Book Reviews 265

was at least partly related to the fact that the court was viewed as an agency of the absolutist
state, where the ruler 'domesticated' his nobles, giving them honour as compensation for
their loss of political and military power. The concept of absolutism has been increasingly
called into question. More recently, the court itself has been subjected to renewed scrutiny.
English readers will be familiar with the important vQlume of essays edited by Ronald Asch
and Adolf Birke (Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the
Modern Age, 1450-1650, Cambridge, 1991) and with Jeroen Duindam's more recent study
Vienna & Versailles. The Courts of Europe Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780 (reviewed
below). Now Andreas Pecar has produced another striking revision of the Elias model.
Pecar's focus on the Habsburg court in the reign of Charles VI is more concentrated than

Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Michigan on June 5, 2016

Duindam's, but his findings are none the less novel and have a very broad relevance.
Fundamental to his approach is that he rejects the notion that the ruler enjoyed anything like
absolute control and that he prefers to focus on the reasons that motivated nobles to seek
careers at court. This was neither compulsory nor driven by economic necessity. On the one
hand the ruler had no means to oblige attendance at court. On the other hand a move to court
was not the solution to a noble's personal financial difficulties. Indeed moving to court often
entailed substantial costs-of clothing, of representation, of building-that were not always
offset by the income that accrued from an office (highly remunerative offices, such as that of
viceroy of Naples, had the significant drawback of necessitating distance from the court).
Moving to court was rather a life or career choice, which required substantial financial
investment as well as ambition and ability. It was a move that must be understood, Pecar sug-
gests, as part of a complex 'economy of honour'. Financial capital was translated into sym-
bolic capital to achieve an inflation of social and cultural prestige, which in turn enabled
a nobleman to become integrated into the social system of the court. In Vienna, this system
with its rituals and norms of behaviour was much less elaborate than that at Versailles-there
was no public or semi-public lever or coucher and most of Charles VI's meals were taken in
private. It was, however, extremely formalized none the less and, far from it being a royal
instrument ofdiscipline or domestication, nobles were keen to participate because it afforded
them a means of enhancing their status in the most public way. That enhanced status was then
expressed in lasting form in the construction of palaces whose organization often mirrored
that of the imperial court. These residences, Pecar suggests, can be 'read' as records of the
cultural code that characterized the court society in which their owners were leading players.
Pecar illustrates his arguments with a wealth of fascinating detail. He has surely writ-
ten the definitive account of the Viennese court of Charles VI. He has also made a major
contribution to the literature on the early modern court generally.
Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge JOACHIM WHALEY

Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe s Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780.

By Jeroen Duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003.
xii + 349 pp. £60.00 (hardback).
Within the handsome covers of this substantial volume is an original, important and stimu-
lating study struggling to get out. It is the fruit of many years of painstaking work in
French and Austrian archives, strongly supported by an impressive quantity of printed
266 Book Reviews
evidence and secondary material. The subject is both excellent and timely. Neglected in
grimmer times in favour of political structures or ideologies, recently the history of the
court has experienced a tremendous revival, exemplified by John Adamson's dazzling col-
lection The Princely Courts of Europe 1500-1750 (1999). A detailed comparison of
arguably the two most important courts of the old regime-Versailles and Vienna-there-
fore has a great deal to recommend it. Not the least important of Duindam's discoveries is
the much greater cost of the French court: expressed as a percentage of the French total,
Austrian expenditure was only 15% in the seventeenth century and still only 30% in 1775.
More surprising is the well-documented conclusion that the court in both countries was

Downloaded from http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Michigan on June 5, 2016

always the third largest budget item, after war and debt servicing. Indeed, it consumed
around 18% in France, a much higher figure than that usually given (by Pierre Goubert,
for example). There were many other similarities in organization and nomenclature, all of
which are described in meticulous-and sometimes numbing-detail. Of the numerous
differences, probably the most significant was the far greater control exercised by the
French grands officiers over their departments, often virtually hereditary, which led to
growing complaints in the later eighteenth century about the semi-legitimate despoliation
of the royal purse. As one report complained shortly before the death of Louis XV: 'it
is difficult to conceive that such a large number of respectable, well-bred and well-off
people should be nothing more than a gang of brigands conspiring to rob the king'. The court
at Vienna was less glamorous, less worldly, less venal, less corrupt and very much more
pious (it was a nasty shock for newly arrived French diplomats to discover just how often
they were expected to appear at various forms of religious devotion).
This brief sample should whet the appetite of every historian interested in the political
and cultural history of the period. Yet more might be asked. Although Duindam is well
aware that the French court remained peripatetic, even after the formal move to Versailles,
he has virtually nothing to say about Fontainebleau, Marly or any of the other palaces great
and small. More seriously, the passages on the Austrian court are all about the Hofburg and
have nothing to say about Sch6nbrunn. Surprisingly, there is almost nothing about sex and
only two pages about the mistresses who played such an important role at Versailles. It also
has to be said that reading this volume is very heavy going. No translator is credited, so one
must assume that the author wrote it directly in English. While this provides further evidence
of the fabled linguistic versatility of the Dtutch, it has to be said that one's admiration is of
the kind Dr Johnson expressed for a woman preaching (or a dog walking on its hind legs).
The abundance of solecisms and the laborious style makes one wonder whether an editor at
Cambridge University Press ever read the text through. How, for example, did a sentence
such as 'This process gave rise to a multicoloured mosaic of recurring tensions and altema-
tives, of which the familiar imagery of Versailles retained only the shrillest tints' escape the
red pencil? Can it really have been decided that the numerous quotations should be left in
the original language, without a translation even in the footnotes, thus confining the reader-
ship to those with a good command of seventeenth-century French and German? Was no
reservation signalled about the plethora of immensely long footnotes, which brings the
already lethargic pace to a complete standstill? Did it not occur to anyone to point out that
the forty-odd illustrations are neither integrated in the text nor adequately captioned? In
short, what has been published looks very much like a rough first draft. This is a great
shame, because the book contains much of quality and might well have been first-rate.
University of Cambridge T. C. W. BLANNING