing in a way that creates financial stability and pros-
perity in an inherently limited and precarious market. Tesnière shows how Alcan man-
aged his different products—journals, monographs, collections, dictionaries, etc.—so
that the more profitable sustained the less profitable, and the less profitable contributed
both to the prestige of the firm and to the eventual production of more remunerative
publications.
The fourth guiding thread Tesnière identifies is also the organizing principle of her
book—namely, the issue of the organizational structure of the academic press. Le
quadrige is divided into two parts. The first part, from 1860 to 1919, covers a period
characterized by the dominance of the small family firm in academic publishing. After
World War I, this type of business became untenable for two reasons. One was the
general economic instability that threatened small business everywhere and made ac-
ademic publishing even more difficult. The other was the growing desire of French
university professors to have greater control over the production and distribution of
their works. These developments provided the immediate background for the creation
of the PUF, which was organized as a cooperative rather than as either a company or
a corporation. Unlike most French publishers at that time, the PUF owned its own
presses and bookstores. It thus embraced all aspects of publishing, from production to
distribution.
The second part of Le quadrige chronicles the history of this experiment in academic
publishing until the upheavals of May 1968 brought further changes to the French
university and to the field of publishing. This period was dominated by another influ-
ential personality, Paul Angoulvent, who directed the PUF from 1934 to 1974. An-

182 Book Reviews
goulvent was largely responsible for creating the prosperity of the institution by mod-
ernizing its management and launching the phenomenally successful “Que sais-je?”
series. Tesnière argues that, through such innovations, Angoulvent was able to update
the mix of mutually reinforcing products that Alcan had established in the preceding
century, thereby allowing academic publishing to prosper in a new age.
Le quadrige should be required reading for anyone interested in the intellectual
history of modern France. It provides an essential context for the understanding of
scholarly production that is unattainable anywhere else. It will also be of interest to
historians of publishing in other countries. The American university press was an im-
portant influence on the creation of the PUF, and Tesnière provides elements for a
fruitful comparison. In addition, her ambitious and largely successful effort to combine
economic, social, political, and intellectual history into a coherent whole can serve as
a model for similar histories. Tesnière makes extensive use of the available primary
sources. This is both a strength and a limitation of her study, for the character of the
book shifts with the quantity and quality of the sources. For the first half of the book,
sources were relatively rare, and the focus is more on the analysis of collections and
the intellectual history of the contributors. For the second half, the author had access
to the archives of the PUF, and as a result the book becomes more of an economic and
institutional history in which intellectual currents receive less attention. One would also
like to see the story carried further. The period since the 1970s has seen a new phase
of consolidation in the publishing industry, with the rise of the Hachette empire in
publishing per se and of the FNAC (Fédération Nationale d’Achat des Cadres) in the
realm of bookstores. The PUF nearly succumbed and was saved only by government
intervention and at the cost of its cooperative status. Despite such limitations, Le quad-
rige is an important addition to the history of publishing.
JOHN I. BROOKS III

Fayetleville State University
France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation. By Philip

C. Naylor.
Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. xvⳭ457. $49.95.
In the colonial era, France viewed Algeria as a pivotal possession, the linchpin to its
empire in black Africa and a strategic jumping-off point for exerting influence in the
Middle East. As Philip Naylor shows, even after Algeria became independent, it con-
tinued to exercise the French imagination; the maintenance of French influence there
was seen as ensuring the projection of French power to the Third World, guaranteeing
great—or at least near great—power status.
Naylor tells the remarkable story of how French governments, often touchy when it
came to questions of national pride, looked the other way while the newly independent
Algeria trampled on French rights negotiated in the Evian Accords—the agreement of
March 18, 1962, providing for Algeria’s independence. The pieds noirs, the Algerians
of European origin, had their property confiscated without any compensation; other
French property was also nationalized. And again, even though the Evian agreement
had clearly spelled out that there would be no reprisals against Muslims who had aided
the French cause, thousands were slaughtered. Yet, the French government hardly
squawked, and it extended considerable aid to the newly born Algerian Republic. One
reason was that Charles de Gaulle did not want to draw attention to the failure of his

Book Reviews 183
negotiations at Evian to protect French interests. He, like his predecessors and succes-
sors, was affected by the mirage of an Algeria that was a “door” to the Third World.
So France extended generous credits to Algeria and negotiated oil agreements that were
financially disadvantageous: this was more a political than an economic agreement, as
French ministers admitted.
Faith that the political stakes were so high made the French persist in courting the
Algerian government, though it sold oil for less to Germany and gave the U.S.-held
firm El Paso Natural Gas more advantageous leasing terms than the French had been
provided.
The story up to the 1980s traverses familiar ground. The second half of the book
covers a subject that has been less prone to receive book treatment—the disruptive
influence the Islamic fundamentalist uprising that began in the late 1980s had on
Franco-Algerian relations. The fundamentalist threat posed a difficult quandary both
for France’s intellectuals and for its government. Should free elections be encouraged
in Algeria that, it appeared, would bring fundamentalists to power who would in turn
impose a Khomeini-type regime? Or, rather, should democratic rights be short-circuited
to allow the survival of a corrupt and authoritarian system that, nevertheless, would
permit at least some freedoms? On balance, however reluctantly, the French opted for
the latter. The questions raised by Islamic fundamentalism were reflected in press ac-
counts of various horrors perpetrated in Algeria, manifestos and newspaper interviews
in Paris newspapers, and Quai d’Orsay communiqués. These are the basis for much of
the second half of the book; they capture the breathless excitement of the moment but,
in retrospect, seem often of lesser importance. Instead of sharing undigested newspaper
clippings with us, Naylor might have provided a shorter and more analytical account.
Algerians are conflicted over their relationship to France. When France appears un-
interested in their country, Algerians complain that they are being ignored; when France
shows interest, they complain that France is meddling. When they want loans, Algerian
presidents remind the French of their common bonds, as President Abdelaziz Bouteflika
did in the summer of 2000 when he laid a wreath at Verdun. A year later, facing riots
at home, President Bouteflika blamed them on French machinations.
Naylor suggests that Franco-Algerian relations will be truly decolonized only when
the French have come to terms with their past, but the Algerians also need to face both
the past and the present in a more realistic fashion.
WILLIAM B. COHEN
Indiana University
Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate. By Susan J. Terrio.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xiiiⳭ313.
$55.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
Readers approaching this work by Susan J. Terrio should not expect to find a history
of French chocolate, as its title tends to suggest. Instead, this is an anthropological
study of contemporary French artisanal producers of luxury chocolate in the Bayonne
area and Paris—their craft structure, their problems concerning foreign competition
and integration into European norms, and their struggle to preserve their handicraft
industry by imposing new taste standards on the public. The Basque Coast region and
Paris were chosen as case studies because of their long tradition of chocolate making.
These two chocolate-producing centers provide the vehicle for Terrio to ask ethno-

184 Book Reviews
graphic questions surrounding the survival and adaptation of crafts in postindustrialized

urban settings. Still, the author’s findings also offer much of interest to cultural his-
torians and the general reading public.
Based upon fieldwork carried out primarily in 1990–91, but updated regularly since
then, Terrio’s book examines how artisans in an advanced modern society displayed
agency and refashioned their future when confronted with globalization and increas-
ingly restrictive European regulations. The author argues that French chocolate makers
began to organize and promote themselves as crafters of luxury items in the 1970s and
1980s because of growing competition from cheap, mass-produced Belgian chocolates.
Their struggles continued into the 1990s when the emergence of large industrial pro-
ducers (Philip Morris acquired the entire Tobler-Jacobs-Suchard and Van Houten-Côte
d’Or consortium in 1990) and attempts by the European Community to impose uniform
standards caused French chocolatiers to form a plan to retain a niche in the market.
According to Terrio, it was Robert Linxe and Gaston Lenôtre, the leading artisanal
producers of elite chocolates in Paris, who decided to convince French customers that
craft-made chocolates were authentic, prestige items distinct from all others. They
devised a strategy of reeducating French palates by promoting dark chocolates, made
artisanally with high percentages of cocoa and ganache rather than praline centers, as
the ne plus ultra of chocolate. They borrowed terminology from wine connoisseurship
and from the nouvelle cuisine model, referring to grand cru chocolates with an engag-
ing “nose” that were lighter, less sweet, and healthier than milk chocolates or the mass-
produced competition. They also stressed the handmade craft paradigm, cultivating the
artisanal mystique and chocolate’s exotic image, the latter drawn from the South Amer-
ican origins of cocoa beans and their African production. Chocolatiers even dissemi-
nated the message that their workshops were still processing chocolate directly from
beans, a practice that had nearly ceased by the 1970s when a handful of manufacturers
such as Valrhona were providing chocolate base (couverture) for the handmade fash-
ioning of most artisanal chocolates. Paris took the lead in attempting to set new taste
standards to differentiate fine French chocolates from their foreign competitors. At the
same time it strove to modernize and professionalize the production and marketing
processes by participating in state-supported apprenticeship programs. It hoped that
provincial centers of chocolate making, such as the Bayonne region, would follow its
lead.
In the early 1990s Bayonne-area chocolate producers were creating their own revival
by promoting the Basque Coast’s historic role as the entry point of cocoa into France
from the Iberian peninsula four centuries earlier. Terrio shows how Basque Coast cho-
colatiers—whom she treats in much more detail than those of Paris—had begun to
reorganize themselves after World War II by slowly mechanizing their craft and pro-
gressively sequestering women into the sales rather than the production spaces of their
workshops. Terrio demonstrates how gendered roles, family tensions, and succession
difficulties still marked the chocolate-making craft in the early 1990s. She also explains
how modern French craft communities were constituted and perpetuated through ap-
prenticeship rituals, promotion policies, and professional contests. Still, she admits that
Basque Coast chocolatiers proved much slower than Parisian ones in espousing the
dark chocolate model; at the same time they resisted pressures from the capital to
professionalize their craft, preferring to retain their local traditions and workshop-ori-
ented techniques. In differing from their Parisian counterparts, Bayonne chocolate pro-
ducers showed the diversity and buoyancy of a modern craft that managed to survive
in a postindustrial society. Terrio concludes that French chocolatiers were largely suc-
cessful in their production and promotions strategies. Luxury chocolate has emerged

Book Reviews 185
as an element of French cultural identity that has also served to promote French ex-
ceptionalism at a time of menacing globalization.
Terrio has produced a well-written, thought-provoking study that should appeal to
a much wider audience than ethnographers. It elaborates upon the recent history of
French chocolate making and provides further evidence on craft modernization and on
cultural rivalries between Paris and the provinces. Moreover, it is sheer pleasure to
read this book, which figuratively drips with chocolate, especially if one is familiar
with Bayonne, Paris, and the French chocolate scene. Historians might object at times
to the redundancy of the author’s argumentation and even to some of her basic as-
sumptions. For example, it could be argued that by concentrating only on Paris and
the Bayonne region she has neglected other historic centers of French chocolate making,
such as Lyon and Saint-Etienne, whose inclusion could have enriched and perhaps even
altered some of her conclusions. How is it possible, for instance, to overlook the im-
mense contribution of the great Lyonnais chocolatier Maurice Bernachon, who took
to promoting the new dark chocolate option even before Linxe and Lenôtre and who
is perhaps the true founder of the modern French luxury chocolate craft? Furthermore,
culinary historians might object that the author displays a limited understanding of
French nouvelle cuisine, which she appears to confuse with the movement for a return
to French culinary sources (terroir) that actually eclipsed nouvelle cuisine in the 1990s.
Still, such reservations do not detract markedly from this study. This is a fascinating
work that elucidates an unexamined facet of French culinary history by offering readers
a taste of the French chocolate world during its moment of challenge, transformation,
and ultimate triumph. Today French prestige chocolates do set the standard for excel-
lence, to the point where one envies those members of Terrio’s doctoral dissertation
jury to whom she provided generous samplings. This interdisciplinary study should
have an impact on anthropology, will interest historians, and ought to be mandatory
reading for all chocolate aficionados.
LAWRENCE C. JENNINGS
University of Ottawa
Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620.

By Christine Kooi. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, volume 82.
Edited by Heiko A. Oberman.
Leiden: Brill, 2000. Pp. xiiⳭ243. $97.00.
Christine Kooi’s is the latest in a series of books that applies to the Dutch Republic a
model of historical investigation first developed for the Holy Roman Empire. Offering
a case study of the Protestant Reformation in a single city, it follows upon works
treating Rotterdam, Haarlem, Kampen, Dordrecht, Delft, and Utrecht.1 Variants of the
1
H. ten Boom, De reformatie in Rotterdam, 1530–1585 (n.p., 1987); Joke Spaans, Haarlem
na de Reformatie: Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (The Hague, 1989); Frank
van der Pol, De Reformatie te Kampen in de zestiende eeuw (Kampen, 1990); John P. Elliott,
“Protestantization in the Northern Netherlands, a Case Study: The Classis of Dordrecht, 1572–
1640” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1990); P.H.A.M. Abels and A. Ph. F. Wouters, Nieuw
en ongezien: Kerk en samenleving in de classis Delft en Delfland, 1571–1621 (Delft, 1994);
Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–
1620 (Oxford, 1995).

186 Book Reviews
genre have appeared too, treating Gouda, Amsterdam, the East Frisian town of Emden,
and Bergen op Zoom.2 These studies have deepened enormously our understanding of
the Dutch Reformation, laying bare both its common dynamics and its variants. If
Leiden has received such treatment relatively late, it is not because it is less important
a city. On the contrary, the fierce conflicts that marked the early history of the Reformed
Church there have always been recognized as central to the larger story of the Dutch
Reformation. Ecclesiastic histories have given them ample treatment. Several of their
chief protagonists, including Caspar Coolhaes, Dirck Coornhert, and the city secretary
Jan van Hout, are the subject of biographies. Recent studies have examined the practice
of Calvinist ecclesiastic discipline in Leiden, the social composition of its secular and
ecclesiastic elites, the reform of its charitable system, and other matters intimately tied
to its Reformation.3 Indeed, more has probably been written about Leiden’s Refor-
mation than about any other Dutch city’s. This presents a scholar who would add to
the existing historiography with special challenges and choices. Do you offer a general
account that incorporates previous scholarship? Carve out a new subtopic? Challenge
existing interpretations?
Christine Kooi has taken yet a different approach. She offers readers of English a
well-written, lucid account of the notorious conflicts in Leiden over the establishment
of a Calvinist church order and discipline. Following a traditional line of interpretation,
she views these conflicts as pitting church against state—that is, Leiden’s Reformed
Church against its magistracy, or, as Kooi also puts it, the city’s religious against its
political elite. She does incorporate Juliaan Woltjer’s findings on the social background
of Leiden’s Calvinist elders.4 These are crucial to her story, for the decision of Leiden’s
patriciate at the end of the 1580s henceforth to sit in numbers on the consistory helps
explain the sudden end, for about fifteen years, of the conflicts she is tracing. Otherwise,
Kooi offers little social history. She does not focus much on individuals either; certainly
2
C. C. Hibben, Gouda in Revolt: Particularism and Pacifism in the Revolt of the Netherlands,
1572–1588 (Utrecht, 1983); Herman Roodenburg, Onder censuur: De kerkelijke tucht in de ge-
reformeerde gemeente van Amsterdam, 1578–1700 (Hilversum, 1990); Andrew Pettegree, Emden
and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford, 1992);
Charles C. M. de Mooij, Geloof kan Bergen verzetten: Reformatie en katholieke herleving te
Bergen op Zoom, 1577–1795 (Hilversum, 1998).
3
See esp. Jan A. F. de Jonste, Om de religie of om de vrijheid: Spanningen tussen stadhuis en
kerk in Leiden na het beleg (The Hague, 1998); Sterling Andre Lamet, “Men in Government: The
Patriciate of Leiden, 1550–1600” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1979); Dirk Jaap
Noordam, Geringde buffels en heren van stad: Het patriciaat van Leiden, 1574–1700 (Hilversum,
1994); Charles H. Parker, The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity
in the Six Great Cities of Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge, 1998); Heinz Schilling, “Calvinis-
tischen Presbyterien in Städten der frühen Neuzeit—eine kirchliche Alternativform zur bürger-
lichen Repräsentation? (Mit einer quantifizierenden Untersuchung zur holländischen Stadt Lei-
den),” in Städtische Führungsgruppen und Gemeinde in der werdenden Neuzeit, ed. Wilfried
Ehbrecht (Cologne, 1980), pp. 385–444; Heinz Schilling, “Reformierte Kirchenzucht als Sozial-
disziplinierung? Die Tätigkeit des Emder Presbyteriums in den Jahren 1557–1562. (Mit verglei-
chenden Betrachtungen über die Kirchenräte in Groningen und Leiden sowie mit einem Ausblick
ins 17. Jahrhundert),” in Niederlande und Nordwestdeutschland: Studien zur Regional- und Stadt-
geschichte Nordwestkontinentaleuropas im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit, ed. Franz Petri (Cologne
and Vienna, 1983), pp. 261–327.
4
J. J. Woltjer, “Een nieuw ende onghesien dingh: Verkenningen naar de positie van de kerkeraad
in twee Hollandse steden in de zestiende eeuw” (afscheidscollege, Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, 26.
Apr. 1985).

Book Reviews 187
she does not analyze the religious sentiments of key figures. Nor does she examine the
religious currents, such as spiritualism, prevalent in Leiden outside Calvinist circles,
or say much about civic culture, except for the role played in it by memories of the
traumatic siege of 1574. As her subtitle implies, Kooi confines herself largely to an
account of church-state relations, and in that account she finds sufficient explanation
for the conflicts in Leiden. As for non-elites, they scarcely figure in her story.
In Kooi’s view, the conflict boiled down to one between church officers and mag-
istrates who held “competing visions” of the Reformed Church. Church leaders, on the
one hand, fought for “a hierarchically organized conciliar church, presbyterian in struc-
ture, confessional in character, independent of secular control or supervision (though
enjoying governmental sanction),” and exclusive in membership (pp. 10–11). Such a
church required a consistory to maintain the purity of the communion rite and promote
the sanctification of its members by exercising ecclesiastic discipline. Magistrates, on
the other hand, desired a church that would strengthen the civic unity and local auton-
omy it was their prime duty to defend. Casting themselves as representatives of “the
entire community,” they believed that such a church had to be subject to their control.
Preferably it should embrace all Leidenaars as members, thus maintaining the equation
of civic and sacral community inherited from the Middle Ages. This conclusion ratifies
the findings of earlier studies and extends them to Leiden. One might suggest additional
dimensions to these two visions, but no doubt they did clash in the Dutch Reformation.
In a different form they underlay the Remonstrant controversy of the 1610s as well,
which Kooi traces in her fifth chapter.
Who held these views and why, however, remain debated questions. Kooi seems to
imply that the magistrates’ vision was determined by institutional imperatives, that is,
by their role as magistrates, but one may doubt whether such an explanation suffices—
after all, not all Dutch magistrates cherished that vision—and whether magistrates were
the only ones who shared it. At one point in her introduction, Kooi suggests there were
three parties and visions, not two: those of Calvinists, magistrates, and “Reformed
Protestants.” This suggestion is not very satisfactory either, but in any event the rest
of the book proceeds as if it had never been made. On the plus side, Kooi’s book
demonstrates very effectively the fatal weakness of particularism. Repeatedly Leiden’s
religious conflicts proved beyond the magistrates’ ability to resolve, requiring the in-
tervention of outside, supralocal forces—William of Orange, the States of Holland,
and the synods of the Reformed Church. This failure was systemic, not accidental, and
ultimately it guaranteed the triumph of Calvinism over anyone’s alternate vision of the
Church.
Kooi’s last chapter offers a vivid portrait of Leiden’s other churches: Mennonite,
Lutheran, and Catholic. Here she seeks to explain the religious tolerance that prevailed
in Leiden, as elsewhere in the Republic. Echoing my study of Utrecht, Kooi argues
that tolerance was made possible by a new distinction between public and private
religious life, though I do not and would not equate public with “observance” and
private with “belief,” as she does. Kooi claims also that tolerance “stemmed at least as
much from the Calvinists’ insistence on a confessional, voluntary public church” as
from any magisterial stance (p. 204). On this point I would call attention to the example
of Puritan New England, where church membership was even more exclusive and
voluntary than in the Netherlands. This in no way diminished the theocratic, intolerant
nature of Puritan society there. Under the right circumstances, some Dutch Calvinists
did not refrain from making radically intolerant demands either, as in the mid-1580s,
when briefly it seemed the government, under the Earl of Leicester, might throw its
weight behind them. Finally, Kooi ties this chapter to previous ones by demonstrating

188 Book Reviews
very effectively a chronological correspondence between degrees of toleration and the

state of “consistorial politics.” When magistrates and Calvinist leaders were locked in
conflict, as in the 1580s and 1610s, non-Calvinist groups enjoyed more freedom to
operate than at other times. Here as elsewhere her findings for Leiden offer a useful
case to lay alongside others, making a significant contribution to studies of the Dutch
Reformation.
BENJAMIN KAPLAN
University of Iowa
The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998. By William J. Callahan.

Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000. Pp. xviiⳭ695.
$49.95.
Despite the significance of the Catholic Church in the history of modern Spain, until
the late 1970s it did not engage the attention of many historians. Most accounts, whether
by apologists or critics, were written for polemical purposes; serious scholars generally
avoided the subject, either out of discretion, distaste, or lack of interest. Over the last
twenty years, however, historians both inside and outside Spain have begun to remedy
this neglect while extending research on the Church to include not only institutional
history but also the political, social, and cultural dimensions of Catholic belief and
practice. The extensive list of secondary sources in the bibliography of William J.
Callahan’s The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998 documents this historiographical
shift. In his monumental study Callahan not only provides a masterful evaluation and
synthesis of this literature but also supplements it with his own research in a wide
variety of printed primary sources, including the Catholic press. The result is a judi-
cious, insightful, and elegantly written study that will surely be considered the standard
work in the field for many years.
This book is a continuation of Callahan’s earlier work, Church, Politics, and Society
in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). Like its predecessor, its principal
subject is the response of the Church to the dramatic changes in politics, social struc-
tures, and cultural values that marked Spain’s transition to modernity. Callahan argues
that the Church adopted a defensive and hostile stance that was ill suited to the cir-
cumstances, neither enabling the Church to regain the political and cultural power it
had claimed under the Old Regime nor stemming a steady decline in religious obser-
vance and belief, especially among the urban and rural working classes. He also traces
the internal and external transformations that eventually led the Church to accept and
adapt to the pluralistic, liberal democracy that emerged after the death of General
Francisco Franco in 1975.
Callahan’s richly detailed analysis is organized around several major themes. The
first concerns the fraught relationship between the Church and the liberal state, whose
regalism collided with the Church’s desire for complete institutional autonomy. Church
and state also held conflicting views on the prerogatives and privileges of established
religion. Whereas the Church insisted that the state should enforce its claim to regulate
the beliefs and morals of all Spaniards, liberals tolerated the secularization of political
and cultural life to an extent that most clergy considered heretical. Longing to restore
an imagined theocratic golden age, many Catholics never reconciled themselves to
liberalism; at best, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and some of the religious orders reluc-
tantly accepted a conservative version of the liberal constitutional monarchy as a “mal

Book Reviews 189
menor.” The liberal project was thus constantly compromised by the contradictions
generated by its own regalism, an antiliberal established Church, and an increasingly
diverse and secular society.
A second theme concerns the Church’s counterproductive embrace of a narrow,
class-based politics at the same time that it launched a campaign to “re-Catholicize”
the masses. After the turn of the century, the episcopate sponsored a variety of orga-
nizations under the auspices of Catholic Action that coupled modern methods of pop-
ular mobilization with resolutely antimodern programs. As Callahan shows, “ultra-
montane populism,” which included Catholic leagues as well as agrarian syndicates
and trade unions, ultimately failed because it responded less to working-class demands
for social justice than to bourgeois fears of social revolution; in similar fashion, “ul-
tramontane piety,” the new devotional culture based on missions, pilgrimages, the cult
of the Sacred Heart, and frequent communion and confession, represented a departure
from traditional religious practice and appealed primarily to the conservative urban
bourgeoisie. Rather than reversing “de-Christianization,” the campaign to “reconquer”
Spain for Catholicism in fact reinforced regional and class differences in religious
observance.
Callahan also traces the internal divisions that prevented the formation of a confes-
sional political party that might have integrated Catholicism into liberal political cul-
ture. During the Second Republic, Catholic ultras prevailed over those who sought to
negotiate a modus vivendi with the new regime, and in 1936 the Church threw its
weight behind the rightist military rebellion. But Catholic hopes that the Nationalist
victory would give the Church the freedom and power it had long demanded were soon
dashed. The political and social costs of its close alliance with an antiliberal, repressive
regime became apparent in the 1960s, when the hierarchy struggled to respond to both
the reforms of Vatican II and the criticism of young priests seeking to minister to the
working classes in a rapidly urbanizing, consumerist, and conflictive society. By the
1970s the Church, under the leadership of Cardinal Enrique Tarancón, had become
reconciled to the need for political democratization and social reform. Under the dem-
ocratic constitutional monarchy that emerged from the Transition, the institution sur-
rendered its privileged position as the established Church and thereby gained the au-
tonomy it had long desired, while retaining a special status within the state. Realizing
the dream of a “Catholic Spain” has remained as elusive as ever, however.
Callahan’s informed discussion of the internal politics that permitted this astonishing
reversal of historic attitudes is emblematic of another major focus of his book—its
attention to the institutional dynamics of the Spanish Church. Anticlerical polemics
have portrayed the Church as monolithic and aggressive; beneath this image, the reality
was one of disunity, factional competition, weak leadership, and drift. Callahan de-
scribes clerical demography, patterns of recruitment, training, and advancement, and
the ideological battles and turf wars among secular clergy, regular clergy, and the laity.
The result is the most complete and nuanced picture of the Spanish Church in its
historical setting that we are likely to have for some time.
CAROLYN P. BOYD
University of California, Irvine

190 Book Reviews
Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice. By Jutta Gisela
Sperling. Women in Culture and Society. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. xxiⳭ417. $70.00 (cloth); $24.00
(paper).
Who would have thought that the wearing of platform shoes in Venetian nunneries
should be understood in terms of Renaissance high politics? Jutta Sperling’s bold and
imaginative monograph on female religious houses in early modern Venice presents a
compelling case for the integral role of nuns in the formation of the body politic. In
the past decade, research on convents in premodern Europe has become a scholarly
growth industry, producing a wide range of studies on the multiple dimensions of
women’s religious lives. Sperling’s work nonetheless makes a unique contribution.
Convents and the Body Politic combines archival research with discourse analysis and
anthropological theory to retell the story of a political system from the perspective of
its seeming margin: female religious institutions.
Starting in 1450, an increasing number of Venetian patricians persuaded their daugh-
ters, if necessary at knife point, to take the veil in the city’s nunneries. By the seven-
teenth century, a patrician woman was more likely to become a bride of Christ than to
marry a man of her social class. Most contemporaries blamed women for this steep
increase in monachizations; their insatiable greed for dowry payments allegedly
stripped families of resources and left fathers no other choice. Modern scholarship in
turn picked up on the early modern discourse (and replicated its misogynist presump-
tions) by explaining forced vocations primarily as the result of dowry inflation.
This is where Sperling intervenes. The cloistering of virgins, she argues, was a “total
social phenomenon” in Marcel Mauss’s sense and requires situating in its broader
political context. Monachization was at once metaphor, means, and model for the con-
struction of Venetian rule as pure and impenetrable to corrupting external influences.
During the sixteenth century, the patriciate refashioned itself from a mercantile class
into an endogamous caste of land-owning nobles who literally embodied the Republic’s
government. This process was predicated on the competitive exchange of women,
which Sperling—pace Claude Lévi Strauss and Gail Rubyn—considers foundational
to patriarchal polities. Venetian patricians embraced agnatic inheritance rules, granting
daughters only dowries while excluding them from the patrimony. Whereas sons were
allowed to marry downward (if the dowry warranted it), daughters could not pass titles
on to commoners and had to marry upward. Should a daughter’s dowry prove either
too high or too low to find a proper match, patrician patriarchs preferred to withdraw
her from the exchange through monachization. Forced vocations, Sperling concludes,
resulted not from dowry inflation per se but from a systemic problem: agnatic inheri-
tance rules coupled with class endogamy and mandatory upward female social mobility
produced a steady surplus of daughters. Women who could not be offered as brides
best aided social reproduction by forgoing sexual reproduction altogether.
Sperling thus reads the circulation of brides on the Venetian marriage market as a
potlatch and the coerced enclosure of virginal women as a form of conspicuous de-
struction of resources that could not be exchanged. Similarly, she explains the concom-
itant state initiative to implement Tridentine cloister reforms in Venice’s female con-
vents in terms of spectacular sacrificial waste. Because brides of Christ symbolized the
intact body politic, their physical integrity had to be protected with the strongest means
possible for the potlatch to run its course. Cloister walls, in Sperling’s poignant terms,
functioned as “an additional hymen” (p. 134).
Yet enclosure and purity remained patrician fantasies. Sperling presents a wealth of

Book Reviews 191
exciting archival material to document how ingeniously nuns countered the rules of
strict cloister and recreated the pleasures of their homes behind convent walls. Among
other things, they wore the aristocratic platform shoes which, according to Venetian
authorities, could only lead on to the slippery slope toward the Republic’s decline. The
imaginary threat of platform shoes, however, paled in comparison to the de facto long-
term effect of squandering human capital. Far from protecting the body politic’s purity,
monachization ushered in its pollution. By 1646, the ranks of the patriciate had shrunk
to such an extent that the endogamous caste had to peddle titles to outsiders.
Venetian political discourse reflected these larger trends within the ruling patriciate
and its female religious institutions. In a daring deconstruction of political treatises and
key historical moments, Sperling argues that images of virginity, enclosure, and integ-
rity competed with representations of Venice as Venus, open not only to commerce
but also corruption. As monachizations increased, the Virgin replaced Venus as the
new master metaphor, only to find herself vulnerable, half a century later, to charges
of prostitution during the sale of patrician titles.
Sperling’s ambitious argument made her cover considerable ground, sometimes
more, sometimes less thoroughly. Specialists might quibble over various aspects of her
theory-informed rereading of Venetian history: even if the reconfiguration of the vir-
ginity myth in political discourse coincided with the peak in monachization rates (and
some may question her chronology), does simultaneity inevitably reflect causality?
More generally, Sperling’s sweeping account gives rather short shrift to the religious
and gender-transcending dimensions of virginity. Nuns appear first and foremost as
reproducers of social purity and as wasted generative potential—“signifiers of that
which they had to endure: the ‘absolute’ power of a sovereign state” (p. 235). Objects
and victims of reproductive control, these cloistered virgins come to stand in for wom-
anhood per se. Yet virginity’s premodern meanings were polyvalent, including the
possibility of overcoming womanhood captured in Saint Jerome’s memorable promise
that the virgin “will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.” Sperling’s over-
arching interpretation in effect reduces the virginal life to modern terms: reproductive
control and sexual repression. Thinking with Foucault, I would argue that the cloistering
of nuns was not so much an expression of controlling a (timeless) female sexuality but
rather an element in the very creation of the virginal body as a sexualized body and
the nun as “woman.”
Such criticism, of course, is in itself testimony to the thought-provoking nature of
Sperling’s monograph. This innovative book should be an inspiring and stimulating
read for all those concerned with the complex relations among gender order, sexuality,
political systems, and religious institutions in Western European history.
ULRIKE STRASSER
University of California, Irvine
The Origins of Nature Conservation in Italy. By James Sievert.

New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Pp. 298. $37.95.
Travelers, writers, and artists have admired Italy’s bel paesaggio and its picturesque
images since at least the fourteenth century. More recently, historians and human ge-
ographers have come to reexamine the origin of landscape ideas in Renaissance Italy
and their symbolic importance in the European imagination (Denis E. Cosgrove, Social
Formation and Symbolic Landscape [Madison, Wis., 1998]). Despite this sustained

192 Book Reviews
interest in the evolution of the Italian landscape, the early history of nature conserva-
tion, as James Sievert argues, appears to have been erased from the Italian historical
memory. He recounts having been told by a regional official charged with environ-
mental issues that “there was no such movement.” This book seeks to recover the
origins of nature conservation in Italy, while providing a general overview of changes
in the landscape and in Italian landscape ideas. The material that Sievert brings to bear
on the subject is rich, diverse, and has hardly been exploited by historians of Italy.
He opens with a general synthesis of landscape ideas in Anglo-American and Italian
historical writing. With the exception of Emilio Sereni’s classic History of the Italian
Landscape translated by R. Burr Litchfield and published by Princeton University Press
in 1997, much of this literature remains unknown to the English-speaking world. Siev-
ert is to be commended for bringing the work of Italian environmental writers, many
of whom have not been formally trained as historians, to light. They include the botanist
Franco Pedrotti and the environmental activist Edgar Meyer as well as the historians
Piero Bevilacqua and Luigi Piccioni.
Sereni saw landscape as an expression of the values of human society, and Sievert
takes up the distinction that has often been made between paese, the aesthetic land-
scape, and territorio, the mundane landscape of roads, homes, and farms. Italian land-
scape ideas have changed and evolved with time, but this distinction has persisted. The
aesthetic value attached to landscape has loomed larger than the ecological, and, as he
later shows, it has ultimately guided much of the legislation governing nature conser-
vation in Italy. The fact that the field of environmental history appears to have emerged
in Italy very late, that it has few practitioners, and that it is often viewed with suspicion,
may be an expression of these predominant aesthetic preoccupations. It may also be
significant that one of Italy’s most prominent environmental historians, Piero Bevilac-
qua of the University of Rome, has argued that the history of the Italian environment
is not a story of unmitigated human destruction.
Part 1 of this book consists of a selective history of changes that have occurred in
the Italian landscape over time by focusing on Italy’s forests, the Po Valley, and the
Italian Alps. Drawing on the work of the nineteenth-century Milanese thinker Carlo
Cattaneo, Sievert points to the importance of the city-country dialectic in the Italian
peninsula. As Italy’s longstanding “southern question” suggests, however, that dialectic
is a northern phenomenon, and Italy’s landscape must be seen as one that is fragmented
and charged with different meanings. The fact that the south remains characterized by
some as a disorderly, chaotic world apart raises larger questions, which Sievert does
not fully explore, about the differing views regarding landscape in a still sharply divided
nation.
Sievert shows that changes in the landscape have been considerable since the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century and that these changes—wrought by industrial and
technological innovations—laid the groundwork for the emergence of the nature con-
servation movement. Part 2 of this book is a comprehensive and carefully researched
narrative of the origins of nature conservation from the late nineteenth century to the
present. The movement appears to have been primarily associated with the northern
urban centers of Rome and Milan. A number of associational groups, including the
Club Alpino Italiano, the Touring Club Italiano, and the Italian Botanical Society were
the principal proponents of the conservation cause. As the names of these organizations
suggest, the inspiration behind the movement came from three groups: Italian patriots
seeking to preserve Italy’s artistic heritage not long after Italian unification, botanists
and zoologists, and the burgeoning new tourist leisure industry. One of the strengths
of this book is the way in which it highlights the very real tensions between these

Book Reviews 193
varying nature conservationists, who often sought to protect the environment in the
name of very different goals. Much of the rest of this study charts the creation and
implementation of measures designed to protect the environment in the form of parks,
most notably that of Abruzzo, in the twentieth century.
Sievert has successfully recovered a stimulating history from benign neglect. The
scope of this work is impressive, but he leaves a number of tantalizing questions un-
asked and therefore unanswered. How and why has the aesthetic conception of nature
conservation persisted for so long in Italy? Why has the history that he has uncovered
been erased? He makes the allusive comment that “the rupture of fascism and war goes
a long way in explaining the collective indifference to conservation’s roots” (p. 12),
but he never explicitly explains how and why. Why, as he asserts, was Italian conser-
vation not closely associated with fascism, and why did it remain free of the “anti-
technology, antimodern overtones” (p. 209) that pervaded the movement in Germany?
How might one account for that difference? While Sievert suggests that environmen-
talism in the 1990s has become less tied to political parties and class affiliations than
it was in the past, the changing politics of Italian conservation remain murky at best.
Finally, a number of historians have suggested that colonialism profoundly shaped
conceptions of nature conservation in a variety of European countries (Richard Grove,
Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of
Environmentalism [Cambridge, 1995]). Indeed, some of France’s first “national parks”
were created in Algeria. What impact did the colonial experience have on Italian con-
servation, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, when Italy’s first national park was
created? Sievert’s sweeping history of conservation in the Italian peninsula will be
useful to all environmental historians, if only by inviting further inquiry into the dis-
tinctive features of nature conservation in twentieth-century Europe.
CAROLINE FORD
University of British Columbia
Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the Challenge of
Mass Culture, 1943–1991. By Stephen Gundle. American Encounters/Global
Interactions. Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. ixⳭ270. $54.95 (cloth); $18.95
(paper).
From the immediate postwar years to its dissolution and reconstitution as the Demo-
cratic Party of the Left in 1991, the Italian Communist Party (PC) was a constant
presence in Italy’s political and cultural landscape. In spite of the PC’s constantly
shifting fortunes, which Stephen Gundle traces with admirable clarity, for almost half
a century the party played a central role in the shaping of modern Italy’s political,
social, and cultural profile. Rather than studying the PC’s general history, Gundle
makes the original move of concentrating on the party’s responses specifically to cul-
tural developments, particularly those linked to the rapid industrialization, moderni-
zation, and “Americanization” of Italian society from the 1940s to a decade ago.
The result is a study that not only illuminates the trajectory of the PC’s political
strategies; it also highlights the emergence over the last half century of a thoroughly
modern cultural scene in Italy, through which an essentially agrarian society was trans-
formed by mass media, consumerism, and a more and more standardized and unified
language and style of daily life, forever changing the face of the Italian peninsula. The

194 Book Reviews
Italian Communist Party was caught, as the book’s title succinctly states, “between
Hollywood and Moscow,” as it struggled, on one hand, to hold onto its traditions and
symbols and, on the other, to keep pace with the enormous influence of modern, “Amer-
ican” models. These incursions penetrated Italian social life primarily through imported
films and other mass media and, secondarily, through the inevitable desires for com-
fortable middle-class economic “well-being” (benessere) that were interiorized within
the Italian populace itself as industry and burgeoning wealth replaced the poverty and
material struggles caused by the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Gun-
dle analyzes the many missteps of the party and argues convincingly that its demise
had much to do with its inability to maintain a balance between the nonmainstream
values and goals it had always generated and upheld and the dominant values of Italian
modernization, which eventually rendered communist ideals unworkable and obsolete.
Gundle’s study is the modified English-language version of his book I comunisti
italiani tra Hollywood e Mosca, published in Italy in 1995. The author states that the
earlier version was much longer and contained more elaborated treatments of Italian
politics, popular culture, sexual mores, and consumption. The decision to abbreviate
this version was motivated both by the availability now of several recent volumes in
English dealing with these topics and by Gundle’s desire to focus fairly exclusively on
the cultural policies of the PC. The book does not have an abbreviated feel, although
readers without a solid knowledge of the Italian political and cultural scene of the last
half century do need to consult other studies for detailed information on, for instance,
the development of Italian feminism, the history of Italian cinema, and different patterns
of industrial development and consumption in northern and southern Italy, to name but
a few of the areas dealt with in Gundle’s overview. His goal of synthesizing a great
diversity of topics, as well as his chronological approach—moving from the fall of
Fascism in the early 1940s to the fall of the Italian Communist Party almost half a
century later—necessarily leads the author to a broad rather than deep analysis.
Italian political life is notoriously convoluted, so much so that even native Italians
have a difficult time grasping its intricacies. It is very much to Gundle’s credit that he
succeeds in presenting for English-language readers a completely understandable pic-
ture of the PC’s recent history. It is even more to his credit that he succeeds in com-
bining this history with a parallel history of sorts that traces general cultural policies
and developments in the rapidly modernizing Italy of the postwar period to the post-
industrial Italy of the 1990s.
Gundle’s central claim is that the American model of modernization won out over
the cultural hegemony of the working class, in which the PC continued to believe and
which it promoted—if with ever-changing strategies—from the formation of the new
republic in the 1940s to the Berlusconi-dominated political and technological post-
modern machine of the 1990s. The triumph of the “American” model in Western Eu-
rope was not limited to Italy, of course—but the ways in which it was assimilated into
Italian society are uniquely tied to Italy’s agrarian past, its north-south divide, its lack
of a unified language, and the enormous role played by the Catholic Church. These
specificities are described and analyzed in each of the chapters, which extend from the
period of reconstruction after the fall of Fascism; through the cold war period and the
boom years of the 1950s; the explosion of youth culture and conflict in the 1960s, the
“years of lead,” or terrorism and crisis, in the 1970s; to the final erosion of left-wing
culture and the collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s.
The book includes excellent notes, reflective of Gundle’s extensive research into
archival sources such as the Archive of the Italian Communist Party at the Istituto
Gramsci in Rome, as well as his mastery of both English-language and Italian critical

Book Reviews 195
materials. If there is any lack in the bibliographic listings, it is the absence of more
titles by scholars working in North America, for almost all of the works consulted by
Gundle are by either British or Italian scholars. There was also no updating of the
bibliography in this present edition to include materials published in the last five or so
years, which means that pertinent books such as David Ward’s Antifascism: Cultural
Politics in Italy, 1943–1946—Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the
“Actionists” (Madison, N.J., 1996) and Revisioning Italy: National Identity and Global
Culture, edited by Beverly Allen and Mary Russo (Minneapolis, 1997) are unfortu-
nately not consulted or mentioned.
Nonetheless, Gundle’s book is an admirable achievement, and it joins other recent
studies of post-Marxist Western European culture as an important contribution to the
comprehension both of Italian communism and of Italian cultural developments in the
crucial period of the second half of the twentieth century.
REBECCA WEST
University of Chicago
Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest

Germany, 1550–1750. By Marc R. Forster. New Studies in European History.
Edited by Peter Baldwin et al.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiiiⳭ268. $59.95.
For too many years the word “Reformation” referred exclusively to the men (yes, men)
and events that produced Protestantism. Fortunately, a number of books have now made
it clear that the Catholic Church underwent a number of parallel renovations without
losing its fundamental identity. Marc Forster was, indeed, one of those who contributed
to our certainty on this point with his first book, The Counter-Reformation in the
Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1992). That book, too, reflected the difficulties of naming the Catholic movement and
of placing it chronologically. For parallels though there were, to most modern observers
Catholic reform displays greater continuity with its late medieval antecedents and con-
tinues recognizably, even coherently, on into the eighteenth century, while Protestant-
ism further subdivides. Whereas one usually ends the Reformation era, at the latest,
with the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Catholicism—above all, official Catholicism—
is finally altered by its encounter with Enlightened monarchs.
In this study, Forster concentrates on the vast Diocese of Constance, which incor-
porated parts of southwest Germany and northern Switzerland, significantly including,
among others, (Catholic) Habsburg and (Lutheran) Württemberg political enclaves.
Taking its initial inspiration from Heinz Schilling’s and Wolfgang Reinhard’s concept
of “confessionalization,” this work challenges it to the extent that that theoretical con-
struct entails the imposition of religious doctrine and practice on the populace from
above, by the institutional church militant, with or without the cooperation of the
aggrandizing state. Instead, Forster draws on anthropologists’ insights concerning the
interaction of rulers and ruled. For all who have worked extensively amid the archival
omnium-gatherum—as this author very creditably has—arguments for popular self-
assertion, resistance to clerical dictation, misunderstanding of what is taught, and ap-
propriation of what coincides with the predominant worldview are most convincing.
Thus, Forster is indeed most convincing in his assertion that the laity themselves con-
tributed much to early modern Catholic belief and performance. He observes, “What

196 Book Reviews
is striking about the Counter-Reformation is the supreme confidence of all authorities

that reform from above would change religious practice at all levels of society” (p. 59).
He then proceeds to demonstrate that these authorities were wrong.
Nevertheless, reforms did occur. Priests gave up their concubines, and they accepted
higher standards of performance. Villagers became more intensely “churchly,” even as
they retained the venerable ritual observance at the core of their lives. One of the
impressive strengths of this book is that it favors neither generalization nor evidence
but looks from one to the other in conveying a pattern of change within a perpetually
negotiated setting. These negotiations took place not just between laity (or groups of
laity) and clergy. They had also to be carried on among territorial princes, the papacy,
bishops, magistrates, monastic orders, parish priests, and Jesuit and Capuchin “mis-
sionaries.” All could basically agree on the divine presence within the world and on
the potential efficacy of human acts (“theology of works,” as Protestants would scorn-
fully label this perspective). They supported processions and pilgrimages, communal
vows and lustral rites, the cults of both local and universal saints—all much as William
Christian has described them in Spain (Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain
[Princeton, N.J., 1981]).
Throughout this book, two further interpretive themes recur. First, laity and local
clergy shared a sense of communal existence, defined as much by the practice of their
faith as by oaths, kinship, and proximity. In this context, the Mass continued to express
and reinforce community. Forster finds Peter Blickle’s thesis of the communal Refor-
mation applicable to the Diocese of Constance (pp. 185–87, 242–43): “Whatever the
fate of the communal church in the Protestant state churches of the early modern era,
it survived in Catholic Southwest Germany” (p. 243).
Second, parishioners accepted the spiritual superiority and indispensability of their
priests, even though they often contested additional imposts for pastoral maintenance.
Forster calls this deference “clericalism.” After Trent, the clergy not only relinquished
their concubines but also generally accepted stricter standards of behavior, better train-
ing, and increased requirements such as that they preach and teach the catechism.
Communal identity and reverence for the clerical estate came together in villages’
demands to be made independent parishes and to have their own curers of souls. Forster
illuminates these two theses with masses of data, both anecdotal and tabulated—and
he also admirably explores their limitations.
It seems about a quarter century too late to have to ask, Where are the women? This
study is replete with the various participants in village and regional life, including
priests, monks, and friars. Laywomen receive passing mention. Most intriguing to me
is the late eighteenth-century attempt by several women in Amtzell to take seats on the
men’s side of the church (p. 192). But it would appear that nuns and Beguines either
did not exist in the entire diocese or were excluded from every transaction.
Further, it would well serve scholars of early modern religion, myself included, to
extend our purview to parallel phenomena beyond our local or regional scrutiny. This
book is a near counterpoise to Luise Schorn-Schütte’s Evangelische Geistlichkeit in
der Frühneuzeit, deren Anteil an der Entfaltung frühmoderner Staatlichkeit und Ge-
sellschaft (Gütersloh, 1996), yet Forster does not cite it. Schorn-Schütte’s findings for
northern German Lutheran and Calvinist clergymen lend yet further credence to For-
ster’s conclusions by enhancing our impression of similarities among the creeds. At
the same time, seeing the confessions together highlights the Catholic Church’s on-
going accommodation of nonlearned religiosity, an acceptance mainly lacking in the
more insistently repudiative Protestantism.

Book Reviews 197
This is a richly informative work by a tireless researcher and creative thinker. I shall
consult it often.
SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN
University of Arizona
Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early
Modern Germany. By Kathy Stuart. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History.
Edited by Sir John Elliott et al.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xⳭ286. $64.95.
The appearance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s great grandfather Franz Mozart as a

journeyman stonemason in seventeenth-century Augsburg is one of the many fasci-
nating details of this rich study. By helping with the funeral of an executioner’s servant,
Franz Mozart and his brother Hans Georg ran afoul of the complex codes of honor and
ritual pollution that shaped guild identity and daily life in early modern Germany. The
Mozart brothers were declared dishonorable and boycotted by their fellow journeymen
(pp. 47–48), and they in turn protested vehemently to their guild. Such disputes are at
the core of Kathy Stuart’s study of the boundaries of honor in early modern Germany,
which focuses on executioners, skinners, and workers in other defiled trades in Augs-
burg, a free imperial city of some 45,000 people in 1600. Her topic cuts across estab-
lished themes in the study of early modern Germany, offering new perspectives on
dishonor, discipline, artisan culture, and the body.
In early modern Germany, dishonor was a broad concept that marked Jews and
gypsies, vagrants and criminals, bastards and prostitutes. It could be legally imposed
as a punishment on otherwise honorable persons, and it was a fundamental condition
of practicing certain trades. Stuart examines these trades: executioners and skinners
were the most important, but shepherds, bailiffs, grave diggers, bath masters, and linen
weavers, among other groups, were also sometimes considered dishonorable. The social
origins of the practice of dishonor are medieval, but the groups defined as dishonorable
shifted as the early modern period began. The defiled trades coalesced around the
distinct legal status of the executioner, whose work with the bodies of the tortured and
condemned made him, along with the skinner, the fount of dishonoring pollution.
Dishonorable status, passed down from parents to children, meant exclusion from hon-
orable corporate society. For the executioners and skinners, however, severe sanctions
were balanced by some tangible benefits: although banned from the guild system, they
were steadily employed by the city government, and their exclusion from citizenship
meant freedom from taxation as well. Stuart shows that Augsburg’s executioners were
far better off than the average guildsman (pp. 86–88).
By examining the values articulated in honor conflicts, Stuart concludes that early
modern German dishonor was secular: the sons of bailiffs, for example, could become
priests but not apprentices; executioners and skinners generally received the same
church rites as honorable Christians. It was also masculine: women were peripheral to
the theory and practice of dishonor, although they were active in pursuing and settling
honor disputes (p. 218). Most important, dishonor was contextual: quoting Pierre Bour-
dieu, Stuart describes it as “lived rather than clearly conceived” (p. 257).
Dishonor was defined through conflict and dispute, generating case after case of

198 Book Reviews
evidence. Stuart examines 132 honor disputes in the period between 1542 and 1804, a
fraction of the total number documented in the records of Augsburg’s craft guilds.
These cases offer Stuart a creative way to examine a familiar complex of questions
regarding state formation, social discipline, and the common people. Early modern
authorities claimed the power to define their community and its values—but concerns
about honor were so intense among guildsmen that the Augsburg city government (and
early modern German authorities in general) could not shift the boundaries of honor
to its advantage or redefine certain groups (including its own bailiffs) as honorable.
Judicial torture and corporal punishment were powerful sources of dishonor, but au-
thorities were unable to contain the dishonor they unleashed (p. 121). The “disciplining
of the staff” posited as the first stage of early modern social disciplining was effectively
undermined by guildsmen’s sense that executioners, bailiffs, and anyone else in physi-
cal contact with criminals were utterly dishonorable (p. 139).
Early modern artisan culture is the fundamental context of Stuart’s book. She ex-
amines both the milieu of the dishonorable trades and the artisan culture that ostracized
them. She describes the transformation of the executioners from a porous, unruly group
to an orderly caste of professionals built upon a regional network of intermarried fam-
ilies. Groups on the boundaries of dishonor actually sparked more conflicts with guilds
than did executioners and skinners. The ambiguous status and uncertain prospects of
bailiffs, beadles, bath masters, barbers, and their children contrasted with the relative
economic security and clear status, disabilities, and privileges of the executioners and
skinners. By examining those so vehemently rejected by the honorable guilds, Stuart
effectively illuminates artisan culture from inside and outside. One of the most signifi-
cant details to emerge is the power of journeymen and their regional organizations to
overrule local authorities in the Old Empire (pp. 208–12).
Guildsmen based their personal and corporate identity on the honorable origins,
legitimate birth, and virtuous life required for admission into any guild. In a 1748 case
the Augsburg printers’ guild threatened to dissolve itself rather than accept a “bastard”
apprentice who had been prenuptially conceived (p. 205). Stuart examines and rejects
the argument that these extreme standards of honor were primarily an economic tactic
to limit the supply of skilled labor (pp. 191–94). There were so few dishonorable people
in early modern Augsburg (about one hundred in 1600) that guildsmen’s fears about
them were clearly out of proportion to their numbers. The corporate identity of the
artisans was at stake whenever questions of dishonor arose.
Executioners themselves gained distinct benefits from their unique place in popular
culture and corporate society. Foremost was their ability to practice medicine, a well-
established activity across early modern Germany. Stuart explores the cultural logic
behind the paradox that physical medical contact with the executioner, otherwise the
fount of dishonor, was completely unproblematic for early modern guildsmen and for
patients of much higher status. The man trained to torture and kill in the name of the
state could also privately heal—and indeed some executioners made more of their
livelihood from medicine than from their official duties. Unique access to the human
body, both in captivity and after death, gave the executioner special medical knowledge
and access to prized healing materials. Rendered human fat, “essence of human bone,”
and dried human flesh served in an “anthropophagic pharmacology” that was perfectly
consistent with both folk and learned medicine across early modern Europe, as recorded
in the authoritative pharmacopoeia of London and Nuremberg physicians, for example
(p. 158). Stuart argues that the preparation for death afforded to condemned prisoners
“sanctified” them in the popular view, contributing to both the healing power of the
executed body and its parts and to the secular infamy of the executioner outside his

Book Reviews 199
healing practice. One might argue, however, that it was simply executioners’ unique
access to the body of the condemned, rather than any quasi-sanctification, that made
executioners’ use of body parts so valuable for healing.
Stuart concludes by grounding the practice of dishonor firmly in the society of orders
in early modern Germany. As the lowest honorable estate in the city, Augsburg’s
guildsmen most carefully policed the boundaries of dishonor and explicitly linked their
exclusion of dishonorable people with the exclusivity of the merchant and patrician
estates above them. In the eighteenth century, Augsburg’s patrician magistrates, whose
political privilege belied their loss of economic rank to the far wealthier merchants,
were ever more sympathetic to guild concerns about pollution. An explanation of the
social role of dishonor that makes sense for Augsburg, however, needs greater elabo-
ration before it can be applied to the Old Empire as a whole (pp. 257–60). The challenge
of relating local conclusions to national questions is inherent to any well-researched
regional study, even one as carefully crafted as this.
CRAIG KOSLOFSKY
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland, and Liberty, 1569–1772. By Karin
Friedrich. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History. Edited by Sir John Elliott
et al.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xxiⳭ280. $64.95.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries German historians wrote the history
of Prussia as the national history of Germany as a whole. Successive waves of revi-
sionist scholarship over the last four or five decades have done much to redress the
balance. Yet many German scholars still find it difficult to approach Prussian history
as Landesgeschichte. The sense that Prussian history is central to the history of the
nation remains strong and continues to distort prevailing perceptions of the German
past. It also, as Karin Friedrich argues in this perceptive and highly original book,
distorts the history of the Prussian territories themselves. Her study of Royal or Polish
Prussia in the early modern period is a significant contribution both to the history of a
significant frontier area between the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth and to our understanding of the process of nation building in the “pre-
national” era.
In recovering the history of Royal Prussia, Friedrich has unearthed a history ne-
glected by scholars in Germany and Poland alike. German scholars focused only on
those Prussian lands that remained—albeit as a fief of Poland from 1457 until 1657—
under the control first of the Teutonic Order and then of the Hohenzollern Dukes of
Prussia. By and large they simply ignored the separate history of those western prov-
inces, including the prosperous towns of Danzig, Thorn, and Elbing, that rebelled
against the Teutonic Order in 1454 and were actually incorporated into the Polish crown
lands. Polish scholars, by contrast, either played down the German origins of the popu-
lation of Royal Prussia or subsumed the area into the wider history of Pomorze, the
Baltic territories as a whole.
In fact, to varying degrees, the estates of Royal Prussia as a whole maintained a
separate identity within the Polish kingdom. In 1569 the nobility accepted the incor-
poration of their parliament into the Polish Sejm in the Union of Lublin. Despite this,
the Prussian Diet continued to exist and to uphold the validity of the province’s thir-

200 Book Reviews
teenth-century Germanic legal code (Kulm law) and the tradition that only native Prus-
sians might hold office in the province. Indeed, for the cities, which opposed the dim-
inution of the Prussian Diet and who were in any case excluded from the noble Sejm,
these principles remained fundamental until the province was finally incorporated into
Brandenburg-Prussia in the early 1790s.
The most fascinating chapters of Friedrich’s study are those in which she analyzes
the political and constitutional ideas espoused by the Royal Prussian burghers and the
notions they formed of their national identity. Despite the Polish Commonwealth’s
reputation for hostility to towns, the Prussian urban elites developed their political ideas
in the Polish context, with remarkably little regard to developments in the Holy Roman
Empire. The ideas of Lipsius, for example, came to Royal Prussia via Cracow rather
than Helmstedt. Along with the adoption of a Polish political and constitutional identity
went the construction of a historical national identity that claimed the Prussians as part
of a Gothic-Sarmatian family of nations. This rendered their German origins compatible
with their fifteenth-century rebellion against the Teutonic Order and their current po-
litical and constitutional interests in the Polish Commonwealth.
Why did this change? For one thing, the prolonged political crisis of the Common-
wealth from the late seventeenth century made it an increasingly insecure framework
for the Prussians. Enlightened schemes for its reforms also posed a threat to the regional
rights and privileges that they had traditionally enjoyed. At the same time the devel-
opment of an Enlightenment discourse of nationality resulted in the emergence of a
new Polish nationalism—the corollary of schemes for a reformed unitary state—that
the Prussians rightly perceived as exclusive and discriminatory. Meanwhile, across the
border in Ducal Prussia, under full Brandenburg sovereignty after 1657, the pursuit of
an absolutist program culminated in the self-coronation of the Elector Frederick III as
“King in Prussia” in 1701. That in turn promoted the elaboration of a rival and more
dynamic German-Prussian ideology and identity. As the Commonwealth fell victim to
partition in the later decades of the century and Royal Prussia ceased to exist, so its
burgher elites adapted both their politics and their myths of origin to the new realities.
The Sarmatian Prussians of the early modern era became the German Prussians of the
modern era.
This is an excellent and important study. Friedrich’s conclusion that political interest
and constitutional patriotism were more significant determinants of national identity
than either ethnicity or language should be studied by anyone interested in the devel-
opment of European nationalism.
JOACHIM WHALEY
Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University
Karl August von Hardenberg, 1750–1822: Tagebücher und autobiographische

Aufzeichnungen. Edited by Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann. Deutsche
Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, volume 59.
Munich: Harald Boldt Verlag; R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000. Pp. 1108.
Prince Karl August von Hardenberg, Prussia’s chancellor from 1810 to 1822, has not
fared well at the hands of biographers. During the golden age of German biography in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hardenberg’s reputation was over-
shadowed by that of his compatriot and rival Freiherr Karl vom Stein, who headed the
Prussian ministry for a mere thirteen months in 1807–8. Historians celebrated Stein as

Book Reviews 201
a staunch proponent of national unification and constitutional rule, but they often dis-
paraged Hardenberg as an opportunist and a libertine. Unlike Stein’s agenda to rein-
vigorate Prussia’s aristocracy and other traditional corporate institutions, Hardenberg’s
more rationalistic and egalitarian social program struck many scholars as more French
than German in character. In his political philosophy, Hardenberg was often charac-
terized as a holdover from the age of enlightened absolutism.
In recent decades, Hardenberg’s reputation has enjoyed something of a revival.
Scholars have increasingly emphasized Hardenberg’s accomplishments in establishing
the foundations of a modern commercial economy in Prussia, as well as in advocating
the principles of freedom of speech and constitutional rule. Yet Hardenberg still has
not attracted a biographer of the stature of Max Lehmann or Gerhard Ritter, who wrote
epic lives of Stein. The division of Prussia’s state archives between eastern and western
Germany after 1945 exacerbated matters: Hardenberg’s two principal postwar biogra-
phers, Hans Haussherr and Peter Thielen, lacked access to the bulk of his personal
papers, which were held in the German Democratic Republic.
Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann’s excellent annotated edition of Hardenberg’s diaries will
be an indispensable source for historians interested in the life of this pivotal figure in
nineteenth-century Prussian politics. Hardenberg kept a daily journal, composed alter-
nately in French and German, for more than forty years, from about the age of thirty
until his death. His diary entries are meticulously reproduced in their entirety here,
along with a series of rough “autobiographical notes” covering the years 1750–97,
which Hardenberg wrote in preparation for his never-completed memoirs. Stamm-
Kuhlmann supplements the diaries with a comprehensive introduction and bibliogra-
phy, as well as extensive footnotes explaining Hardenberg’s frequently obscure refer-
ences.
It must be noted that anyone looking to these diaries for their literary merit or unique
historical insights is likely to be disappointed. Hardenberg’s daily entries were fre-
quently brief and cryptic, and he made scant mention of many of the tumultuous po-
litical events of the age. His entries for the year 1789, for example, did not allude even
once to the French Revolution, though they repeatedly discussed a disputed land sale
involving the Danish king. Nor did he write about subsequent revolutionary events
such as the trial and execution of Louis XVI. On January 21, 1793, the date of the
French king’s execution, he wrote: “Duke of Wurtemberg’s [sic] birthday. Dull comedy
at his home.” His entries for the following days were no more informative:
具Tues典22 Dinner with Flotow.

具Wed典23 Dinner with Oberland. Toothaches.
具Fri典25 Terrible toothache.
具Sat典26 Faudel’s arrival.
具Tues典29 Men’s dinner.
具Fri典[Feb.] 1 General Grevenitz’s return. (p. 244)
Even when discussing certain momentous events in Prussian history, Hardenberg

offered only sketchy accounts. His entry for October 14, 1806, when Prussia’s armies
were crushed by Napoleon, read simply: “Day of Auerstedt and Jena. Contradictory
news” (p. 433).
Despite the paucity of details in many of the entries, however, Stamm-Kuhlmann’s
extensive running commentary allows us to glean important information about Har-
denberg’s life and political involvements. Moreover, as Hardenberg assumed an in-

202 Book Reviews
creasingly central role in the Prussian government, his entries became more thorough
and informative: close to two-thirds of the diary material (about six hundred pages of
the book) dates from the years 1806–22. The diaries enrich our understanding of Har-
denberg’s political activities during these years, such as his diplomatic maneuverings
following Prussia’s defeat by France in 1806–7, his negotiations at the Vienna Con-
gress of 1814–15, and his struggle for a Prussian constitution during the final years of
his life.
In some instances, Hardenberg’s entries offer surprises. For example, they persua-
sively document the closeness of his friendship with Wilhelm Ludwig Georg von Witt-
genstein, Prussia’s police minister, who has often been depicted as an arch-reactionary
and Hardenberg’s most formidable opponent. Thus, the diaries highlight the fluidity of
political alignments in Prussia during this era, as well as the frequent blurring of bound-
aries between “reformers” and “reactionaries.” In discussing his private life, Harden-
berg provided certain intriguing revelations, for example that he was drawn to mes-
merism during his old age. He offered few hints, however, about his family life or his
numerous romantic entanglements.
Stamm-Kuhlmann deserves praise for his accurate rendition of these documents and
his thorough background notes. Though the diaries and autobiographical sketches pro-
vide only an incomplete impression of Hardenberg’s intellectual dexterity and force of
character, future biographers will find this work to be an essential starting point for
their labors.
MATTHEW LEVINGER
Lewis & Clark College
Bürgerliche Rittergüter: Sozialer Wandel und politische Reform in Kursachsen,

1680–1844. By Axel Flügel. Bürgertum: Beiträge zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte,
volume 16. Edited by Neithard Bulst et al.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Pp. 304.
In this study, Axel Flügel seeks to revise Heinrich von Treitschke’s image of the
Kingdom of Saxony as the political dinosaur of the German Confederation. In the third
volume of his history of nineteenth-century Germany (Deutsche Geschichte im Neun-
zehnten Jahrhundert, 3 vols. [Leipzig, 1927]), Treitschke drew a sharp contrast between
Saxony’s social and economic dynamism and its stagnant political institutions. By
1830, the majority of landed estates were in the hands of nonnoble or recently ennobled
families. The result was that 75 percent of the estate owners in Saxony could not prove
the noble descent required for a seat in the Landtag and were thus excluded from
political life. For Treitschke, the prophet and apologist of German unification under
Prussian hegemony, Saxony’s political backwardness revealed its inability to play a
leading role in German unification (Flügel, pp. 9–10).
According to Flügel, Treitschke’s picture of Saxony’s political backwardness con-
tinues to influence historians. He proceeds to set the record straight by analyzing the
structure of estate holding and political participation in the district of Leipzig, where,
according to Treitschke, the large number of noble estates owned by Leipzig merchants
had led to a situation in which, by 1830, less than 10 percent of all landed estate owners
qualified for a seat in the Landtag.

Book Reviews 203
Until the constitution of 1831, the monarch and the nobility dominated political life
in the Kingdom of Saxony. The Landtag, which met regularly every six years, was
largely the preserve of the nobility, although the towns and the Lutheran church were
also represented. Noble participation in the Landtag was open only to owners of noble
estates (Rittergüter) who could prove four generations of noble descent. This dual
requirement excluded most of the owners of noble estates: urban corporations, the
recently ennobled, and—most important—nonnobles. Flügel does not deny that this
undermined the political legitimacy of the Landtag, but he rightly points out that the
political system also excluded many nobles from direct political participation. The legal
system in Saxony distinguished between two categories of landed estates: estates in
the first category conferred on their owners the right to participate directly in the Land-
tag, while owners of estates in the second category could participate only indirectly,
by electing representatives from their ranks. In 1793, for example, only 54 percent
(104) of the 193 noble estates in the district of Leipzig qualified their owners for direct
participation in the Landtag. But since most of these 104 estates were owned by non-
nobles or others who were excluded from political life, the quota of political partici-
pation was even lower. This would seem to confirm Treitschke’s view of political
stagnation, but Flügel’s analysis reveals a more dynamic political process that led to
the integration of newcomers into the landed elite by 1818.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, 85 percent of noble estates
were in noble hands, but nonnoble ownership rose steadily beginning in the 1720s and
reached a high point in the 1840s, when 50 percent of the noble estates in the Leipzig
district were in the hands of commoners. By the end of the eighteenth century, there
already existed a stratum of nonnoble estate owners with firm roots in the landed world.
This group was made up of state officials, members of the learned professions, peasants,
farmers, and merchants. Contrary to Treitschke’s assertion, the merchants did not oc-
cupy a prominent place among the nonnoble estate owners and in 1819 accounted for
only eleven of the eighty-eight nonnoble estate owners (p. 149). Treitschke also ex-
aggerated the political stagnation in Saxony. The noble monopoly on political partic-
ipation was already under fire in the second half of the eighteenth century, and, in 1818,
twenty-four nonnoble estate owners (mostly bankers, merchants, and members of the
learned professions) petitioned the Landtag to allow all owners of noble estates, re-
gardless of their social status, to elect representatives to the Landtag. After much debate
and some compromise, this petition was approved and thirteen nonnoble estate owners
(five of them from the Leipzig district) were elected to the Landtag in 1820. According
to the author, this signaled neither a noble abdication from power nor a bourgeois
victory but rather the fusion of noble and nonnoble estate owners into a conservative
landed elite that would rule Saxony for the rest of the nineteenth century (pp. 206–7).
Flügel builds a convincing case against Treitschke’s image of an antiquated political
system incapable of adapting to social change. Less persuasive, however, is the author’s
view that these political developments resulted in the creation of a landed ruling class
in which aristocratic and bourgeois elites were merged. This view would be more
convincing if Flügel could show that the financial and commercial elites of Saxony
played a large role in the purchase of landed estates, but his work presents only limited
evidence for this, at least in the period up to 1844 (p. 149). The majority of nonnoble
estate owners were state officials or members of the learned professions and not rep-
resentatives of the business elite. This remains, nevertheless, an intriguing hypothesis
that may find more support in the sources dealing with the second half of the nineteenth

204 Book Reviews
century. Hopefully the author will pursue this in a later study. Meanwhile, his case
study of the relationship between landed property and political development in eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth-century Saxony provides an excellent introduction to the
political and institutional history of one of the most important, yet also most neglected,
states in nineteenth-century Germany.
EDGAR MELTON
Wright State University
Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz

bis zum Sozialistengesetz. By Thomas Welskopp. Historisches
Forschungszentrum der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Reihe Politik- und
Gesellschaftsgeschichte, volume 54. Edited by Dieter Dowe and Michael
Schneider.
Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 2000. Pp. 839. DM 128.
According to Thomas Welskopp, the early years of the German labor movement be-
tween 1848 and the passing of antisocialist legislation in 1878 have been largely ne-
glected by historical research and reduced to the status of prologue to the history of
German social democracy. It is the declared goal of Welskopp’s voluminous 840-page
study to rescue this period from oblivion by offering a comprehensive examination of
workers’ associations as they developed during this time.
The author views early German social democracy as a political movement with a
heterogeneous social base that took shape mainly in peoples’ assemblies and local
workers’ associations. It is consequently upon these that the analysis is focused. Wel-
skopp claims that in its early phase, between 1848 and 1878, the workers’ movement
constituted a united bloc against its foremost antagonists—the old system of guilds,
capitalism, and the reactionary Obrigkeitsstaat. Since the workers’ movement recon-
stituted itself within its old confines in the 1860s, continuity with the structures that
had emerged in 1848 was maintained despite the rupture during the reactionary 1850s,
when socialist and democratic associations were banned and their members harassed
and driven into exile. The workers’ movement had come into being as a federation of
local associations, and it remained, despite its various permutations, “a decentralized
party based on associations (dezentrale Vereinspartei)” (p. 24) until 1878. No national
or even supraregional apparatus existed, only loose networks of a multitude of local
organizations with no party headquarters or hierarchical structure. The organizations’
extremely heterogeneous social composition and the absence of clearly defined lead-
ership structures lead Welskopp to conclude that the traditional tendency to equate
“worker” with “industrial laborer” cannot be upheld in this early period.
After an informative survey chapter on the development of a host of organizations—
among them the liberal Arbeiterbildungsvereine, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbei-
terverein (ADAV), the Vereinstag Deutscher Arbeitervereine (VDAV), and the sub-
sequent party formations that emerged from these groupings—Welskopp’s main focus
is on the unfolding of party life in the plethora of local organizations. In three sub-
stantial sections, Welskopp first analyzes the social composition of the local associa-
tions’ rank and file and leadership. He then turns to what he calls the social and cultural
praxis of workers’ associations and assemblies, which, in somewhat idealized terms,
are characterized as “democratic minirepublics” and considered harbingers of a better
and socially more egalitarian future. The third section examines the nature of discourse

Book Reviews 205
to throw light on mentality, ways of thinking, and the importance of ideology in the
associations.
In his analysis of social composition, Welskopp makes it clear that in its infancy
German social democracy was not a movement based on social class in the Marxian
sense. Not until Wilhelminian Germany did it become acceptable to describe one’s
identity in class terms. Welskopp argues that democracy preceded socialism in terms
of ideology and organization; the ideas of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle exerted
but little influence. Minimal social distance separated rank and file from leadership in
early social democracy, which was first and foremost a democratic movement. Among
the rank-and-file membership, journeymen and small master craftsmen of the most
widespread trades—such as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and cabinetmakers—pre-
dominated, with bourgeois radicals, schoolteachers, pharmacists, and free-floating in-
tellectuals (Literaten) composing a lesser but still significant part of the membership.
Those who considered themselves to be simply “wage laborers” were in a minority;
factory and agricultural laborers were rarely to be found. An inherent dynamic toward
democratization prevailed within the associations, according to Welskopp. Radical
democratic rules became the standard. Workers subscribed to self-realization and self-
perfection as reflected in the ideal of Bildung and as suggested by the epithet Arbei-
terbildungsverein. The author insists that for journeymen tailors, master weavers, pri-
mary school teachers and others, the association was the only self-determined social
space in which they were respected, able to debate on an even footing, and considered
worthy members of society. Workers created a lifestyle alternative to that found in
society at large, where they were often isolated and repressed by authorities. In their
associations, in contrast, political involvement and the quest for identity and community
happily coincided, for one met not only comrades of the same political persuasion but
also friends and drinking buddies. Welskopp argues that the associations, in which
workers could fully realize their potential, formed a positive counterfoil to an otherwise
hostile social environment. In this context, the empowered worker-citoyen of Wel-
skopp’s ideal “minirepublic” of the associations is juxtaposed to the repressed jour-
neyman—patronized and manipulated like a marionette by society’s controlling
strings.
Welskopp’s study, which is based on a great many printed primary sources and select
archival documents, offers a wealth of detail on the organization and dynamics of the
Arbeitervereine, including information on age and professional structure, and interest-
ing characterizations of labor leaders, such as Ferdinand Lassalle, Johann Baptist von
Schweitzer, and Wilhelm Liebknecht. A significant drawback, however, is that the role
of the workers’ movement as a tactical device in the political struggles of the age is
not sufficiently appreciated: the relationship between Bismarck and Lassalle is dis-
cussed on only one page, and Hermann Wagener’s attempt to use the working classes
as a mass base against liberalism is not even mentioned. In fact, Wagener—Bismarck’s
influential adviser on social issues—is not listed in the index. What is more, the subtitle
of Welskopp’s study is misleading, since the Vormärz period is not integrated into the
analysis, which begins in 1848. In a study of such magnitude, closer attention might
also have been devoted to the similarity between central features of socialism and
conservatism and to the role played by Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch—the liberal cham-
pion of the workers—in the period’s political struggles. The importance of the wars
of unification and the profound changes in political parties after 1866 might also have
been given greater weight, though one could argue that these issues lay beyond the
purview of Welskopp’s microanalysis of workers’ associations.
The author points out that the present study is the revised and shortened version of

206 Book Reviews
his Habilitationsschrift. Yet neither revisions nor cuts were comprehensive enough to
make for a readable book. The arguments made in this detailed work would have been
more effective and also more appealing to the reader if the writing were less encum-
bered, the style less long-winded and repetitive, and the points made more succinctly.
Nonetheless, though not as accessible to the reader as one might wish, Welskopp’s
study is a significant contribution to our understanding of the social composition, na-
ture, and goals of the early labor movement in Germany.
HERMANN BECK
University of Miami
Kleinstadtbürgertum in der Habsburgermonarchie, 1861–1914. Edited by Peter

Urbanitsch and Hannes Stekl. Bürgertum in der Habsburgermonarchie, volume 9.
Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, with assistance from the Fond zur Förderung der
wissenschaftlichen Forschung, 2000. Pp. 516. DM 98.
This book is volume 9 in the impressive series, Bürgertum in der Habsburgermonar-

chie, which deals with the formation of Austria’s Bürgertum in the modern period.
(Bürgertum, a term increasingly not translated in the scholarly literature, means roughly
the bourgeoisie or middling groups.) This book covers new territory by taking the reader
into the secondary cities of the Habsburg monarchy. Scholarly interest in these urban
areas and their surrounding regions has grown recently and this book should contribute
to and encourage this trend. Thankfully, a more comprehensive and intriguing view of
the social and cultural dimensions of the Habsburg monarchy is beginning to emerge.
Readers familiar with this series on the Bürgertum in Austria will recognize the
design of this volume: an excellent introductory essay is followed by a number of
probing case studies—in this instance, studies of individual cities. Hans Heiss, Hannes
Stekl, and Peter Urbanitsch, three leading scholars, write the introductory essay for this
volume. They collaborate again to provide an incisive conclusion to the book. As with
any book of this type that includes numerous individual studies, it is difficult to treat
all of the contributions separately. Thus, this review will focus on a few common
themes in the volume. A preliminary observation: the work treats smaller cities in the
western half of the Habsburg monarchy (Cisleithania) such as Wels, Baden, Bregenz,
Brixen (Bressanone), and Wiener Neustadt in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The focus on western Austria is not clear from the book’s title.
One theme of the volume is the reaction of the Bürgertum to dramatic as well as
subtle changes in the urban landscape. All of these cities, for different reasons, expe-
rienced social and cultural upheaval in the second half of the nineteenth century. The
causes of the upheaval ranged from industrial growth to increasing tourism. As a result,
the Bürger of these cities had to reevaluate constantly their political, economic, and
social positions. As Heiss, Stekl, and Urbanitsch emphasize, one way in which they
did so was by trying to stay in control of the transition from a corporate to a class-
based society—from Stände to Klassen. Of course, as the authors and editors make
clear, this transition was not seamless, easy, or complete. Old and new ways of man-
aging urban affairs continued to mix and old and new elites often struggled for control
and influence.
What emerged from dealing with the dramatic transformations of the nineteenth
century is what I would call the attempt on the part of the Austrian Bürgertum to
control modernization. Indeed, controlling modernization or attempting to do so is the

Book Reviews 207
biggest theme of this collection of essays. In myriad ways urban leaders found that
they could not completely prevent modern innovations from penetrating their city walls;
on the contrary, they sometimes found that it was more beneficial to their status to
embrace and exploit social and cultural changes in the nineteenth century. Whether
resisting or exploiting modernization, however, Austria’s Kleinstadtbürger always tried
to manage it on their own terms. Thus, economic development—such as expanding
rail networks or promoting individual industries—could be tolerated and even en-
couraged, but civic leaders hoped that it would not overwhelm the social balance of
their communities. Similarly, tourism could be promoted, but urban officials and elites
hoped to link it to already established economic and cultural networks in their cities
or regions. The major question for many of these Austrian secondary cities, therefore,
was usually not whether to modernize but when, how, to what extent, and to what ends.
Nevertheless, resistance to change on the part of some Kleinstadtbürger could still be
quite strong. This resistance might have manifested itself through attempts to delay or
derail modernizing moves at the urban or regional level or through the persistence of
and adherence to premodern symbols of urban identity—for example, the celebration
of long-standing local festivals. All of the authors in this volume do a fine job of
describing the complicated process of controlling modernization; they analyze well
how the Austrian Bürgertum displayed enthusiasm, ambivalence, and resistance to
modernity. The studies of Hans Heiss and Ulrike Königsrainer on Brixen, Hans Peter
Hye on Aussig (Ústı́ nad Labem), and Gabriele Fröschl on Wels are particularly good
in this respect.
Several of the essays also contribute to another growing area of Austrian social and
cultural history, namely, interest in tourism and leisure in general. As present-day
Austria depends economically on tourism, this new scholarly interest in its historical
roots and cultural importance is welcome. In addition, as several authors have shown,
tourism and its related activities brought Austrians increasingly into contact with out-
side influences and new cultural trends. Urban leaders tried to manage this develop-
ment, too. Thus, they might have introduced improvements or innovations in such
urban cultural institutions as libraries, theaters, or musical organizations in efforts to
promote their cities to outsiders or to maintain their status vis-à-vis the Bürger of
neighboring cities. As the authors state, very infrequently did Kleinstadtbürger in west-
ern Austria envision competing with major urban areas in economic and cultural de-
velopment (in fact, they usually feared the culture of large cities such as Vienna). They
did hope, however, to maintain their position within a given region and perhaps move
ahead of other competitors for territorial predominance, cultural standing, and tourists’
money. Once again, therefore, the Kleinstadtbürger wanted to strike a balance: cultural
innovations and increased contact with the outside world could be tolerated and even
promoted, but the fear and anxiety associated with big-city urban culture prevented the
Bürger from embracing too much innovation.
The editors and contributors of this book might have conceived of a study of the
Kleinstadtbürgertum in a narrow sense and therefore have focused their energies pri-
marily or exclusively on the attitudes and actions of urban leaders in governmental
decisions and urban politics. Thankfully, that is not the case. The authors have taken
a very broad look at Austria’s secondary cities. One welcomes the discussions of urban
design, park construction, and the quality of local theater and music productions along-
side the anticipated structural analysis of the shifting political and economic contours
of these cities, the changing composition of urban elites, and legislative debates. The
volume succeeds in large part because of the interlocking stories it tells and the multiple
perspectives on urban life it offers. A minor criticism: in a volume of over five hundred

208 Book Reviews
pages with copious footnotes and numerous tables, space could have been found for a
few maps. They would have helped orient the general reader and made clear spatially
some of the descriptions and developments covered in the book. Although it of course
adds to the cost of producing such a work, including photographs and drawings from
the era would also have been a nice addition.
In sum, this volume is to be recommended for scholars of modern Austria and
especially for those interested in the social and cultural history of its cities and regions.
The book belongs on the shelf of any research library as well.
WILLIAM D. BOWMAN
Gettysburg College
Im Schatten der Diktatur. Die Finanzdiplomatie des Vertreters des

Völkerbundes in Österreich: Meinoud Rost van Tonningen, 1931–1936. By
Peter Berger. Studien zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte und Wirtschaftspolitik, volume 7.
Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2000. Pp. 616.
Minoud Marinus Rost van Tonnigen represented the League of Nations in Austria from
1931 to 1936. In that role he was responsible for protecting the interests of Austria’s
foreign creditors as well as for advising the Austrian government on fiscal issues. Rost
was not, however, among the top bureaucrats and politicians in the Austria of his day.
The author of this study, Peter Berger, believes that this relative lack of prominence
allowed Rost to attain an unusual degree of influence in government circles and to
acquire much valuable information, which in turn found its way into his correspondence
and his diary.
Rost came to Vienna initially with a conservative, middle-class outlook, but during
the second phase of his life in Vienna, in 1931–36, he gravitated more and more toward
National Socialism. Rost’s relationship to the Austrian political leadership remained
distant until Engelbert Dollfuss replaced Karl Buresch as Chancellor. Rost deeply ad-
mired Dollfuss, and this admiration—especially for Dollfuss’s brand of authoritarian
politics—reached its high point in the fall of 1933. During these years Rost van Ton-
nigen evolved from a representative of foreign interests to become first an honest broker
and then a full-fledged friend of Austria.
Rost’s enthusiasm for Dollfuss’s regime in no way precluded his growing support
for the political goals and methods of Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, Rost became a strong
supporter of National Socialist ideology. This had two practical consequences, accord-
ing to Berger. First, Rost opposed any steps to strengthen the role of the League of
Nations as the formal guarantor of Austria’s independence from Germany. Second, he
interceded with the German embassy in Vienna and later directly in Berlin for a “ne-
gotiated peace or at least a ceasefire” between the political camps. Berger considers
these actions “a meaningful extension of Dollfuss’s right-wing posture” and not a break
with the Austrian Chancellor. He attributes that rupture instead to Rost’s disappoint-
ment in the Heimwehr. This would explain Rost’s criticism of the friction between
Major Fey and Chancellor Dollfuss, his attack on Starhemberg’s immoral conduct, and
his conviction that Odo Neustaedter-Stuermer was promoting inflation (pp. 393–94).
The growing influence of Catholicism also contributed to the rift. When Kurt von
Schuschnigg came to power and the Catholic influence grew even stronger, Rost van
Tonnigen withdrew his support from the Austrian regime. He looked with growing

Book Reviews 209
sympathy toward National Socialist Germany, where the relationship between church
and state appeared to be clearly defined (pp. 561–64).
During his last two years in Vienna, Rost van Tonnigen came increasingly under the
influence of the extreme German nationalist group led by Karl Anton Rohan. Rost
began to discharge his duties as a League of Nations official “somewhat eccentrically”
(p. 28). He worked aggressively to prevent the West from becoming more heavily
involved financially in Austria. He also actively opposed, within the limitations im-
posed by his relative lack of authority, a policy encouraging Austrian debt repayment,
which London strongly advocated. (That policy demanded that Austria repay the cou-
pon holders of the 1923 American portion of the League of Nations loan with “Re-
liefbonds” and “Live-Claims” on the Austrian treasury.) After Ludwig Draxler replaced
Buresch as finance minister in 1935, Rost van Tonnigen began to exclude the League
of Nations from its central role as a financial consulting authority to the Austrian central
government. This development leads Berger to one of the central themes in his book,
namely, that Austria’s decision to stop cooperating with the League of Nations in the
summer of 1936 ranked with the July agreement and the conference in Berchtesgaden
as one of the “tragic developments” on the road to the extinction of Austria’s sover-
eignty. Rost van Tonnigen succeeded, despite his relatively insignificant position, in
destroying the framework of the Lausanne agreement, designed ultimately to keep
Hitler out of Austria. Berger attributes Rost’s success to the erosion of the major
principles designed to prop up the European post–World War I order. Liberal economic
thinking was permanently discredited as a consequence of the worldwide economic
crisis. Lack of trust became the dominant theme in international economic relations as
well as in Austria’s domestic politics.
After his return to the Netherlands, Rost became a fanatical friend of Germany. He
collaborated with the German authorities after the occupation of the Netherlands in
1939. As president of the Niederländische Notenbank he participated in the exploitation
of the Netherlands and its Jewish population. Neo-Nazi elements continue to regard
him as a hero.
Peter Berger has written a gripping and serious study about the life and politics of
this colorful figure. It is clear that he has mastered diverse source material in Geneva,
Paris, London, Vienna, and Amsterdam, and he demonstrates a broad knowledge of
the secondary literature. He has also contributed an interesting glimpse into the fiscal
policies of the 1920s and 1930s.
JÜRGEN NAUTZ
Kassel University and University of Vienna
Doing Business with the Nazis: Britain’s Economic and Financial Relations with
Germany, 1931–1939. By Neil Forbes. Foreword by Richard Overy.
London: Frank Cass, 2000. Pp. xixⳭ250. $59.50.
Throughout most of the interwar period the United Kingdom was the most important
or second most important export market for Germany. Germany was also an important
export market for Britain. Given that they were two of the leading industrial nations
in the world this is not surprising. But in the 1930s Germany was slipping toward
totalitarianism and war, and British trade policy (and the culpability of British politi-
cians, bankers, and industrialists) in this period has been questioned. Academics such
as Martin Gilbert, W. N. Medlicott, Bernd Jürgen Wendt, and (more cautiously) Gustav

210 Book Reviews
Schmidt have argued that appeasement was as much an economic as a political beast.
This book maintains that, in general, British politicians, bankers, and industrialists did
the best they could in difficult circumstances, and it finds little evidence of active
appeasement. British policy toward Germany in the 1930s was not driven by strong
profascist or anticommunist leanings but by practical economic considerations, and
British businessmen were pursuing economic self-interest rather than political agendas.
Often that self-interest was tied up with debts owed to them by Germany; that, in turn,
gave Germany economic, and political, leverage.
Having said that, the thesis of this book is underpinned by some strong assumptions
about the economic and political power of Britain. For example: “Germany’s effort to
attain price and exchange equilibrium was brought to nothing by the depreciation of
sterling . . . [and] the economic and hence political problems of the Weimar Republic
were compounded when Britain brought in protectionism” (p. 224). This suggests that
if Britain had remained on the gold standard and committed to free trade maybe the
world would have been saved from Hitler. But it ignores the possibility that if Britain
had stayed on gold, and if it of all the major economies had not retreated into some
form of protectionism, it is likely that the economic (and political?) consequences for
it would have been extremely serious.
Forbes is concerned with British financial, and to a lesser extent economic, policy
toward Germany in the 1930s. At the heart of this was a debate about what sort of
Germany was best for Britain: “a prosperous or ‘fat’ Germany would be good for British
business and would enable the supposed [German] moderates to exercise a stabilising
influence; on the other hand it was held that prosperity would only facilitate Nazi
rearmament—keeping Germany ‘lean’ would help, therefore, to preserve peace in Eu-
rope” (p. 11). In effect, the advocates for a prosperous Germany won the argument,
partly on political grounds (the consequences of the alternative seemed potentially
disastrous in the early 1930s) and partly on business grounds (the need to protect British
financial and commercial interests with and in Germany).
The first part of the book is dominated by a narrative of the financial aspects of
bilateral trade in the 1930s (chaps. 2–4). In particular, it charts German efforts to
maintain access to British goods and British efforts to ensure they got paid for those
goods. Under the Weimar regime Germany began a process of obtaining imports with-
out paying for them, which they accomplished by defaulting on long-term loans and
short-term credits and by failing to honor debts to individual exporters. However, it is
argued that although within Britain financial interests were initially more successful
than commercial interests in gaining the ear of the state, there was, in general, no
obvious bias. Thus, the Anglo-German Transfer Agreement of July 1934 mainly helped
bondholders, not exporters. But exporters only had to wait until November for help in
the form of the Anglo-German Payments Agreement. The Payments Agreement estab-
lished an official regulatory framework for economic and financial transactions that
would last until September 1939. Forbes calls it the most important of all such arrange-
ments, while acknowledging, but disagreeing with, Paul Einzag (the contemporary
journalist) that it was the first act of “economic appeasement.” By late 1938 it was
clear that the Payments Agreement was feeding German rearmament, but the British
continued it for practical strategic reasons: imports of German machine tools and ma-
chinery were crucial to British rearmament.
Chapter 5 offers case studies of the Dunlop Rubber Company, Anglo-Persian Oil,
and the Lancashire Cotton Corporation to examine the degree of British industrial
complicity in German rearmament. Both Dunlop and Anglo-Persian Oil had subsidi-
aries operating in Germany and this made them particularly vulnerable to German

Book Reviews 211
pressure. However, Forbes is able to show that they both tried to defend their economic
interests while at the same time resisting pressure to become part of the rearmament
process. For example, Anglo-Persian Oil (unlike Shell and Standard Oil) did not allow
its subsidiary to participate in the hydrogenation projects undertaken by I. G. Farben,
despite the fact that this gave its rivals economic advantages in the German market.
Whereas Forbes vindicates the industrialists, he is less kind, in chapter 6, to the bankers
(including Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England), whom he sees as
politically naı̈ve. Of course, the political elite in Britain was also prone to underestimate
Nazi goals and methods. Chapter 7 explains how the British state hoped “that an Anglo-
German industrial agreement might provide the basis for achieving an accommodation
with Hitler” (p. 199). Forbes is careful to show that the British state was not a homog-
enous entity: the Treasury and the Board of Trade were both suspicious of the activities
of the Foreign Office, which, in turn, did not appreciate the position of the Bank of
England and the machinations of its governor.
This is a useful exercise in bilateral financial and economic diplomacy written from
the perspective of one of the participants (Britain). It pays due attention to the com-
plexities of the various relationships involved (empire vs. Europe, finance vs. com-
merce, Board of Trade vs. the Foreign Office), and although its conclusions are perhaps
occasionally stated with too strong a conviction, they are at least explained clearly and
thoughtfully.
PETER HOWLETT
London School of Economics
Unterm Hakenkreuz: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung, 1933 bis 1939. By

Michael Schneider. Geschichte der Arbeiter und der Arbeiterbewegung in
Deutschland seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, volume 12. Edited by Gerhard
A. Ritter.
Bonn: Dietz, 1999. Pp. xiiiⳭ1184. DM 98.
This is the seventh volume to be published in the series of monumental studies on the
history of workers and the labor movement in Germany issued by Dietz. The chrono-
logical survey is now nearly complete, from 1800 to 1939, the only significant gap
being the First World War. Thematic volumes are planned for the pre-1914 period, and
the publishers promise further volumes on the experience of World War II and on East
and West German workers from 1945 to reunification. Previous contributions to the
series have been distinguished by their combination of detailed coverage and critical
assessment of the historiography, and Michael Schneider’s work maintains that high
standard.
The book comprises four substantive (and substantial) chapters. The first details the
situation and fate of the workers’ organizations during the first months of the dictator-
ship, while each of the following three covers the whole period from a distinct per-
spective: official policies toward the workers, worker experience and response to the
regime, and underground and exile activity, respectively. An introduction and conclu-
sion set out historiographical issues and problems of interpretation.
The central questions addressed by the book are about the relationship between
workers and regime: How far was the working class won over by National Socialism,
how far intimidated, how far transformed? For the period before 1933, Schneider argues
judiciously that while organized workers were relatively resistant to the appeal of the

212 Book Reviews
National Socialist party (NSDAP), this was a result of specific political traditions, not
a simple reflex determined by their class position. Indeed, even the self-conscious
parties of labor lost votes and members to the NSDAP before 1933, and Schneider
does not hesitate to treat the Nazi factory-cell movement (NSBO) as part of the labor
movement. For the years of Nazi rule, a particularly useful section on “moods and
attitudes” traces the shifts in response to the regime chronologically over the whole
period. Without ignoring the extensive literature on public and worker opinion, Schnei-
der provides a substantially new account by relying on his own analysis of official and
underground opinion reports, including material from Communist observers, which has
become available since the opening up of former GDR archives. This largely confirms
the accounts of previous students of the subject, but with some new emphases. Schnei-
der’s conclusion is that economic circumstances (prices, wages, relief levels) were the
most consistent grounds for complaint against the regime and sources of continuing
anxiety and discontent. These concerns did tend to become politicized, though they did
not result in political action, being outweighed in practice by the positive features of
the regime: foreign policy successes and the person of Adolf Hitler. Typically, Schnei-
der is able to demonstrate that measures for work creation had a positive effect on
opinion but only among those workers who actually gained work and/or experienced
a lasting improvement in their social position. Overall, the regime’s key success was
the provision of a sense of security that left the working class politically resigned or
neutralized; neither black nor white, but shades of gray dominate the overall picture of
worker attitudes to the regime.
Political neutralization did not entail the end of class, however. In the absence of
the means of collective action and self-articulation that historically defined class,
Schneider argues, the evidence of mentality reveals a persistent awareness of who was
on the top and who was on the bottom, of rich and poor, of workers and “bosses.” In
a provocative phrase that recalls Jürgen Kocka’s account of the condition of German
workers in the First World War, he proposes that under Hitler they lost the character
of a “class for itself” while remaining a “class in itself” (p. 769). Similarly, Schneider
finds no evidence of a “social revolution” in Nazi Germany—no sign of an increase
in equality or a real realignment of the social structure, whether measured by income,
education, or vocational opportunities. If it proved impossible after 1945 for organized
labor to recover the discursive and organizational power that it had enjoyed in the
1920s, this was a result of long-term transformations, particularly in the material and
moral conditions that constituted the Arbeitermilieu. National Socialism only acceler-
ated this development.
Of course, drawing any conclusions about the nature and consequences of a regime
that ended in total war on the basis of an account that stops short of the outbreak of
war is problematic. If there are problems with this book, they reflect the difficulty of
maintaining a focus on the particularities of the moment when one’s attention is con-
stantly drawn to the larger (and often better-documented) processes that defined the
regime itself. Schneider’s dense coverage of policy and policy making makes much of
the volume more like a history of National Socialism than an account of workers and
their movement. Even the sections on public opinion, drawing largely on “official”
voices (whether state or movement), leave the reader hungry for more material that
would provide an insight into the character and quality of worker experience. The
portraits of individual opponents of the regime in the sections on resistance are an
exception to this, adding a human touch to the account; it seems rather old fashioned
to accord privileged visibility in this way to a select group of activists. The contributions
of Alltagsgeschichte to the historiography of Nazi Germany are generously cited in
Schneider’s bibliography, but they have made little impression on the text.

Book Reviews 213
But these are problems inherent in a project of this kind, and one of the most at-
tractive features of the volume is Schneider’s critical awareness of methodological
issues. He is candid about problematic sources, providing useful information on how
particular sets of statistics were compiled and an excellent introduction to the uses and
pitfalls of public opinion reports. Like its companion volumes, Unterm Hakenkreuz is
equipped with an extensive bibliography and comprehensive place, name, and subject
indices, all of which add to its value as a standard work of reference.
EVE ROSENHAFT
University of Liverpool
The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. By Jonathan

Petropoulos.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xviiⳭ395. $30.00.
The jacket notice for Jonathan Petropoulos’s book describes it as “a gripping read,”
and it is. While one of its central themes is the large-scale looting of art that took place
in Germany and occupied Europe during the Third Reich, it is also a wide-ranging and
absorbing study of the German art world’s dealings with the Nazi leadership and its
survival more or less unscathed after 1945. By means of a series of well-documented
case studies it examines the role of museum directors, critics, art historians, dealers,
and artists themselves in the regime’s ambitious program of purging public collections
of modern “degenerate” art, dispossessing Jewish collectors, tracking down and pur-
loining thousands of works in the occupied territories, and making cultural propaganda
for Hitler’s project of racial hegemony. The principal figures investigated are Ernst
Buchner, director of the Bavarian State Galleries; the critic Robert Scholz, editor of
the prestigious journal Die Kunst im Dritten Reich and a close associate of Alfred
Rosenberg; the dealer Karl Haberstock, who became involved on a vast and lucrative
scale in the transfer of art from Vichy France and the Netherlands to the Nazi elite
(Hitler alone spent 163 million reichsmarks on paintings and sculpture); the Austrian
art historian Cajetan Muehlmann, who was similarly active in Poland, Russia, and
Holland; and Nazi Germany’s leading monumental sculptor, Arno Breker, who earned
huge sums from state and private commissions and during the war used forced labor
to turn out sculptural decorations on an industrial scale. Of subsidiary concern—though
not necessarily because their activities were less interesting—are a range of other
individuals including the sculptor Josef Thorak, the painter Adolf Ziegler (the so-called
master of German pubic hair), and the distinguished museum official Hans Posse, who
retired honorably from his post as director of the Dresden Gallery in 1939 only to be
seduced into taking charge of Hitler’s scheme for a gigantic art museum at Linz. Most
of Petropoulos’s subjects were exceptionally well educated and, by contemporary stan-
dards, civilized men. All were able enough to have had successful careers under more
normal circumstances. After 1933, sooner or later and with varying degrees of rapacity
and moral turpitude, all of them accommodated themselves to the demands of a regime
that needed their services and, in return, offered undreamed-of prospects of wealth and
power. Morally, the most complex case is Buchner’s. His expeditions to France and
Belgium in 1942 to recover major works forfeited under the Versailles Treaty could
be defended in terms of the orthodox nationalism of the time; many others would have
done the same. He also showed energy and courage in preserving most of the Bavarian
collections from destruction: this is one reason, despite rumbles of protest, why he was

214 Book Reviews
officially reinstated in 1953. Thoroughly discreditable, however, was the pressure he

had exerted on Jewish collectors to sell works of art to the state at knock-down prices.
And Theodore Rousseau, the able American investigator who later scrutinized his war-
time activities, fairly recommended punitive sanctions against him as one of the many
prominent Germans who “provided the fanatics and criminals with the necessary cloak
of respectability” (p. 50). But in fact Buchner was not alone in getting off lightly.
Muehlmann escaped punishment in Austria simply by moving to Bavaria (and in any
case the Austrian authorities were more interested in his pre-Anschluss activities as an
illegal Nazi than in his cultural banditry during the war). Breker lived comfortably until
1981 on the proceeds of plentiful commissions from foreign governments and German
industrialists. Haberstock resumed dealing and eventually bequeathed a large picture
collection to the Municipal Gallery of his native Augsburg. These individual stories
are fascinating (and often depressing) in their own right. But the book also sheds light
on many other issues, such as the complex relations between Austrian and German
Nazis after 1938; the multifarious cultural projects of the SS; the internecine rivalries
within the Nazi elite, never more ferocious than over possession of looted masterpieces;
and Paris’s booming wartime art market, fed by German dealers, Vichy officials, and
swarms of shady speculators and middlemen. Petropoulos’s main achievement, how-
ever, with the help of a wide range of primary sources, is vividly and convincingly to
evoke the crisis of a key segment of the Bildungsbürgertum under dictatorship. Dis-
secting the attendant moral ambiguities is a demanding task: at times Haberstock living
in his luxurious quarters on the Ile Saint-Louis and Breker throwing lavish parties
within earshot of his captive labor force seem like nonrepentant—but occasionally
altruistic—Oskar Schindlers. Yet, apart from one outrageous comment about the
painter Wilhelm Truebner (p. 99), the author succeeds magnificently. This is a very
good book that deserves to be read well beyond the ranks of Third Reich historians.
ROBIN LENMAN
University of Warwick
Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis. By Ian Kershaw.

New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Pp. xlviⳭ1115. $35.00.
With the publication of this second of two volumes, Ian Kershaw has completed what
now unquestionably becomes the reigning biography of Adolf Hitler. The culmination
of over twenty years of research on the Third Reich, Kershaw’s study draws on a
staggering array of primary and secondary sources to provide the most comprehensive
examination yet of the career of the strange man who gained autocratic control over
one of the world’s most advanced and powerful nations, only to plunge it into a geno-
cidal war that ravaged Europe, cost millions their lives, and left Germany defeated,
divided, and diminished.
To a greater extent than previous biographers, Kershaw has widened the scope of
his study to encompass not only the life of the central figure but also the responses of
the German people to his rule. Drawing on his earlier works on public opinion in the
Third Reich, Kershaw charts the rise in Hitler’s popularity resulting from his peacetime
successes with economic recovery and revision of Versailles through his early military
triumphs. The inability of millions of Germans to recognize, even after the war was
obviously hopelessly lost, that the ruler they had come to revere as an infallible savior

Book Reviews 215
was leading their country to perdition is then framed in terms of the “Hitler myth,” a
concept developed in Kershaw’s earlier book of that title.
Kershaw’s depiction of Hitler abounds in illuminating detail. By mining the full
edition of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels and the contemporaneous notes of others who
had immediate access to the dictator, he comes closer than earlier biographers to re-
constructing Hitler’s thought processes and motivations. An example is provided by
Kershaw’s handling of the contentious question of Hitler’s role in the origins of the
Holocaust. On the basis of statements by Hitler recorded at the time by Goebbels and
others, Kershaw depicts a dictator preoccupied with his invasion of the Soviet Union
who was gradually prodded by eager minions into unleashing the full fury of his patho-
logical antisemitism. Particularly revealing is the conspicuous increase established by
Kershaw in both the frequency and the vehemence of Hitler’s references to Jews during
the crucial months in late 1941, when the measures that resulted in mass genocide were
set in motion. As if seeking to convince himself, Hitler repeatedly invoked during that
period his own prophecy of January 1939 that another world war would result in the
“annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” One gains the impression of a Hitler
seeking, by his own spoken words, to overcome lingering inhibitions on his part that
proved inadequate to deter him from giving oral authorization for mass murder but that
were sufficient to cause him to avoid direct involvement himself.
For Kershaw, there is no doubt that responsibility for both World War II and the
Holocaust rested squarely with Hitler. In his interpretation, the intentionalist-function-
alist controversy, over which so much scholarly ink has been spilled, emerges as a
misleading dichotomy. He agrees with the intentionalist view that Hitler was a powerful
tyrant who subjugated the old elites, imposed one-man rule, and determined all the
basic lines of policy. But he also agrees with the functionalist view that many of the
measures that shaped Nazi rule in Germany and in occupied territories were initiated
by zealous underlings striving to carry out what they perceived as his will by “working
toward the Führer,” as one of them put it. Orders from the top and initiatives from
below combined to produce the criminality of the Third Reich.
For all of Kershaw’s efforts to bring Hitler alive, he remains an elusive figure who,
despite his massive impact on a large part of the world, concealed much about himself
even from those closest to him. Still unclear is the extent to which he was, on the one
hand, a calculating dissembler who fabricated the persona of the Führer in order to
manipulate others or, on the other, a fanatic who was driven by fixations over which
he had no control.
The invocation, in the subtitle of the second volume, of nemesis, the Greek goddess
of retribution, effectively conveys the catastrophic downfall that Kershaw sees as the
consequence of the hubris—the subtitle of the first volume—to which Hitler suc-
cumbed as a consequence of the adulation showered upon him because of his early
triumphs. Like most other biographers of the Nazi leader, Kershaw finds no redeeming
features in his career or in the regime he headed. As he points out, Hitler left nothing
of lasting value.
The book is based on prodigious research, as attested by the 194 pages of meticulous
reference notes that will long serve as a rich mine for other scholars. While nothing of
any importance on Hitler himself has been overlooked, a few missing recent mono-
graphs would have sharpened the treatment of some secondary figures. The reputation
of Hjalmar Schacht, who during the early years of the Third Reich headed the Reichs-
bank and served as economics minister, has been considerably tarnished by Albert
Fischer’s Hjalmar Schacht und Deutschlands Judenfrage (Cologne, 1995). Recourse
to Stefan Kley’s Hitler, Ribbentrop und die Entfesselung des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Pa-

216 Book Reviews
derborn, 1996) would have strengthened Kershaw’s deflation of the role of the cham-
pagne salesman whom Hitler elevated to German foreign minister.
HENRY ASHBY TURNER, JR.

Yale University
The Third Reich: A New History. By Michael Burleigh.

New York: Hill and Wang; London: Macmillan, 2000. Pp. xxvⳭ965. $45.00.
Michael Burleigh, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Wales, has

produced a single-volume study of the Third Reich that can only be called a tour de
force. He traces the Third Reich’s rise and fall by selectively focusing on key problems
and major turning points rather than trying to touch on every single topic. He is par-
ticularly attentive to questions of how to understand persecutions, mass murder, and
armed conflict.
In this book Burleigh refurbishes and utilizes the model of totalitarianism, even
though many scholars have long since discarded it. He is right to challenge us on the
issue and to insist on the commonalities of Hitler’s Third Reich and the Soviet Union
under Stalin. Many of these shared features were highlighted years ago by writers like
Hannah Arendt, but for a host of reasons totalitarian theories like hers fell almost
completely out of fashion. Now, however, particularly with this book as well as some
recent studies of the Soviet Union, totalitarian theory may be in for something of a
renaissance. Burleigh also believes that Nazism and Communism can be usefully stud-
ied as political religions. It is surely the case that there were many quasireligious
features to these ideologies and the regimes they inspired that went well beyond su-
perficialities, though, as other historians have emphasized, both Hitler’s Third Reich
and Stalin’s USSR revealed secular, rational, and modernist sides as well. Thanks to
this book, the debate as to the utility of all these theories will likely be renewed. In the
book itself, however, the theoretical discussion takes up only a part of the introduction.
After that, Burleigh gets down to the job at hand and tells a very compelling story.
He begins with an account of the end of the Weimar Republic and moves quickly
to the Nazi “seizure of power.” He is quite right to point to the significance of the
demise of the rule of law in Germany, which began almost from the first day of the
new regime in 1933. This development was “not some prosaic B-movie, before the
lurid A-movie of the regime’s wartime racial rampage, but the crucial breach with the
most fundamental characteristic of free societies. It was not a side-issue, which once
unaccountably preoccupied an older generation of historians and is now best left to
legal historians, but the most important departure from civilized values engineered by
the Nazi government” (p. 157). Such remarks are typical of Burleigh’s approach and
spirited tone, not merely pointing to failings in the literature, and even in the profession,
but coming down emphatically with an interpretation of his own. In more ways than
one, therefore, he justifies the subtitle of his book by offering a new history of the
Third Reich.
A special feature of the book is the attention paid to Eastern Europe, which is an
area Burleigh knows well from his earlier research and writing. His account of the
invasion of the Soviet Union, as well as his studies of occupation and collaboration in
various countries, are uniformly insightful and well informed. His study of the racial
war against the Jews, perhaps the best part of the book, is vividly written and could
almost be republished as a short history of the Holocaust. When it comes to why the
Nazis decided to kill all the Jews, Burleigh points to decisions in Berlin, not to demands

Book Reviews 217
from the periphery, and he shows that the key decisions were likely taken in the autumn
of 1941. He also highlights the role of the enforcers on the spot in the east, “security”
issues, and antisemitism. He offers new perspectives on the Holocaust, even about
topics we might think have been well covered in the literature. For instance, he shows
how various nations (and even specific localities) became involved in genocide for
reasons of their own, and at times outdid the Nazis in their murderous zeal. No one
can read what he has to say about the mass murders carried out by Romania and not
conclude that the Holocaust was a multinational operation. The headquarters of the
genocide was undoubtedly in Berlin, but other nations like Romania (and additional
ones in the east like Lithuania) were almost as bloody minded and enthusiastic in the
mass murder as were the Germans. Incidentally, Burleigh questions the Milgram ex-
periment (p. 617), which has been much too often used to explain the behavior of the
killers on the spot, by pointing to telling examples that are drawn from what actually
happened in the killing fields. His approach, in other words, is not only to go over the
same ground covered in other studies but also to pose new questions and to offer many
refreshingly new answers. All along the line he provocatively challenges historians in
their many subspecialties.
The book does not devote a specific chapter to the role of ordinary citizens in Ger-
many, but at several points Burleigh makes it abundantly clear where he stands. In his
conclusion he notes that the Nazis were enthusiasts for their cause, but “the rest of the
population were bathed in narcissistic ethno-sentimentality, enjoying a brief improve-
ment in their standard of living and vistas of national greatness. A full plate, work and
a wage packet considerably reduced people’s interest in their fellow man. A minority
grumbled about this or that aspect of Nazi policy, while not seeing the enormity of the
whole” (p. 812). One might add that they also applauded how the regime cleaned up
the streets, cracked down on crime, and reintroduced “traditional” German values and
social discipline. Minister of Munitions Albert Speer, quoted by Burleigh, maintained
that “the outlook of the people was often poor, but their behavior was almost excel-
lent”—at least in the sense in which even during the worst days of the war they were
willing to carry on the fight (p. 763).
Michael Burleigh not only surveys the history of the Third Reich but also offers in-
depth accounts of many of the key problems and historiographical controversies. His
approach is always interesting and often original, the text fast moving and compelling.
Indeed, he has written with such passion and brilliance that he sets a new standard in
the field. This is not the kind of “big book” one buys and merely consults on occasion:
it is one that should be read. It provides a grand narrative, substantive new findings,
and challenging theoretical perspectives. Even with its considerable size, the book will
be a rewarding challenge for undergraduate and graduate students. It really is a must
read, not just for people in the field but also for anyone interested in coming to terms
with those most troubling times.
ROBERT GELLATELY
Clark University
War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany.
By Robert G. Moeller.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xiiiⳭ329. $45.00.
In Robert Moeller’s powerfully argued book, it becomes clear that stories of World
War II were told and retold to fashion a collective memory of the past in which Germans
stood out as victims rather than perpetrators. Far from forgetting the Nazi past, as

218 Book Reviews
conventional accounts indicate, Germans remembered it selectively—but energeti-

cally—in order to “acknowledge the war as part of their history and at the same time
to distance themselves from the National Socialist state” (p. 3). Indeed, a sturdy sense
of postwar national identity in Germany rested on the idea of Germans as victims.
Moeller brilliantly examines how the refugees who fled the Soviet advance, or who
were expelled from German communities in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and German
soldiers held as prisoners of war in the Soviet Union stood out as heroic survivors to
overshadow completely the victims of Germans themselves. In understated, eloquent
prose, this book advances a major argument about vernacular memory and political
consciousness and fundamentally revises older ideas about the muted presence of the
past in German public life after the war.
Almost single-handedly, Moeller has remapped the vernacular political landscape of
postwar Germany. The very effective description of “war stories” shows an intense
public interest in the fate of the German national community, one that continued to
bear the traces of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community.
Looking at movies, parliamentary debates, historical commissions, and homecomings,
as well as press commentary, Moeller reveals how Germans spoke up again and again
as victims. This “community of memory” has largely escaped the notice of historians
but has nonetheless served as the basis for the mutual recognition of wartime suffering
and, in addition, for social compensation. Although Germans acknowledged crimes
committed against Jews, Poles, Russians, and others, they dwelled on their own suf-
fering and did so with a “palette of vivid colors” (p. 191). “In this abbreviated account
of National Socialism,” Moeller writes, all Germans were ultimately victims of a war
that Hitler had started but everyone lost” (p. 3).
In an extremely incisive analysis of the historicization of the expulsion of Germans
from the East, Moeller shows how a vast oral-history project, undertaken in the 1950s
under the aegis of the German government and staffed by young historians including
Martin Broszat and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, advanced bold methodological claims for the
social-historical value of witness testimonies and acknowledged the ways in which, in
Broszat’s words, “society in its entirety has itself become in large measure the subject
of history,” allowing Germans to craft an authoritative narrative of German victimhood
(p. 60). These victims appeared on the historical stage all of a sudden in 1945; there
was neither an investigation of prewar politics or wartime racist policies nor an attempt
to account for the destruction of Jewish life. In a perceptive analysis, Moeller dem-
onstrates that German testimonies closely paralleled the Jewish experience of depor-
tation and genocide. German “war stories” are full of references to special armbands,
hunger marches, ominous camp slogans, and the pillaging of German corpses. Unfor-
tunately, Moeller does not use the literature on trauma to reflect on the ways in which
the murder of the Jews speaks in distorted fashion through the testimonies of Germans.
In a fascinating argument, he explores how “the ubiquitous term ‘millions’ joined
together victims of many sorts” (p. 33); the 12 million refugees and the 2 million
prisoners believed to be in the Soviet Union were repeatedly compared to the 6 million
murdered Jews. Moreover, widely disseminated depictions of German prisoners stand-
ing behind barbed wire with their heads shaved drew on the imagery of the Holocaust.
Again and again, government spokespersons and private individuals insisted that the
Germans were as much victims as the Jews. To this day, the notion of German victim-
hood retains considerable authority, although it is no longer part of official German
political culture.
Moeller goes on to analyze the return from the Soviet Union of German prisoners
of war, whose reception reaffirmed their masculinity and honor and who, in contrast

Book Reviews 219
to the veterans of World War I, served as welcome figures of German-German rec-

onciliation. A wonderful chapter on the Heimatfilm of the 1950s emphasizes how Ger-
many’s war victims, many of them forced to make new homes in a reconfigured re-
public, gently reminded viewers of the wholesome and virtuous nature of traditional
German culture at a time of increasingly frenzied consumption. To be sure, other mem-
ories of the war persisted, but this public narrative was extremely compelling because
it allowed Germans to recognize their suffering and to tell their war stories without
recriminations. The political site of collective memory remained primarily national,
and the nation subordinated other, more specific milieux de mémoire.
Moreover, it is certainly true that the evocation of this community of German suf-
fering kept Germans from exploring their own complicity in the Nazi regime. But these
memories were more than simply politically instrumental or self-serving. Collective
memory is designed to create recognition, solidarity, and political power. It does not
well serve a critical historiography, whose potential for public influence is perhaps
overstated. In this regard, Moeller might have explored the genre of memory more
fully: Is it surprising that Germans remembered collective suffering rather than collec-
tive accountability? What is the critical capacity of vernacular constructions of the
past? How resistant is collective memory to scholarly insight?
This is an extremely important book, truly thought provoking, and it has the addi-
tional virtue of being rather short and to the point. Moeller is a superb writer and an
incisive analyst, and his seminal contribution to the history of postwar history will
undoubtedly shape historiographical debates in the years to come.
PETER FRITZSCHE
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a

Modern Society. By Peter Thaler. Central European Studies. Edited by Charles
W. Ingrao.
West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2001. Pp. xiiⳭ227. $42.95.
The Struggle for a Democratic Austria: Bruno Kreisky on Peace and Social
Justice. Edited by Matthew Paul Berg, in collaboration with Jill Lewis and Oliver
Rathkolb. Translated by Helen Atkins and Matthew Paul Berg. Preface by John
Kenneth Galbraith.
New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. Pp. xxixⳭ565. $69.95.
In many respects these two books differ from each other greatly. The one is a highly
condensed scholarly presentation and argument, the other the rambling and expansive
recollections of one of the foremost figures in the political life of Austria after World
War II. The one primarily informs and instructs; the other engages and reveals. They
complement each other, however, in one fundamental respect: Bruno Kreisky’s mem-
oirs illustrate the theme that Peter Thaler examines.
Thaler joins a growing list of scholars seeking to determine the extent to which
Austrians have developed—and accepted—a distinct sense of nationhood, one separate
from identification with some form of larger entity (e.g., the Habsburg or German
empires). In a short book that is alternately wide ranging and sharply focused, Thaler
presents a case study embedded in a primer on the phenomenon of nationalism. The
resulting hybrid—synopsis of historiography, condensed historical overview, and ar-

220 Book Reviews
gument based on original research—warrants attention even though the writing is oc-
casionally stilted and the conclusions not entirely surprising.
The author’s training in both history and the law is evident in this book. An associate
professor of history at the University of South Denmark, Thaler has doctorates in
history and in Scandinavian studies from the University of Minnesota and a doctorate
in law from the University of Vienna. Emphasizing the “instrumentalist” approach,
which “describes nations as social constructs developed by nationalist elites,” he sets
out to examine “nation-building in Austria” and to use “the Austrian experience to
explore the conceptual foundations of nationhood” (pp. 1–2). Along the way, he calls
attention to historical forces, to interpretations both of nationalism and of Austrian
history, and to the use of institutions and laws in molding popular consciousness.
The chapters are asymmetrical. In chapters 1 and 3, Thaler presents brief synopses
of theories of nationalism (“nation theory”), of Austrian history beginning with the
Illyrians, and of Austrians’ complex sense of identity, especially among intellectuals.
The heart of the book lies in the second and fourth chapters, which deal, respectively,
with “the socioeconomic environment of Austrian nation-building” and “the institu-
tional instruments of nation-building.” In the earlier chapter, Thaler effectively argues
that “the [economic] successes of the postwar republic,” successes lamentably absent
in the interwar years, “did not inherently create a sense of national identity; they formed
a basis on which policies of national identity formation could build” (p. 42). “Political
measures,” he adds, “provided the catalyst” (p. 43). Thaler notes, however, the irony
that “Whereas fewer Austrians than ever consciously define themselves as part of a
larger German community, their country is integrated more deeply into the German
economic sphere than in earlier historic periods” (p. 42), a point that he develops
later on.
Thaler acknowledges that the desire on the part of many Austrians to distance them-
selves from defeated Germany after 1945, however loyal they may have been to Greater
Germany during the war, left them disposed to accept designation as Austrians. But he
persuasively argues that a relatively small group of Austrian nationalists set out in
almost conspiratorial fashion to create an “imagined community” (a concept advanced
by Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and
Spread of Nationalism [London, 1983]). The governing partnership maintained by Aus-
tria’s two principal parties for many years after 1945, and Austria’s neutrality after
1955, when the western part of a divided Germany entered NATO, gave these nation-
alists an unprecedented opportunity to use political and bureaucratic levers to “build,”
for the first time, a distinctive sense of national identity in Austria. The acceptance on
the part of the Socialist Party, reluctantly in some quarters, of Austrian separateness
from Germany provided an additional boost to the overall development, as did the
acceptance of “democracy” by the conservative People’s Party, which thereby atoned
for its unfortunate role between the wars.
In his most original contribution, Thaler focuses on three key instruments that na-
tionalists used to sponsor and hasten “Austrian nation formation” (an infelicitous but
oft-used phrase). He calls them “judicial instruments” (pp. 119–24), “educational in-
struments” (pp. 124–32), and “delegitimization” of traditional “German” nationalism
(pp. 132–41)—all based on firm control of relevant ministries and on influence over
the media. Thaler acknowledges that “it would be too one-dimensional to say that
Austria’s new identity was created by public institutions,” but he argues that “it most
definitely relied on their support” (p. 141). He suggests, in effect, that people committed
to replacing an earlier form of collective identity with a new Austrian nationalism
sought to create a “love it or leave it” attitude about the country.

Book Reviews 221
Selected public opinion polls, examined in chapter 5, indicate that intentional nation
builders were largely successful—up to a point, anyway, and largely thanks to favor-
able circumstances. Polls indicate that in general people in Austria think of themselves
as Austrians, not as Germans. But polls also show that despite the effort of nationalists,
at least 10 percent of people in Austria identify primarily with the broader German
world, even with German nationalism, and that yet other Austrians continue to feel
ambivalent about the relationship between Austrian-ness and German-ness. Thaler im-
plicitly suggests that were it not for the fact, as he sees it, that “the explicit rejection
of Austrian nationhood seems to be considered impolitic” (p. 173), many more Aus-
trians would give expression to such ambivalent feelings.
Indeed, throughout Thaler’s study one detects a subtly expressed “Germanism.” In
this case, “Germanism” means neither “pro-German” nor “anti-Austrian.” It suggests,
in line with Fritz Fellner, on whose work Thaler draws with highly favorable comment,
that the self-conscious builders of Austrian nationalism knowingly, perhaps fraudu-
lently, misrepresented historical relationships. The author thus implicitly argues that
Austrian-ness might not be built on solid foundations. He laments the suppression of
historic memory and quotes the “Austrianist” historian Gerhard Botz as “wondering if
‘this success on the part of Austrians [is] really based on a deeply-rooted national
identity and not just on a learned ability to give the “politically correct” answer’” (p.
175). Thaler also suggests, with reference to Austria’s close economic ties with Ger-
many, that “changes in Austrian national consciousness express changes in assessment
and opinion more than changes in fundamental social and cultural identity” (p. 175).
Both derivative and original, Thaler’s taut but complex study invites reflection and
discussion. He demonstrates that under auspicious circumstances a dedicated group can
“build” a sense of national identity by effectively directed effort. In the foreword,
Charles Ingrao sees in the efforts of elite Europeanists to “[fold] their societies into a
single multiethnic—and multinational—polity” an analogy with postwar develop-
ments in Austria (p. ix). Thaler suggests, though, that in the case of Austrian nation-
alism we are dealing with a concept not yet fully developed, one perhaps in need of
some revision and one certainly subject to change.
Thaler says little about Austria’s chancellors, and nothing about Bruno Kreisky. As
already noted, however, Kreisky’s memoirs illustrate acceptance, indeed advocacy, of
a distinctive Austrian identity, albeit one without exclusivist overtones. Kreisky took
issue early on with those Austrian Social Democrats who were reluctant to relinquish
the party’s interwar commitment to union with a republican Germany, and as foreign
minister and chancellor he championed Austria’s role as a neutral country. Other writers
also note his contributions to the growing willingness to accept [little] Austria as Aus-
tria, one in which völkisch conceptions gradually gave way to civic ones.1
An abridgment of the first two volumes of Kreisky’s memoirs,2 the book under
review represents the combined efforts of translator, editor and cotranslator, and the
advisers who helped select material to be included—Jill Lewis and Oliver Rathkolb,
director of the Kreisky Archives. Together they have produced a highly useful volume.
The collaborators disregard Kreisky’s third volume altogether in order to avoid “the
1
See Manfred Scheuch, “Vom ‘Staat, den Keiner wollte’ zur österreichischen Nation,” in Bruno
Kreisky: Ein biographischer Essay, ed. Wolfgang Petritsch (Vienna, 2000), pp. 201–2; see also
Heinz Fischer, Die Kreisky-Jahre: 1967–1983 (Vienna, 1993), pp. 275–76.
2
Bruno Kreisky, Zwischen den Zeiten: Erinnerungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten (Berlin, 1986), and
Im Strom der Politik: Erfahrungen eines Europäers (Berlin, 1988).

222 Book Reviews
minutiae of Austrian domestic politics during the 1970s and early 1980s that would be
of relatively little interest to a broader audience” (p. xv). One of their aims, then, is to
acquaint readers of English with the personality and views of one of Austria’s best-
known postwar statesmen and with his role as spokesman for Austria on the world
scene during his years at the foreign ministry, where he held several posts, including
that of foreign minister between 1959 and 1966. The editor, Matthew Paul Berg, also
has a more particular aim: to provide extensive notes that explain, sometimes take issue
with, and provide scholarly references about much that Kreisky has to say.
Appropriately, Berg notes that these memoirs are “prone” to the “shortcomings”
inherent in the genre (p. xiv). They are loosely constructed and selective, and for all
his attractive qualities, Kreisky hardly suffered from a paucity of egotism. Nevertheless,
the text is for the most part engaging and revealing, and Kreisky—a secular Jew who
refused to be bitter (and whose early call for recognition of the Palestinian Liberation
Front caused much controversy)—takes shape as a sympathetic, idealistic yet realistic,
and in ways farseeing politician.
The memoirs open windows on important matters: on Kreisky’s formative years;
especially on the importance of his wartime sojourn in Sweden, where he became
friends with Willy Brandt; and on politics and foreign policy in postwar Austria. And
they demonstrate that throughout the years after 1945 Kreisky championed “a new kind
of Austrian patriotism” (p. 69), his obvious nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire as “an
economic community more closely-knit and better integrated than any which exists
today” notwithstanding (p. 17). One may be grateful that here Kreisky does not limit
his commentary about issues of broad and enduring concern, including his thoughts
about what it meant to be Jewish, to the years before he became chancellor in 1970.
At the same time, one may lament his occasional inconsistencies (e.g., his discussion
of Khrushchev) and his tendency now and again to give simplistic lectures and to
imagine conversations (e.g., among Soviet leaders).
The editor’s extensive notes enrich the book greatly, especially for scholars knowl-
edgeable about Austria’s recent history and able to appreciate citations to books and
documents in German. Berg admires Kreisky but does not hesitate to challenge his
assertions. A significant example, related to the theme of this review, occurs in Berg’s
contention, with reference to several recent works, that Kreisky “overstates” the extent
to which, already in 1945, rejection of Anschluss and the attendant birth of a “new
Austrian patriotism . . . overnight,” was based “on a [newfound] deep inner conviction”
(pp. 220–21, n. 1). But Berg does not question Kreisky’s commitment to democracy
and to Austria’s distinctiveness (here one is reluctant to use the term “nationalism”
because of the negative connotations still associated with it).
In sum, however different they might be, both of these books reward study. Both, it
should be noted, have fine bibliographic listings.
C. EARL EDMONDSON
Davidson College
Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. By Hillel

J. Kieval.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xiⳭ311.
Only rarely can a collection of a single author’s previously published essays serve as
a comprehensive monograph. Hillel Kieval’s anthology does manage to cover the ter-
rain suggested by the book’s subtitle. In nine essays, along with an introduction and

Book Reviews 223
epilogue, this book explores the variegated history of Jews in Bohemia and Moravia
from the Enlightenment to the beginning of the First Czechoslovak Republic, offering
some glimpses of the early modern and even premodern as well as postwar periods.
The absence of any substantive discussion of the Holocaust in the Czech lands will be
regretted by many readers, but there is even a small gesture to what Kieval would call
the last phase of this history, which “began with Joseph II and ended with Rudolf
Slánský” (p. 228).
The book’s first chapter, “Czech Landscape, Habsburg Crown,” surveys the history
of Jews in the Czech lands from the earliest recorded, and indeed even rumored, history
to the end of World War I. This is a crisp, concise, and nuanced survey that offers
reflection on the oft-cited parallel of changing Jewish life and the emergence of “con-
ditions of modernity” (p. 26), never losing sight of the particularity of this East Central
European case. Here the special links between the imperial project and a flourishing
Jewish experience can be tracked through Jewish scholarly vitality in the High Middle
Ages, the “golden age” of Czech Jewry during the realms of the “humanist emperors”
Maximilian II (1564–76) and Rudolph II (1576–1612), the Catholic Reformation, the
Enlightenment, Jewish emancipation, and finally the emergence of radical nationalisms
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This essay warrants inclusion in any
survey of the Jewish experience in Europe on its own merits.
The other essays are both chronological and topical, and to greater or lesser degrees
they follow up on the first chapter’s promise of maintaining a twin view of the ways
this case of diaspora identity represents both Czech exceptionality, on the one hand,
and the shared experience of European modernity, on the other. Chapter 2 thematizes
the questions of both modernization and “Central Europe,” each issue both celebrated
and disputed by historians in a range of specializations. Kieval writes, “as with general
modernization, government policies concerning the Jews were often contradictory and
self-defeating” (p. 43). Here and throughout, the author balances his desire to see the
general in the particular with a consciousness of the partiality, hesitancy, and self-
contradiction of initiatives. The central tension within modern Jewish history, the
“struggle between Western Enlightenment and Eastern traditionalism” (p. 51), might
well have a privileged place in Central Europe, but Kieval is everywhere meticulously
cautious not to cast an argument in strokes too broad. A chapter on the social vision
of the intellectuals of the generation of 1848 continues the discussion of the post-
Enlightenment question of assimilation, tracking the biographies of six Bohemian Jews
born between 1815 and 1822 in a way that allows readers to see the lure offered such
intellectuals by the combination of German culture and Habsburg patriotism.
Kieval’s essays are as methodologically diverse as they are wide reaching. Several
have the character of microhistorical cultural readings. These include the interpretive
survey of the legend of the Golem (which did not begin with Prague or Bohemia as a
setting at all, but in Poland), where twists and turns in the content of the myth as well
as its reception outside of Jewish tradition are stunningly situated. Another chapter, a
comparative exploration of two different types of forgeries, provides a further explo-
ration of “invented traditions,” juxtaposing the well-known case of the nineteenth-
century “discovery” of medieval Czech manuscripts (now accepted to have been fakes)
against the publication in 1863 of a polemic by an anonymous Jewish author, which
Kieval ventures is a pseudepigraphy written by a gentile Czech (p. 132). The purpose
is to expose the peculiar relations of identity, culture, myth/history, and national politics
in this venue as well as the general operations of invented and self-validating histories
within nationalist projects. In an essay on “Education and National Conflict” Kieval
uses demographic evidence alongside newspaper reports and other texts in social his-

224 Book Reviews
torical fashion. Here too we enter the latter part of the nineteenth century and the height
of the Czech-German nationality conflict, with the Jews caught in the middle. The
Bohemian Jewish dilemma in the context of the nationality struggle properly occupies
the remainder of the volume. One essay focuses on the period at the turn of the century,
when Bohemian and Moravian Jews were poised among competing and mutually hos-
tile potential positions of Czech assimilationism, German liberalism, and Zionism, the
turf most closely trodden by Kieval’s first monograph, The Making of Czech Jewry:
National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (New York, 1988). It is
here that readers begin to see the complex of self-identification, ideology, and associ-
ation that is unique to Central Europe at the same time as it is instructive to readers of
modern European history generally. Another contribution charts out the ground to be
covered by Kieval’s forthcoming book, focusing on the revival of the blood libel at
the turn of the century, where he persuasively argues that the elision of categories of
popular antisemitic rumor and historical fact produced “a naturalistic portrait of human
beliefs that rendered the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ irrelevant” (p.
197), combining symbolic systems in a form useful for nationalists. Because of Tomáš
Masaryk’s renowned role in the famous Czech case of the blood libel, the Hilsner
Affair (1899), this chapter offers a smooth transition to the last, which reconsiders the
relationship of Masaryk (and, with him, enlightened, tolerant, or “progressive” nation-
alism) to Czech Jewry. This essay offers more than an antidote to Masaryk veneration,
providing a complex view of the cohabitation within the philosopher statesman of an
“emotional” antisemitic residue actively at odds with “his pursuit of rational justice”
(p. 206).
Brought together in this form, these essays certify Kieval’s place as the leading
historian of Czech Jewry. The relative paucity of such scholarship in any language
speaks for the importance of this anthology, which would be usable in a survey of
European Jewish history. Of course, an essay collection is not a comprehensive survey,
and this one too is subject to the limitations of the genre: repetitiveness of detail without
an overarching thesis. While the contributions have been slightly revised to refer to
one another, a singular and wide-reaching argument is just barely discernable in shad-
ows among the particulars of each historical moment Kieval explores. That argument,
concerning the broad significance of this particular community from Renaissance times
until its virtual destruction, is implicit in the book, but it is also resisted. If Europe’s
self-claimed and fraught passage into “modernity” is recorded in the pattern of the
official and popular responses to its internal community of others, this particular Jewish
history exposes those relations in unparalleled ways. Therein lies the potential interest
of this subject and this book to a wider readership. Kieval, for his part, senses this
potential significance, and he shies away from it: to see this particular Jewish experience
as “paradigmatic” of a Central European condition, of the dilemma of European mo-
dernity, or of Jewish assimilation and authenticity seem to him betrayals of the modest,
everyday specifics helping us understand Czech Jewish historical life “on [its] own
terms” (p. 2). Thus, for instance, while Kieval opens his introduction with Milan Kun-
dera’s claims regarding the integrity of a cultural realm of Central Europe, this figure
barely reappears in the essays, and the book will do little to contribute to the “Central
Europe” debate.
One of my favorite parts of this book is the twelve-page epilogue titled “A Sitting
Room in Prague,” which recounts the 1964 reunion in Prague of four Jews, each having
taken a different path of identity: the Czech man of letters František Langer, the Zionist
Max Brod, the Germanist and Kafka specialist Eduard Goldstücker, and the Marxist
philosopher and mathematician Arnošt Kolman (to which in the course of conversation

Book Reviews 225
were added the memories of the Hasidic mystic Jiřı́ Langer and the Catholic convert
Alfred Fuchs, both lost in the Shoah). Kieval succinctly unpacks this all-too-neat an-
alogue of the Bohemian Jewish experience(s) by displaying how the figures in each
case overlapped with others, not only at different times of the lives of each but also,
often, all at once. If this perilous fluidity of identity positions and ideologies was never
so pronounced as in twentieth-century Prague, it strikes one at the same time as eerily
suggestive of both modern Jewish history and the possibilities and paradoxes of the
place, if there is one, called “Central Europe.”
SCOTT SPECTOR
University of Michigan
Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. By Dominic Lieven.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxixⳭ486. $35.00.
Dominic Lieven has always been more interested in engaging broad-ranging topics
than in producing yet another narrowly focused monograph. Here, too, as in his pre-
vious studies, Lieven is seeking to break out of the confines of the academic ghetto
with its specialized monographs, parceled out areas of expertise, and built-in disincen-
tives to either change or extend the specialty fields. Crossing traditional academic
boundaries and engaging a topic of such breadth requires courage, and in this endeavor
the author has this reviewer’s enthusiastic support.
In his new book about empires, Lieven offers far-reaching comparisons spanning
centuries and civilizations. His confident globe-trotting ranges geographically from
ancient Rome to China and chronologically from antiquity to modern times. A study
of this kind involves a great deal of reading, and the author is in good command of the
literature dealing with his principal case studies: the British, Ottoman, Habsburg, and
Russian empires.
Yet this laudatory effort is hardly a substitute for a focused analysis, structural com-
parisons, and disciplined narrative. Part 1 of the book, for instance, discusses the mean-
ing of the concept of the empire. Yet, by the end of this eighty-six-page-long intro-
duction, which ranges from ancient Sargon, to the Civil War in the USA, to the cold
war, one finds no definition of the term “empire” either general or contextual. Likewise,
there is no attempt to discuss and define the term “colonial” or to engage the recent
literature on colonial and postcolonial theory, however fashionable and tendentious
much of this literature tends to be. One never finds an answer to basic questions: What
is the thesis of this study? What are the propositions and arguments?
A jumpy narrative offers little guidance to the reader, who on the same page finds
references to the Holy Roman Empire and the Nazi Reich (p. 14) or to Montesquieu
and the International Monetary Fund (p. 18). There are descriptions of the Umayyad,
the medieval European and Chinese empires, but these remain just that, descriptions,
with few attempts to examine and link the diverse imperial experiences and to establish
some coherent patterns. The latter failing is perhaps the main weakness of the book.
The discussions of the British, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires are a list of
standard chronological histories with little connection to each other. Each empire is
briefly compared with Russia, but such comparisons are pursued unsystematically with-
out fleshing out key structural developments and contrasting diverse imperial mecha-
nisms, institutions, goals, and policies. This is precisely because the author has no
methodological apparatus: no thesis to develop, no analytical categories to discern, no

226 Book Reviews
common themes that could have provided a basis for drawing useful analogies or
suggestive contrasts.
Each section presents a summary of the key events and developments of the given
empire, and the author, largely, does it competently and accurately. Amid general
statements Lieven does not lose sight of the nuances, but the necessary caveats and
qualifications are often lost in the avalanche of other information, finding their way to
the surface only pages later. For instance, in discussing the Ottoman millet, a system
of administrative autonomy of the religious communities, Lieven suggests inappropri-
ately that millet “prefigured modern multi-culturalism” (p. 150) and gives an initial
impression that he, like many Western historians, tends to idealize the notion of Ot-
toman tolerance. In fact, the millet system was based on religion, not ethnicity, and the
Ottoman notion of tolerance implied no more than protection of Jews and Christians,
who had always remained the sultan’s separate and unequal subjects. It is only at the
very end of this discussion that Lieven shows that he is aware of the danger of roman-
ticizing the millet system.
Lieven is on much firmer ground, both structurally and narratively, when he discusses
the Russian empire, which is the central part of his book. Russia emerges here, both
in terms of geography and civilization, as an unmistakable periphery of Europe, where
its evolving imperial institutions faced different challenges in the East and West.
In the end though, the intended audience for the book remains unclear. With no new
empirical evidence or theoretical approaches, the book is unlikely to impress those
already familiar with the basic historical outline of the given empires. Moreover, an
educated layperson might simply be overwhelmed by the almost indiscriminate flow
of information leaping across time and space. Lieven deserves full credit for undertak-
ing a project of such magnitude. Nonetheless, some of those who took upon themselves
a similar task in the past—Arnold Toynbee or William McNeill, for instance—did so
in order to pose new questions and to open up new and unexplored historical vistas.
By this standard, Lieven’s book does not measure up as a work of synthesis.
Lieven seems to be aware of and ready for potential criticisms, suspecting that his
“scattering generalizations will enrage some historians” (p. 417). This historian found
himself more disappointed than enraged. The last sentence in the book is perhaps most
indicative that Lieven himself remained unsure of what he had set out to achieve. He
stated simply that the main purpose of his book was to show that the Russian people,
like the members of his own family to whom the book is dedicated, were children and
victims of empire.
MICHAEL KHODARKOVSKY
Loyola University of Chicago
Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia. By Christine D.

Worobec.
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. Pp. xvⳭ288. $36.00.
In Russian villages of the late nineteenth century, Orthodox services during the Easter
season did not always conclude with the milling departure of congregants from the
church into the yard. Sometimes several male parishioners carried out the inert body
of a peasant woman and placed her on the earth. She was likely to be deathly pale and
expressionless. When the men stepped aside, peasant women moved forward, carrying
tablecloths and linens blessed for the Easter feast. These they laid gently over the

Book Reviews 227
woman’s body, covering her much as Our Mother the Protectress draped lengths of
fabric across her hands in her icons, signifying the protection not only of the Mother
of God but also of Orthodox faith itself.
Under the blessed cloths bearing Orthodoxy’s healing power and ministered to by
her neighbors, the woman on the ground was not dead. Quite the contrary—she was
born anew as a full and healthy member of her Christian community, just liberated by
the priest’s blessing and a forced taking of Christ’s body and blood through commun-
ion. This was the final act of a contest between good and evil enacted through kliku-
shestvo—demon possession (literally “shrieking”)—in which her body had been the
unwilling host to the devil or his minions (p. 76).
For days, months, or years, the demon-possessed woman may have been having fits
of convulsions, shrieking, cursing, hiccuping, moaning, and head banging at church
services and weddings. For centuries, the Russian state had deemed such fits criminal
shams. More recently doctors and psychiatrists had called them hysteria. Contemporary
ethnographers pointed to them as examples of the Russian peasant’s—and especially
the Russian female peasant’s—exceptional ignorance and backwardness. They were
all wrong. Christine D. Worobec’s masterful study makes this scene not only compre-
hensible but also, indeed, lovely as an expression of Orthodox and community faith
for all the participants and an intriguing declaration of Orthodox power in the country-
side by the parish priest, who administered the healing bread and wine. The laying on
of blessed cloths was the final scene in a “ritual drama” that testified to the proximity
of Orthodox and popular beliefs in late nineteenth-century Russia. Although Worobec
opens this study by stressing the female nature of klikushestvo and its significance as
an illustration of women’s relegation to inferior status and of peasants’ characterization
as “inferior, weak, and volatile” (p. xi), she contributes more than another examination
of the demonization of women and peasants in late Imperial Russia. Instead, she adds
her deconstruction of klikushestvo to expanding scholarship on popular piety in rural
Russia and on villages as “communities of believers following Christian teachings”
(p. 70).
Possessed will be of interest not only to historians of Russia and witch crazes but
also to students and scholars in women’s history and religious studies. It is the product
of prodigious and creative research in sources ranging from tsar’s decrees to lists of
miracles in canonizations and the literature of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Worobec’s
writing is direct and free of jargon, making this study accessible to advanced under-
graduates as well as graduate students and fellow historians. She employs legal history,
social history, religious history, and intellectual history of representations. She includes
folklore, medical anthropology, and frequent comparisons to other cultures.
Worobec organizes her study around competing images and interpretations of kli-
kushi (hereafter “shriekers”): the state’s views, embodied in decrees, laws, and court
cases; the Orthodox Church’s images in saints’ lives, church councils, icons, prayers,
sermons, priests’ writings, and the behavior of parish priests; peasant views; literary
and ethnographic representations; and medical writings of the late nineteenth century.
She concludes by sorting through these “multiple realities.” Worobec demonstrates that
almost all elements of educated society and official institutions were competing for the
authority to define what shrieking was and to deal with it accordingly. From Peter the
Great forward, the state criminalized shrieking as non-Orthodox superstition or malin-
gering. Ethnographers of the late nineteenth century presented it as evidence of peasant
women’s captivity in retrograde patriarchy and superstitions. Doctors and psychiatrists
deemed it a form of hysteria, usually with a sexual basis. They were not averse to
forcibly examining these women’s bodies, especially after finding it nearly impossible

228 Book Reviews
to penetrate their or their neighbors’ minds. Worobec includes the particularly delicious
example of the psychiatrist Pavel Iakobii, who, alarmed by excessive female power in
an area of male labor outmigration, concluded in 1903 that shrieking was an expression
of the pathological inversion of power—“gynecocracy,” or rule by the womb (p. 180).
Most interesting, however, are the church and peasant views. In a fascinating analysis
of priests’ behaviors and church writings, Worobec displays the Orthodox Church’s
refusal to comply with state orders to report shriekers to state officials. She shows that
the priest’s role in healing shriekers was too important in establishing and retaining
peasant loyalty to the Orthodox Church to be relinquished. Faith healing in the church’s
repertoire bound rural people to it. When the church refrained from such healing,
peasants drifted away to Old Belief, sects, or village healers. Priests sometimes used
distinctly unorthodox elements in their cures. When the peasant Mar’ia Federova sought
her priest’s healing, she later recalled, “He brought communion bread to me, and once
again I could not control myself. Then he asked if he could hold me; he smeared me
with tree sap and put a piece of communion bread in my mouth” (p. 85).
It is not just the tree sap that should capture our interest in this description. We
should also pause on her memory, “Then he asked if he could hold me.” The gesture
of the Orthodox priest’s physical embrace of a demon-possessed peasant woman pro-
vides a vivid image of the coming together of peasants and priests in faithful com-
munities. Peasant men also were known to take convulsive shriekers into their hands
to bring them to the communion cup. The healing embrace, the strong grasp, and the
collective ministration all held the demon-possessed woman. They made a space for
her howling, cursing, thrashing, head banging, and shrieking. They permitted her to
cry out her agonies and sorrows. Of these she had plenty, as Worobec reminds us in
her restrained portrayal of the burdens of peasant womanhood. On some level, priests
and fellow villagers acknowledged that rural life could break a woman. They, accord-
ingly, relieved her of domestic and labor obligations to seek a cure. Demon possession
“allowed social actors . . . to release stress and readjust their life circumstances”
(p. 192), making “klikushestvo . . . a spiritual and cultural outlet for women whose
emotional burdens needed release” (p. 205).
Although most educated observers vilified and sought to control these possessed
women, Fyodor Dostoyevsky understood their meaning in Orthodox rural culture, as
Worobec explains in her fine exegesis of The Brothers Karamazov. She notes that
Dostoyevsky associates shriekers with “inaudible tears” (p. 137) and “tears of tender-
ness and ecstacy” (p. 138); he understood the “positive spirit of communal suffering”
(p. 140). Worobec herself has also penetrated the distancing portrayals of shrieking
that dominated late Imperial Russia’s discourse of victimized, hysterical, superstitious,
or deceptive peasant women to enter fully into the ritual drama of klikushestvo. In a
spirit not unlike that of a shrieker’s female neighbors, who gently laid their blessed
cloths over her exhausted, exorcised body, Worobec has brilliantly and movingly
achieved her goal of rendering the demon-possessed women of late Imperial Russia
“more intelligible through the humanistic exploration of that drama” (p. 206).
CATHY A. FRIERSON
University of New Hampshire

Book Reviews 229
Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in Soviet Russia.
By Gerald M. Easter. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics. Edited by Peter
Lange.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiiiⳭ221. $54.95.
The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System. By James
R. Harris.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. viiiⳭ235. $39.95.
Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1943–1953. By Kees Boterbloem.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Pp. xⳭ435. $49.95.
Regional studies are trendy, and for good reason. No one would argue that there is
nothing more to say about the core areas of the Soviet Union, but it is also true that
when something is known about the Soviet Union it is generally about those core areas.
Over the last two decades scholars have grown increasingly convinced that it is only
possible to understand the history of this great empire by understanding what was
happening in the countryside. Of course scholars have only had the opportunity to
pursue regional studies—with certain exceptions—since 1991, when scholarship and
reality became more closely related. Even the questions that arise from such studies,
however divergent, reflect new interests. Each book under review here presents an
innovative perspective that must be judged on the basis of its explanatory power—
whether it be Gerald Easter’s thesis that personal networks were key in the rise and
maintenance of power in the new state, or James Harris’s contention that regional
aspirations exerted influence on central politics, or Kees Boterbloem’s conviction that
Stalinism was omnipresent in every aspect of daily life.
Gerald Easter makes the largest claim. He attempts to reevaluate the effectiveness
and stability of the new state during its early phase in the 1920s, as well as at its end.
He sees remarkable continuities between the two periods down to the time of Gorbachev
(p. 170). But he tries to go one step further, in accordance with his background and
scholarly objective as a political scientist. His primary purpose is not just to reconstruct
a piece of history but also to confirm his theory that informal structures are critical to
the stability of the state (p. xii). According to this thesis, the entire state was doomed
as soon as its foundation began to crumble, despite the efforts of the central authority
to prop it up. Constraint and stability go hand in hand: no state can exist without elite
personnel, which in turn confer identity on the state.
The way Easter fleshes out his hypotheses is in some ways original and correct but
perhaps not as earth shattering as he appears to think. He analyzes in detail “the first
generation of revolutionary leaders” (pp. 17–18), who as “provincial komitetchiki”
clearly became the supporters and builders of the new state. (J. Hough called such
functionaries in a later period “Soviet prefects” [The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party
Organs in Industrial Decision-Making (Cambridge, Mass., 1969)].) Without the sup-
port and loyalty of these officers of Lenin and Stalin, the new regime could never have
survived. Easter correctly draws attention to a wealth of similarities among these in-
dividuals. They represented two generations: “old Bolsheviks,” who were cultured and
sophisticated, and “young Bolsheviks,” who were crude and had grown up as conspir-
ators. Both lived through the civil war. But that conflict marked them in different ways.
The young Bolsheviks became convinced that they were indispensable. This led to the
fault lines of the 1920s and 1930s: the younger supporters of Stalin stood opposed to
the older Bolsheviks. Easter does not dwell on these well-known differences; rather,

230 Book Reviews
he concentrates on the importance of the entire group of functionaries to the central

authority. According to his thesis, it was the personal connections among members of
the same generation of this regional elite that allowed the new regime to succeed. At
the same time, these personal connections restricted the apparent arbitrary power of the
central authorities to a much greater degree than has been generally assumed. This
interpretation even suggests that collectivization was essentially part of a conflict
among the elite, not a result of ideological disagreements. A similar interpretation
applies to the Terror after 1934. It is remarkable that Easter does not even mention the
well-known debate about the importance of the role that local causes played in gen-
erating the Terror. Instead, he presents the purpose and the progress of the Terror as a
“master plot,” something even the most convinced believers in Stalin’s sole guilt no
longer argue. In this case, the author’s predilection for theoretical political science has
triumphed over his role as a historian.
Easter’s conclusions will also leave many historians unconvinced. Is it really possible
to take scholarly conclusions that arise from a study of collectivization during the 1920s
and early 1930s and present them as a paradigm for explaining the postwar Soviet
Union? Did Gorbachev really inherit the “constraints of power” that took root during
the time the regional leaders shared power with the central authority? Did the sharing
of power really weaken the regime? Certainly the Soviet Union was not a rational
bureaucratic state as defined by Max Weber—but what serious scholar during recent
decades ever claimed that it was?
Harris also has an ambitious scholarly goal. His original plan, which called for a
limited study of industrialization, turned into an exemplary study of the entire Soviet
political process. Harris’s objective became “to trace the flow of political decision-
making from the Politburo to the factory shop floor” (p. 2). This entailed an examination
of the conventional interpretation that power was entirely concentrated in the central
Soviet authority: the politburo in Moscow determined what happened in the provinces,
and the general secretary determined who would transfer the policy into reality. This
expansion of the research goal led to a broadening of the time period under review.
Harris assumes that his results reflect the Soviet circumstances during the period be-
tween the wars, and he certainly understands as a historian that his evidence does not
lead to far-reaching conclusions outside his time period.
Harris uncovers startling evidence about the significant policy decisions during the
Stalin decades. It turns out that, at the very least, the provincial authorities in the Urals
exerted authority more frequently than they submitted to it. The basic decisions were
indeed made in Moscow. It goes without saying that it was Stalin and his henchmen
who authorized the persecution of the kulaks at the notorious November Plenary Meet-
ing in 1929 and that the growth targets for the First Five-Year Plan were repeatedly
raised by the central authorities. Arrests, murders, and other despotic acts during the
Great Terror could not have taken place without Stalin’s approval. But Harris proves
that the provincial party secretaries clearly exceeded the central guidelines. They in-
sisted on a doubling of capital expenditures (p. 93), they demanded more forced la-
borers from the expelled kulaks than had originally been assigned to them (p. 122),
and they relied on persecution of their opponents whenever they missed their plan
targets and needed a scapegoat (pp. 178–79)—until even they, recognizing the dam-
aging consequences of using force, began to backpedal. The end result of Harris’s
research is to demonstrate a much greater provincial influence on the central govern-
ment than has been generally assumed. The provincial authorities were able to intensify
the decisions taken in Moscow; furthermore, in some cases they were in a position to
ignore them or even to sabotage them silently (pp. 210–13). The prefects were in no
sense simple instruments of the central power.

Book Reviews 231
Nevertheless, questions remain about how representative Harris’s findings are, de-
spite his thorough analysis of the primary sources in the Sverdlovsk/Ekaterinburg ar-
chive. Competition between the older Ural industrial area and the new one in Ekater-
inoslav explains a great deal. The aging Ural industries desired and needed to make up
the ground they had lost in the nineteenth century; they therefore demanded more
capital and more forced laborers. Even if other provinces had their own reasons for
acting in a certain way, did they always adapt themselves so seamlessly to the central
decisions?
If you look at the problem purely chronologically, it might appear that Boterbloem
is most modest in his approach, because he limits his investigation to the postwar Stalin
years. But it is not by chance that his book is the most all encompassing of those under
review—he attempts a histoire totale. He insists that there is nothing remarkable about
the province of Kalinin. He chose it because it was so average: it is a paradigm for late
Stalinism in everyday life.
Accordingly, Boterbloem begins with a discussion of the Communist Party and its
organization. The heirs of terror were in power. They were very young and lacked
qualifications, partly because they had not had an opportunity to acquire any qualifi-
cations during the war and partly because mindless loyalty counted for everything.
Most secretaries performed their duties poorly, but they performed well enough to stay
in power. Their only concern was that the Komsomol’tsy pursued their own agendas.
An ignorant, mediocre class rather than an elite came to power, and it acted in Kalinin
as it did everywhere—it formed itself into cliques, which in turn tried to strike out on
their own. Boterbloem asks in the next chapter how a party of this kind discharged its
most important obligation, to convert the people to its point of view. He shows that
there were significant difficulties. The leadership deployed the full range of repressive
measures at its disposal with considerable success. Nevertheless, significant resistance
persisted in the countryside. Considerable energy as well as shock troops comparable
to the fanatics of 1929–30 were required to implement the forced collectivization,
which, incomplete before 1941, had not progressed during the war. A second forced
collectivization took place twenty years after the first.
Kalinin and its surrounding regions suffered especially severely during the culmi-
nation of the terror. The war claimed additional victims. Victory brought the hope that
the repression would end, but Boterbloem demonstrates that this did not happen. There
may not have been any more mass arrests, but “a staggering amount of control” (p.
160) continued. Those who wanted to speak freely in private had to dissemble in public.
Old problems reemerged during the difficult postwar years. Theft, violence induced by
alcohol, and crimes committed by orphaned children brought uncertainty even during
a time of peace. The early years of the 1920s seemed to be coming back, bringing
misery to those who deserved peace in the aftermath of a horrible war.
Daily life also brought no relief. Industrial rebuilding was slow. The system was not
very productive. Central planning, which subjugated the demands of the local economy
to the needs of the state, did not improve efficiency. There was no economic miracle
to improve working and living conditions. Boterbloem investigates a variety of sub-
jects—including the condition of women and the state of public morality—always
with the same conclusion: there were no significant improvements. The situation in the
villages was no different. The kulaks continued barely to subsist because their work,
however intense, was directed inefficiently and because increasing numbers of outsiders
required support. (It was only after Stalin’s death that the relationship between physical
comfort and the need to pay for it broke down completely.) But the party leaders were
unable to do anything about the situation other than to threaten and to offer unimagi-
native counterincentives. Everything stayed the same.

232 Book Reviews
Boterbloem concludes that, at least for the region around Kalinin, there is no evi-
dence that state and society were working cooperatively. Nothing suggests that the
nomenklatura and the ambitious middle class concluded the so-called big deal (V. S.
Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction [Cambridge, 1976])
by which the former held power while leaving the prestige and privileges to the latter.
Boterbloem finds only force and subjugation, not compromise. Thus endorses the the-
ory of E. Zubkova that the great fear during the years 1937–38 was revived after 1945
in order to negate any concessions that had been made during the war years (Elena
Zubkova, “Obshchestvennaia atmosfera posle voiny, 1945–1946,” Svobodnaia Mysl’
6 [1992]:4–14). Stalin’s tyrannical system persisted throughout his lifetime.
The monographs under review illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of
regional histories that depend on local detail. A wealth of detail only promotes general
understanding when the author has a sense of proportion about his individual discov-
eries as well as an ability to relate them to his general historical hypotheses. Boterbloem
and Harris have succeeded admirably in this regard. But they fail to answer a key
question: How representative are their findings? We can only hope that future studies
of this kind will contribute more to our understanding.
MANFRED HILDERMEIER
University of Göttingen
The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. By
Jeffrey Veidlinger. Jewish Literature and Culture. Edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pp. ixⳭ356. $39.95.
Many of the most glorious moments in the history of the professional Yiddish theater
belong to ensemble companies that had an artistic mission, visionary leadership, and
talented actors, writers, designers, and directors. This could describe the Vilna Troupe;
New York’s Yiddish Art Theater and Artef [Arbeter Teater Farband, or Workers’ The-
ater Society]; and the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater, to name just a few of the best-
known examples. Among such celebrated companies, perhaps none attained greater
heights of artistry, or was more deeply affected by events taking place beyond the walls
of the theater building, than the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (widely known as Goset,
the acronym for the company’s Russian name, Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii teater).
Given the Moscow State Yiddish Theater’s artistic accomplishments as well as the
dramatic highs and lows of its history, it is little wonder that the company has been
either the main subject or a primary focus of a number of histories, memoirs, and
biographies. Contemporaries such as the actor Joseph Schein and the critic Moyshe
Litvakov have left memorable accounts of the troupe’s personnel and performances,
while theater historians like Béatrice Picon-Vallin have described its landmark pro-
ductions in the 1920s. Until now, however, no book-length account of this company
has been published in English, and Veidlinger goes far beyond the existing Yiddish,
Russian, and Hebrew sources in his exhaustive chronicle of the company’s endeavors,
both on and off the stage.
The organization had its genesis not in Moscow but in St. Petersburg, where the
Jewish Theatrical Society began meeting in the months prior to the Revolution and
ultimately formed the Yiddish Chamber Theater, which began performing in 1919
under the direction of Alexander Granovsky. The following year, upon an invitation
from the critic Abraham Efros, Granovsky moved his headquarters to Moscow and

Book Reviews 233
relaxed his initial insistence upon an all-amateur company. Among the professionals
he hired was designer Marc Chagall, who would work for the troupe for just one
production, but nevertheless left a lasting mark.
Granovsky and his company quickly distinguished themselves with reinventions of
classic Yiddish plays and novels like Sholem Aleichem’s 200,000 (1923), Avrom Gold-
faden’s The Sorceress (1922), Y. L. Peretz’s Night in the Old Marketplace (1925), and
Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s Travels of Benjamin III (1927). By infusing familiar material
with the latest theatrical techniques being developed in Russia, such as Meyerhold’s
system of biomechanics, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater began to develop an on-
going, onstage manifesto that announced the end of Yiddish theater as it was then
known. Indeed, the updated version of The Sorceress—a Constructivist whirlwind of
ladders, platforms, and actors in constant motion—included a funeral for the old Yid-
dish theater: that is, for Goldfaden as his work had been performed ever since he helped
establish the modern Yiddish theater in the 1870s. This rejection of a theatrical tradition
went hand in hand with the dismissal of religious traditions as well; in this production,
as in many others in its repertoire, Goset exploited countless opportunities to mock
Jewish rituals, laws, and customs.
Yet in the provocative interpretation put forward in this study, such moments can
be deceptive. Veidlinger argues that, particularly after the defection of Granovsky to
the West and under the leadership of Solomon Mikhoels, Goset appeased the authorities
with material that seemed to conform to the criteria of Soviet art but that contained
coded messages for Jewish audiences that affirmed nationalist Jewish ideas. Veidlinger
forcefully argues that the theater and its repertoire were not merely mouthpieces of
Soviet propaganda but that they were in fact deeply Jewish, even when Jewish content
had to be suppressed in order to satisfy the authorities. A case in point is Avrom
Veviurka’s 1926 proletarian drama 137 Children’s Homes, the company’s greatest
commercial and critical failure (even Mikhoels was bored during rehearsals, the his-
torian infers from the extensive doodles on the actor’s copy of the script). Forgettable
as the play was in most respects, Veidlinger makes a bold argument based on its title:
since it was changed from 200 Children’s Homes in the version approved by the cen-
sors, and every reference to 200 was changed to 137, he speculates that the latter number
may have been a coded reference to Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we
sat down.”
Readers need not be persuaded by every one of Veidlinger’s interpretations in order
to appreciate the value of his extensive research. Here is an author clearly in command
of a broad range of sources: plays, prompt books, box office figures, official and per-
sonal correspondence, and even an award to the murderer of Mikhoels “for exemplary
execution of a special assignment from the government” (p. 262). The text is supported
by some fifty photographs, many of them from private collections, that help bring to
life the Moscow Yiddish Art Theater’s actors and productions.
Veidlinger explores the full extent of this important institution’s activities, from its
pre-Moscow days around the time of the October Revolution to its death throes in the
aftermath of World War II. In addition, he devotes a full chapter to Mikhoels’s activity
as chair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war, and he demonstrates
that even while carrying out this service Mikhoels was considered suspect by the au-
thorities—a fact of which the actor himself was well aware.
Writing the history of Soviet cultural institutions is always a delicate task, a balanc-
ing act between following an elaborate paper trail and reading between the lines of
such documents. In the case of an ephemeral art like theatrical production, the historian
is left to decide whether the actor who seemed to wink was signaling his audience or

234 Book Reviews
merely had something in his eye. Veidlinger is not afraid to take a firm stance on such
questions—in this case, coming down decisively on the side of the meaningful, sub-
versive wink—and providing compelling evidence in support of his arguments. In
doing so, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater has earned a secure place on the book-
shelves of students of Yiddish and Soviet culture.
JOEL BERKOWITZ
State University of New York at Albany


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Book Reviews

Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. By Peter N.

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Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte. By Christoph

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The Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721–1794. By Thomas

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The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century

This book offers a comparative overview of “political censorship in nineteenth-century

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European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. By Karen Offen.

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crust of patriarchal domination showed some fissures, feminist volcanic movements

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Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual

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writer and established himself as a leader in clinical psychiatry, making hundreds of

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Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840. By Jonathan Lamb.

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political thought contained in eighteenth-century British encyclopedias except to say

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LISA JANE GRAHAM

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world, both epistemologically and materially, disenfranchising and seeking to over-

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