Book Reviews

Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War. By Abbott Gleason.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 307.

Early in August 1943, citizens of Venice were praised by their local newspaper for
their ready “totalitarian” acceptance of the recent fall of Fascism. This even more
confused than usual usage of that embattled term is not recorded by Abbott Gleason.
But his book does trace the story of the word’s origins among Italian Anti-Fascists in
1923, through its adoption by Mussolini and such court philosophers as Giovanni
Gentile later in the 1920s, to its penetration of a wider world after 1933. By the outbreak
of the Second World War (and its prelude in the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov
Pact), opponents of Stalinism and of Nazism, be they Trotskyites, socialists, liberals,
or conservatives, found totalitarianism a meaningful concept with which to link the
evil ideologies and practices of these ostensibly rival regimes.
Given his subtitle, however, it is natural that Gleason devotes his greatest attention
to the deployment of the word after 1945 or, rather, after that moment, whenever it
may be dated, at which the Second World War transmogrified into the Cold War. As
his first sentences explain, “Totalitarianism was the great mobilizing and unifying con-
cept of the Cold War. It described the unparalleled threat that faced the European and
American democracies from a new kind of insatiably aggressive and invasive state; . . .
and it channeled the anti-Nazi energy of the wartime period into the postwar struggle
with the Soviet Union” (p. 3). Now was the time of the triumph of the concept in that
new world order presided over by Harry Truman (“By leaning hard on the terminology,
by ‘putting himself at the head of an anti-totalitarian party,’ Truman was able to save
his presidency and ensure that the Cold War [I] would be waged under Democratic
auspices” (p. 82).
Appropriately, no doubt, the triumph was neither total nor everlasting, and Gleason
is soon illustrating the rise of a discontent with the explanatory power of the “totalitarian
model,” first in academic circles and later, during the “thaw” of the 1960s, among those
in the general public who were unwilling to accept that the world was, or should be,
divided in a Manichean fashion into good guys and bad. This fall was not too precip-
itous, however. In turn, the Anti-Anti-Communists had their ideas challenged by an
array of neoconservatives and by the spread, during the late 1970s and 1980s, of Cold
War II, a conflict which was again sustained by the intellectual and emotional power
of the word “totalitarian,” serving as it were as the Mark of the Beast of the “Evil
Empire.” On this occasion the war resulted in (total) victory, a victory which underlined
the hegemonic power of the totalitarian model while simultaneously suggesting that its
usefulness might thereafter dwindle. As Gleason remarks, “The end of the Cold War
will not mean the end of arguments about totalitarianism, but it will probably for the
moment deprive them of ‘actuality’ . . . , unhook them from the deepest political pas-
sions of the age” (p. 209). Gleason has not quite finished, however. In an epilogue, he
briefly informs his readers that post-Soviet Russians, rather like the mass of Eastern
Europeans already before Mikhail Gorbachev, are fond of the term and feel that it does
indeed explain their recent history. With this coda, the fundamental structure of To-

Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.
184 Book Reviews

talitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War is thus a study of Rise, Fall, Return,
Triumph—and probable survival.
In his account of accounts of totalitarianism, Gleason thus charts the intellectual and
social role of the most usable of postwar pasts, and does so succinctly and with con-
siderable span. Though the heart of the book’s reference remains American, Gleason
finds space to examine commentary on the idea across Eastern and Western Europe.
Philosophers from Hannah Arendt to Alain Besançon, novelists from Albert Camus to
Czesław Miłosz, and a galaxy of historians and political scientists have their work
noted and reviewed. Even religion finds a place.
So much is good. There is also weakness. The book’s span and its author’s apparent
determination to deal with everyone who has ever mentioned the word “totalitarian”
left this reader at times breathless. The sensation of unfortunate haste is confirmed in
other regards. Poor Simona Colarizi is deprived of anything other than her initial both
in text and index, and, generally, Gleason’s comments on Italy are superficial and
confused. Sheila Fitzpatrick is deemed a carrier of “French social history” to her cohort,
while E. P. Thompson and the huge squadron of non-French social historians who were
so cheerfully and so proudly occupying the frontiers of history in the 1960s and 1970s
are not mentioned at all. Moreover, Gleason’s prose is not always well honed; the start
of his first sentence in chapter 2, “In looking to see how people see Stalinism . . .”
(p. 31), is, I fear, a classic example of how not to write. I was also troubled by Gleason’s
moments of confession. Perhaps it is helpful to learn that his Dad served in the Office
of Strategic Services, “was a fervent member of the Cold War elite” (p. 3), and was
possessed of certainties with which Gleason has continued to wrestle. I am less sure
that I needed to know that “As a twelve-year-old, my [Gleason’s] efforts to understand
the Cold War and what it was like in the Soviet world (and would be like everywhere
if the Russians ‘won’) began with Orwell’s images of a totalitarian world” (p. 84).
Perhaps Gleason was just trying to be modish, perhaps he was just trying to be nice,
but, to this hard-bitten Australian, such indulgences, in what is after all a brief text,
confirm an overall impression that there is something decidedly Clintonic about the
work. Like its subject matter, Gleason’s book is another which reveals as much about
the moment of its composition as about the period it purports to study.

R. J. B. BOSWORTH
University of Western Australia

The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science. By Ann Blair.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv`382. $45.00.

Long-winded laments to the effect that the accumulated knowledge of a given period
had become so complex as to be nearly impossible to organize or to comprehend can
be found long before the beginning of the early modern era. Still, the problem of the
multiplicity of beings received fresh relevance at the hands of the scholastics. By the
time of Bacon, Leibniz, and Newton it had become one of the chief problems of phil-
osophical speculation. Standing at the threshold of the modern discussion of this issue,
Nicolaus Cusanus sought to embrace the multiplicity of individual beings by means of
their common convergence in the divine infinite. Even in the sixteenth century, in the
midst of a Europe torn by religious wars and social upheavals, thinkers continued to
ponder the problem, and laments over the bewildering immensity of existent things
could still be heard. This rage for order probably is based in the first instance upon the
 Book Reviews 185

need to present traditional learning, along with newly recognized natural phenomena,
in a systematic manner, within the scope of the pages of a printed book, and to render
that knowledge accessible to readers. Many continental scholars, whose horizon was
gradually expanding beyond the boundaries of Europe, were to contribute to this effort.
Ann Blair seeks to depict this quest for an organization of knowledge by examining
a work published by Jean Bodin late in his life, in 1596. In his Universae naturae
theatrum (or “theater of all nature”) Bodin sought to sketch a new “conception” of
nature and of natural philosophy. Of fundamental importance for him was a unification
of the results obtained by direct observation and empirical investigation with the tra-
ditional body of natural philosophy. His innumerable observations, however, cannot
yet be regarded as scientific facts in a Baconian sense, since what they are is a collection
of disconnected details or “commonplaces,” usually assembled without regard for stan-
dards of proof, evidence, description, or prevailing taxonomies. In Bodin’s Theatrum
nature has not yet become natural history; it remains natural philosophy. Nature was
still encompassed within the transcendent dignity of a salvation history directed by
God. But even as Bodin differs from Aristotle by resorting, in his explanation of the
origins and interrelations of things, to their connectedness with God and by denying
the eternity of the cosmos, his assemblage of facts remains in large part indebted to
scholastic-Aristotelian doctrines (p. 117).
What makes Bodin’s investigation of nature in the Theatrum fundamentally new is
his establishment of previously unrecognized causal connections. In order to explain
natural phenomena Bodin uses a combination of different models, some literary, some
scholastic, to convince his readers. When discussing the global distribution of heat, he
draws upon Sigismund von Herberstein’s account of Moscow (Sigismund von Her-
berstein, Rerum moscoviticarum commentarij [Basel, 1556]). A fire in Moscow in 1525
had been mentioned by Herberstein as a proof of the extreme weather conditions in
Russia. Using his customary “method of commonplaces” Bodin extracted from this
report what he regarded as the essential details, but no more. He interprets Herberstein’s
report as a proof of the fact that summer temperatures in areas outside the tropics are
higher than those in the tropics themselves. He adds some additional, independent
explanatory material as well, noting, for example, that the atmosphere outside of the
tropics is heavier because of the “vapors, rains, and rivers that abound beyond the
tropical regions” (p. 73). It is apparent that Bodin’s understanding of what constitutes
an experiment is thus far from modern. Nevertheless his Theatrum takes its place with
other Renaissance natural philosophies in exhibiting a growing interest in investigating
“matters of fact” and in empirical methods. Admittedly Bodin still does not differentiate
qualitatively between observations derived from secondary sources and those obtained
through direct observations and tests. In general, however, he is receptive (or “suscep-
tible”) to the experimental approach. His intellectual openness and curiosity are shown
clearly by his inclusion of subjects that had previously been deemed unworthy of
discussion by natural philosophy.
In his use of dialectic, dichotomy, and the dialog form, Bodin employed categories
and criteria that made the Theatrum accessible to a broad scientific readership. The
book has its place, too, in the continuing modern discussion of the organization of
knowledge. This is clear from the fact that its claim of investigating the connections
of nature hinges primarily upon its portrayal of these connections. Around 1600, how-
ever, the representative order of things was no longer being discussed solely within a
“republic of letters.” It seems to a certain degree one-sided, therefore, when the prob-
lems of natural phenomena are presented exclusively as problems among books. One
example may suffice for this broad context of the discussions characteristic of natural
186 Book Reviews

philosophy. Since the fifteenth century Europe had been virtually inundated with a
variety of genealogical tables supposedly explaining the interrelations between dynas-
ties and peoples. The representation of these relationships in family trees or pedigrees
is, however, only partially the result of an established, written tradition. Often there
was a given social and legal order of the members of a family or of a state before this
was treated, in a second step, in books. Certainly books were capable of a very high
degree of complexity in bringing order to things, but books should not be regarded as
a theoretical, reflective level, standing over against a level of worldly phenomena and
of living beings—as a kind of closed front, or medium, ready to receive them. Ann
Blair is thoroughly cognizant of this problem when she describes the book as a physical
medium. In so doing, she is observing a premise once insisted upon by Joseph S. Ong—
a premise frequently neglected, however—that the printed text in its complexity should
be distinguished from the spoken word. All formal schemes of organization not found
within the pages of the book, like genealogical diagrams or the theater, should be
viewed as the concrete space of knowledge, as a collecting point for scholars, and not
only as metaphors (pp. 153–79).
In her study, Ann Blair demonstrates the variety of source materials and categories
to be found in Bodin’s thought. Precisely by limiting herself to a single work she
succeeds in revealing the enormous complexity of the discussions of natural philoso-
phy. Bodin played a significant role in these discussions, despite the fact that he always
lived outside Europe’s intellectual centers. Ann Blair’s investigation can therefore also
be read as a portrayal of the scientific discussion of nature around 1600, with a much
more intense problem focus than previous works on the subject.

KILIAN HECK
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford.
By John Coffey. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Edited by
Anthony Fletcher, John Guy, and John Morrill.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xii`304. $59.95.

Samuel Rutherford has come down to posterity, in an unintended and ironic sense, as
a “man of parts.” His “constituencies” were and are as varied and ill-reconciled as the
man himself. The Scottish pastor’s private letters, rankly emotional and sensuous, be-
came evangelical devotional classics on their posthumous publication. His 1644 treatise
Lex, Rex was as cerebral, brutal, and cold as the letters were hot. Steeped in scholastic
and jusnaturalist learning, Lex, Rex became a proof text of constitutionalist thought,
and the primary reason, outside of theologically like-minded circles, for continuing
scholarly interest in him. Rutherford’s formidable ultrapresbyterian ecclesiology, from
which he never deviated doctrinally, nonetheless harbored purist impulses that led him
into schism within his own church and sympathy for gathered congregations.
John Coffey’s mission in this useful, generally thorough, and widely learned study
is to penetrate the “mind” of his subject, showing what harmonies Rutherford could
extract from his internal discordances and, no less important, the stops or trumps. In
accord with the dominant modes of the study of public discourse, Coffey no less as-
siduously seeks to establish the contexts of Rutherford’s public and private utterances.
Lex, Rex is very properly situated in the context of the continental jusnaturalist and
scholastic political thought as well as the Calvinist biblicism that was very much the
 Book Reviews 187

substance of Rutherford’s university training at Edinburgh. From that light, of course,

there was little original about Lex, Rex, Rutherford’s “moves” being essentially choices
of what items to take off the shelf. Coffey also does well to show the extent to which
Lex, Rex was provoked by the Scottish royalist and episcopalian James Maxwell’s
stunning Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas (Oxford, 1644), a full-dress, full-frontal attack
on what Maxwell took to be the conceptual underpinnings of Covenanter and English
parliamentarian political thought. Rutherford might well be construed as particularly
enraged by Maxwell as only a fellow Scot might have been. But Coffey also might
have noticed that Maxwell drew Henry Parker, whose maxims in his Observations
upon His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (n.p., n.d. [London, 1642]) had been
exposed by Maxwell to a withering critique, to Parker’s most theoretical treatment of
English politics, his Jus Populi (London, 1644). More generally, of all the contexts
available to Coffey the weakest is the English.
While in theological matters Coffey’s grip is steadying, the immediate circumstances
of Lex, Rex are not particularly well drawn. Coffey’s supposition (pp. 149–50) that the
title-page assertion that the book was published in London “by authority” was an index
of official approval is off the mark; such a form was often a dodge. Why Rutherford
and his publisher did not exhibit a proper imprimatur for the book or enter it into the
register at Stationers’ Hall (neither of which Coffey noticed) must be something of a
mystery. Indeed, Coffey’s extensive bibliography shows that few of Rutherford’s works
published in his lifetime were first or even ever printed in Scotland. This whole di-
mension might have been more fully explored.
Lex, Rex lies structurally at the center of Coffey’s book, reflecting its significance
for Rutherford’s reputation. Yet one suspects that Coffey’s own sympathies remain
primarily with the intricacies of controversial theology and ecclesiology. At this task
Coffey is at his best, guiding readers deftly through the labyrinths of seventeenth-
century presbyterian squabbling, notably exposing the contrary impulses generated by
Rutherford’s authoritarianism and his extremism. A staunch presbyterian, Rutherford
was uncompromisingly committed to a strong national church vested with extensive
powers of discipline. The sworn opponent of toleration in even the most modest form,
Rutherford appeared to English independents and sectaries almost as an unintentional
self-parody of a Scottish presbyterian. For Rutherford sectarianism was not an accept-
able option, since the purity for which both sectarians and presbyterians strove was
different: for the sects, purity lay in saintly congregants; for Rutherford and his ilk, in
unblemished doctrine. Yet in Scotland Rutherford’s unyielding nature often put him at
odds with his church, or at least leading or dominant parts of it, and ultimately led him
into schism.
For all its subtlety, this study suffers at times from a flaw of method and logic.
Coffey erects a multifaceted but unappealing image (presented as a caricature or ste-
reotype), holds it up to Rutherford, inevitably finds it wanting in some respect, and
then in effect exonerates Rutherford from the other characteristics. Measuring Ruth-
erford against the “stereotype of the bigoted, narrow-minded Presbyterian cleric” (p. 62),
Coffey naturally and usefully finds that Rutherford and his fellows were immersed in
wide-ranging European learning, from scholastics and Jesuits as much as from men of
their own cloth—as also was the despised Maxwell. Yet Coffey, while properly men-
tioning in the same place Rutherford’s role as an “intolerant advocate of religious
persecution,” does not fully engage the question of how one could be both widely read
and cultivated (and thus not narrow-minded in one sense) yet bigoted and narrow-
minded (in another sense). His assertion at several points that the Bible trumped natural
reason and anything else at once answers everything and nothing. Similarly, Coffey
188 Book Reviews

exonerates Rutherford from “complacent patriotism” and “foster[ing] chauvinism” (p. 231).
Yet it is precisely a worried “chauvinism” that Coffey’s own presentation reveals.
To his credit Coffey tries to explicate but not excuse Rutherford. Rutherford’s in-
transigence wearied even his friends and allies, and it cannot be argued that Rutherford
labored in ignorance of alternatives—Rutherford acted precisely because there were
alternatives. But Coffey is perhaps off the mark in trying to separate Rutherford com-
pletely from Rutherford’s latter-day American disciples. The Rutherford Institute, a
Virginia-based legal arm of the Christian Right, shares a good deal more with Ruth-
erford than Coffey (pp. 14–15) is prepared to admit. Ostensibly pursuing “religious
liberty,” that body operates according to a sternly Calvinist definition of liberty—the
freedom to do good (by their biblicist lights), the only definition that Rutherford al-
lowed. Constitutionalism is to them as it was to Rutherford, a doctrine expressive of
the concord of the universe with their views and a humbler of the errant magistrate,
but conveniently never a threat to their own theocratic agendas. And the Rutherfordian
mix of steely rationality in the judgment of others and a moist, emotional spirituality
among one’s own is hardly foreign to the modern parceners of his legacy.

MICHAEL MENDLE
University of Alabama

Linen, Family, and Community in Tullylish, County Down, 1690–1914. By

Marilyn Cohen.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Pp. 287. $65.00.

The modest title of this book conceals the ambitiousness of the project undertaken by
the author. Marilyn Cohen’s “microhistory” of a single parish at the heart of Ireland’s
first industrial zone links the particular setting of Tullylish to the broader context of
industrialization in Ireland and elsewhere, and to an enormous wealth of theory and
research from other cases. In doing so she sheds light on multiple dimensions of the
uneven development of capitalism across two centuries. The book is compelling in its
extraordinarily nuanced account of local differences in the development of the linen
industry over time, and of differences within and between social groups. She focuses
significant attention on the intersection between gender and class. While the study of
Irish history is steadily emerging from the empiricism and “extreme cultural relativism”
criticized by the author (p. 17), this book is certainly exceptional in the extent to which
it brings interdisciplinary, comparative, and theoretical perspectives to bear on an Irish
case. The range of sources and methods employed is equally impressive. In addition
to drawing on a wide selection of business and estate records, parliamentary papers,
and so on, the author provides evidence from quantitative analyses of census and school
records, and from oral histories.
The book is divided into three parts. The first, focusing on the eighteenth century,
places the Irish linen industry in the context of dependence on Britain and tackles some
of the questions surrounding the theories of protoindustrialization. In earlier published
work, Cohen has criticized the variant associated particularly with Hans Medick, on
the grounds that evidence for the emergence of social class differences within the rural
industrial population undermines the “neo-Chayanovian” assumptions about the house-
hold at the heart of the theory (“Peasant Differentiation and Proto-industrialisation in
the Ulster Countryside: Tullylish, 1690–1825,” Journal of Peasant Studies 17, no. 3
[1990]: 413–32). Here she reemphasizes the significance of class differentiation and
 Book Reviews 189

of peasant entrepreneurship. Perhaps the most interesting chapter in this section de-
scribes the emergence of what Cohen calls an “elite bloc” of landlords, bleachers, and
drapers, bound together by “gender, wealth, Protestantism, and an economic interest
in promoting the linen industry” (p. 40). Yet characteristically, the author immediately
nuances this concept by highlighting differences and conflicting relationships within
the elite. In a fascinating discussion she suggests that characteristics associated with
the elite—like masculinity and Protestantism—provided resources for innovation, yet
she also shows that it was a marginalized group within the elite, namely the Quakers,
who were the most important innovators in Tullylish.
The second part of the book focuses on the nineteenth century, when industrial
capitalism developed in complex and uneven ways in the northeast of Ireland. Cohen
provides an excellent discussion of gender and regional differences in the process of
proletarianization, in addition to a detailed account of the different manifestations of
home, workshop, and factory production in the linen industry, from spinning to hem-
stitching. A good deal of attention is given to the emergence of paternalistic capitalism
in Tullylish. Here Cohen has been strongly influenced by recent scholarship, which
has highlighted the ways in which paternalism appealed to familial ties and reinforced
gender hierarchies in creating a “total factory milieu” (p. 120). She argues that pater-
nalism was particularly suited to the Irish linen industry, because it helped to reconcile
the industry’s reliance on female labor with the prevailing norm that women should be
dependent on a male provider (p. 163). In chapter 7 Cohen makes a courageous inter-
vention into what has become a highly specialized area in Irish history, namely, the
Great Famine. She argues that women and children were more likely to suffer and die
on two grounds. First, analysis of demographic change by townland shows that women
were more likely to migrate to the vicinity of the spinning mills, suggesting that male
handloom weavers were more insulated from the effects of the Famine in the country-
side. Second, the proportion of women inmates from Tullylish in the Lurgan workhouse
was greater than that of men “due to the elimination of handspinning, greater economic
expendibility and desertion by husbands” (p. 151). However, other studies have shown
that in Ireland as a whole, women were less likely to die than men, and David Fitz-
patrick has even suggested that the overrepresentation of women in admissions to
workhouses may help to explain this (“Women and the Great Famine,” in Gender
Perspectives in Nineteenth Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, ed. M. Kel-
leher and J. H. Murphy [Dublin, 1997]). Certainly further research is required to de-
termine the extent to which the gendered nature of Famine suffering was mediated by
local and regional differences.
Part 3 shifts the perspective of the book somewhat. Here Cohen employs data from
the 1901 census schedules, and from oral histories, to throw a different light on the
“milieu” described in part 2. While taking on board criticisms of the concept, she uses
the idea of “family strategies” to explain patterns of household composition and work-
ing-class life in Tullylish, concluding, in the words of one of her respondents, that “it
wasn’t a woman’s world” (p. 259). In the analysis of the census records, she draws
attention to religious inequality: Catholics were overrepresented among those holding
unskilled occupations and were more likely to be illiterate. The oral histories reported
in chapter 11 also contain intriguing hints about the nature of Protestant and Catholic
relationships. For example, while Cohen reports that none of her respondents felt that
the credit provided by shopkeepers was exploitative, she also points out that the great
majority of shopkeepers were Protestant, such that both Catholic and Protestant work-
ing-class households were indebted to Protestant shopkeepers for essential commodities
(p. 243).
190 Book Reviews

In analyzing Tullylish, and more broadly the Irish linen industry, with a wealth of
theoretical insights from other cases, this book has made an important contribution. If
there is any shortcoming, it is that at times the author fails to explore the implications
of her particular case for some of the theoretical perspectives she discusses. For ex-
ample, she draws attention to the dependent nature of Irish industrialization and to the
centrality of Protestantism in the hegemonic culture, but she does not always fully
analyze what difference these factors made, in the dynamic of protoindustrialization or
in the nature of paternalist capitalism, and how the theories themselves might be mod-
ified in light of this. However, this criticism is minor given the major achievement this
book represents. By bringing together theory and a nuanced analysis of the evidence
from a small parish in the north of Ireland, Cohen has cast light on the whole process
of uneven and gendered capitalist development.

JANE GRAY
National University of Ireland, Maynooth

The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886. By K. Theodore Hoppen. The New

Oxford History of England. Edited by J. M. Roberts.
New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xviii`787. $45.00.

Britain in the mid-Victorian period was the greatest industrial power in the world. It
was also the greatest commercial power and the greatest imperial power. These were
facts that governments and peoples everywhere had to deal with. Historians still have to.
For historians, nineteenth-century Britain is becoming a greater problem all the time.
All the old landmarks seem to be disappearing. If we can still use the term, “Industrial
Revolution” has come to denote something very different from its original meaning. It
may have started in the later eighteenth century, but it was not over until late in the
nineteenth century—rather attenuated for a revolution. Partly for this reason, the class
system has also come under question. Karl Marx did not think much of the British
working class, but he never doubted that there was one. Historians now do, at least in
the nineteenth century. Women did not cut much of a figure on the historical stage
until the 1960s. Then they were portrayed as suffering and oppressed. Now they are
increasingly seen as active in most areas of Victorian life, though admittedly with little
recognition. Then, to turn to the question that the title of this series begs, there is new
stress on “Britishness.”
K. T. Hoppen, therefore, is presented with a formidable challenge. He meets it with
distinguished success. He manages to deal with the major concerns of modern histo-
riography, and yet by careful thematic development to make the whole not only co-
herent, but attractive to the reader—no mean achievement.
Part 1 looks at society and the state. The three chapters on what would traditionally
be called “class” demonstrate the difficulties with the concept. What Hoppen calls the
“Agrarian Interest” includes the landed aristocracy, but it also includes farmers and
agricultural laborers. The three might differ among themselves, but by no means al-
ways; and the two latter had no exact analogue in the broader society. The industrial
and commercial middle classes stretched downward from great bankers to impecunious
clerks, covering a multitude of interests. It is sometimes suggested that a serious attitude
to religion provided a common bond. But the same attitude could be found among
some of the aristocracy as well as sections of the working classes. And this illustrates
but one of a multiplicity of differences that divided the latter. To find a unity of attitudes
 Book Reviews 191

and interests that the classic notion of class posits among any of the traditional three
in the Victorian period is hard.
Was the Victorian state laissez-faire or interventionist? In the usual sense, neither,
Hoppen suggests. The strong bias was toward laissez-faire and nonintervention, toward
the minimalist state. However, if the problem was great enough, as in the cases that
provoked the regulatory legislation of the third and fourth decades of the century,
orthodoxy was ignored.
Part 2 is a thoughtful discussion of politics from 1846 to 1868. It broadly reflects
current historical thinking about these years. Sir Robert Peel’s stock is down; so is
Lord John Russell’s. Palmerston’s is down on foreign affairs, slightly up on domestic
affairs. Derby’s, long a drug on the market, is definitely up. Other historians tend to
put a higher value on both Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, especially the
latter. But Hoppen, both in this section and the last which carries the story to 1886,
sees serious flaws. Disraeli had less to lose. Gladstone and imperialism is a sorry tale.
Part 3, “Money and Mentalities,” is full of good things. Hoppen is impatient with
arguments of British economic decline in the mid-Victorian period. As he rightly ar-
gues, the decline was only relative. Nor does he detect seeds of future decline. He pooh-
poohs the idea that public schools seduced the business classes away from their proper
pursuits; hard evidence is lacking. He is equally suspicious of the rather different
challenge posed by the theory of “gentlemanly capitalism”: that business, as opposed
to finance, was never important anyway. He argues that, by any fair measure, and
compared with those in other countries, British businessmen come out with high marks
for shrewdness and success.
A chapter entitled “Living and Spending,” like the political chapters, gives a good
account of current concerns in social history, including the new approach to women’s
history. But the next one, “The Business of Culture,” is ingenious. Instead of the usual
dangling chapter on culture, this one is neatly stitched into the fabric of the work. The
thread is the business metaphor, a powerful one among Victorians from MPs to trades
unionists. And among the Victorians, as before and since, what they bought is naturally
a useful guide to their tastes. Authors and artists had to adjust to the market. In some
ways, it constricted them. In more ways, it was liberating. There is an excellent chapter
on religion, a factor that complicates other issues besides class. And the concept of
evolution serves the same integrative function in the discussion of intellect as business
does in the treatment of culture.
The fourth and last section begins with a chapter that poses the important question—
“A British Nation?” In talking about what since 1707 has been the “United Kingdom,”
describing its inhabitants as simply “the English,” customary until a couple of decades
ago, simply will not do. But is “British” any better? It would never have done for
Ireland as a whole, and still won’t for a large minority in Ulster. Hoppen concludes
that, at the best of times, the idea of a British nation is suspect. Religion transformed
Wales between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries,
producing a nation that rallied round its own distinctive brand of Protestant Noncon-
formity. Religion had always played a large role in the Scots’ view of themselves. Their
church had been their great surviving national institution after 1707, and even after the
great disruption in 1843 the common Presbyterianism of the large majority left Scotland
untouched by the bitter controversies over the place of religion in education that
plagued England. Scottish education itself was believed to be a major source of the
more democratic and egalitarian society that flourished north of the Tweed. In a great
industrial and imperial Britain there were factors that served to soften notions of dis-
tinctness. These factors no longer exist.
192 Book Reviews

No review can ever do full justice to a book. The function of the reviewer is to
persuade others to see for themselves. Those new to the field will learn a great deal
from this one, and will be given a great deal to think about. Those who think they
know the field may well want to think again.

RICHARD W. DAVIS
Washington University in St. Louis

Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire. By

James R. Ryan.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. 272. $38.00.

In this engaging and attractively produced volume, James Ryan provides an account
of the ways, during the Victorian era, that photography helped create an “imaginative
geography” of the British Empire. Photography appealed to the Victorians, as it often
does to us, for its apparent ability to capture an objective and uncontestable reality.
This faith, from the occasion of the camera’s invention in 1839, spurred British pho-
tographers around the world to picture, and so give visible reality to, an empire whose
most rapid growth paralleled that of photography itself. Yet, as much recent research
has shown, photographs are culturally constructed ways of seeing and cannot be taken
as representing some obvious preexisting reality. Thus, Ryan argues, photographs “re-
veal as much about the imaginative landscapes of imperial culture as they do about the
physical spaces or peoples pictured within their frame.” They are, that is, “themselves
expressions of the knowledge and power that shaped the reality of Empire” (pp. 19–
20).
Ryan casts his net widely. His survey of imperial photography ranges from Africa
and India to England itself, from the 1850s through the Edwardian era, and includes
discussion of an array of photographers and photographic practice. His six narrative
chapters consider, in turn, the role of photography in African exploration, the repre-
sentation of landscapes by commercial photographers, the use of photography in mili-
tary campaigning, in hunting, in ethnography and the classification of racial types, and,
finally, its role in imperial education. In the face of such an ambitious agenda, Ryan
inevitably must choose examples selectively. No one topic is treated at all exhaustively.
Inevitably too, while there is much that is fresh, and the book is full of suggestive
insights, some of the chapters take up well-studied topics or lead to conclusions that
tell us little we did not already know.
Ryan’s account of David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition of 1858–64 is of interest
largely for revealing the enthusiasm with which this new medium was embraced by
explorers. Despite the bulky apparatus required, and the difficulty of travel, Livingstone
was determined to acquire by use of the camera an accurate record of African geog-
raphy. The resulting photographs, though few in number, began, Ryan argues, the
process of “naturalizing the colonial vision,” and so making familiar the image of
“darkest Africa” (p. 36). During these same midcentury decades, commercial photog-
raphers in India and China were further developing what Ryan calls an “imperial way
of seeing” (p. 46). Of these the most well known is Samuel Bourne, whose picturesque
photographs of the Himalaya have been justifiably acclaimed for their aesthetic merit.
For Ryan, however, what matters is the way Bourne, by familiarizing and domesticating
the potentially hostile landscape of northern India, gave viewers an “imaginative control
over it” (p. 61). In similar fashion, John Thomson’s views of China used the aesthetic
 Book Reviews 193

of the familiar picturesque to make “powerful arguments for the inevitable extension
of the British imperial landscape” into eastern Asia (p. 65).
Ryan’s chapter on the Abyssinian expedition of 1867–68 tells us little beyond the
obvious facts that the British military sought to use photography, with science more
generally, to master the terrain the army had set out to subdue; and that the Royal
Geographical Society, anxious to expand its archive of “scientific” knowledge, happily
collaborated in this enterprise. Rather grandly, Ryan concludes that photography “con-
quered the geography of Abyssinia, bringing visual residues of its landscapes back
home as trophies” (p. 97). Although a good deal has been written recently, by authors
such as J. M. MacKenzie, about hunting and empire, and photographs of dead animals
killed on safari comprise much of the imperial photo archive, Ryan juxtaposes discus-
sion of the camera, the gun, and taxidermy in a fresh and lively manner. He shows in
fascinating detail how photography was closely associated with the practice of taxi-
dermy. In their quest to produce “the living image of a dead thing,” taxidermists and
photographers, Ryan insists, “drew on each other’s codes and conventions in the con-
stant reinvention of the natural” (pp. 114, 119). The intricate interplay of camera and
gun in the “shooting” of wild animals is compellingly demonstrated in two illustrations
(nos. 50 and 51), the latter showing a rhinoceros bearing down on the photographer
while his assistant stood by with a gun ready to fire the moment the photographer had
secured his “shot.”
The role of the camera in the late Victorian project of racial and ethnic classification
has of late become rather well known, thanks in part to the work of such scholars as
Christopher Pinney. Ryan usefully develops and extends this literature. Although Ryan
discusses the classic works of colonial racial classification, such as “The People of
India” photographic collection (1868), especially suggestive is his juxtaposition of
photographs of racial “types” from the Empire with those taken in Britain itself. The
photographer John Thomson, for instance, returned from China to catalog British urban
“types” in his “Street Life in London” (1878). Although following in the footsteps of
Henry Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor” (1861), Thomson’s volume,
as Ryan cogently argues, mapped the Far East onto the East End of London, so that
“both became areas of darkness, danger, and the ‘unknown,’ to be explored and sub-
jected to scrutiny” (p. 180). By the 1880s the domestic and the imperial were inextri-
cably linked. Such linkage is evident as well in Ryan’s final chapter, which examines
the work of the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee during the first decade
of the twentieth century, as it set about the production of an elaborate lantern slide
collection that could project Britain to the colonies and the colonies to Britain. This
project, as Ryan demonstrates, made of the Empire a “vast visual display”—one de-
signed not simply to promote surveillance of inferior “natives” but to construct ideas
of citizenship and national identity at home (pp. 209, 219). Admittedly only a collection
of “fragments,” Ryan’s book still makes of the colonial photograph not just a nostalgic
remembrance of the past, but a window into the world of Victorian imperial culture. It
deserves a wide readership.

THOMAS R. METCALF
University of California, Berkeley
194 Book Reviews

Rebel on the Right: Henry Page Croft and the Crisis of British Conservatism,
1903–1914. By Larry L. Witherell.
Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Pp. 291. $45.00.

Henry Page Croft has been seen until now as a marginal figure on the radical right of
early twentieth-century British politics. He is known for the National Party, which he
founded in 1917, and the Empire Industries Association (1924–47) which succeeded
it, but he is also to be found lurking in the shadows of most right-wing conspiracies
before 1914. His name appears in the footnotes, or in lists of troublemakers; he is seen
as a groupie, not a leader. In this biography of Croft, focusing on the years 1903–14,
Larry L. Witherell seeks to rescue his hero from the margins, planting Croft firmly in
the center stage of the Edwardian radical right: a conviction politician with an agenda.
Page Croft first emerges in politics in 1903, as a brash twenty-two-year old, the
Cambridge-educated second son of a gentry family, destined for a job for life in the
family brewing business in Ware, Hertfordshire. Fired by Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff
campaign, he threw himself into local politics, organizing a local branch of the Tariff
Reform League and campaigning vigorously against the local member for East Hert-
fordshire, an old-fashioned landowning MP named Henry Abel Smith (not Abel Henry
Smith). Witherell has combed the local newspapers to unearth Croft’s speeches and
the tactics he used to undermine the position of Abel Smith. At the 1906 election,
however, Croft stood not against Abel Smith, but against Seeley, the Unionist Free
Trader MP for Lincoln. Croft came third with 11 percent of the vote, but Seeley was
defeated and the Liberal won—though given the magnitude of the swing in 1906, this
would probably have happened in any case.
Still outside the House in 1906, and with little prospect of getting there until the
next election, Croft’s frustration began to boil. After a stroke incapacitated his leader
Joseph Chamberlain, Croft joined Leo Maxse, editor of the National Review, Thomas
Comyn Platt, and Bernard Wise to form the Confederacy: a secret society committed
to undermining Unionist Free Traders in the constituencies and securing the selection
of Tariff Reformers. Witherell provides the fullest narrative yet of this group, ampli-
fying the pioneering research by Alan Sykes in the 1970s. Fully documented here is
the political cannibalism of the Conservatives between 1907 and 1909, focusing on the
little-known case of East Herts, where Croft’s rottweiler-like persistence eventually
succeeded in forcing the resignation of the unfortunate Abel Smith. According to With-
erell, Croft’s triumph over Abel Smith represented a victory for his “scorched earth”
policy of eliminating dysfunctional elements within the party that blocked the transition
to a modern party capable of advancing constructive programs in defense of nation and
empire, these latter being Croft’s preoccupations in politics. The Confederates thus
signaled a transition in British politics.
In January 1910 Croft was at last elected MP for Christchurch. He was never an
effective House of Commons politician; his strength was as a platform speaker, where
he was slick, immaculate, debonaire—and impossible. In Parliament his frustration
began to boil once more, triggered this time by Balfour’s inadequate leadership during
the Constitutional Crisis. In August 1910 he launched the Reveille, a group of “wild
men” opposed to Balfour’s inaction. At the same time he formed the Imperial League,
which promoted a national imperial program. By now Croft had come to believe in an
“instrumentalist” view of party: that party exists for the promotion of certain ends, and
a leader deserves support only insofar as he furthers those ends. Balfour’s speeches,
which were more like impartial summaries in the Annual Register than fighting state-
ments of policy, convinced Croft that settlement of the leadership question was essential
 Book Reviews 195

in the interests of the imperial question. Working closely with the disaffected journalist
Leo Maxse and the showman peer Willoughby de Broke, he set the agenda for the
Balfour-must-go campaign. During the crisis over the Parliament bill, he was a diehard,
claiming that the creation of five hundred Liberal peers would enhance the legitimacy
of the House of Lords.
Bonar Law, who succeeded Balfour as leader in 1911, brought hubris for Croft.
Hopes of an imperial policy were dashed by Law’s abandonment of Tariff Reform
1913, and Croft’s attempts to revive the imperial issue were swamped by the Home
Rule crisis. When Croft left for the front in France in August 1914, it must have seemed
that his eleven years’ struggle had all been for naught.
Witherell claims that his book is more than a study of Henry Page Croft. It is a study
of a radicalized right that sought to redefine the ideological orthodoxy of the Conser-
vative party and forge a new and modern party, committed to a constructive policy and
the twin pillars of populism and statism. He sees the party’s problems in terms of
intergenerational tension, a dysfunctional party structure and lack of dialogue between
a Victorian elite and radicalized youth. It is refreshing to read a study of Conservative
politics that steers clear of the narrow English obsession with class (Balfour as the
effete aristocrat, Bonar Law the new middle-class man, etc.). Witherell also succeeds
in avoiding the whiggish preoccupation with collectivism and social reform that distorts
so much of the English historiography of Edwardian conservatism. He is admirably
nonjudgmental, commenting neither on Croft’s anti-Jewish sentiments nor on his lan-
guage, which was sometimes violent, as when he exhorted the Hertfordshire Tories to
“put their foot on such people and squash them out like beatles.” Not for nothing did
Croft title his autobiography My Life of Strife. Witherell steadfastly refuses to succumb
to the temptation of seeing fascists under Croft’s bed. Witherell perhaps occasionally
exaggerates Croft’s centrality, but by taking a biographical approach rather than study-
ing an issue or a movement like Tariff Reform he provides fresh and stimulating in-
sights into the pre-1914 radical right.

JANE RIDLEY
University of Buckingham

They Shall Not Grow Old: Irish Soldiers and the Great War. By Myles Dungan.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Pp. 218. $30.00.

How should an academic historian review a book whose preface shamelessly declares
that “it is not a work of academic history,” that “it does not seek to analyse or draw
many conclusions from the data,” that many “relevant files” have not been consulted,
that “any reader looking for thorough historical research and insight will be sorely
disappointed,” and that its sole function is “to bring some more anecdotal material into
the public domain in an edited, organised and palatable form” (p. 9)? Such a display
of modesty is calculated to appeal to a popular readership while making any criticism
seem inappropriate, even churlish. Only a pedant would denigrate Dungan’s achieve-
ment by cataloguing misspelled proper names, errors of transcription, or journalistic
clichés. After all, Dungan’s work as a writer and also broadcaster is contributing to the
belated acceptance in Ireland that the Great War was no less important than the struggle
for political independence in reshaping Irish life after 1914. Should we not gratefully
accept, on his own terms, Dungan’s third anthology of Irish war testimony, following
his Distant Drums (Belfast, 1993) and Irish Voices from the Great War (Dublin, 1996)?
196 Book Reviews

By assembling and extracting scores of vivid personal accounts of Irish war experi-
ences, uncluttered by elaborate commentary or context, Dungan allows the reader to
sense the “red hot needle” of mustard gas in the lungs (p. 47), the appearance of a
German fatigue cap “filled and quivering with its owner’s brains” (p. 82), and the “raw,
cracked and pulpy” consistency of feet after forty-eight hours’ drenching in a dugout
(p. 172). Speaking and writing long after the war, his witnesses recapture the black
humor of the trenches, the fine line between cowardice and heroism, and the relief from
monotony afforded by the occasional burst into action. We become persuaded, in the
words of Jack Campbell (“the last of the ‘Old Contemptibles’ to die in the Republic
of Ireland”), that none who survived the war “was really mentally steady” (p. 87).
Dungan is probably justified in believing that scholars will be tempted by the morsels
in this book to examine more systematically the 30-odd recorded interviews and thirty
unpublished written accounts cited in the bibliography. It should however be noted that
many of his tastiest morsels are openly quoted, not from the original sources, but from
theses and monographs by the small but growing band of scholars who have already
rescued Ireland’s war from academic oblivion. This applies in particular to the chapters
on military chaplains and Irishmen in the Australian forces. Dungan’s unpretentious
book fails to match the standard set by Philip Orr in The Road to the Somme: Men of
the Ulster Division Tell Their Story (Belfast, 1987) and by Terence Denman in Ireland’s
Unknown Soldiers: The 16th (Irish) Division in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Dublin,
1992). Nor can it bear comparison with foreign masterpieces such as Bill Gammage’s
The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Melbourne, 1975), an im-
passioned yet methodical analysis of the content and meaning of thousands of soldiers’
letters, or Alistair Thomson’s Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne,
1994), in which spoken recollections of ex-servicemen are brilliantly interpreted by a
sophisticated oral historian. Whereas Thomson adds meaning to personal testimony by
exploring the background, mentality, and later career of each witness, Dungan’s extracts
are mostly left to “speak for themselves” as if they were unmediated observations of
reality.
Few historical works, however modest in their declared aims, truly win exemption
from criticism by avoiding generalization and analysis. Dungan’s book is arranged
thematically, separate chapters being devoted to accounts of enlistment, the experience
of battle, the Irish chaplaincy, “shell-shock,” Irishmen in the Australian forces, Irish
literary responses to the war (from the familiar trio of Francis Ledwidge, Tom Kettle,
and Patrick MacGill), imprisonment, and trench conditions. Several of these themes
have already been subjected to searching analysis by historians not primarily concerned
with Ireland, by comparison with which Dungan’s commonsensical commentary seems
naive and misleading. “Shell-shock” is baldly defined as “psychological trauma”; and
the origin of self-mutilation, malingering, and desertion is assumed to be self-evident
(“trauma” or “cowardice”), despite British and Australian studies suggesting that these
practices were widely accepted as rational strategies for minimizing personal risk.
The opening chapter on enlistment contains a string of generalizations, undermining
Dungan’s claim to be merely an anthologist. Many of these assertions have already
been tested and found wanting in the Irish context. As Dungan later admits, it is de-
monstrably not the case that “those enlisting in Southern regiments would have in-
cluded a disproportionate percentage of Protestants” (pp. 17, 22–23). Dungan claims
that Kitchener’s refusal to allow Redmond’s National Volunteers control over the Six-
teenth (Irish) Division “appears to have had little if any impact on recruitment” (p. 18);
yet the contrary is demonstrated by Patrick Callan and Martin Staunton in unpublished
theses, which Dungan goes on to cite extensively. This chapter is littered with palpable
 Book Reviews 197

errors of interpretation: the Sixteenth Division included numerous northern as well as

southern nationalists (p. 25); emigration was not a viable option for most wartime
Irishmen (see pp. 25, 36); and the 1916 Rising was followed by a temporary increase,
not decline, in enlistment (p. 28). These slips reflect Dungan’s haphazard approach to
scholarship on Irish military history, much of which is synthesized in the uncited col-
lection edited by Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, A Military History of Ireland
(Cambridge, 1996). Familiarity with such studies would have confuted the complacent
claim that it is “well nigh impossible” to enumerate Irish participation in the Great War
(p. 25) and discredited Dungan’s perplexing pronouncement that Ireland “had no great
military tradition of its own” (p. 15). For all its faults, however, this book serves a
useful purpose in helping us to visualize the war as it seems to have seemed to Irish
participants. As Jack Campbell told Dungan in 1990 (p. 195), “I can see the stone on
the side of the road, the broken branch of a tree, an old broken gate and all those things.
I’m not seeing you.”

DAVID FITZPATRICK
Trinity College, Dublin

Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative

Statesman. By Jason Tomes.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. ix`323. $59.95.

Jason Tomes’s new study of the international thought of Arthur Balfour (1848–1930)
offers a most stimulating survey of a leading Conservative’s attitudes to the great issues
of British foreign policy. The great merit of the book is its comprehensiveness. Tomes
examines Balfour’s emerging (but scarcely ever varying) convictions and his contri-
butions to the making of British foreign policy, from the Berlin Congress of 1878 to
the Imperial Conference of 1926. In his examination of this broad field, Tomes is well
informed and most effectively succinct. The study is logically organized and based on
a command of the primary material (chiefly private papers, Public Record Office col-
lections, and newspaper sources) which is most impressive.
In a career that included stints as Conservative leader, Prime Minister, First Lord of
the Admiralty, and Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s coalition governments, Balfour
enjoyed positions that gave him formidable power to mold opinion and decisions in
foreign policy. However, as Tomes depicts them, Balfour’s convictions were scarcely
very surprising, original, or penetrating. Balfour was a consistent navalist, a Pan-
Anglican chauvinist, a believer in imperial federation and imperial preference, and an
opponent of Home Rule for Ireland. At the turn of the century, he was fearful above
all of Russian and French imperial rivalry. While he resisted the views of the leading
Germanophobes before 1906, he soon adapted his public face to the common prejudices
of the Radical Right, so influential in the Conservative Party. This suited the political
requirements of his party’s scaremongering campaign against the evils of an ambitious
Germany, and the alleged blindness of the Edwardian Radicals to the diabolical danger.
During the war of 1914–18, like so many others in Lloyd George’s “knock-out blow”
Coalition, Balfour “did not care to consider peace without victory” (p. 150); thus, he
condemned countless thousands to the sufferings of a prolonged war in order to secure
a resolution by force and the supposedly essential benefits of a dictated peace. On the
other hand, Tomes demonstrates that Balfour was more positive and genuine about the
possibilities of Anglo-American partnership than most of the anti-Wilsonian reaction-
198 Book Reviews

aries gathered under the “fight-to-the-finish” banner. Tomes dubs him an “Atlanticist”
(p. 291). Similarly, he was less obsessed with crushing Russian Bolshevism than many
of his wartime colleagues and gave little support to those pressing for intervention. At
the Paris Peace Conference, he tried to play the role of a moderate, but he did not
overexert himself and ultimately presided over a disaster. Tomes defends him from the
charge of exerting a “malign influence” at Paris but concedes “his sins of omission”
(p. 154). On crucial issues, such as the blunder of open-ended reparations, Balfour was
guilty of “a failure to assert himself” (p. 164), writes Tomes. When it was all over, like
so many others, Balfour blamed the French, or the Prime Minister. But his own per-
formance hardly testified to a statesman working from a coherent system of “interna-
tional thought.” In the aftermath of the war, the indolent survivor from the age of “old
diplomacy” offered only lukewarm support for the ideals of the League of Nations. As
Tomes puts it, the idealism of the 1920s, which sought to build faith in “collective
security, disarmament, compulsory arbitration and open diplomacy,” was an uncom-
fortable environment for a man who remained at heart a believer in “alliances, arma-
ments, voluntary arbitration, and confidential diplomacy” (p. 283). In the last analysis,
Balfour still believed that the different “Psychological Climates” dividing the peoples
of the world made it exceedingly difficult for nations “to acquire the gift of reciprocal
comprehension” (p. 299).
While Tomes is often admirably fair-minded in his judgments, he is perhaps too
respectful toward his subject. He acknowledges that Balfour had many critics and that
most agreed that his “idle insouciance” was at the root of the problem (p. 163). Tomes
is aware, for example, of Balfour’s habitual neglect of his duties, his delight in sleeping
in until mid-morning, his passion for tennis ahead of preparation for crucial meetings,
and his paralyzing indecision at Paris in 1919. In light of this, Tomes’s treatment of
Balfour’s convictions is undertaken with a little too much reverence. After all, it was
not merely Balfour’s Radical critics who railed against him as a dilettante; his friends
and colleagues criticized him, too. Tomes does not appear to recognize that a certain
mental laziness may have accompanied Balfour’s physical laziness. Thus, Tomes is
only sparingly critical as he invites readers to ponder Balfour’s unchanging beliefs,
many of which, it must be said, were either unremarkable prejudices or embarrassing
Conservative fairytales. For example, we learn that Balfour was convinced that “Au-
thority” and “Psychological Climates” were the key factors in accounting for the rise
of superior civilizations (p. 30); that the English were “the political light bearers for
the rest of the civilised world” (p. 39); that certain races, such as the Australian abo-
rigines, were “predestined for extinction” (p. 47); that the doctrine of human equality
was “an eighteenth century fallacy refuted by the advance of science” (p. 61); that the
British Empire was “synonymous in the extension of liberty and self-government in
every part of the world” (p. 69); and that Germany had to be fought in 1914 because
it “had suffered a fit of insane egoism” (p. 298).
Finally, in a study of Balfour’s “international thought,” it is surely worth stressing
that Balfour was contemptuous of most internationalists of renown in his day. Balfour
opposed exactly the brand of progressive Radical internationalism that was to emerge
ultimately, via the disasters of the war and the Versailles Treaty, as supremely influ-
ential. The internationalism of such figures as G. Lowes Dickinson, J. A. Hobson, H. N.
Brailsford, H. W. Massingham, Norman Angell, E. D. Morel, Arthur Ponsonby, and
Ramsay MacDonald was eventually to become the new consensus of the 1920s. Balfour
had always sneered at such internationalism, deriding it as “the impossible aspirations
of fanatical peace-at-any-price persons” (p. 40). Balfour’s own “internationalism” was,
in fact, an anemic thing. Tomes surely understates the fact when he notes, after sur-
 Book Reviews 199

veying Balfour’s period as wartime and peacemaking Foreign Secretary, that “his sys-
tem of thought had not coped very well with the foremost international occurrence of
his time” (p. 172).

DOUGLAS NEWTON
University of Western Sydney, Macarthur

The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1919–1926. By Ephraim Maisel.

Foreword by Martin Gilbert. Preface by Zara Steiner.
Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1994. Pp. xi`323. $60.25.

Ephraim Maisel, who died in August 1991 at the age of forty-five, devoted the last
seven years of his life to his researches for this book. Research in the Foreign Office
371 political series, as well as related papers, let alone Cabinet Office, Board of Trade,
and Treasury as well as private papers, is a time-consuming task. Maisel consulted all
these papers on British relations with France and Germany between 1919 and 1926, a
formidable undertaking. Unfortunately he left an incomplete manuscript, and it is
thanks to the labors of Zara Steiner and Rivka Elron that this book has finally seen the
light of day. Maisel has examined the administrative structure of the Foreign Office,
the changes in its organization at the end of the First World War, the personalities of
successive foreign secretaries and of leading Foreign Office officials, the Foreign Of-
fice’s relations with the prime minister, the cabinet, and other government departments,
and the Foreign Office’s input into the leading policy issues of these years. These were
many and complex and often seemed insurmountable: relations with France and Ger-
many, reparations, security and disarmament, relations with the Soviet Republic, the
future of Turkey, and so on.
As the author shows, Foreign Office officials were not united in their recommen-
dations for handling these problems. The only clear and sensible advice was provided
by Sir Eyre Crowe, the permanent undersecretary until 1925, who insisted on the crucial
importance of the Anglo-French connection in an uncertain and unstable world, but he
was ignored. Moreover, between 1918 and 1922 Foreign Office influence was greatly
weakened by the control exercised by the prime minister, David Lloyd George, over
foreign policy, a development encouraged by his contempt for the Foreign Office and
his predilection for diplomacy by conference. His foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, was
not greatly interested in Europe and was not prepared to stand up to the prime minister’s
incursions into his domain. Matters improved slightly when Andrew Bonar Law suc-
ceeded Lloyd George in 1922 and when James Ramsay MacDonald became both prime
minister and foreign secretary in 1924, replacing the querulous and manic Curzon. The
Foreign Office recovered the bulk of its influence, however, when Austen Chamberlain,
a more conventional figure, took over as foreign secretary in November 1924. After
1924 the influence of the Foreign Office on foreign policy was restored to something
like that of the pre–Lloyd George days, although the cabinet now insisted on overseeing
the main foreign policy issues, which caused Austen Chamberlain endless difficulties
in 1925 in his negotiations over what became the Locarno treaties.
During the immediate postwar years, British foreign policy was largely unsuccessful.
It had no real plans for the future beyond the wish, it seemed, to be left alone. As a
result policy lacked coherence and consistency. Having emerged as the major victor in
1918, British policymakers then proceeded to throw away the fruits of that victory by
ignoring France’s genuine security concerns. They recognized that reparations were a
200 Book Reviews

source of European instability, yet demanded that Britain secure a major share of the
spoils, and ignored Germany’s breaches of the Treaty of Versailles, particularly over
disarmament. This was not Lloyd George’s finest hour, and he deservedly fell from
power when his policy in the Near East was finally exposed as one of bluff and bluster
which nearly landed Britain in a wholly unnecessary war with Turkey. After the fiasco
of the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, during which Britain stayed on the
sidelines, the Anglo-Americans finally exerted themselves to promote, via the Dawes
Plan, a temporary and unstable settlement of the reparations issue, while the Franco-
phile Austen Chamberlain achieved an equally temporary and unstable settlement of
Franco-German security relationship via Locarno. This enabled Britain to avoid a one-
sided guarantee of France by joining a multilateral guarantee of the frontiers of France,
Belgium, and Germany. In any case, by 1925 Britain possessed neither the armed forces
nor, as it turned out in 1936, the will to uphold the permanent demilitarization of the
Rhineland to which it was bound under Locarno.
The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy will, as its title suggests, appeal mainly to
diplomatic and international historians, but it should also be of interest to specialists
in administrative history and government, as it deals with the interactions between
foreign and domestic policies, the often stormy relations between the various govern-
ment departments involved in foreign policy, trade, financial, and military affairs, and
the role of prime ministers and cabinets in the formulation of foreign policy.

MICHAEL DOCKRILL
King’s College, London

Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity, 1929–1942. By

D. A. Low.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xv`358. $74.95.

Between the 1920s and the onset of the Second World War, it is commonplace that a
succession of unprecedented global events quickly undid the British mastery over In-
dia’s fate. David Anthony Low in this study ably demonstrates that it was also the
shortsightedness, parsimony, and often miscalculated compromises of British colonial
policy in the years of Gandhian nationalism and mass politics in India that hastened
the demise of empire. Casting the confrontation between the Indians and the British in
a wider imperial context of French Indochina, the Dutch Indies, and the American
Philippines, Low contends that British administration in India, perched precariously
between repression and tolerance, shaped the peculiarities of the nationalist movement
in India. In encountering Gandhian civil disobedience, or the political demands of the
Indian National Congress (INC) for a greater share in legislation, a profound ambiva-
lence riddled the British stance toward any conception of Indian liberty—be it domin-
ion status within the Commonwealth, constitutional autonomy, or outright indepen-
dence. While India remained a cornerstone of empire, unimaginably difficult to
relinquish while Europe was in turmoil, the moral legitimacy of the British custodi-
anship of India remained entrenched in liberal values, though articulated poorly and to
the detriment of consistent policy.
This thesis is spelled out in the introduction; subsequent chapters in the book reiterate
it by selectively exploring flashpoints in the history of the nationalist struggle. The
essay (chap. 3) on the Lucknow satyagraha of 1930 (following Gandhi’s call for pop-
ular defiance of the Salt Act) shows most clearly how the British “drew lines on the
 Book Reviews 201

sand” (p. 31) and tried to defend them to the limits of their executive power. During
repeated showdowns between the police and Congress leaders (including Jawaharlal
Nehru) over routes taken by nationalist processions, the British, worried as usual about
“law and order” in the city, tried almost uncharacteristically to assist the Congress in
organizing peaceful demonstrations. But what became a crucial symbol of struggle
between the Congress and the administration was access to the civil lines, which had
been created after the Mutiny as a first line of defense for the European quarters of the
city. Defending this as the last bastion of the Raj, the police would not let any dem-
onstration spill over into the European quarters of Hasratganj, while the Congress
persistently led their marches closer. Low guides his narrative skillfully into the police
actions of May 25 (Lucknow Day), the involvement of a crowd inflamed by police
atrocity, and the attack on the Aminabad police outpost. Indian nationalism derived its
strength from such carefully crafted contests, hoping to pare the imperial rhetoric of
benevolence and responsibility to its autocratic bone.
The inconsistency and duplicity of the British stance also created serious difficulties
for the political strategy adopted by the Congress. It threatened to drive a wedge be-
tween its younger and more activist members such as the young Nehru, Subhash Bose,
Jayprakash Narayan, and the older guard represented by Sir T. B. Sapru, Motilal Nehru,
R. Iyengar, and M. M. Malaviya. It was Gandhi, above all, who rose to this challenge.
He prevented a breakdown within Congress ranks and stopped Nehru’s resignation
(chap. 1), when Lord Irvin countered the Lahore Congress call for purna swaraj (com-
plete independence) by outlining the possibility of dominion status for India and in-
viting Congress stalwarts to a round-table conference in London. Through his extraor-
dinary presence both within and without the formal structure of the party, Gandhi not
only brought the Congress, time and again, back from the brink of dissipation, but also
continued to devise finely honed issues of moral and political unfairness that fed the
fire of nationalist agitation.
The British may have acquiesced at times to the Congress as representing a majority
of Indians notwithstanding the Muslim League and the Princely States, but they clearly
bestowed on the Mahatma a special mandate as an emissary of the people. The unusual
geniality of the Gandhi-Emerson talks, which were dedicated to the harsh political
realities of the aftermath of the 1930s struggle—death sentences on terrorists, release
of imprisoned members of the Congress, anti-rent campaigns of the United Provinces
and Gujarat—belies the sea of conflict that surrounded them. Gandhi kept a dialogue
alive with the spokesmen of the empire even while in prison (1932–33), as his corre-
spondence with Samuel Hoare, Secretary of State for India, reveals. Campaigning
against untouchability from within his prison cell and forcing the government to let
him use the prison yard for a public political forum, Gandhi held the British to their
promise of political fairness.
Imperial policy, on the other hand, strove to corral the Congress toward the path of
graduated constitutional reform. It held out carefully worded offers such as the Gov-
ernment of India Act of 1935, over which Nehru and Philip Lothian (Parliamentary
Under Secretary for India) spilled much rhetorical blood, and then in 1937 the more
substantial invitation for the Congress to participate in the provincial legislature. Such
gestures were successful in keeping mass agitation at bay. But they secured for the
Congress crucial leverage with which to impress their demands and threaten a with-
drawal of their partnership—as they did by resigning their provincial ministries when
Lord Linlithgow declared India to be at war in 1939 without native counsel. A conclu-
sive episode in this long duel was the fateful wartime coup de main delivered to Win-
ston Churchill in Washington (January 1942) by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru in the form of
202 Book Reviews

a telegram asking for a nonofficial National Government in India. This demand not
only drew the attention of Clement Atlee and made headlines in the British press, it
forced Churchill, who epitomized the conservative imperial stand on holding India to
the empire at great odds, to concede a constitution for India in the near future. By the
time of Stafford Cripps’s wartime proposal to grant India dominion status, Indian in-
dependence had almost become a legitimate, if not a forgone, conclusion.
The story of imperial vacillation is carefully retold here to show that the national
movement in India was historically rather specific, and that a nonviolent struggle would
not have succeeded with the French or the Dutch and would have been superfluous in
the Philippines. Repeated reference to “ambiguity,” “ambidextrous hand,” “duality,”
and the like, however, detracts at times from the important distinction that could be
drawn between contradiction and duplicity. Beyond the parry and thrust of nationalist
and imperial rhetoric, and even beyond the moves of the Congress, Gandhian disobe-
dience raised the specter of a wider social upheaval that threatened the roots of the
colonial state in India and its balance of moral suasion and instruments of violence.
This was so much the case that the consequence of Gandhi dying in jail, or the use of
brute force as in the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of 1919, or even a civil disobedience
movement deteriorating into a violent mass uprising were imponderables that could
not be brought to the bargaining table. Low’s study in its finer nuances brings us a step
closer to fathoming the depths of British colonial ambition in India.

SUDIPTA SEN
Syracuse University

Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951. By Ross McKibbin.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. x`562. $45.00.

Historians in many fields have reason to welcome the appearance of Ross McKibbin’s
new book, much the best general social history of twentieth-century Britain to appear
in a long time. Although attentive to a wide range of cultural practices and trends,
McKibbin is concerned throughout to defend the analytical usefulness and descriptive
accuracy of the concept of “class”—a determination that gives the book a degree of
coherence not always found in surveys of this kind. The book begins with five chapters
on the public and private lives of the three classes—upper, middle, and working—
before turning to those institutions (schools, churches) that reflected or sustained class
differentiation and to different manifestations of the popular culture of the period—
cinema, music, radio, reading, sport, and sexual relations. Out of these disparate in-
vestigations, a coherent argument emerges. Class segregation was on the increase in
these years, McKibbin argues, with both the middle and working classes becoming
occupationally and residentially more isolated. Quite distinct “class cultures” emerged
as a result, but the dominant tone of the period was set by the middle class—a class
that became at once numerically stronger and economically more vulnerable, and that
responded to these pressures by retreating into a middlebrow culture of domesticity,
antipolitics, and ressentiment.
In the course of developing this argument, McKibbin highlights two particularly
significant themes. A first concerns the central place of community and family life
within all classes. From the growing popularity of gardening among middle-class men,
to the continued reliance on personal contacts (rather than employment exchanges) in
job hunting, to the overwhelming importance of mother-daughter ties in working-class
 Book Reviews 203

life, McKibbin convincingly demonstrates the degree to which domesticity came to

dominate the experience of English men and women of all classes. Yet (and this is the
book’s second theme) men and women experienced these trends in very different ways,
and one of the great merits of this book is that McKibbin pays as much attention to
the lives and subcultures of women as he does to those of men. For women, he argues,
experienced class segregation particularly sharply in these years; in consequence, they
became the bearers less of some oppositional “class consciousness” than of the social
practices, accents, and preferences that distinguish class from class. Thus it was upper-
class girls, isolated from public school influences and barricaded at home, who pre-
served the huntin’ and shootin’ accent of the English aristocracy long after it had eroded
among men; likewise, working-class girls, often disdainful of the improving culture of
school and prone to find work through family and friends, were even less likely than
working-class boys to show any interest in politics, instead wrapping themselves up in
the fantasy worlds of cinema, romance novels, and dance. Through this attention to
domesticity and to gender, McKibbin provides an exemplary account of how, during
these years, gender relations produced “class.”
Yet for all its strengths, this book is not quite the pathbreaking and integrative work
that I had hoped McKibbin would write. And this is not because particular social
practices or cultural forms receive too much emphasis and others not enough—al-
though almost all twentieth-century historians (myself included) are bound to have
their own specialist criticisms on such points. (I, for example, felt that McKibbin’s
focus on the growing rigidities of class cultures may have led him to underemphasize
trends that may have widened outlooks or fostered social mixing in these years—
including travel, tourism, migration, immigration, and the social experience of the
Great War.) The real problem is, rather, what he has chosen to leave out entirely—
which is, specifically, politics. By this I don’t mean that McKibbin has left out “high
politics,” since we would expect this in a social history, but rather that he has omitted
from his story any coherent narrative of the shifting balance of social power in his
period and of the particular events and negotiations that shaped that balance.
This is a frustrating and baffling omission. For McKibbin is, first and foremost, a
political historian, always attentive to the political meanings and implications of cul-
tural practices. And indeed, an implicit political argument undergirds this book, since
it is above all about the social behaviors and relations that sustained middle-class and
conservative hegemony during these years. Of course, anyone familiar with Mc-
Kibbin’s earlier work, and particularly with his brilliant essay of a decade ago on the
foundations of Conservative dominance in the years between the wars (“Class and
Conventional Wisdom: The Conservative Party and the ‘Public’ in Inter-War Britain,”
in his The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 [Oxford, 1990],
pp. 259–93) will recognize this implicit political framework, and in occasional asides
McKibbin does highlight its main features. Thus, for example, he rightly sees the
repudiation of David Lloyd George and the period of “structural adjustment” after
World War I as of greater significance for the shaping of the interwar political economy
than the much-researched period of the Slump and second Labour Government; like-
wise (and equally rightly) he stresses the ways in which middle-class cultural norms,
and especially the pervasive effort to avoid controversial (or even serious) topics of
conversation, would lend support to the circumscribed and rhetorically “anti-political”
agenda of Stanley Baldwin. Asides of this kind—and they are, here, largely asides—
bring a shadowy, parallel narrative of conservative political hegemony momentarily
into view, only—frustratingly—to whisk it once again out of sight. Thus, although his
distinctive and compelling analysis of the character of interwar British politics has
204 Book Reviews

implicitly structured his social history, at no point does McKibbin make this framework
explicit.
It is, of course, more than a little unfair to play the usual reviewer’s game of criti-
cizing the author for having written the book he wrote rather than some other book,
and were this book not by Ross McKibbin, I would not be tempted to play it. Yet,
precisely because of McKibbin’s great gifts as both a political and a social historian, I
do regret his choices here. The division between social history and the history of “high
politics” is still too sharp in twentieth-century British historiography: “high political”
historians rarely investigate the social and cultural frameworks constraining politics;
social historians too often (and with some reason) flinch from the task of linking the
histories of sport and gardening, travel and childraising, with the history of appeasement
or the slump. Yet such relationships exist, as Alison Light’s brilliant study of the
“elective affinities” between literary modernism, domesticity, and Conservatism dem-
onstrated (Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism
between the Wars [London, 1991]), and when explored can prove wonderfully illu-
minating. From his past work, and indeed from the implicit argument underpinning
this remarkable book, it is clear that McKibbin is one of the few historians around
capable of writing a pathbreaking comprehensive interwar history, one that will show
not only the distinctiveness of Britain’s class structure and cultures but also the ways
in which social relations shaped—and were shaped by—its political life. For all its
many insights and pleasures, this is not that book.

SUSAN PEDERSEN
Harvard University

Comment la Franc-Maçonnerie vint aux femmes: Deux siècles de

Franc-Maçonnerie d’adoption féminine et mixte en France, 1740–1940. By
Gisèle Hivert-Messeca and Yves Hivert-Messeca.
Paris: Editions Dervy, 1997. Pp. 390. 150 F.

The story of women in French freemasonry has implications far beyond the organi-
zation itself. A grasp of the details, personalities, and politics of this society as it
evolved from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century gives one new
insight into the nature of feminism, the complexities of French politics, and the way
women relate to their society in general. The letters and speeches of the women mem-
bers and the minute entries and rituals of this secret society offer new understanding
of the otherwise inexplicable behavior of some of the strong women who were part of
the organization. In the eighteenth century, these women were royal; in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, they included radical feminists as well as socialist and com-
munist party leaders.
French women’s freemasonry had two especially profound moments in its long his-
tory. During the decade before the Revolution (1780–89), the organization attracted
some of the most powerful women in the court of Louis XVI. These women and their
masonic sisters developed an incipient form of feminism fully a century before the
classic feminism appeared. At the same time in some provincial cities, the women and
their husbands, typically government nobles, seemed to have used their lodges as cen-
ters to help develop their political power even as an older nobility tried to deprive them
of it.
Another moment where the forces of women’s masonry seemed to interact with
 Book Reviews 205

feminism and the nation’s politics was in the second half of the nineteenth century
when some of the leaders of French feminism, notably Maria Deraismes, became in-
volved in the organization. A radical strain of feminism, promulgated by an organized
feminist movement that supported equality of women outside the home, dominated
many lodges at that time. As Deraismes said in her introductory speech as a mason,
“It is said that the place of the woman is in the family, that motherhood is her supreme
function, that in the foyer she is queen. This is an outrageous lie” (p. 239).
Strong women in the lodges were also active at this time in the politics of France
and Europe. Their numbers were evident in the Paris Commune (1870), in the volatile
politics of the Dreyfus Affair, and in the growing European socialist movement. The
attachment to socialist theory in the lodges grew into a strong involvement in the
movement during the interwar period, when the roster of one typical masonic organi-
zation showed that twenty-one of thirty-seven women members were active syndical-
ists, socialists, or communists, many of them officers in those organizations.
Gisèle Hivert-Messeca and Yves Hivert-Messeca fully document this complex story
in their work, providing a rich treasury of reference material, but they fail to make the
significant connections themselves. Their thesis finds its echo in the title, How Free-
masonry Came to Women. The focus of the work is strictly linear, tracing the struggles
women have experienced in trying to establish full equality with men within the or-
ganization. Unfortunately, this is the same focus found in most other works on women’s
freemasonry. Institutional historians, whose purpose did not extend beyond the politics
of freemasonry itself, have traditionally been the ones to trace the role of women within
the organization. The Hivert-Messecas are no exception. Theirs is the same tale, the
same narrow view, more richly documented.
It is the last factor that makes this work especially worthwhile. The documentation
is extraordinary. The authors have pulled the strings of women’s freemasonry in seem-
ingly every possible corner and have published material found exclusively in archival
collections. They have looked at pseudomasonic organizations, the occult lodges, the
charlatans who regularly infiltrated masonry, and some lodges from countries outside
France. In the process, while making none of the appropriate connections themselves,
they have virtually opened the archives to the rest of the world. The book contains
complete rosters of women’s lodges, lists of members’ professions and affiliations,
entire speeches of women members (including the magnificent introductory oration of
Deraismes), useful charts, and even minor details about political wrangling with the
grand lodges.
The breadth of meaning, then, becomes evident to those who are not confined within
the narrow interpretive boundaries of masonry itself. Those more broadly focused read-
ers can trace the interaction of women with the intellectual, societal, and political
currents of their age. Women encountered the ideas of the Enlightenment in their
eighteenth-century lodges just as they later did the feminism and socialism of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The parallels between women’s masonry and the
public sphere show, further, that times of confusion are good for women. When an
organization or country is in chaos, women can advance in power and stature, presum-
ably because society is so busy dealing with the chaos that many of its members fail
to notice. Whenever the masonic grand lodge was experiencing confusion within or
competition from without, women managed to enter the masonic temples, which by
the organization’s constitution were forbidden to them. It was the wildcat growth in
higher degrees and irregular orders in eighteenth-century French freemasonry that al-
lowed some male lodges to introduce women’s masonry in the first place. By the time
the duke of Chartres became Grand Master and decided to regularize the jumble of
206 Book Reviews

new obediences, women’s freemasonry was a fait accompli. The Grand Orient of France
voted in 1774 to accept women in their “lodges of adoption” as official members of
freemasonry. Similarly, strides within the organization occurred with the confusion of
the Commune and with World War I. The women’s lodges also changed their gover-
nance as the political world around them changed; their various forms of masonry
moved from a hierarchical rule to a more democratically run and egalitarian one as the
government of France changed its nature. Their secret society was a microcosm of their
public sphere.
The story of women’s freemasonry in France does indeed show the struggle of
women for equality within the organization, as the authors so well describe it. The
greater significance of this work, however, lies in the multitude of threads that link the
women to their society, their politics, and the intellectual ferment around them.

JANET M. BURKE
Arizona State University

The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. By Jon

Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. xv`352. £25.

When the disease we now call syphilis first hit the Italian peninsula in 1496, the effect
was devastating. Although from the outset syphilis was a degenerative disease that
destroyed its victims relatively slowly, it was initially far more lethal and incapacitating
than it had become even a century later. A disease that infected all sections of society—
including the princely house of Este—it was inevitably compared with the plague. The
Great Pox is an account of contemporary reactions to this new disease, both popular
and professional, and its effect on the theory and practice of disease. The authors’
approach is steadfastly historical. As they explain at length in an introductory first
chapter devoted to an analysis of the medical study of the disease over the past four
centuries, there is no reason to assume a close relationship between modern-day syphilis
and its Renaissance forebear. To avoid confusion, therefore, they deliberately refer to
the malady throughout the book by its sixteenth-century sobriquet. Dubbed for obvious
reasons “the pox” by the English, it was also known throughout Europe as “the French
disease,” owing to the fact it appeared in Italy shortly after the invasion of the peninsula
by Charles VIII.
The introduction is followed by five chapters that deal with contemporary accounts
of the pox. The first two look at popular reactions in the years immediately following
the appearance of the disease; the next three look at the views of late fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century physicians at Ferrara (where there was an official disputation on the
subject in an Este palace in the spring of 1497), Germany, and the papal court. Not
surprisingly, lay perceptions of the disease reflected the contemporary moral and po-
litical climate. In an era that saw the highly influential Savonarola dominant in Florence,
exhorting the citizens to see the French invasion as a divine chastisement, the pox too
was read as God’s judgment on sinful Italians. Learned physicians, on the other hand,
were more interested in understanding the disease in terms of existing Galenic medical
theory. As a result, the physicians, in contrast to the laity, were very unwilling to see
the disease as new. Rather, turning to their preferred authority—Avicenna (in the case
of the scholastic establishment), Hippocrates, or Plato (in the case of the humanists)—
they related the pox to age-old maladies such as elephantiasis and provided a humoral
 Book Reviews 207

explanation of its symptoms. In the first instance, only the antiestablishment Paracelsus,
who valued popular medical knowledge much more highly than the wisdom of the
ancients, used the pox as a peg on which to hang a revolutionary ontological theory of
disease. What divided scholastic and humanist theorists was the disease’s external
cause: could it be attributed to astrological influence or was it natural (e.g., climatic—
the result of a particular weather pattern)?
The next two chapters examine one of the most important social consequences of
the spread of the French disease—the foundation all over Italy of hospitals for incur-
ables in the course of the sixteenth century. Whatever the religious imperative behind
these foundations—and most were associated with the new regular orders of the Cath-
olic Reformation in some way—the authors are insistent that the movement had a lot
to do with the fear and disgust of syphilis. The sight of the sick poor lying rotting in
the streets of the peninsula’s big cities encouraged an urban clean-up campaign that
would place the indigent safely behind the walls of a hospital. The close association
in the public mind of prostitution and syphilis in an age of moral reform only hastened
the development. This is not to say, however, that the hospitals were no better than
prisons. The authors’ careful analysis of admissions to the hospital of San Giacomo at
Rome in the second half of the sixteenth century reveals that the new institutions were
far from being the “portals of death” familiar to readers of Foucault. The death rate
(male and female combined) was only 12 percent, and the hospitals were popular
centers of healing to which syphilitics thronged in their thousands to receive freely
administered doses of guiacum (or holy wood), the preferred alternative to mercury
therapy.
The last two chapters return again to the question of medical theory, this time in the
second half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. As the pox “grew old”
and less virulent, so the theory of the disease changed. Making good use of the concept
of occult diseases and cures (i.e., those whose cause could not be explained simply in
terms of humoral balance), a number of late Renaissance Galenists groped toward the
idea that the pox was a real entity that could be passed from person to person, and not
just a series of symptoms that differed in strength and manifestation according to the
individual victim. The leading theorist of the occult was the Parisian court physician,
Jean Fernel, but more important for the development of an ontological theory of disease
per se was the Italian Fracostero, whose complex theory of contagion, enunciated in
1546, argued that the pox passed from person to person through the agency of syphilitic
particles, often lying dormant in food or clothing. This neo-atomist idea, owing much
to Lucretius, was taken up in the early seventeenth century by the highly influential
Wittenberg professor of medicine, Daniel Sennert.
The authors are to be congratulated for producing an extremely learned and informed
book. Not only is it successfully shown how the various Renaissance readings of the
pox were cultural constructs, the result both of shared cultural resources and individual
ideological preferences. More important, through their analysis of the growing interest
in an ontological theory of disease, the authors demonstrate how a novel pathological
conundrum (especially the problem of how the pox was transmitted) can move the
medical debate on. The growing eclecticism of late Renaissance Galenism is thus to
be attributed not just to the rediscovery in the fifteenth century of new intellectual
resources for discussing sickness (especially Democritan atomism) but to the appear-
ance of a medical mystery that could not be easily resolved in traditional Galenic
humoral terms. Although the section on hospitals does not fit easily with this general
thrust of the work, it too is of interest for another reason. Historians of early modern
poverty and the Catholic Reformation who debate the rationale behind Foucault’s “great
208 Book Reviews

confinement” will henceforth have to add the syphilitic factor to their evolving equa-
tion. This is a book that whets the appetite. The reader is left wanting to know about
the reactions to syphilis in other parts of Renaissance Europe, not just the Italian pen-
insula and a few German cities.

L. W. B. BROCKLISS
Magdalen College, Oxford

Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle. By
Thierry Wanegffelen. Bibliothèque littéraire de la Renaissance, series 3, volume
36.
Paris: Honoré Champion in association with the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 1997. Pp. xx`681. 670 FF.

Despite the attention historians have lavished on the French Reformation and wars of
religion, we still lack what Thierry Wanegffelen calls “a history of the believer” (une
histoire de la personne croyante) during an important century of political and religious
transformation. Recent scholarship has been dominated by studies of confessional
choice and Protestant-Catholic violence. In this ambitious book Wanegffelen attempts
to shift the focus from confessional division to religious accommodation. His subject
is what he calls the wide frontier between Rome and Geneva, inhabited by numerous
French Christians who refused the increasingly insistent claims of both churches to
define doctrinal truth for their followers. Wanegffelen does not deny the importance of
the social and political contexts, or the implications, of religious choice, conversion,
and war. Yet he insists that historians must also attend to “religious sensibilities,”
individual experiences of belief and community that he distinguishes from doctrine,
church membership, even attendance at religious services. Religious sensibilities do
not always correspond neatly to our labels of Protestant and Catholic, categories largely
established by churches or religious zealots. Wanegffelen invokes the much-debated
confessionalization thesis, primarily to describe the war of words between reformed
Catholic and Calvinist pulpits. But his book ultimately complicates our ability to see
the politics and religions of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as fundamen-
tally shaped by the European-wide struggle among multiple, competing confessions,
each defining narrowly the boundaries of orthodoxy and membership.
Wanegffelen’s “history of the believer” is based on a close reading of first-person
testimonies of faith and doubt. He begins in the 1520s with the first stirrings of religious
reform in Paris and Meaux, but the bulk of the book focuses on the period spanning
the wars of religion and their aftermath in Henri IV’s reign (1562–1610). We read
about well-known figures (Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, Hugues Sureau du Rosier,
Pierre de l’Estoile, Michel de Montaigne, etc.), and a few unfamiliar ones, among this
motley assortment of moderate Protestants, politique Catholics, and anguished apos-
tates. Wanegffelen succeeds admirably at laying out the multiple meanings of conver-
sion, conformity, apostasy, and abjuration at different stages of the religious wars, for
members of the nobility, robe nobility, and bourgeoisie. Although most case studies
are of individuals not communities, an important contribution of the book is the author’s
discussion of the confessional accommodations negotiated in Troyes and Lectoure. We
already know a great deal about the Reformation and wars of religion in Troyes from
 Book Reviews 209

the work of A. N. Galpern (The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Cham-

pagne [Cambridge, Mass., 1976]), Penny Roberts (A City in Conflict: Troyes during
the French Wars of Religion [Manchester, 1996]), and others, though I think Wane-
gffelen exposes the genuinely religious motivations behind conversion and confes-
sional accommodation more fully than they have done. But there has been little dis-
cussion of Lectoure, a small town in the kingdom of Navarre for which a wealth of
documentation survives (much of it published and further analyzed in several appen-
dices, pp. 495–543).
Some readers will debate a few of Wanegffelen’s interpretations. To begin with, all
the individuals the author discusses are male, all are elite, most left behind written if
not published memorials to their internal struggles. I wonder whether the insights pre-
sented here could be extended to women, communities beyond Troyes and Lectoure,
and people about whom we have no direct or first-person evidence. And I found some
of the author’s cases more convincing than others. Wanegffelen sometimes finds in-
habitants of the “religious no-man’s-land” between reformed Catholicism and Calvin-
ism in odd places. Did the cardinal of Lorraine really have an irenic moment at the
colloquy of Poissy? I remain doubtful. Other cases are more convincing and genuinely
break new ground. For example, before reading this book I would never have thought
to include among “Christians between the confessions” (chrétiens d’entre-deux) Pari-
sian cleric René Benoist, Catholic League sympathizer and fierce critic of Huguenots
and politique Catholics. But Wanegffelen’s subtle exegesis persuades me that we can
profitably see Benoist deviating from the Tridentine line on key issues like grace and
intercession.
This raises a question about how to understand the broader achievement of this
important book. Wanegffelen argues that the persistence of so many serious disagree-
ments within Calvinism and Catholicism is evidence of a widespread “refusal of con-
fessional Christianity” and of wide common ground shared by ordinary believers of
both confessions. He has indeed found a large number of elite Frenchmen who did not
conform to an official church’s teachings. In fact, Wanegffelen’s book reveals a re-
markable diversity of views on a range of subjects among Catholics and, to a lesser
extent, among Huguenots. Does this mean that ordinary believers shared common
ground “between the confessions”? Wanegffelen’s own categories of analysis could
indicate something slightly different, but of no less significance. He distinguishes
cleanly between what is “authentically” Catholic and what is “authentically” Protestant,
not on theological grounds but in piety and religious sensibility. The dividing line is
not salvation, a question on which Wanegffelen shows that many Catholics and Hu-
guenots did not disagree significantly. Where they did diverge sharply was on the
eucharist. As Wanegffelen puts it, Catholics experienced the “real presence” of Christ
in the ritual of the mass, while Protestants experienced that presence in God’s word
revealed in scripture. Wanegffelen astutely points out that for ordinary believers this
is less a matter of doctrine than of experience, feeling, and nonrational conviction. By
looking at the eucharist in this way Wanegffelen highlights a distinctively French cul-
ture of both piety and religious division in the Reformation era. Nowhere else did rival
confessions battle quite so brutally over the eucharist (although it was of course a major
source of disagreement nearly everywhere). Wanegffelen’s elegant explication of the
different meanings of the eucharist for Catholics and Huguenots shows that there was
at least one irreconcilable difference between ordinary believers of both groups. Yet
he has also found a diversity of opinions on salvation, ritual, and church government
far greater than anyone has yet seen in either French Catholicism or French-Genevan
210 Book Reviews

Calvinism. Looking at the problem from another angle, this book helps us question the
extent to which sixteenth-century churches were able to impose their teachings on those
they would count as members.
Wanegffelen is not the first to find a complex lived reality behind the simple labels
of Protestant and Catholic. More than a decade ago Mario Turchetti called our attention
to so-called moyenneurs (Nicodemites) who outwardly practiced Catholicism but se-
cretly sympathized with Protestantism, their conformity to the majority religion stem-
ming less from fear of persecution than from hope of finding common ground between
confessions (Turchetti, Concordia o tolleranza? François Bauduin (1520–1573) e i
“moyenneurs” [Geneva, 1984]). More recently Benjamin Kaplan has described elo-
quently the struggles of moderate Protestants in multiconfessional Utrecht to promote
limited toleration of religious minorities in order to secure civic peace (Kaplan, Cal-
vinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 [Oxford,
1995]). In the early modern period, any measure of religious toleration depended upon
distinguishing between public religion on the one hand and private convictions on the
other. We have generally seen this distinction as maintained for essentially political
reasons (to preserve communal, civic, or national unity), and further as a hallmark of
a more modern political consciousness. Like Kaplan, Wanegffelen shows how the effort
to reach some accommodation with other confessions could also stem from genuinely
religious motivation, such as a desire to preserve peace and charity among neighbors,
or between a community and God. Wanegffelen’s innovative study of French Christians
“between the two pulpits” adds considerable subtlety to our understanding of how this
modern notion of religion grew out of the bloodshed of the Reformation.

VIRGINIA REINBURG
Boston College

Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution. By

William Beik.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii`283. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95
(paper).

With this analysis of several dozen urban revolts in seventeenth-century France, Wil-
liam Beik has completely redrawn the boundaries of popular protest in early modern
Europe. Moreover, he has issued a convincing challenge to those who would still argue
that politics in the Old Regime was the preserve of the elites. Taking material from
local archives in twenty provincial French towns (he has excluded Paris because of its
exceptionalism), Beik has produced a powerful synthesis of urban popular revolts that
not only moves well beyond the parameters set by Boris Porshnev and Roland Mousnier
in the 1950s and 1960s, but sets out a new agenda of questions and issues from the
perspective of the cultural history of politics.
Although he draws on two earlier models of early modern crowds—Natalie Davis’s
sixteenth-century “rites of violence” (Society and Culture in Early Modern France
[Stanford, Calif., 1975]) and Edward Thompson’s eighteenth-century “moral economy”
(Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture [New York, 1993])—
Beik argues persuasively that popular protest in seventeenth-century French towns took
a different form, as rioters were neither attempting to purify the polluting “other” from
 Book Reviews 211

their community nor trying to regulate the local economy. Instead, Beik sketches out
what he calls “a culture of retribution,” in which the principal goals of urban protest
were to express public indignation and to single out specific individuals for punishment.
Whether tax collectors from outside or local officials in authority who simply tried to
introduce innovations deemed to be violations of the norm, the targeted agents invar-
iably experienced the wrath of the crowd. Although the agents themselves were rarely
harmed (though they might be run out of town), they often found their homes ransacked
and property pillaged and burned in public demonstrations of retribution. Thus, Beik
demonstrates through this series of case studies how powerful and active the popular
classes could be in the contested arena of urban politics. Though the various forms of
popular protest inevitably were about influence rather than control—none of them had
as an explicit goal the overthrow of the social or political order with the exception of
the Ormée in Bordeaux during the Fronde—Beik makes a very convincing case for
the inclusion of popular politics in any assessment of early modern polity. Although
the politics of the crowd might have been limited to stopping unpopular measures and
publicly punishing those officials deemed responsible, these were hardly negligible
activities, particularly when the officials in question were royal officers.
The impressive research in municipal archives upon which this book is based allows
for a detailed and studied analysis of most of the major urban revolts in seventeenth-
century France. Although many others are cited and analyzed (there are roughly a
hundred individual protests, revolts, or incidents listed in a table in the appendix), there
are extended treatments of urban protests in Troyes (1625–27), Dijon (1630), Lyon
(1632), Agen (1635), Bordeaux (1635), Toulouse (1635), Béziers and Albi (1640s),
Châlons-sur-Marne (1641), Montpellier (1645), Bordeaux (1648–53), Angers (1649–
50), Bordeaux (1675), Rennes (1675), and Aix (1695). The resulting synthesis stresses
that the culture of retribution was the single most distinguishing feature of early modern
French crowds. These protests were truly popular, in that the people involved in these
collective protests were invariably drawn from the masses of ordinary citizens in the
town: shopkeepers, craftsmen, and artisans of every description, vignerons, butchers,
bakers, that is, the entire gamut of the humbler trades in any town. Moreover, they
usually saw themselves as opposed to the power oligarchies that controlled political
power. Although the popular classes had no legal remedy to affect the powers that
controlled them short of humble supplication, Beik is really effective in showing how
efficacious urban crowds could be. Because of their numbers, early modern crowds
were not restricted to the “weapons of the weak.” Not only did municipal officials
depend on the acquiescence of the masses for urban government to function as well as
for social and political order, but many of the protesters were, despite their humble
social origins, persons of standing within the community who had various economic
and social roles to play in the city.
Thus, Beik argues for an assessment of these protests as much more than simply a
mechanical reaction against the fiscal demands of the state, and he departs sharply from
the model of peasant revolts established by Yves-Marie Bercé, in which the protesters
are essentially depoliticized by viewing them through the lens of carnival and festive
popular culture. Bercé’s focus on ritual mocking, drinking, and celebration makes the
protesters, according to Beik, seem childlike and irresponsible. And while Beik does
not deny that the festive mockeries described so well by Natalie Davis and even Bercé
himself were significant motifs in sixteenth-century protest, they were largely absent
from seventeenth-century revolts, where anger, risk, and uncertainty made for a fright-
ening rather than festive form of collective experience for the participants. Indeed, in
many of the protests described by Beik, it is clear that the local elites were the ones
212 Book Reviews

who were most prone to perceive collective protest as expressions of popular culture
rather than the expressions of political protest that they were. In all of this discussion
Beik is both convincing and free of the sin of romanticizing the popular classes. He is
very explicit about the limitations of popular protest, and he goes to great lengths to
suggest that these protests did not make any significant headway in overturning the
social and political order. Nevertheless, Beik’s greatest achievement is demonstrating
that local elites, and on occasion even the king, were forced to sit up and take notice
of these protesters throughout the seventeenth century, and in some cases even to alter
their policies as a result of the culture of retribution.

MACK P. HOLT
George Mason University

Saint-Simon ou le système de la Cour. By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie with the

collaboration of Jean-François Fitou.
Paris: Fayard, 1997. Pp. 635. 160 F.

This is a learned, original, and completely intelligent book. It is not a biography, though
it does include a biographical account that is eventually amplified by elucidations of
Saint-Simon’s ways of thinking. (Born in 1675, Saint-Simon died in 1755. His diaries
are a prime source for the study of Versailles from 1692 to 1723.) Nor is it an analysis
of Saint-Simon’s Journal as such: true enough, the text does pay ample tribute to Saint-
Simon as a great stylist, and one of the qualities of the book is in its juxtaposition of
two writing styles (Saint-Simon’s and Le Roy Ladurie’s) that stand in amusing contrast.
But Le Roy Ladurie does not seek to analyze the literary merits of this most famous
of all French journals, our first source for the history of court politics. Nor, finally, is
this book a work of political history in the strict sense, though it has an important
message about the vagaries of the French path to modernity.
Le Roy Ladurie’s purpose is instead to consider the absolutist court of Versailles as
an ethnologist or an anthropologist might consider an Amazonian tribe whose most
acute participant-observer was also an avid diarist. That is the overall method of the
book, which centers on three themes: the social organization of the tribe; its central
cultural values; and its strategy in dealing with the outside world.
The sociological dimension is the most impressive. Le Roy Ladurie’s understanding
of how Versailles worked is unrivaled. He identifies the changing and interrelated
networks and cabals that formed around Mme de Maintenon, for example, or Louis
XIV’s son and grandson with astounding ease and clarity. These descriptions are won-
derfully involved but never tedious.
Around what issues are cabals formed? Who has power and influence, and why?
Here, ethnology (as in kinship systems) is used to consider the values of the court and
Saint-Simon’s interpretation of them. A central theme, of course, is that the entire
edifice rests on the idea, wholly unquestioned, that man is born unequal. Social order
must be hierarchic and holistic. The “gradations des états” is inscribed in nature. Saint-
Simon, though a sincere Christian, never envisaged that men, whose souls were equally
divine, might be socially equal as well. Hierarchies seemed to him, and to the court,
inevitable and good. Saint-Simon would have been completely at home in premodern
and caste-ridden India, and it is a curious fact that this diarist had a lively interest in
the social ordering of non-European peoples. He was very intrigued by the tsar’s visit
 Book Reviews 213

to Versailles and made note of what he had heard of and read about Asian and African
monarchies.
Birth rank mattered most, but Le Roy Ladurie’s most insightful pages deal with
Saint-Simon’s views—and instincts—on the nature of the pure and the impure. Here,
the author successfully connects Saint-Simon’s thoughts on power, money, food, social
miscegenation, and the like to the religious theme of Jansenism and Augustinian
thought in eighteenth-century France. Saint-Simon’s detestation of Louis’s bastards is
well known, but it is presented here in a new and enriching light. Legitimacy is pure;
bastardy is impure. Saint-Simon thought highly of Germans who, it appears, also
thought poorly of royal bastards.
Two other themes, both of them critical to an understanding of eighteenth-century
French history, round out the book: in 1715, at the death of Louis XIV (as Le Roy
Ladurie perspicaciously emphasizes), France was at a crossroads. How would it
change? Toward the English manner? Toward more capitalism, religious toleration,
and participatory government? Or could France afford to stay set in its classically
conservative, centralized, and hierarchic ways? Two great options, then; one of the
strengths of this book is to show that solutions depended in no small part on the
workings of cabals and factions, that is to say, on the interplay of ethnographically
ascertainable alliances. Baldly stated, the argument is that politics were not just about
this or that option. They depended also on the structure of the groups struggling to
survive at Versailles. Ideologies drew supporters, but supporters also used ideology as
a weapon.
Hence also the metahistorical conclusion of the book: how should we think of cul-
tural forms? Do they trickle down from above as Norbert Elias suggested (e.g., courtly
duplicity as against feudal force)? or work their way up to Versailles from the deep
structures of French ways of thinking (a societal suspicion of equality)? In an echo
perhaps from his Marxist past, Le Roy Ladurie argues vigorously for the latter. The
debate has some piquancy: to argue that Saint-Simon’s Versailles—the archetypal Elia-
sian court—was far more a superstructure than a cause is to carry the cultural argument
to the very heart of the enemy’s entrenchment. And in an unconscious echo, perhaps,
of a concern for eternal France, Le Roy Ladurie takes some pleasure also in tracing
Elias’s (erroneous) way of seeing to the nineteenth-century German distinction between
an (artificial) French Zivilisation that came from above and a deeper, chthonic, teutonic
Kultur spawned from primeval depths. Revealingly, one of the books on which Le Roy
Ladurie relies most is Daniel Gordon’s recent Habermasian work on eighteenth-century
France (Citizens without Sovereignty [Princeton, N.J., 1994]) that focuses on the emer-
gence from below of new and antimonarchic, antihierarchic social forms—the preface,
incidentally, to the Republican values of 1789–94 and the collapse of Saint-Simon’s
worldview.
Le Roy Ladurie’s Les Paysans du Languedoc was an important book that taught us
to look at social history in a more subtle way, one more attuned to demographic change.
This equally brilliant work will underscore the need to weigh cultural and sociological
concerns in a renewed understanding of French political history.

PATRICE HIGONNET
Harvard University
214 Book Reviews

Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. By Chandra Mukerji.

Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. Edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven
Seidman.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xxiv`393. $79.95.

Monographs in historical sociology are all too rare. Chandra Mukerji’s first, From
Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983), was a study of
early modern consumption. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, her
second study, is more sharply focused but shows the same preoccupation with material
culture. Although it ranges from fashions in clothes to the trade in plants, the book is
essentially concerned with the gardens of Versailles as “expressions of a new French
political territoriality” (p. 18). Claiming that historians have “missed” the importance
of what she calls “the material aspects of state power,” Mukerji makes a series of points
about the gardens. For example, they are a “theater of power.” The “repetitive geom-
etry” of the gardens is reminiscent of the layout of French forests, which were already
subject to regulations (p. 76). Another comparison, central to this study, is that between
gardening and war. Garden design, according to Mukerji, was derived from fortress
design. Indeed, “military culture was essential to enjoying the gardens” (p. 82), where
the trees were lined up as if on parade. Behind the parallel lay a purpose, the “social
mobilisation of nature” in the service of the king or the state. Her central claim is that
garden design changed in seventeenth-century France because the organization of the
state changed: “government transformation of the French landscape—with the con-
struction of fortresses, factories, garrisons, canals, roads and port cities—imprinted the
political order on to the earth” (p. 1).
In order to support this series of theses, Mukerji has not only walked the gardens
but also studied seventeenth-century treatises on gardening, estate management, and
the art of war, such as Jacques Boyceau’s Traité du jardinage (Paris, 1638) and Allain
Mallet’s Les Travaux de Mars (Paris, 1684). The 150 well-chosen illustrations include
engravings from these books as well as photographs of the gardens.
Territorial Ambitions is probably the most ambitious and original study of seven-
teenth-century France in the service of a sociological argument to be published since
Norbert Elias’s book on the court society. The author is not afraid to ask large questions
or to put forward answers. Historians of the early modern period will have to engage
with Mukerji’s arguments. All the same, her book has serious flaws, two in particular.
In the first place, her use of sources presents a problem. Where gardens are con-
cerned, Mukerji has gone back to primary printed sources, but where the state is con-
cerned she relies on the work of earlier historians. Dependence on secondary literature
was only to be expected in a work of this scope; the problem is that she has not read
sufficiently widely in it. Thus she discusses French government finances in apparent
ignorance of the work of Daniel Dessert, the ballet de cour without citing Margaret
McGowan or Rudolf zu Lippe, and so on. At times she relies on what might be called
tertiary rather than secondary sources, since they are still further removed from the
evidence, such as the syntheses of Elias, Perry Anderson, and Michael Mann. Appar-
ently unaware of certain debates, she takes it for granted that the seventeenth century
witnessed the rise of a “new system” in politics, without discussing the weaknesses of
the seventeenth-century state (although studies by William Beik and Roger Mettam
appear in her bibliography, they appear to have made no impact on the argument).
Following Elias, Mukerji speaks of the “disciplining” of the aristocracy, once again in
apparent unawareness of challenges to this thesis by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and
others. The acknowledgments to the book suggest that the author discussed her ideas
 Book Reviews 215

with many sociologists. A pity that she did not also approach specialists on seventeenth-
century France at the University of California or elsewhere.
A second flaw in this study is conceptual. The analysis is soft-centered in that the
author does not appear to make up her mind whether she is describing similarities or
connections. The argument sometimes depends on coincidence in time: “Just as the
state was restructuring the political map of France, Le Nôtre was designing a new
spatial and technical orderliness for French gardens” (p. 21). Sometimes the case de-
pends on speculation: Le Nôtre “most likely cultivated an independent fascination with
the material techniques of war” (p. 45). Even the similarities are sometimes question-
able, notably what the caption to figure 61 calls the “stairs shaped like a fortress,”
which to my eye do not differ from the stairs to the main door of classical or baroque
churches.
It seems odd to be making this point about a sociologist, but a comparative approach
might have helped make the argument more rigorous. An examination of private gar-
dens in seventeenth-century France (at Castres, say, or Sceaux), or of gardens in other
parts of Europe, might illuminate the possible links between landscaping and politics.
In Italy, formal gardens developed earlier than in France, at the same time as the rise
of the bastion but for aristocrats as often as for rulers. In England, the most famous
description of a garden using a military metaphor—“See how the flowers, as at parade
/ Under their colours stand displayed”—Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House, was
written about a private garden during the civil war, when state power was at its weakest.
In short, this is a book of variable quality, valuable for its fresh insights but offering
intuitions and speculations rather than fully developed arguments, and more successful
when discussing gardening than when discussing politics. It should and probably will
provoke further studies in its territory.

PETER BURKE
Emmanuel College, Cambridge

Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. By Henry Phillips.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xi`334. $59.95.

Today priests differentiate themselves from their parishioners through their public be-
havior, their dress, their speech, and their knowledge. However, this was not the case
in France prior to the Counter-Reformation. Then parish priests often had another
identity as a barber, a tailor, or a manual laborer. They were frequently seen at the
local tavern, swearing and indulging in sexual licentiousness. They did not wear cas-
socks to set themselves visibly apart. Nor did they possess a special knowledge to
distinguish them—many rural priests were unable to understand the words of the mass.
The Catholic Reform in France sought to change the relationship of the priest to his
flock by clearly distinguishing the two. This was part of a more general reform strat-
egy—to establish clear-cut boundaries between the sacred and the profane in an effort
to rethink the nature of the sacred and its relation to political power. The church feared
that if the sacred were portrayed as too familiar to the everyday world of its parishion-
ers, it might engender irreverence.
Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France is a fascinating, well-researched
book that illuminates how “organized religion” in seventeenth-century France became
more organized as a result of the Counter-Reformation and how that organization took
the form of increasingly systematic differentiations between the sacred and the profane,
216 Book Reviews

between notions of an inside and of an outside. The church’s goal in establishing

divisions and differentiations was paradoxically to achieve a more inclusive and total-
izing control over France. Henry Phillips carefully documents how the church sought
to redefine itself in order to bring Protestants and others into the mother church and so
make the frontiers of the church coterminous with those of the kingdom. Ultimately,
it sought to include all areas of human activity—moral, social, and political—within
the frame of Christian orthodoxy.
To structure that frame, the church increasingly conceived of itself in terms of its
ability to include and exclude, “Hors l’Eglise, point de salut.” It included through
baptism and excluded through excommunication. Excommunication involved an ex-
clusion from a real space, the church building itself, as well as from an abstract, sym-
bolic space which the building represented—belief. “This concept of exclusion and
inclusion thus gives rise to a notion of boundaries, and boundaries suggest a space,”
writes Phillips (p. 1). He organizes his chapters according to the different kinds of
spaces that the church sought to occupy. His chapter headings are “The Spaces of
Belief,” “The Spaces of Representation,” “The Spaces of Education,” “The Spaces of
Dissension,” “The Space of Ideas,” “The Spaces of Discussion,” “The Spaces of Hos-
tility,” “The Space of the Word.” As these titles suggest, his understanding of space is
essentially metaphorical. It is not clear what a metaphorical concept of space adds to
our understanding of the church’s effort to strengthen its power. It would have been
helpful if Phillips had elucidated why space is sufficiently important to serve as his
book’s organizing frame, but this does not take away from the compelling nature of
the analyses themselves.
The church was not the only force attempting “to fill the space.” It had to contend
with competing claims from the “space of the world” and the “space of royal power.”
To deal with these rivals, the church developed various strategies of accommodation
and assimilation which Phillips discusses in fascinating and meticulous detail. For
example, he shows how the church transformed pagan ceremonies such as the May
celebrations, originally rites of fertility, into a celebration of the Virgin. The church
multiplied the number of its transformed processions and ceremonies in the towns and
villages such that they became “divertissements” to attract the faithful away from more
worldly practices and beliefs.
The strategies the church used to compete with its rivals and become a totalizing
force, however, ultimately fragmented and weakened its power. Its efforts to create
greater differentiations between the sacred and the profane solidified the secular space,
prompting its adherents to develop a heightened sense of its own identity and inde-
pendence, fostering its own distinctive logic. The church’s refusal to include the new
science or philosophy within its space forced scientists and philosophers to seek refuge
in a new space over which the church had little or no control. Moreover, the church,
in its efforts to assimilate and accommodate the social world, ran the risk of being
assimilated by society, of being compromised by secularism, of conceding too much
to that space. Phillips raises the question of whether the church controlled the social
world—or the reverse.
This is a masterful book, essential to a comprehensive knowledge of seventeenth-
century French culture. I use the word “culture” advisedly since, as Phillips shows, to
understand the importance of the church is necessary to understand the culture—they
are inextricably intertwined. Drawing on a wide range of research, this book is a major
contribution to our understanding because it provides a wonderful, insightful synthesis
of many areas of inquiry—religion, literature, art, theater, education, science, philos-
ophy, social conduct, political history—all of which are needed to gain a full under-
 Book Reviews 217

standing of the church and culture. By juxtaposing these different domains, he offers
the reader a broader perspective that opens up all kinds of interesting and important
connections. His analyses in each domain provide a remarkable richness of detail. Yet
the reader never loses track of the larger framework that continually attempts to make
sense of that detail. It is a true pleasure to read a book as well presented and well
written as this one.
Yet, as intelligent as this book is, there still remain some larger questions that Phil-
lips, surprisingly, does not ask. For example, he discusses the church’s rivalry with the
world in the domain of the theater. Given all the documentation that Phillips provides
to understand the nature and vehemence of the church’s opposition to theater, one might
logically assume that theater was a rather marginal literary form in seventeenth-century
culture, especially given the church’s power. How, then, is it possible that theater was
the culture’s defining literary genre given all this opposition? Since Phillips has written
two excellent books on seventeenth-century French theater, his failure to pose this
question is all the more surprising.
This reservation is not meant to take away from the accomplishment that this book
represents. It is a thorough, thoughtful, and wide-ranging overview of one of the most
important problematics—the institutional struggle for power.

SARA E. MELZER
University of California, Los Angeles

Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–
1762. By Helena Rosenblatt. Ideas in Context, volume 46. Edited by Quentin
Skinner et al.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv`298. $59.95.

In 1717 Isaac Rousseau took his son Jean-Jacques and moved from the upper-class
part of Geneva to the working-class Saint Gervais district. Scholars have always ex-
plained the move in economic terms: Isaac, a watchmaker and simple artisan, had been
living in the fashionable section because his wife, Suzanne Bernard, was a patrician;
after her death, he could no longer afford to reside there. Helena Rosenblatt, however,
argues that the move was politically motivated. The watchmakers of the Saint Gervais
district were the driving force behind the opposition to Geneva’s ruling elite, and Isaac
went there in order to be at the center of protest.
Rosenblatt’s point, like her entire book, is grounded in evidence taken from the
Genevan archives. The significance of her point is that it transforms our image of the
young Rousseau. Instead of looking like a psychologically torn victim of social in-
equality, he appears as a youth steeped in a culture of proud opposition to political
inequality. Rosenblatt establishes the young Rousseau’s powerful sense of loyalty to-
ward the protesters with whom his father associated, protesters who opposed the con-
centration of power in a small number of patrician families and who championed the
sovereignty of the General Council. From the First Discourse to the Social Contract,
Rosenblatt argues, Rousseau put his talents to use to bolster the claims of Geneva’s
democratic party.
This book is informative because Rosenblatt’s archival work is broad as well as
deep. She uncovers new information not only about Rousseau’s life but also about
Geneva’s political and intellectual history. Thus she narrates the ongoing debates about
the constitutional functions of the General Council. She shows how the patricians
218 Book Reviews

successfully monopolized power by concentrating it in the smaller councils and how

they aggressively rationalized their elitism with natural-law theory. The patricians, in
fact, were aided by the great natural-law jurists of the day, such as Jean-Jacques Bur-
lamaqui. Though his name is well known to intellectual historians of the period, Bur-
lamaqui’s activities as professor of natural law in Geneva receive fresh treatment in
this study. Rosenblatt forces her readers to confront the fact that “while scholarship
has tended to see natural-law theory as a liberalizing force in history, it has compara-
tively neglected the fact that natural law theories, at least in Geneva, were used against
the forces of democratization” (p. 102).
Natural-law theory in the eighteenth century had many modes, but as Rosenblatt
shows, they all tended to institutionalize a language of “interests” and “utility.” In other
words, natural-law thinkers regarded government as legitimate when it ruled on behalf
of the economic well-being of the populace. The promotion of commerce thus became
an excuse not to grant citizenship. Rosenblatt shows how spokesmen for the popular
party in Geneva challenged natural law and its auxiliary science, liberal political econ-
omy. In fact, one of the outstanding features of the book is its detailed account of the
conservative uses of liberal economics in Geneva. Rousseau’s attack on commerce in
his article “Political Economy” in the Encylopédie becomes much more intelligible in
this context. Similarly, Rosenblatt allows us to see how Rousseau’s attack on natural
law in the Second Discourse resonated in Geneva. And she concludes with a careful
analysis of the Social Contract, in which Rousseau, by shifting the standard of political
legitimacy from “interests” to “will”—from wealth to participation—pulled the ideo-
logical rug out from beneath the feet of the Genevan patricians.
Rosenblatt’s ability to link Rousseau’s political ideas to the Genevan context is
uncanny. Yet her fixation on Geneva is perhaps too narrowly construed. At times she
seems to suggest that Geneva is not just one framework for understanding Rousseau’s
activities but the only one. Her methodological statements make it plain that she iden-
tifies with the Cambridge school of contextual intellectual history. Like the other mem-
bers of this school, she avoids literary and psychological theory and relies on her own
detailed scholarship to recreate the historical situations in which authors engaged in
their speech acts. But even adhering to this method and no other, one would have to
acknowledge the importance of Paris as a context for the young Rousseau as well as
several personal contexts that are essential for understanding his ideas on music, love,
language, and other themes—themes that are not treated in this book but that do form
part of the story of Rousseau’s early thought. (The separation of the political ideas
from the rest of an intellectual’s creative work is typical in the Cambridge school.)
A thinker like Rousseau, moreover, requires more than one technique. No product
of the Cambridge school has ever attained the depth of insight into the mind of a major
thinker comparable to Jean Starobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris, 1971). Sta-
robinski’s method is phenomenological, not contextual; it focuses on the shape of
Rousseau’s idealism, his consistent longing for social innocence and transcendent unity
within secular time. Starobinski’s remarkable work shows us that knowledge of the
political context cannot be a substitute for a sympathetic comprehension of that creative
area where obscure passion and disciplined intellect meet and energize each other.
All of this is to say that Rosenblatt’s method is somewhat doctrinaire. Her book,
however, is the finest execution one can imagine of the strictly contextual method. And
precisely because her approach is so different from Starobinski’s, Rosenblatt has given
us a work that is an excellent supplement to it. She provides a superb analysis of some
of Rousseau’s key political concepts and their relationship to the history of Geneva, a
small state that never stopped holding a large place in Rousseau’s imagination. Rous-
 Book Reviews 219

seau and Geneva will have to be read by all Rousseau scholars, and it will provide to
students one of the most lucid and scholarly introductions to Rousseau’s political
thought.

DANIEL GORDON
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775. By Steven Laurence
Kaplan.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii`761. $49.95.

Steven Kaplan begins this massive study of the breadways of eighteenth-century Paris
by placing bread at the center of Paris’s metaphysical as well as physical universe. The
centrality of “our daily bread” to Catholicism mirrored its role in life. Some French
families still adhere to the tradition that only the paterfamilias has the right to cut the
bread; as one such French father told me, “children slaughter (massacrent) the bread.”
For Kaplan, too, the bread is a living thing, which derived “its empire in the Old Regime
from its location at the intersection of material and symbolic life” (p. 3).
This last of a trilogy covers the final stage—the production and consumption of
bread—of the process by which the grain of Champagne or the Ile-de-France or Nor-
mandy became the bread on eighteenth-century Parisian tables (Bread, Politics, and
Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols. [The Hague, 1976]; Provisioning
Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain Trade during the Eighteenth Century [Ith-
aca, N.Y., 1984]). Kaplan focuses on the bakers—on their family and business rela-
tions, on their guild organization, on their ambiguous relationship with various au-
thorities—but begins with a fascinating (if a bit overlong) discussion of the role of
bread in French culture, which anyone working on French history would do well to
read.
He directly ties together the economic, social, and “symbolic” roles of bread in
Parisians’ lives: “To eighteenth-century Parisians the presence of bad bread in the
markets or shops was an intolerable affront and menace. It signified either an act of
social crime or a mark of social breakdown, two different levels of crisis” (p. 2). Kaplan
offers a nuanced reading of the debates between the bakers (and their allies) and their
liberal opponents (like Turgot). He understands the difficulties faced by bakers and by
police authorities determined to keep a population living at the subsistence line supplied
with “good” bread and so rightly dismisses the simplistic notion that the guild repre-
sented some sort of “backward” economic organization.
Kaplan takes us into the quotidian reality of producing bread, offering detailed ex-
aminations of the many different loaves, of debates on mollet bread (made with
brewer’s yeast), of arguments about the “whiteness” of the proper loaf, of the literal
techniques of bread production, of the nature of marketing. Husband-and-wife bakeries
had to oversee every aspect of the process carefully: assuring themselves of a good
wheat supply, checking the techniques of the miller, obtaining suitable water and wood,
blending the proper proportions of ingredients, kneading to the right consistency, burn-
ing an effective fire, removing the bread at the right moment. They had to be constantly
on the alert for cheating by millers or wood vendors. The baking process required
perfect timing—once the baker removed the bread, he could not return it to the oven—
and so did the collection of past due accounts by the baker’s wife.
Kaplan’s eighteenth-century evidence confirms what we know about earlier periods.
220 Book Reviews

Authorities regulated each step of the process, from provisioning of grain markets to
the sale of the bread itself, not so much by fixing prices (which they rarely did) but by
making sure that prices remained within accepted (and known) limits. Bakers thus
operated less within a world of price and wage controls, than one in which market
forces had to play out within socially (thus politically) defined limits. Kaplan demon-
strates that bakers from outside the Parisian guild—from the faubourg Saint-Antoine
and from the countryside, and above all from the remarkable baking bourg of Go-
nesse—sold two-thirds of the bread bought at the city’s markets (and thus about 55
percent of all bread consumed in Paris).
The jurés (guild stewards) reveal themselves as full-fledged human beings: seeking
economic advantage from their position, embezzling money from the guild’s treasury,
extorting bribes from those seeking entry into the guild, concocting family alliances to
assure their market supremacy, yet sometimes acting disinterestedly to serve the public
and to protect the guild. In many cases, those public-minded in one situation were those
who had embezzled or sought private advantage in an earlier one. Kaplan’s evidence
suggests that the jurés worked tirelessly to protect guild bakers against other suppliers
and from state authorities less to obtain a monopoly than to defend the guild’s existing
share of the market.
Those who have researched the artisanal world of the Old Regime will find few
surprises. Bakers (and their wives) were usually literate, had good incomes and sub-
stantial capital assets, and practiced a moderate level of endogamy (about half the time).
Outsiders had ready access to the guild: only 32 percent of the 826 masters admitted
between 1736 and 1775 were masters’ sons and admission became more, not less,
democratic as the century wore on. Kaplan lets us down a bit on two critical issues:
the role of women, both as bakers’ wives and as widow bakers (women provided 14
percent of the market bakers in 1727), and the conditions of labor. Kaplan has a nice
little section (pp. 105–9) on the porteuses (the bread delivery women) but gives in-
sufficient attention to women bakers and to the role of male bakers’ wives (although
the latter do get some serious discussion). Kaplan could also have pushed harder in his
consideration of the labor market. Most of the book (especially sec. 1) suggests that
the masters had full control of the labor market, yet the chapter on journeymen strongly
implies (pp. 211–13) the opposite. Bakers’ journeymen seem to have ignored the legal
requirement, set forth in article 40 of the revised guild statutes of 1719, that they give
two weeks’ notice before leaving a shop. One would like to see more discussion of the
journeymen bakers in the context of work done by others, such as Michael Sonenscher.
The tantalizing section on the imposition of the livret (1781)—Kaplan notes his lack
of evidence about its success or failure—offers a fruitful agenda for other scholars to
pursue.1
Kaplan’s book provides poignant portraits of ordinary eighteenth-century Parisians.
How right he is to emphasize the role of credit in Old Regime life. How easily we
forget that many, perhaps most, purchasers of bread did not pay in cash, but rather
relied on the credit granted by the baker’s wife (who then, as today, ran the business).
Kaplan reminds us of the extraordinarily precarious nature of early modern life—
whether the debt-ridden world of the bread purchasers or the tense, fragile finances of
the bakers themselves. The large debts of noble customers to their baker suppliers

1
A livret recorded a journeyman’s name, age, birthplace, and work record. In theory, the master
kept the livret during the journeyman’s stay with him or her; again, in theory, a journeyman could
not obtain work without presenting his livret to the master.
 Book Reviews 221

perhaps give us some insight into the enormous hostility the artisans would later display
toward such people.
Kaplan’s long-standing role as mediator of French and American historiographic
traditions casts him as the embodiment of Marc Bloch’s definition of the historian’s
métier—métier not simply as “craft” but as calling, that mysterious blend of craft skill
and spiritual commitment so central to the guild member’s sense of self. How fitting
that one of the outstanding contemporary practitioners of the métier of historian should
reconstruct for us the world of the quintessential métier of the Old Regime. Moreover,
Kaplan has wielded his knife well, reminding us that our cuts will be all the more
skillful if we know how the loaf was formed.

JAMES B. COLLINS
Georgetown University

Riforme fiscale e crisi politiche nella Francia di Luigi XV: Dalla taille tarifée al
catasto generale. By Antonella Alimento. L’Officina dello Storico, volume 1.
Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995. Pp. 396.

Not the least of the paradoxes of a century of enlightened absolutism is that the project
of enlightened reform was least successful in the capital of the Enlightenment and in
a monarchy that embodied the ideal of “absolute” rule for others. And nowhere was
this failure more flagrant than in the domain of fiscal reform. Whereas monarchies or
duchies in Austria, Lombardy, Savoy, Spain, and Tuscany—to limit the list to Catholic
absolutisms—all succeeded in significantly limiting clerical and noble exemptions
from direct taxes and in enhancing the valuation of taxable landed property, the French
monarchy’s efforts to rationalize the distribution and collection of taxes bogged down
against resistance in the defense of privilege until the revolution which the failure of
fiscal reform made all but inevitable. The most “anecdotal” explanation for this failure
has to do with the character of France’s less than enlightened and even less resolute
monarchs—neither Louis XV nor Louis XVI was a Frederick the Great or Peter Leo-
pold of Habsburg—while the most structural probably has to do with the French mon-
archy’s peculiar dependence on the sale of corporate privilege as a means of indirect
borrowing, as the work of David Bien has shown. Somewhere between these levels of
explanation lies the realm of the properly political, ranging from the conflict between
court factions to the more ideological opposition of the parlements. This is the domain
in which Antonella Alimento has chosen to situate her analysis, much of it concentrated
on the decade of the 1760s and the aftermath of the disastrous Seven Years’ War.
The chief institutional and social actors in these fiscal politics are the familiar ones:
the technical professional branches of the monarchy represented by the department of
the Contrôle général; the familial factions at the royal court and their notorious stake
in ministerial instability; the cause of justice reglée as represented by the Parlement of
Paris and its constitutional power of registration; and of course the provincial parle-
ments and representative Estates where these were still standing. In Alimento’s anal-
ysis, conflict occurred not only between but within each of these entities not excluding
the bureaux of the control general where proponents of a raw or gross valuation of
landed property or cadaster arrived at by “experts” squared off against those who, like
Anne-Robert Turgot, favored a more precise parcel-by-parcel valuation of net profit
calculated by means of the aid and advice of the taxable community. But what is unique
about a book of this sort is its attention to the religious dimension of the conflict in the
222 Book Reviews

form of Jansenism and the remarkable influence that a Jansenist “party” had acquired
in the Parlement of Paris. For while France’s role in the Seven Years’ War and the
resultant fiscal crisis of the monarchy would dominate any diplomatic or economic
account of the 1760s, the same years witnessed the dissolution of the Society of Jesus
by a Parlement of Paris animated in part by Jansenists and their abiding hatred of
Jesuits and Jesuit theology. The link between these two sets of dissimilar events is the
willingness of Jansenist magistrates to accommodate the monarchy on the fiscal front
in return for a free hand in the making of religious policy. But this cooperation was
perforce limited, not only because of the monarchy’s concern for Catholic orthodoxy
but because of the bias of the Parlement of Paris’s constitutional theories which, as
elaborated by Jansenists like the barrister Adrien Le Paige and as applied to taxes,
tended to insist on the need for consent and to eliminate all intermediaries like inten-
dants between the king and taxable subjects.
With this as background, Alimento’s analysis dissects the failure of two successive
contrôleurs généraux, Henri-Léonard Bertin and Charles-François L’Averdy, to carry
the cause of fiscal reform in the 1760s. The first such attempt, Bertin’s, was a reform
package that combined some very predictable measures like the prolongation of exist-
ing twentieth or vingtième taxes with more innovative provisions of vaguely physi-
ocratic inspiration, namely, the making of a revised cadaster of all landed property and
the liquidation by purchase of quasi-“feudal” landed annuities into governmental se-
curities for the purpose of feeding a fund to amortize the royal debt. Although Bertin
had taken the precaution of securing the collaboration of Guillaume Lambert, one of
the chiefs of the parti janséniste, Lambert proved unable to speak for his colleagues,
while Bertin’s measures encountered their stiffest opposition from the most unexpected
quarter, namely, from the Joly de Fleury brothers and the abbé Terray who, as “king’s
men” and royal reporter, respectively, were direct royal appointees and were supposed
to plead the king’s interest. But since all had also been trying to save the Jesuits from
total destruction, Alimento plausibly speculates that their opposition to Bertin’s mea-
sures may have been motivated in part by a desire to wreck the entente between the
Parlement and the government upon which the Parlement’s success in the affair of the
Jesuits was predicated. Far from wrecking any such policy, however, this opposition
was used by Choiseul and his faction at court to topple Bertin and to replace him with
the parlementary councillor L’Averdy, one of the Jansenist architects of the Parlement’s
case against the Jesuits. With the support of Choiseul at court and his former colleagues
in the Parlement, the new contrôleur général then inaugurated a policy of cooperation
between the government and the Parlement, salvaging a series of scaled-down and more
traditional provisions from Bertin’s original proposals that obtained registration by the
Parlement. Successful in Paris, L’Averdy’s policy of “concert” between government
and parlements nonetheless foundered on the periphery because of the Parlement of
Paris’s inability to control the provincial parlements which justified their more adamant
opposition to royal taxes by a highly decentralist reading of parlementary constitution-
alism. L’Averdy’s fall eventually set the stage for that of Choiseul, followed by the
rise of the pro-Jesuitical faction of the duc d’Aiguillon and the abbé Terray, and for
Chancellor Maupeou’s partial suppression and purge of the parlements in 1771.
Alimento’s analysis throws precocious light on the ultimate crisis of the Old Regime
which fell victim to a similar combination of fiscal bankruptcy, physiocratic reform,
factional conflict, parlementary opposition, and an antiparlementary coup. If religious
conflict was no longer an immediate factor, Jansenist constitutionalism as applied to
fiscal policy still was, articulated in all its decentralist glory by the Paris councillor
Goislard de Montsabert on the eve of Loménie de Brienne’s violent reform and dis-
 Book Reviews 223

persal of the parlements in 1788. Nor is that the end of the story, because Lambert,
surfacing as contrôleur général in 1790, took advantage of the Revolution’s abolition
of noble privilege and intendants in order to implement a highly decentralized fiscal
policy that vested collection of taxes in locally elected municipal officials. But since
this policy led to the fiscal disaster of the Revolution which collected very few taxes,
the Old Regime’s Contrôle général got its revenge under the consulate and empire
which reimposed a centralized bureaucracy to collect taxes, and, after experimenting
with Bertier de Sauvigny’s system of land evaluation, opted for Turgot’s ideal of a
precise parcel-by-parcel cadaster of landed property. The gigantic task of making one
did not reach completion until shortly before the Revolution of 1848 which, while
using this cadaster, made one last attempt at decentralizing the collection of taxes.
Thus, in Alimento’s telling, did the crisis of the 1760s throw up the options for a whole
century of experimentation with fiscal policy.
No book is beyond criticism, and this one is no exception. Missing in Alimento’s
analysis of the connection between fiscal policy and religious politics is any attention
to the well-known Jansenist opposition to interest, an opposition that plagued royal
policy as late as on the occasion of Loménie de Brienne’s attempt to gain parlementary
approval to raise loans in the “royal session” of November 19, 1787. And although
Alimento is probably right in speculating on the existence of a philo-Jesuitical or
“devout” faction in the Parlement earlier in the 1750s and 1760s—David Bell has
succeeded in identifying such a group among the barristers—that conjecture remains
only a conjecture in the absence of fuller documentation. Finally, the attempt to make
sense of the Parlement of Paris’s growing social conservatism and attachment to “feu-
dal” forms of property in the 1760s and 1770s would have been helped by more atten-
tion to its attempt to strike a political alliance with the peers and princes during the
same period. But these criticisms are the merest quibbles in comparison to the book’s
many virtues, not the least of which is its rehabilitation of L’Averdy as a would-be
reformer of the first order. If, in the final analysis, this is political history, it is old-
regime political history at its very best, combining a Namierite analysis of “faction”
and the quest for power and position with due attention to economic, intellectual, and
even religious perceptions of interest. As such the book will surely take its place along-
side Steven Kaplan’s work on the grain trade (Bread, Politics, and Political Economy
in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols. [The Hague, 1976]), James Riley’s on the Seven
Years’ War (The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France [Princeton, N.J.,
1986]), and Julian Swann’s recent book on the origins of the Maupeou “revolution”
(Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774 [New York, 1995])
as indispensable reading for the period’s politics of fiscal reform.

DALE K. VAN KLEY

Ohio State University

La fortune du colbertisme: État et industrie dans la France des Lumières. By

Philippe Minard.
Paris: Fayard, 1998. Pp. 505. 160 F.

This book is a welcome addition to recent scholarship on the state, industry, and eco-
nomic thought in enlightenment France. It explores the history of the inspectorate of
manufactures employed to regulate the textile industry between 1669 and 1791, an
exploration which the author uses to develop a series of larger themes: the development
224 Book Reviews

of the administrative state; the relationship between that state and the Enlightenment;
and, most significantly, the articulation of economic theory and regulatory practice
with concrete commercial realities. Minard’s conclusions are not strikingly original—
he elaborates on major themes in recent scholarship rather than contesting them—but
the elegance with which he weaves together a series of historiographies is impressive
and makes this book a significant contribution in its area.
Minard offers a sympathetic reading of the regulatory practices of the state in the
eighteenth century by showing how regulation was adapted to dealing with real eco-
nomic problems. The primary task of the inspectors of manufactures was to maintain
quality standards in the textile industry. In guaranteeing the quality of fabrics, regu-
lation acted to reduce uncertainty, facilitating exchanges through the confidence that it
introduced. Minard demonstrates the commercial advantages to be gleaned from such
confidence in the case of the “toiles bretagnes” which, because of their reputation for
quality, competed so successfully on the Spanish-American market in the eighteenth
century (p. 281).
In what is perhaps the strongest section of the book, Minard suggests that the de-
velopment of certain aspects of liberal economic thought in the eighteenth century was
tied to changes in the nature of the market for consumer goods. By the middle of the
century, the old dual market of high-quality textiles for export and rude fabrics for
domestic consumption had become more diversified. As a result of the changes in
popular consumption, new markets developed for cheaper, lower-quality fashion items
such as cotton “indiennes” (Daniel Roche, La Culture des apparences. Une histoire
du vêtement, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle [Paris, 1989]). The regulatory system, obsessed with
the maintenance of quality, was ill adapted to the development of a market more re-
sponsive to innovation and price than to quality. Minard suggests that those entrepre-
neurs most enamored of liberal economic ideas were manufacturers of “nouveautés,”
fashions of medium or ordinary quality.
As Minard shows, the assumption that a dirigiste administration faced a class of
entrepreneurs fighting to be free of regulation is misleadingly simplistic.1 Entrepreneurs
and merchants frequently called for state regulation and had much to gain from it:
producers wanted government protection from competing imports; regulation was at-
tractive to entrepreneurs as a way to control their workforce; most producers were
themselves occasional buyers and in this capacity wanted guarantees concerning the
quality of the materials they were purchasing. Paradoxically, the most “irregular” pro-
ducers had the most to gain from regulation: the windfall profits of fraud depended on
the existence of regulation for competitors. Nor was the administration monolithically
regulatory. Indeed, it was from the administration of commerce that the most trenchant
denunciations of regulation emerged; the upper ranks of the Bureau of Commerce were
dominated by liberals in the second half of the eighteenth century. Here Minard makes
a point to which he returns several times in the book: defining the Enlightenment as a
collection of discourses and concrete practices geared toward the production of “im-
provement,” he argues that the Enlightenment was not against the state so much as
within it. Finally, he argues, the rigid opposition between liberals and regulators breaks
down when one examines their views in any detail. Even the most liberal of commen-
tators envisioned a state that would intervene to make economic adjustments—to lower
interest rates or to encourage commerce and manufactures.2

1
Here Minard’s conclusions are in broad agreement with those of Jean-Pierre Hirsch. See Les
deux rêves du Commerce. Entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise, 1780–1860 (Paris,
1991).
2
Here Minard borrows Simone Meyssonnier’s concept of the “watchmaker state.” See La
 Book Reviews 225

The most problematic section of the book is that dealing with the inspectorate as a
case study in the development of the administrative state. Certain subsections here
(most notably those concerned with problems of mapping the districts of inspectors to
both economic realities and administrative boundaries) are tediously detailed and do
little to advance the argument of the book. More significantly, problems arise where
Minard sets out to show that the inspectorate was becoming increasingly profession-
alized over the course of the eighteenth century. Here the author seems guilty of forcing
a complex historical dynamic into the procrustean bed of “professionalization.” A prob-
lematization of recent historical conceptions of professionalization in light of his own
evidence would have made for a more interesting argument. Finally, the section on the
dissolution of the administration of commerce in 1791 is not entirely satisfactory. In
Minard’s account, the outright abolition of the regulatory apparatus takes on the ap-
pearance of accident. Nobody, he argues, intended to abolish the administration of
commerce without putting something in its place. But the Constituent Assembly, on
the point of being dissolved, voted only on the first part of the bill—that abolishing
the old institutions—and neglected to establish any new organs. Here the author runs
up against the limits of his own argument. If economic liberalism were primarily a
pragmatic engagement with new economic conditions in the eighteenth century, no
interdiction would have prevented the reestablishment of a regulatory apparatus as soon
as the need for one became clear (as it did almost immediately). However, as Minard
points out, it became almost impossible subsequently to reestablish an administration
of commerce because of the negative associations with which any kind of regulation
was freighted. Economic liberalism was certainly a response to economic realities to
some degree, but its real power and lasting significance derived from its political func-
tion as ideological dynamite for the society of privilege.
These problems ought to be put in perspective, however. They detract little from
what is otherwise a formidable accession to recent scholarship on the state, commerce,
and political economy in enlightenment France and a model for historians who seek to
explore the relationship between economic theory and concrete economic practices.

JOHN SHOVLIN
Hobart and William Smith Colleges

The British Monarchy and the French Revolution. By Marilyn Morris.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. viii`229.

This intelligent study explores the eighteenth-century roots of the British monarchy’s
impressive stability. Considering the royal family’s recent problems, its beloved status
among the English begs explanation. While previous commentators have agreed on the
monarchy’s “mystical power” (p. 4), few have been able to clarify what that entails.
After all, by the end of the seventeenth century, the monarch’s legitimacy had lost its
“divine” status, and eighteenth-century believers in divine-right ideology were on the
defensive. Monarchs after the Revolution of 1689 were mostly foreigners with strong
ties to the Continent. George I never bothered to learn English. At the same time, the
authority of the House of Commons grew at the expense of the monarch. Given this
historical trajectory, one cannot help wonder why English republicanism (or what some

balance et l’horloge. La genèse de la pensée libérale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Montreuil,

1989).
226 Book Reviews

historians call British Jacobinism) did not triumph during the era of the French Rev-
olution.
In his Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), E. P. Thompson
gave what has perhaps become the most famous answer to that question. The threat of
republican revolution, argued Thompson, was indeed just as great in England as it was
in France. George III was no more popular among the people than his grandfather or
great-grandfather had been. The working class was ready and willing to toss its king
aside. But after the French Revolution, the British middle class abandoned the working
class, aligning itself with the aristocracy (unlike France, where in 1789 the bourgeoisie
joined the peasants and sans-culottes). Consequently, under the guise of war against
France, the Pitt government successfully waged what Thompson called a “counter-
revolution” against the popular classes.
In contrast to Thompson’s magnum opus, Morris’s monograph (a polished revision
of a 1988 University of London Ph.D. dissertation) is less ambitious, focusing on the
pamphlet debate over the fate of the monarchy during the 1790s. It is a work, then, of
intellectual rather than of social history. Nonetheless, it effectively challenges one
important piece of Thompson’s argument.
In the most original and penetrating section of her book, Morris reviews the explosive
pamphlet war that broke out in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revo-
lution in France (London, 1790) and Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (London, 1791/92).
While Morris is hardly the first to tackle this literature, her fresh and original analysis
compels our attention. She notes how the followers of Burke responded to Paine and
how the disciples of Paine responded to Burke. Burke and Paine themselves simply
dismissed each other’s ideas. These two masters of rhetoric did not so much argue with
each other as attack one another. However, their followers often engaged one another
in serious debate. This meant that what we find is not so much a restatement of Burke
or Paine’s ideas but rather a genuine debate among lesser-known writers. The result
was that both Burkeans and Painites moderated their positions, accepting certain fea-
tures of the opposing argument, groping awkwardly for some kind of compromise.
Morris argues that Paine’s followers, for example, seemed to give up on the central
demand of republicanism itself—a call for the end to monarchy. She claims that only
a small minority of British Jacobins actually called for the removal of George III and
an immediate end to the British monarchy. By the time the French had killed their king
(1793), British Painites had begun to return to the monarchical fold. Rather than call
for an end to monarchy, “republicanism developed into a set of ideals against which
monarchies could be evaluated” (p. 81). The radical’s unwavering call for universal
suffrage, annual parliaments, a more equitable system of representation, and fiscal
reform was increasingly placed within a monarchical context.
In John Thelwell, one of Paine’s most ardent champions, Morris finds her most
dramatic example. At the height of the French Terror, Thelwell bragged to friends that
he admired the famous French regicide, Jean-Paul Marat. But, two years later, he tried
to locate a synthesis between republican ideals and monarchical institutions. “By mon-
archy,” explained Thelwell in a 1796 pamphlet, “the reader is to remember, that I mean
something very different than kingly power. The former means a government by one
man, who holds his power by some supposed or assumed individual right: the latter is
a delegated trust, conferred by and held for the acknowledged benefit of the people.
Where monarchy begins, kingship ends; and the people who bargained for a king, are
not bound to submit to a monarch” (p. 93).1

1
Thelwell’s pamphlet, The Rights of Nature against the Usurpation of Establishments, has
 Book Reviews 227

Of the forty-six Burkean responses to Paine that Morris studied, she finds that most
made various concessions to their radical adversaries. Many admitted, for example,
that monarchies had indeed once been tyrannies (as Paine argued), but they claimed
that the legitimacy of the British monarchy was not found in the institution of monarchy
itself but rather in its “historical evolution” (p. 66). However, the most compelling
argument from the monarchist side was that this particular king, George III, had dem-
onstrated his virtues before his subjects, and that he had earned the love of his people.
In later chapters, Morris demonstrates that however much radicals attacked the gov-
ernment, they were unwilling to damage the personal image of the king as a decent
family man dedicated to the welfare of his country.
Morris concludes that this late eighteenth-century debate over the British monarchy
resulted in a kind of synthesis between Burkean conservatism and Painite radicalism.
On the one hand, most republicans accepted that the British king had an important
political role to play; on the other hand, loyalists acknowledged that this king could
not act independently from the nation but rather his behavior and his character had to
be sanctioned by the British people. In this way, argues Morris, the modern notion of
the British monarchy was born amid the war and strife associated with the French
Revolution. The nineteenth-century monarch would have less political power than his
or her early modern counterpart, but he or she would be armed with a kind of national
sanctity in which monarchy represented Englishness itself.

GARY KATES
Trinity University

The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915. By

Judith G. Coffin.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii`289. $35.00.

This elegant and ambitious work analyzes changes in conceptions of gender, of the
home, of the workplace, and of the role of the state in modern France. In so doing it
also contributes to ongoing discussions of industrial transformation and the role of
distribution and consumption in the making of the modern world. Coffin approaches
these large and complex problems through an analysis of the Parisian garment trades.
The centrality of women’s work to the needle trades and their scale, the author per-
suasively argues, make them a particularly propitious case for this analysis. It is not,
as the author herself says, a “history of the garment industry per se” (p. 15) but rather
a history of how gender, economy, society, and polity were reconceptualized in nine-
teenth-century France. This study, in its melding of social and intellectual history, of
production and consumption, and in its crossing of the traditional barrier of the Rev-
olution, builds on the turn in French labor history of fifteen years ago.1 In its addition
of gender, regulation, and the state to the mix, it is exemplary of current trends in that
historiography.2

recently been reprinted in a superb collection, The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of
John Thelwell, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, Penn., 1995).
1
William Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–
1990 (Cambridge, 1984); and William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Lan-
guage of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1984).
2
Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Tessie Liu, The Weaver’s
Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750–1914
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1994).
228 Book Reviews

Coffin traces the discursive web woven around the needle trades from the eighteenth
century to the early twentieth. Guildswomen, corporations, Enlightenment thinkers,
political economists, social catholics, socialists, male and female trade unionists, strik-
ing garment workers, feminists, advertisers, doctors, sociologists, novelists, and leg-
islators of all political stripes all engaged the problem of the organization and meanings
of women’s work. In so doing they took positions on the major questions of their day:
How was society to be organized in a period of burgeoning urbanization and commer-
cialization? How was poverty to be addressed? Did the state have a place in the factory?
The workshop? The home? What were the respective places of women and men in
society? How should production be organized? The author manages the daunting task
of giving all these diverse social actors their voices—being very careful to explicate
divergences among as well as between groups—in a relatively brief book. Although
its succinctness occasionally comes at the cost of a staccato progression of very short
sections, The Politics of Women’s Work is generally economical in the best sense. It
makes excellent use of terrific examples and provides enough information to not lose
a reader unfamiliar with the details of nineteenth-century French history.
The Politics of Women’s Work illustrates the complexities of industrial expansion
and the inadequacy of binary models of home and workplace, public and private, pro-
duction and consumption, providing a lucid exposition of the transformation of distri-
bution and its impact on production as well as a fascinating discussion of the discursive
interactions behind the advertising designed to increase consumption. Charles Sabel
and Jonathan Zeitlin’s argument, that the path to modern industrial production did not
necessarily involve mechanization or the concentration of labor in factories, which
Coffin reinforces, is now familiar.3 Under certain circumstances, small-scale and/or
domestic production and handwork were efficient means of intensifying production.
Coffin demonstrates how nineteenth-century home work was in no sense “traditional,”
but rather was a form of production well adapted to conceptions of gender roles, the
needs of the industry, and available labor. Coffin presses beyond Sabel and Zeitlin to
make effective use of recent work on commercialization to emphasize the impact of
department stores on the organization of production and to elaborate the gendered logic
of industrial intensification.4 Examples of the brilliant changes Coffin rings on these
narratives are her analysis of how the sewing machine was constructed as a consumer
good (rather than a machine tool), the interactions of the medical and advertising lit-
eratures, and the place of conceptions of the relation of gender, class, domesticity, and
labor in these and other constructions.
The most compelling moments of The Politics of Women’s Work in fact are those,
like the marketing of the sewing machine, when the narrative allows Coffin to move
among discursive fields, demonstrating how those discourses—even when seemingly
about something else—were both shot through with gender and participant in the con-
struction of gender norms. A thread pulled through the book, for example, is how
nineteenth-century conceptions of women’s particular (and extreme) embodiment
shaped their discursive place. Not only was the marketing of sewing machines influ-
enced by both advertisers’ and doctors’ rather extraordinary understandings of women’s

3
Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production Politics, Mar-
kets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization,” Past and Present 108 (August
1985): 133–76.
4
Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920
(Princeton, N.J., 1981); Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton,
N.J., 1986); Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982).
 Book Reviews 229

sexuality, but critics of political economy used vivid descriptions of the impact of
industrial labor and poverty on women’s bodies to make palatable their more general
arguments against unfettered capitalism. These powerful and engaging insights could,
however, have been rendered even more persuasive had Coffin had space to more
thoroughly elaborate some of her complex causal claims. She argues, for example, that
“the seductive and erotic associations promoted in modernist advertising helped shape
medical perceptions” (p. 112). A sentence later the causal direction reverses when she
writes, “Alarmist writings like these [in the medical discourses] obliged advertisers to
assuage public health worries” (ibid.). It is plausible that the advertisers influenced the
doctors and vice versa, but I found myself occasionally hungry for a more thoroughly
elaborated demonstration, including perhaps a more detailed discussion of the inter-
actions among the social actors whose texts Coffin so deftly analyzes.
The chapter devoted to the eighteenth century is—not surprisingly, given the book’s
focus on the nineteenth century—the least nuanced. Coffin seeks to demonstrate that
the Revolution was not as dramatic an economic watershed as has been claimed but
that something did radically change with the new century—contemporaries’ concep-
tions of gender. Her general points are well taken: women’s work in the needle trades
did not simply follow from their traditional labor within the household; twentieth-
century historians have too readily accepted nineteenth-century writers’ distorted im-
ages of early industrial labor; and conceptions of the relationship of gender, labor, and
power were radically transformed by the Enlightenment. In her eagerness to underscore
the modernity of the gendered division of labor, Coffin overstates her point, however,
arguing that “in the eighteenth century gender was understood as a relationship of
authority; by the nineteenth it was understood as a division of labor” (p. 12). Labor
was not gender-neutral in the eighteenth century, nor did gender cease to be central to
relationships of authority in the nineteenth.
The Politics of Women’s Work is a compelling and important book. It is well re-
searched, well written, and, most important, enables us to better understand the complex
ways in which gender ideologies are made and how they are both used in, and made
by, the political and economic discourses of their day.

LEORA AUSLANDER
University of Chicago

Tocqueville and the French. By Françoise Mélonio. Translated by Beth G. Raps.

Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Pp. xv`300. $37.50.

Tocqueville and the French is written with several intentions in mind. It is a study of
the rise, fall, and rise of Tocqueville’s influence and reputation in France, and an
examination of the reception of his works and ideas from the publication of the first
volume of Democracy in America in 1835 until the present. It is also an interpretive
essay on Tocqueville by one of the most eminent of today’s Tocqueville specialists.
Finally, it is an attempt to turn the attention of French historians away from the Rev-
olution, “to loosen the grip of this tyrannical fascination with France’s origins” (p. 1),
and encourage instead more consideration of the nineteenth century—a century which,
according to Françoise Mélonio, was prolonged in France until the 1950s (p. 5). Readers
will no doubt react to this last plea in accord with their professional prejudices.
As an investigation of Tocqueville’s reception in France, Mélonio’s account is of
great interest. She brings out the immediate divergence between Tocqueville and the
230 Book Reviews

Doctrinaire interpretation of America, and then between Tocqueville and the republican
opposition. Despite the great acclaim Democracy in America received, Tocqueville was
marginal to French political culture under the July Monarchy. His greatest period of
popularity was to come later, with the publication of The Old Regime and the Revo-
lution in 1856. It was seized on as the intellectual manifesto of the opposition to the
Second Empire, and through the 1860s, Tocqueville’s reputation was at its political
apogee. Even in the 1860s, however, his work was subject to numerous reservations,
particularly from those on the republican left. He remained important through the
1870s, by the 1880s he was passé, and he was merely a minor and unread classic from
the fin de siècle until his post-World War II revival. After World War II, first Raymond
Aron, and then Louis Dumont, Michel Crozier, and finally François Furet led a vigorous
upsurge in Tocqueville’s fortunes, which has culminated in a wave of new editions and
appreciations, notably including the massive Gallimard edition of Tocqueville’s com-
plete works and an edition in the Pléiade series.
Mélonio presents a provocative analysis of the reasons behind the twists and turns
of Tocqueville’s popularity which is too extensive to reproduce here. Only a few points
can be noted. She rightly emphasizes Tocqueville’s blindness to the importance of
nationalism and the resulting lack of interest in Tocqueville in periods of intense na-
tionalism. Mélonio suggests that just as the decline in Tocqueville’s influence was due
in part to the rise of nationalism, so his revival in the 1950s and 1960s had much to
do with the weakening of French nationalism after World War II (p. 201). Furet’s
triumphant revival of Tocqueville as historian of the French Revolution is also dis-
cussed, and the success of this revival may well be related to the same cause. Mélonio
cautiously suggests that the post-1880 decline in Tocqueville’s standing also had some-
thing to do with the decline of the “society of notables” (p. 164). Here the reviewer
might suggest the close connection between Tocqueville’s ability to be a living influ-
ence in political debate and the ability of liberalism in general to act as a political power
in France. The decline of Tocqueville’s influence after 1880 is a symptom, not only of
the decline of the notables, but of the disappearance of liberalism as an independent
force in French political life. In this respect Mélonio does not provide an explicit
parallel analysis on Tocqueville’s return to favor. Without the notables, where is the
contemporary cultural stratum receptive to Tocqueville? Perhaps it lies in the rather
different elite educated at the Grandes Ecoles.
Besides the magisterial analysis of Tocqueville’s reception in France, the product of
what was originally the author’s thèse d’état, Mélonio gives sidelights on Tocqueville’s
reception in Europe and the United States. It is fascinating to discover that Tolstoy
read The Old Regime as part of the preparatory work for War and Peace. In the Amer-
ican case Mélonio gives perhaps too much credit for post–World War II interest in
Tocqueville to Friedrich Hayek. It did not need Hayek’s intervention to keep Americans
interested in Democracy in America.
Mélonio’s historical narrative of Tocqueville’s reception is combined with a sensitive
interpretive reading of Tocqueville. Tocqueville has often been described as a moralist;
Mélonio goes on to point out his essentially Jansenist temper, perhaps influenced by
his Jansenist childhood tutor (p. 127), and his combination of an aristocratic aesthetic
with a democratic ethics (p. 69). His moralism, his humanism, his difficult balancing
act between rational pessimism and spiritual optimism, are all discussed by Mélonio
with careful balance. Mélonio, however, gives less importance than it deserves to the
role of enlightened self-interest in Tocqueville’s moral system, perhaps because she
emphasizes his humanism so much.
The chief drawback to Mélonio’s analysis lies in its emphasis on exceptionality, both
 Book Reviews 231

of America and of France. She claims that “scholars agree in finding in Tocqueville’s
work a meditation on French exceptionality” (p. 206). Tocqueville was always attentive
to the particular, both American and French, but he was too much the child of the
Enlightenment to privilege the particular over the general. He wrote a book about
democracy, “Democracy in America,” and looked at America as a case study of the
larger phenomenon. When he wrote The Old Regime, he was still looking beyond
France toward a general understanding of the relationship between equality and political
freedom in the modern world.
The book ends with a section called “Tocqueville and Us,” followed by a concluding
chapter entitled “Tocqueville and French Culture.” Here Mélonio emphasizes the role
Tocqueville has come to play in an era that is once again concerned with some of the
problems that most troubled him: the relationship between democracy and diversity,
and the means of encouraging political participation in a society where private life is
inevitably privileged over community. Mélonio’s final words are that “Tocqueville has
been the repressed side of French democratic tradition.” This book is splendid evidence
that the id has given way to the ego, and the repression of the Tocquevillian tradition
has been replaced by a high degree of consciousness.
It is unfortunate that a work of such interest is scarred by a translation that is often
awkward, sometimes incomprehensible, and occasionally suffers from ignorance. Con-
sider “the events of 1848–51, when France revisited the Revolution—first the moderate
Gironde version, then that of radical leftist La Montagne” (p. 86). A translator who
knew that “La Montagne” was not an individual but “the Mountain,” and that “the
Mountain” signified the Jacobins, would have served the University Press of Virginia
and the author far better.

ALAN KAHAN
Florida International University

L’invention scientifique de la Méditerranée: Égypte, Morée, Algérie. Edited by

Marie-Noëlle Bourguet et al. Studies in History and the Social Sciences, volume
77.
Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998. Pp. 325. F 150.

In 1798 when Napoleon Bonaparte took his army to Egypt, he also brought a legion
of scientists with him. For three years botanists, zoologists, geologists, geographers,
archaeologists, and savants of every stripe marched around Egypt observing, measur-
ing, classifying, sketching, and recording all that they found interesting. In due course
they wrote up and published their findings, in eight volumes, as the Description de
l’Egypte (Paris, 1809–28). They set an example for scientific expeditions to follow.
Several did. Among them were one to the Morea, or Peloponnese (the southern pen-
insula of mainland Greece), in 1829–31 and another to Algeria in 1839–42. Each of
them generated its own multivolume book as well as other ancillary writings.
These three scientific expeditions in the Mediterranean world were the focus of a
two-year monthly seminar at the University of Paris-VII and some follow-up meetings
in Austria, Israel, and Greece. Some thirty scholars, trained in diverse disciplines, took
part. They have now begun to publish their findings, in more compact fashion than did
their scientific predecessors. The nineteenth-century scientists labored under Enlight-
enment assumptions and “Encyclopedist” ambitions. The participants in the seminar at
Paris-VII (a university named for Denis Diderot) make no pretense to an encyclopedic
232 Book Reviews

approach, preferring Michel Foucault to Diderot and d’Alembert. They are interested
in the conditions under which scientific knowledge was produced.
This book consists of fifteen chapters by fifteen authors, loosely grouped into sections
entitled “Terrain,” “Knowledge” (“Savoirs”), and “The Mediterranean.” The essays
deal with subjects as disparate as the Algerian sketches of a Corsican captain in the
French Foreign Legion and notions of the geological formation of the Mediterranean
Sea. Although they make occasional reference to one another, the essays each stand
alone. The book has no real organization.
It does have some unity, however. The expeditions in question were confined to the
Mediterranean world. Many of the same scientists took part in more than one expedi-
tion. Both the expedition to the Peloponnese and that to Algeria were led by the same
man, Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent. All three were funded by the French state,
albeit by different ministries.
Each essay in its own way deals with the history of science as practiced in an
expeditionary age. “Expedition” had been a military term until the late eighteenth
century, when it became more versatile. The French scientific expeditions were quasi-
military. In Egypt the scientists worked closely with the army, and in Upper Egypt
they had to work quickly because their escorts often grew impatient and the local
population proved occasionally inhospitable. In the Peloponnese the army’s role was
merely logistical, providing transport and equipment, not protection. In Algeria the
scientists worked in the context of a scorched-earth campaign to suppress resistance to
French rule, imposed in 1830. In Egypt and Algeria the expeditions fell firmly within
the genre now called “colonial science.” But the book makes clear that the relationship
between the scientists and army was complex, not a simple one whereby scientists
merely toiled to ease and legitimate the army’s work.
But in Egypt and Algeria the expeditions took place in an atmosphere of imperial
ambition and national self-assertion. The Egyptian stage appealed to Napoleon in part
because Alexander and Caesar had strutted there in their day, and he thought it appro-
priate that French scholars should be the ones to study Egypt’s essence and greatness
(four of the eight volumes of the Description de l’Egypte deal with antiquities). In
Algeria, the statesmen and savants of the July Monarchy had ancient Rome’s Medi-
terranean empire on their minds. On conscious and unconscious levels the scientists
found in Algeria both a model and a legitimation for French rule. The main point of
the book is to explore this relationship between French military action and ambition,
on the one hand, and scientific process and findings on the other.
The findings of the fifteen authors are too diverse to summarize, which may help
explain why the book has no concluding chapter. Some of the essays struck me as
trivial. Others pointed out interesting matters entirely new to me. For example, who
originated the idea of a Mediterranean region, and when? We tend to take our regions
for granted, but they are of course intellectual constructs, with origins and evolutions
(think of what “Asia” meant to Herodotus and what it means in popular usage today).
The idea of the Mediterranean as a unit apparently occurred first around 1805–10 to
botanists, who were impressed by the similarity of the flora from Spain to Algeria to
southern Italy and Greece. The various naturalists of these expeditions could, most of
them, find some unity in the Mediterranean. The social scientists (as we would now
call them) saw only difference, not unity, among Mediterranean peoples. Theirs was
an age preoccupied with classifying the varieties of humanity, chiefly on physical
characteristics, as Linnaeus had done for plants. The social anthropology of the 1960s,
in contrast, detected strong commonalities among Mediterranean societies. In any case,
according to the introductory piece by Marie-Nöelle Bourguet, the Mediterranean re-
 Book Reviews 233

gion was a European construct, with no logic or appeal to (non-European?) Muslim

peoples of the Mediterranean.
Bourguet’s opening is both an insightful piece and a handy guide to the rest of the
book. Most readers will be content to stop there. Those with a keen interest in the
practice of expeditionary science, and science-military relations, in the French context
around 1798–1850, will find plenty to satisfy their curiosity.

J. R. MCNEILL
Georgetown University

Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason. Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist

Theory of History. By Thomas R. Flynn.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xvi`340. $55.00 (cloth); $18.95
(paper).

This book is the first half of a projected two-volume comparative study of the theories
of history of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault. In the present volume Thomas
Flynn focuses on Sartre. Flynn has carried out an exhaustive study of Sartre’s writings
relevant to history; these include a substantial body of posthumously published writ-
ings. There exists a large body of commentary on “existential Marxism,” and the central
conundrums, with regard to Sartre and history, to which this literature pointed are well
known. First, how can one connect existentialism—especially Sartre’s version of ex-
istentialism, which sometimes seems to verge on solipsism—and history? Second
and relatedly, what is the connection between the existentialist Sartre of L’Être et le
néant (1943) and the Marxian Sartre of Critique de la raison dialectique (1960)? The
linkages between existentialism and history in Sartre, and between early Sartre and
later Sartre, seemed quite unclear.
Flynn clarifies these obscure matters, while casting light on issues in the theory of
history generally. He is the author of an earlier book on Sartre, Sartre and Marxist
Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago, 1984), and he is
also well informed on recent work in the theory of history. Accordingly, he brings an
acute and relevantly stocked philosopher’s mind to the material. He does irritate this
historian by sometimes failing to make it crystal clear in his text when Sartre wrote or
published such-and-such a writing under discussion, and by omitting a bibliography.
Nonetheless, he makes a big contribution to our understanding of Sartre’s encounter
with history.
From the perspective of the intellectual historian, the single most important contri-
bution that the book makes is to show that Sartre’s positive concern with history began
twenty years prior to the publication of Critique de la raison dialectique. Thus we are
not dealing here with a trajectory “from” existentialism “to” history. To make the point
another way: one should not infer from Sartre’s extremely negative portrayal of the
amateur historian Antoine Roquentin, in his novel La Nausée (1938), that the early
Sartre somehow “rejected” history. Already in his Carnets de la drôle de guerre (War
Diaries), written in 1939–40 while he was serving in Alsace during the “Phony War,”
Sartre reflected extensively on matters of history, prompted in part by the publication
not long before of Raymond Aron’s Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (1938)
and in part by the presence of history in the situation through which he was living.
Sartre reflected on history again in his Cahiers pour une éthique, written in 1947 and
1948 as he attempted to work out the moral philosophy that he had promised at the
234 Book Reviews

end of L’Être et le néant. These two texts appeared in print only in 1983, three years
after his death. To my knowledge, Flynn is the first commentator to take systematic
account of them in reconstructing Sartre’s intellectual evolution.
From the perspective of the philosopher of history, the most important contribution
of the book is its highlighting of the relations between ethics on the one hand and
history and historical understanding on the other. It has often been noted that Sartre
was essentially a moralist, and it seems clear that his thinking about history was as
deeply motivated by ethical concerns as was any part of his philosophy. A question
that he raised in the Carnets de la drôle de guerre—namely, what was the relation
between Germany’s English policy and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s withered arm?—remained
with him throughout his life, to be probed in various different ways. His concern with
the ethical dimension of history seems to have undergirded his rejection of Aron’s
constructivist view of history in favor of a history that would somehow address lived
experience (le vécu). An ethical concern also seems to have motivated his persistent
interest in the relation between actors’ intentions and the outcomes, intended and un-
intended, of the actions in question. Finally, one must point to Sartre’s unbending
commitment to a committed history, aimed at carrying forward a progressive social
project.
Perhaps the simplest way to look at Flynn’s book is as a presentation of, and reflec-
tion on, Sartre’s views on history from early in his career to near its end. As such, the
different parts of the book strike me as differentially interesting. Part 1, embracing
chapters 1–4, seems to me of compelling interest. In the first two chapters Flynn
recounts Sartre’s early confrontation, in the period before L’Être et le néant, with Aron
and with the French Hegelians, and in the next two he addresses the ethical concern
that became manifest in Cahiers pour une morale. These chapters are interesting partly
because the material is not well known, but more importantly because Sartre here
addressed important issues at a broad level. Against Aron he articulated a historical
realism; in conversation with the Hegelians he attempted to show how history has an
overall shape and unity. Part 2, embracing chapters 5–8, seems less generally inter-
esting, for much of Flynn’s focus is on the frustratingly abstract Critique de la raison
dialectique (both vol. 1 and the posthumously published notes for the unwritten vol. 2),
where Sartre tried valiantly, but by general agreement mostly without success, to revise
and make workable the Marxian dialectic. Still, in the last of these chapters Flynn
analyzes brilliantly Sartre’s three-volume study of Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille (1971).
The concreteness of the analyses—Sartre’s and Flynn’s—helps to make them illumi-
nating. In the two chapters of part 3 Flynn turns to the poetics of history (drawing on
recent work by Frank Ankersmit and others) and to Foucault’s inversion of Sartre.
Here, too, the discussion is generally interesting because of the aliveness of the issues
addressed.
To this reader what is most important, in a book rich in insights, is its highlighting
of the relation between history and ethics. After the poetics and aesthetics of history,
perhaps now the ethics? In this regard, to look at Foucault in tandem with Sartre seems
a promising project: beginning in a Nietzschean vein as a critic of the ethical, Foucault
turned in his final work to “the constitution of the moral self.” Thus one looks forward
to the second, Foucault volume of this study.

ALLAN MEGILL
University of Virginia
 Book Reviews 235

The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War, 1954–1962.

By Martin Evans. Berg French Studies. Edited by John E. Flower.
Oxford: Berg, 1997. Pp. xvi`250. $50.00 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).

Martin Evans, who teaches French studies at the University of Portsmouth in England,
chose an evocative if somewhat inaccurate title for this fascinating work of oral history.
While he does devote significant attention to questions of memory, his fundamental
focus, which he states forthrightly in his preface, is the “motivations for resistance”
(p. xi, his italics).
The subtitle is also misleading, in that Evans is studying the tiny minority of French
men and women who moved from legal to illegal opposition to the Algerian War.
Evans’s estimate, which is convincingly argued, is that the total stands somewhere
between five hundred and a thousand, far fewer than the four thousand which Alistair
Horne had estimated, without documentation, in his well-known history, A Savage War
of Peace (London, 1977). A much greater number—including many prominent intel-
lectuals who would not go as far as to join Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,
Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, and two hundred
and forty of their peers in signing the famous “Declaration on the Right of Insubor-
dination in the Algerian War” (usually known as the “Manifesto of the 121”) of Sep-
tember 1960—were of course involved in legal antiwar protest. They formed com-
mittees, signed petitions, marched peacefully, drafted protests against torture—
activities at least reluctantly tolerated by the governments of both the Fourth and Fifth
Republics. Entire political parties, including the Parti Communiste Français (PCF),
were officially opposed to the undeclared war across the Mediterranean, which dragged
on endlessly for seven years and five months, almost as long as America’s war in
Vietnam. At least a half million Parisians marched legally against the war on February
13, 1962. Accounts of this more common type of engagement can be found in many
works, both in English and French.
The real subject of Evans’s monograph has been much less studied, and he makes
an important and original contribution to our understanding of antiwar activism in the
modern period. Although he does not draw parallels with opposition to “America’s
Longest War,” also undeclared, in Vietnam, there are many, and Evans would be well
qualified to examine them in a future study. To cite just one example, all of Evans’s
informants denied that they were traitors to France, and the vast majority of them
insisted that in directly aiding the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) their actions
were patriotic and that they were renewing vital French humanitarian, genuinely re-
publican traditions. This can be compared with Mary McCarthy’s equally firm insis-
tence that patriotism motivated her decision go to Hanoi in 1968. She was surprised
that she “cared enough about America to risk being hit by a U.S. bomb for its sake”
(The Seventeenth Degree [New York, 1974], p. 317).
The core of Evans’s work, what makes it original and innovative, is its oral history
component. In 1989, guided by the eminent historian Jean-Pierre Rioux, Evans was
able to interview forty-eight antiwar activists, seventeen of them women. This is a
remarkably large sample, one that would surely satisfy the most rigorous statistician,
in that Evans reached close to 10 percent of his total population. And when one con-
siders that by 1989 a number of the original antiwar militants were deceased, his
percentage is probably even higher. Evans also moved far beyond Paris, which makes
his data even more interesting and useful. He spoke with a militant who had been based
in Mulhouse, members of resistance networks in Lille, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille,
Lyon, and even from as small a town as Mâcon.
236 Book Reviews

There is a significant gap between the interviews and publication. All the interviews
Evans refers to directly in his text, save one, were tape-recorded in 1989. The exception
has no real impact on his findings but adds a snippet of information. Evans interviewed
Marcel Péju in 1995. Péju, who had worked with Jean-Paul Sartre at Les Temps Mo-
dernes until the two had a falling out in 1961, told Evans that he, not Sartre, coined
the term, “Les Porteurs de valises [The Suitcase Brigade].” These were French men
and women, mostly young, who carried the carefully collected hard currency contrib-
uted by Algerian workers out of France to Switzerland, where it was used to purchase
arms and supplies for the FLN’s war effort.
Although he is not explicit, Evans apparently maintained contact later with many of
his informants, who indicated their sadness and disillusion at the violence engulfing
Algeria after 1992. The actual interview reports are not modified; this is a preferable
methodology because it makes the interviews “cleaner.” In 1989 his informants could
not have known of Islamic fundamentalism and what is now often called the “Second
Algerian War,” though they certainly had opportunity to observe the steady deterio-
ration and increased corruption of the uniparty state established in 1962. Only one of
those interviewed regretted his activism from the vantage point of 1989; perhaps that
number would be somewhat larger today.
Evans wanted to see how resistance felt from the inside, and in this he succeeded
remarkably. He is a deft and sensitive interviewer, and the set of questions he designed,
reprinted in an appendix, is excellent. Thirty-six interviews are presented separately.
They are carefully woven into chapters considering four principal motivations for re-
sistance. Evans makes an extremely persuasive argument that these were indeed the
key reasons for illegal antiwar activity during the Algerian conflict. In fact, his analysis
could quite easily be transposed to construct an explanation, based on oral and written
testimony, for the illegal antiwar engagement of a wide range of Americans a decade
later, from Noam Chomsky to Dr. Benjamin Spock, from Daniel Berrigan to an obscure
draft counselor who helped AWOL soldiers escape to Canada.
The reasons for resistance that Evans gleaned from his interviews are as follows:
first, the memory of and inspiration provided by the anti-Nazi resistance. (Ten inter-
views are in this category.) Second, the impact of ideas, more important than one might
have guessed. For a significant number of the resisters, their decision to move into
illegality had to be “abstract and intellectual” (p. 73), because they had essentially no
experience of colonial Algeria, nor had they met any Algerians. Reading authors like
Mohammed Dib, Kateb Yacine, and especially Frantz Fanon was often cited as a critical
influence. (Six interviews fit this mold.) Third, personal experience, for example having
spent one’s childhood in Algeria or Morocco, or actual service in the French army as
a draftee in Algeria, or contact with Algerians in the workplace. (Ten interviewees cite
these reasons.) And, finally, various political motivations. Illegal opposition was in-
variably “a response to the perceived failings of the organized Left” (p. 137). These
men and women simply would not give up searching for an alternative form of op-
position to the ugly conflict which seemed to them to be tearing their society apart,
and they derided the caution of the parties of the Left, including the PCF. They all had
bitter memories of PCF support for the March 1956 Special Powers Act, which set the
stage for the “Battle of Algiers” and the well-documented use of torture by the French
military. Besides disaffected communists, other small groups of politically motivated
antiwar activists included Trotskyists, Anarchists, and Left-wing Catholics, including
a number of worker priests. Several of these gave extraordinarily moving and illumi-
nating interviews to Evans. (Nine interviewees expressed such political motivations.)
Evans wanted to locate people who had never been interviewed before, people who
 Book Reviews 237

had been marginalized, not just famous intellectuals like Francis Jeanson or Pierre
Vidal-Naquet. It would have been helpful if Evans had given a precise count, beyond
indicating that the former were a large number. My estimate is that twenty-eight of the
forty-nine gave their first-ever interview to Evans.
What these diverse people—teachers, former army officers, priests, artists, journal-
ists, factory workers, peasants, a railway worker—have to say is both illuminating and
inspiring. Indeed, it is a measure of Evans’s success that the reader wishes many of
the case histories could be expanded, perhaps into full autobiographies.
For historians of contemporary France the interest of Evans’s study is obvious—it
casts new light on the bitter and divisive “War without a Name,” which has resulted
in the still unhealed “Algerian Syndrome.” Americans of the Vietnam generation will
find The Memory of Resistance haunting and evocative. It will leave them with a
powerful sense of déjà vu.

DAVID L. SCHALK
Vassar College

Die Abrechnung mit dem Faschismus in Italien, 1943 bis 1948. By Hans Woller.
Quellen und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte, volume 38.
Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996. Pp. vi`436. DM 78.

The process of attempting to remove fascism and its traces from Italian society began
after the overthrow of the Mussolini regime. Quite early on it became known as the
“purge” (epurazione). Even to this day, both for the general public and in the eyes of
contemporary historical research, it is almost universally viewed in negative terms. For
with the restoration of social and political relations in Italy, which began as early as
1945–46 and which, with the coming of the Cold War, was largely an accomplished
fact by 1948, nearly everyone who had been involved in, or affected by, the epurazione
was left with a feeling of disappointment, deception, failure, and helplessness—though
often for completely different reasons. For its “victims” and their sympathizers the
process of epurazione had gone much too far. For its proponents, the antifascists, it
had not gone nearly far enough. The historical writing of the resistance school refers
almost unanimously to the “failure” of the process ( fallimento dell’epurazione)—thus
Alessandro Galante Garone in his preface to the Italian edition of Roy Palmer Domen-
ico’s Processo ai fascisti (Milano, 1996).
The contemporary historian Hans Woller, a fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte
in Munich, has recently published his investigations of this period. His work is based
on a very broad and thorough review of the sources, and it is considerably more ex-
tensive than previous studies. Most important, Woller has carefully examined the rele-
vant American and British archives. As a result, his study also serves to cast light on
an important aspect of allied occupation policy.
In the eyes of the antifascist exiles and the resistance, what was needed was a broadly
based confrontation with the fascist past, one that would encompass all areas of society.
Only in this way could a fundamentally new beginning be assured. The victorious
allies, too, pressed for a thoroughgoing removal of fascist elements from Italian society.
A passage to this effect was included in the “Long Armistice” signed on September
29, 1943. Article 30 declared that “The Italian government observes all additional
regulations of the United Nations regarding the elimination of fascist institutions, the
removal of fascist personnel, the seizure of fascist funds, and the suppression of fascist
238 Book Reviews

ideology and indoctrination.” But there was considerable disagreement about how Italy
was to be cleansed of fascism. In the course of these events the allies functioned as
instigators and not as obstacles.
Woller succeeds in showing that there was not one, single epurazione. Rather one
must speak of a number of different “purges” depending on the time, the location, the
body with jurisdiction, and the circle of individuals involved. The entire complex pro-
cess lasted from July 10, 1943, when the allies landed in Sicily, through the end of
1947, with the withdrawal of the last allied troops, and on to April 18, 1948, the date
of the parliamentary elections. Further, the term epurazione was applied to a number
of completely different processes. In the first place there were the criminal investiga-
tions and prosecutions of crimes committed by the fascists during the period of fascist
rule, both in and outside of Italy. These proceedings brought to light events reaching
back to the period of the seizure of power, including the attacks on the leading anti-
fascist figures, men such as Giovanni Amendola, Piero Gobetti, Giacomo Matteotti,
and Carlo and Nello Rosselli. In the second place there were administrative investi-
gations with consequences for the civil service. Which individuals had advanced in
their careers illegally because of their fascist connections? Which individuals had ben-
efited financially in illegal ways? Which individuals were simply unfit for service in
the construction of a new, democratic administration? A further consideration was this:
how was the level of responsibility for the acts of the dictatorship to be apportioned
among the various segments of the elite—the military, the courts, cultural organiza-
tions, economic and financial institutions, the church? Finally, how was the goal of
just punishment to be reconciled with the political and military requirements of a
continuing war effort and with the maintenance of law and order?
There were three chief actors in the drama of epurazione: the allies; the lawful Italian
government in power in the South (first in Brindisi, then in Salerno, and finally in
Rome); and, third, the leadership of the resistance in northern Italy. One might also
name a fourth actor: the spontaneous justice administered when local communities took
the law into their own hands. Woller speaks about a deep-seated, collective desire for
vengeance, about “hatreds that had accumulated over the years,” a “kind of natural law
that justified the settling of accounts,” and a “dammed-up potential for settling scores”
that was difficult to control.
One can divide the epurazione into four periods. The first period extended from
August 1943 until June 1944. Despite some efforts one could expect no serious exer-
tions in this area from either of the Pietro Badoglio governments. Badoglio, the leading
military figures, and powerful members of the previous regime would have had to pass
judgment on themselves. Following the liberation of Rome on June 4, 1944, however,
and with the formation of the Ivanoe Bonomi government, the problem was attacked
with greater energy. Woller calls the “epurazione” legislation of July 27, 1944, the
“Magna Carta” for political cleansing. The principles and guidelines developed there
were also included, in part, in the judicial planning by the resistance. During the latter
half of 1944 the most decisive measures were implemented to make a clean break with
the fascist past. As early as the winter of 1944–45, however, the Italian Communist
Party (PCI) leadership shifted from a hard-line stance on the issue of epurazione to a
more “realistic” approach, one prepared to make compromises. With the creation of a
mass party and with the gradual liberation of northern Italy, many former fascists joined
the PCI. The appeal of the party depended to a significant degree on its policy toward
the immediate past. When northern Italy was liberated at the end of April 1945, it was
possible to address the issue of epurazione on a national basis. Woller describes in
considerable detail how the efforts of the Ferruccio Parri government were accompa-
 Book Reviews 239

nied by a wave of extralegal violence. One indication of the importance of the issue
of epurazione is the fact that it led to the downfall of the Parri government at the end
of 1945. The first government of Alcide De Gasperi, beginning in December 1945, was
committed to “rehabilitation, amnesty, and exclusion.” With the plebiscite of June 2,
1946, rejecting the monarchy, and with Justice Minister Palmiro Togliatti’s issuance
of an amnesty decree on June 22, two major breaks with the past occurred. The amnesty
applied to all political crimes, with the exclusion of those crimes that were unusually
cruel (particolarmente efferate). Some 220,000 accused individuals, predominantly for-
mer fascists, were pardoned, and 30,000 detainees were released.
Woller’s study marks the beginning, and not the end, of an important area of research.
The author himself points to a number of gaps and deficiencies in our knowledge. In
contrast to the prevailing opinion, the author draws a generally positive balance, though
with some reservations. “Thousands of officials and employees had lost their positions,
hundreds of thousands were involved in investigations, and millions felt threatened by
the epurazione” (p. 330). Woller finds significant effects upon the transformation of
the elites; upon the juridical, intellectual, and moral confrontation with the past; and
upon the construction of a new democracy. “Italy subjected itself to a drastic cure,
declared itself healed, and categorically refused all further treatment” (p. 405). Woller’s
study is a significant contribution to contemporary German historical research, one
which has rapidly found, as the Italian translation indicates, an audience in Italy.

JENS PETERSEN
Istituto Storico Germanico di Roma

The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch
Economy, 1500–1815. By Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xx`767. $89.95.

In the more than forty years since B. H. Slicher van Bath started the careful dissection
of past agrarian societies in the Netherlands, new economic historians have compiled
a mass of research on many of the aspects of demography, agriculture, commerce,
industry, labor organization, and welfare of the people who lived in the seven provinces
that formed the Dutch Republic. This long-awaited, virtually comprehensive report on
that scholarship, first published in Dutch in 1995, is a testament to the scale and scope
of what has been done. The reading is rarely easy, despite many tables and graphs that
are generally clear and extremely helpful. The citation is sparse, perhaps in an effort
to shorten the work, so it is not always easy to find the origins of reported information.
As data are added to data, a picture slowly takes shape of the most advanced economy
of seventeenth-century Europe: how it emerged from the Middle Ages with structural
advantages and how it declined relatively and, the authors say, absolutely in the eigh-
teenth century.
Since both authors are renowned historians of agriculture, it is not surprising that
farming gets careful consideration, although not at the expense of industry, commerce,
or finance. The sector-by-sector report yields repetition, but that is often dealt with by
judicious cross-references. The description and explanation of growth and decline of
sectors show an economy responding to demand but also responding to changes in
costs, including labor costs. The marshaling of information from so many different
aspects of the economy reveals not only long-term trends but also the various restruc-
turings of the economy, away from traditional industries like brewing toward interna-
240 Book Reviews

tional trade in the seventeenth century and away from agriculture and manufacturing
to the working up of colonial goods and finance in the eighteenth. The Dutch economy
was resilient and responsive to shocks internal and external, a sign of its modernity. It
was, then, not just the high levels of urbanization, nor just the high proportion of output
that came from commerce and manufacturing rather than agriculture, nor just small
family size and low birthrates that were earmarks of the advanced nature of the Dutch
economy.
Analysis is promised about three-fourths of the way through the book, but instead
the authors detail results of studies on labor mobility and the pattern of change in real
incomes. The final sixty pages do serve to draw together what has gone before and
offer not only an overview of economic and social developments but also a tentative
theory about patterns of the rise and fall of modern economies. The authors launch a
sustained attack on traditional periodization of economic and, indeed, all history. They
find in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century many of the features of nineteenth-
and twentieth-century economic growth. They see no reason to look on the English
Industrial Revolution as a cataclysmic event. Rather they see a continuum, with the
Dutch Republic perhaps not matching the size of later English growth but being similar
in every other way. The attack on English exceptionalism is undoubtedly correct; it is
sustained and supported by the mass of evidence that fills the book. What may not be
sustained, however, is a refusal to see Dutch development as being an interim sort,
different from what came before in the Middle Ages but also different from the pattern
of economic change that would follow in Europe and the rest of the world.
This is economic history, but political structures are by no means ignored. They are
seen as an integral part of both the growth and the decline that the Republic enjoyed.
International politics, in contrast, are not analyzed nor even reported, so readers need
to bring to this work a basic knowledge of the competition among European states in
the period. There seems to be no doubt that the massive debt run up by the Dutch
government in fending off the French threat from 1672 to 1713 burdened the economy
so much that it could neither recover earlier levels of growth nor engage in restructuring
like that which occurred in the years from 1660 to 1700 in the face of falling food
prices, rising real incomes of laborers and craftsmen, and declining land values. Too
many people in the eighteenth century—such as government officials and bondhold-
ers—lived well thanks to the need to service the debt; these people resisted necessary
fiscal reform.
Refreshingly, the inland provinces are not ignored as is usually the case, though
Holland remains the center of focus. Craftsmen and shopkeepers, also typically given
short shrift in the study of the Dutch economy, find their place as major contributors
to prosperity. Small errors in the presentation of information are to be expected, but
they seem to be few. There are odd gaps; for example, the Thirty Years’ War, which
raged in a major Low Countries market throughout the period of the most rapid Dutch
growth, does not even rate a mention or an entry in the index.
The origins of economic growth are found in free markets, technical advance, and
capital investment, though the authors seem to denigrate the importance of the last in
the sixteenth century; this is surprising, since it is certainly a driving force for them
throughout the rest of the period they examine. Evidence is always treated with care,
and there is an effort to prevent overreaching what is available. Where the authors do
not have enough data to draw conclusions, they speculate with reserve. The concen-
tration always is on measurement, on phenomena to which figures can be attached.
That which is not subject to measure is not the subject of study. Even with such a
limitation, much can be mined from the mass of data presented about the European
 Book Reviews 241

state with the highest income per person for almost two centuries. Monuments are
typically erected to commemorate something that has ended, but this monumental work
shows how useful economic history, when properly integrated with social and political
history, can be for comprehending how the world functioned in the past.

RICHARD W. UNGER
University of British Columbia

Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam. By

Anne E. C. McCants.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. viii`281. $36.95.

The civic charity at issue is the Amsterdam municipal orphanage, the Burgerweeshuis,
which, the author convincingly argues, was created and administered by the ruling elite
to insure that the urban middle level of the Dutch republic, the largest group paying
excise taxes to the government, survived the hazards in an early capitalist economy
and did not slip into poverty. This case study of the administrative policies and man-
agement practices of the Burgerweeshuis regents, from the period of rising prosperity
in 1639 to the republic’s end in 1812, details their strategy for institutional charity,
acknowledging that it did not include a means for relieving suffering among the true
unfortunates in Amsterdam’s urban underclass. The Burgerweeshuis accepted only the
orphaned children of parents with full citizenship ( poorters), promising their relatives
and neighbors that the children would be given a diet, an education, and employment
appropriate to their kleine burgerij (middle-class) status. How the regents were chosen
and rewarded by the Amsterdam patriciate, and how they managed to keep the insti-
tution healthy and to maintain its privileged status in civic life for almost two hundred
years, are the central questions answered in this very interesting book.
It begins with a discussion of the social and economic theories that historians have
used to explain the motivation for charitable behavior and the forms that it took with
the rise of capitalism in the early modern period. In the case of the Dutch republic in
the seventeenth century, the historiographic debate has settled mainly on the question
of whether the pronounced societal commitment to charitable institutions might be seen
as a favorable or antagonistic cultural response to an emerging market economy. An
opportunity to test empirically the cultural response is the author’s rationale for an
econometric study showing how the nature and function of a prominent charitable
institution, the Burgerweeshuis, was linked to the economy of Amsterdam.
The financial reports that the Burgerweeshuis regents were required to submit to the
Amsterdam city government between 1639 and 1812 provide the economic data that
are assembled, analyzed using econometric techniques, and interpreted to give surpris-
ingly detailed evidence that the establishment and maintenance of Dutch charitable
institutions complemented the development of early capitalism. The method sheds light
on the orphan population and the regents’ responsible management of sizable institu-
tional resources to provide consistently the kind of care deemed socially appropriate
for middle-class children. (Comparison with the data that exist for Amsterdam’s other
orphanages, the publicly funded and less selective Aalmoezeniersweeshuis and the
religious congregations that were dependent on charitable giving, confirms a substan-
tially higher standard of living in the Burgerweeshuis.)
The challenges that the regents faced to maintain stable conditions in the Burgerwees-
huis become understandable in the context of Amsterdam’s flourishing, and later failing,
242 Book Reviews

market economy. The analyzed data show that during the boom years of the seventeenth
century, the regents were able to increase the accumulation of assets by investing surplus
income from soaring rents they collected on properties acquired from the city at no cost
in 1578. The regents were forced into debt, however, by the increased taxation imposed
by the city to pay for war in the 1670s. Early in the eighteenth century, the regents
followed a general turn in the market and began to sell some of their property that had
declined in value and reinvest in financial paper. Finally, the crises that rocked the econ-
omy of Amsterdam in the last quarter of the eighteenth century brought to an end the
regents’ ability to manage independently, and they were forced to accept loans from the
city to meet their expenses. The patterns of spending and investment reveal that the
regents were making decisions based on their understanding of middle-class consumer
standards, and that they avoided luxuries when income was high (attaching moral value
to the virtues of moderation) but also insisted in times of hardship that the things they
regarded as necessities (for example, meat and sugar in the eighteenth-century orphans’
diet) be provided. The author argues for the social effectiveness of the Burgerweeshuis
in the support of Dutch urban culture and demonstrates that it was mostly younger men
from Amsterdam’s elite, wealthiest families who served a term as regent, and that for
many of them it was a career springboard to high government office.
A particular strength of the book that social historians and art historians will appre-
ciate is the thoughtful attention given to the cultural context when interpreting the
economic data. For example, the founder’s vision of a residential home for orphans
was religiously motivated but, before the Reformation, the Burgerweeshuis was re-
stricted to poorters and funded by civic contributions. Later, private charitable giving
was a small and declining part of the institution’s income, but it did not disappear
completely until the nineteenth century. The third of the annual budget spent on food
was a sign of a wealthy institution. The author observes that “middle-class prosperity
was manifested not in the purchase of luxury foods but in the ability to consume more
of the same thing that the lower orders were eating” (p. 43). Burgerweeshuis orphans
ate less bread and more dairy products, and the staff consumed the same diet in large
enough quantities to have grown obese. Middle-class notions of the appropriate spheres
of activity for males (public) and females (private) guided the regents’ policies on
training for employment. Boys were placed as apprentices with craftsmen and trades-
men (the building trades were preferred; the textile trades were too low status, the
professions too high status), while girls remained inside the orphanage in one of several
household-type workshops. Researchers on the family will find in this study numerous
ways in which the regents tried to model the Burgerweeshuis on the private middle-
class Dutch home. The orphans, in fact, could not easily cut their ties after leaving the
“family.” They owed a share of their acquired wealth to the institution at their death
unless they had paid the regents in advance for the right to choose another beneficiary.

SHEILA D. MULLER
University of Utah

Gentlemen, Bourgeois, and Revolutionaries: Political Change and Cultural

Persistence among the Spanish Dominant Groups, 1750–1850. By Jesus Cruz.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. x`350. $59.95.

The work of Jesús Cruz constitutes a magnificent example of the analytical tensions
produced in European historiography by the failure of the classic theory (liberal and
 Book Reviews 243

Marxist) of the bourgeois revolution. These tensions are particularly evident in the
Spanish (and Hispanist) historiography of the nineties in the wake of substantial revi-
sion of the old topic of secular Spanish stagnation and its profound anomaly with
respect to Western Europe, a diagnosis brilliantly refuted, for example, by David Ring-
rose in Spain, Europe, and the “Spanish Miracle,” 1700–1900 (Cambridge, 1996).
Cruz’s book, originally a doctoral thesis directed by Ringrose, seeks to connect the
recent revision of the old model of the Spanish economic collapse with the contributions
of Anglo-Saxon revisionist historiography concerning the basically political character
of the European revolutionary cycle of 1789–1848. The author’s objective is to provide
new empirical evidence that allows for revisiting “the theory of the bourgeois revolution
and the concept of bourgeoisie as an emerging new and revolutionary social class”
(p. 6).
To that end Cruz proposes a sociological study—based fundamentally on notarial
sources—of 549 individuals from Madrid’s business, financial, professional, bureau-
cratic, and political elite groups between 1750 and 1850. His aim is to examine the
causes and effects of the 1830s when, following various failed rebellions and a civil
war (1833–40), liberalism solidified, tithing was eliminated, church properties were
sold off, family property rights and lordships were abolished, and freedom of commerce
and industry was decreed.
Cruz shares the premise (or rather the conviction, as he says in the text on p. 3) that
these changes were of a political nature, that only in part did they respond to economic
needs, and that only to a limited degree were they the result of changes in the prior
social structure. Both before and after the liberal rupture, Madrid’s fortunes were ba-
sically patrimonial. Industrial investment was minimal, and the free-market economy
did not alter the traditional patterns of trading luxury products at the expense of products
of mass consumption. The needs of the state continued to be the focus of major trade
and financial agreements.
Politicians and upper-level bureaucrats continued to come from more or less the
same groups during this entire period: the petty, provincial nobility, and the business
and financial elite. The cultural practice of marriage within one’s social class was kept
for the most part intact, and private discourse constantly contradicted liberal values
“traditionally associated with a class society” in favor of a policy based on “personal
loyalty and collective solidarity” (p. 173). The Spanish revolution, he concludes, “was
not the result of the ascent of a new social class but rather the product of the acceptance
of modernization on the part of an old elite that coopted some bourgeois elements”
(p. 171).
The first objection is obvious. The extreme social and political fragmentation of the
period prevents us from extracting such general conclusions from the particular case
of Madrid. Second, among the 230 businessmen studied, only thirty are supported by
sequential data for the period from 1816 to 1850. In this way Cruz understates the
importance that the crisis in land ownership and trade of the 1820s and 1830s might
have had in the break in peaceful coexistence among the elite groups of different origin
and character within a very fragmented national framework. Finally, by leaving out of
his analysis the clerical state and the nobility, he is not taking into account the unde-
niable costs to privileged groups exacted by the liberal revolution and the social dis-
placement that it caused. Nothing is said regarding the drastic reduction in economic
power of the old nobility (not to mention the church) nor of the deeply plebeian char-
acter of Spanish politics during the entirety of the nineteenth century—as opposed to
the politics of England, Germany, or even France.
Nevertheless, the principal risk that Cruz’s work takes—and to which it partially
244 Book Reviews

succumbs—consists in letting itself be guided by what Jon Elster has called “active
negations,” indebted in the end to the theory of the bourgeois revolution whose very
historical inapplicability he is attempting to illustrate. The criteria of social change that
he uses are excessively rigid and dichotomous, and his notion of the political is sur-
prising in its implicit debt to the classic metaphor of social verticality. It is thus difficult
to evaluate the relationships established between the actions of the subjects he studies
and those impersonal factors (economic development, modernization) to which he at-
tributes the (real) responsibility for the changes experienced by nineteenth-century
Spain.
Once the circular logic and the rigid dichotomies of the classic theory of the bour-
geois revolution have been dismissed, one cannot go on repeating the obvious, which
is that in Spain, as in all of Europe, patrimonial investments prevailed both among
those who favored liberalism and those who opposed it, or that influential friendships
and familial ties were the cement of economic and cultural life of liberal societies.
The evaluation of the public and private conduct of the Cabarrús family is a good
example of the difficulties his analytic lens encounters in addressing the relationship
between continuity and change (between expectations and experiences) during the crisis
of the Old Regime. Their adaptive strategies cannot be evaluated by attributing them
to a cynical contradiction between public statements (enlightened and reformist) and
private practices that did not keep them from forming a legacy of family property and
defending the values of honor, family, social exclusivity, and patronage. In the uncer-
tain climate of 1816 the Cabarrús family, like many others, tried to maximize their
benefits and preserve their inheritance and family continuity within a framework of
economic and political contextual expectations that are not addressed as such.
For all of this, basic questions remain unanswered. Why did many of those families
risk their fortunes and their lives in order to provoke a break with the Old Regime that
Cruz considers (merely) political? Why did other families oppose it with arms in hand?
Cruz’s answer is ill defined. The liberal revolution was, above all, the product of
conflicts among old elite groups, especially those conflicts between local and central
powers. By reading this calm panorama of continuity of traditional investments and of
maintaining marriage practices within the social class (with Madrid as the central focus
producing the general conclusions), the reader may totally miss what those conflicts
were, concretely speaking. What relationship might have existed between the collapse
of trade and land ownership under the absolute monarchy (evident as of 1814) and the
failure of definite traditional strategies of adaptation? Why and how did liberalism
become the predominant discourse at the moment of defining the conflicts raised in
that context? If the answers are not forthcoming, perhaps it is due to the fact that what
interests the author, more than anything else, is to show (once again) the interpretive
limitations of the classic theory of the bourgeois revolution. It is an endeavor that, in
the late 1990s, reminds us of Don Quixote confronting the windmills and believing
them to be giants.

ISABEL BURDIEL
University of Valencia
 Book Reviews 245

Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg. By

Thomas Max Safley. Studies in Central European Histories. Edited by Thomas A.
Brady Jr. and Roger Chickering.
Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1997. Pp. xiii`350.
$70.00.

Ever since theories of social discipline found their way into research in social history,
the care of the indigent during the early modern period has been a topic due for critical
investigation. Support for the needy can no longer be interpreted uncritically as a means
of charity. It can equally well be viewed as the instrument of an authority exercising
power and control. In his most recent monograph, Charity and Economy in the Or-
phanages of Early Modern Augsburg, Thomas Safley does not simply rest content with
this interpretation. On the basis of his research, he comes to the conclusion that support
for the poor played a significant role in the origins of modern capitalism. His thesis
conflicts with the widely accepted notion that charitable care for the needy remained
outside the limits of the emerging capitalist system. Indeed, Safley suggests that his-
torians who neglect the economic basis for the care of the needy have created a distorted
picture and misinterpreted the significance of the subject (pp. 288 ff.). With this work,
Safley has put forward a different concept of poor relief in the early modern period:
instead of a rigid, traditionalistic, and economically isolated authoritarian instrumen-
tality, he finds a flexible, capitalistic-minded enterprise. The distinction between a
precapitalist and a capitalist society, or, to put it somewhat differently, between a
moralistic economic structure and a purely economic one, becomes blurred in Safley’s
interpretation. Safley defends this perspective, claiming that, in Germany at least, there
was no “Great Transformation,” in the sense of a radical transformation of the economic
life and economic organization of early modern states, driven by technological change,
overseas trade, and ideological change (pp. 58 ff.).
In Augsburg, one of the leading financial centers of the early modern period, public
aid had a significant effect on the market. Safley bases his claims on an examination
of the extensive archival material of the Augsburg orphanages. The original orphanage,
begun in 1572 during a period of famine, had been reorganized into two confessionally
distinct institutions following the Peace of Westfalia. Certainly, neither of these insti-
tutions viewed the augmentation of capital as an end in itself. But both had to be
concerned with their long-term survival and with assuring the continued availability of
aid for needy children, and the manner in which they sought to achieve these aims
showed clear capitalistic features. For their existence the orphanages were dependent
on public funding, but in their policies and practices they were largely independent.
Safley convincingly undermines the interpretation of aid recipients as a marginal
group, excluded from the activity of the market. The needy, such as Augsburg’s or-
phans, were not simply a group without possessions. Directly and indirectly, money
and goods passed through their hands (p. 179). Financing of the orphanages rested on
public subventions, private donations, and the institution’s own profits. Among the
profits were gains realized from administering the property of the children. However
small these initial amounts may have been, over an extended period of time they were
capable of producing income. The children themselves, as laborers, were a commodity,
a commodity in demand by masters, who received pay for their instruction.
In order to keep budgets balanced during times of change and uncertainty, flexibility
was necessary. The orphanages were active in three segments of the market. In the
capital market, they put their funds into the most secure investments, primarily loans
and credits. In the traditional market they were Augsburg’s largest purchaser of goods
246 Book Reviews

for daily use and consumption. They entered into long-term contracts in order to insure
that their supplies would not be interrupted by the constant uncertainties. They placed
their orders with the suppliers who gave them the best prices. And by accumulating
supplies they sought to manipulate demand and price (p. 204). Finally, in the labor
market, the orphanages appeared not just as consumers but as suppliers as well. They
offered apprentices and skilled workers, orphans whom they had trained for manual
labor and for domestic service, with special emphasis on the qualities of obedience,
sense of duty, and industriousness.
A detailed analysis of the activities of the orphanages in these three markets forms
the basic structure within which Safley develops his argument, organizes his chapters,
and presents his theses. He examines not only the external activities of the orphanages
but also everyday life within the establishments themselves, bringing to bear theoretical
and institutional perspectives. The close relationship between a caritative institution
and a capitalistic enterprise loses its contradictory character and becomes conceivable.
In Safley’s words, “The orphanages served God and Mammon by caring for the needy
and banking with the rest” (p. 114).
The house rules of conduct embraced in equal measure Christian ethics and economic
self-interest. Work, meals, and indeed every conceivable avenue of activity were sub-
ordinated to an ever-present religiosity and subject to rigid supervision. Safley presents
detailed citations from house regulations, menus, rules of conduct for the staff, and
prescriptions for the moral training of children in order to depict the daily routine of
prayer and work in the orphanages. His descriptions are based not only on these nor-
mative sources but also on an extensive selection from previously unpublished docu-
ments related to daily activities in the orphanages, from the Augsburg Stadtarchiv and
from the Bayrischen Hauptstaatsarchiv in Munich. His portrayal of a meticulously
organized and religiously tinged work ethic naturally recalls Max Weber’s thesis re-
garding the close connection between ascetic Protestantism and capitalism. Safley de-
votes a separate chapter (pp. 285–87) to a discussion of Weber’s thesis. In it he insists
on a careful reading of Weber’s essay, arguing that the latter in no way limits capitalism
exclusively to Protestant societies, even if Weber himself nowhere attempts to describe
Catholic capitalism. Though Weber’s portrayal of capitalism was not intended to reflect
any particular reality, but rather functioned as an ideal type, Safley nevertheless finds
the qualities Weber assigned to the “spirit of modern capitalism,” such as industrious-
ness and asceticism, reflected in the organization of the orphanages. They were prev-
alent in the Catholic as well as in the Lutheran orphanage. To be sure, Safley finds in
the course of his inquiry a number of differences between the confessions. But these
had less to do with a specifically religious ethic than with the practical realities of a
society in which adherence to the same faith affected the generosity of gifts and the
establishment of commercial contacts.
Safley’s work has only a few shortcomings. An appendix of tables is intended to
illuminate some of the economic features of the period 1600–1680, a time span of
particular interest because of the crises caused by the Thirty Years’ War. But the
graphical data are rather meager, and it is particularly regrettable that the numbers
themselves were not edited or revised. Figures for income and expenditures are given
in absolute values and not in relation to the then-current purchasing power. Similarly,
figures for the consumption of food in the orphanages are not given in relation to the
number of orphans. The index includes a comprehensive listing of the individuals
named in the examples, but the subject headings are few, overly broad, and give in-
complete page references. Besides these minor blemishes, one further point might be
raised. The reader finishing this interesting volume may well wonder how representa-
 Book Reviews 247

tive the case of Augsburg is for the subject of poor relief generally. A comparison with
similar institutions such as the Francke Institute in Halle might have served to under-
score Safley’s thesis or to indicate how significant economic interests were for other
“charitable” organizations of the early modern period.

IRIS RITZMANN
Institut für Geschichte der Medizin, Stuttgart

Rechtsgeschichte als Rechtspolitik: Justus Möser als Jurist und Staatsmann. By

Karl H. L. Welker. 2 volumes. Osnabrücker Geschichtsquellen und Forschungen,
volume 38.
Osnabrück: Verein für Geschichte und Landeskunde von Osnabrück, 1996. Pp.
xl`1217.

Probably about two thousand monographs have been written about Justus Möser. In
these he has been described variously as a liberal and conservative, as an opponent of
the Enlightenment and a figure of the German Enlightenment. In the English-speaking
world he has perhaps become best known through the work of Klaus Epstein, The
Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, N.J., 1966), which claimed that “[Möser]
stands at the very beginning of Germany’s Conservative tradition, before there were
forerunners upon whose writings he could draw” (p. 308). This assertion is challenged
by the author of the work under review.
Karl Welker’s two-volume book is the product of two separate doctoral dissertations,
one at the law faculty at Frankfurt am Main and other in the humanities at Osnabrück.
Each of his volumes is made up of one of the reworked dissertations, which together
amount to a thousand pages plus an introduction, with a short summary in English and
some appendices at the end. The author claims to treat Möser’s theory in the first
volume and his practice in the second. There is no doubt about Welker’s detailed
command of the subject. Indeed, his scholarship, as borne out by fifty pages of bibli-
ography, not to speak of his use of several archival sources, is enviable. But in some
respects the different origins of the two parts create a dichotomy, that, while Welker
would disclaim it, leaves an impression of discontinuity that is not removed until the
last few pages of his summary.
The work is not a general biography of Möser, not even strictly speaking an intel-
lectual one. Nor is the main title itself truly revealing. It promises both more and less
than the book delivers and is more applicable to the second volume than the first. What
Welker tries to do is to free Möser from the labels that have been attached to him.
Möser’s numerous published writings had become the subject of endless debates even
before the end of his life. Among nineteenth-century political writers, Möser was a
liberal to Karl Theodor Welcker and a conservative to Friedrich Kreyssig. He was
regarded as an enemy of the Enlightenment who looked to the past and viewed the
status quo with skepticism, as a defender of the society of estates, but also as one who
favored enlightened ideas such as religious toleration. The author rejects such anach-
ronistic evaluation of Möser. To him Möser was suspicious of all scholarly systems
and showed reticence in the face of all dogmatic structures.
There is no doubt that Möser was a complex figure who, despite some deeply held
notions, was of necessity flexible in the practical exercise of his official duties. In the
first part of his work Welker addresses the literary—that is, published—activity of
Möser. In his earlier works, before he became involved in the affairs of his own epis-
248 Book Reviews

copal principality of Osnabrück, Möser displayed a wide interest in the current thought
that had come from England and France to Germany, critiquing the moral philosophy
of Shaftesbury and absorbing some of Montesquieu. His attitude toward the burgeoning
Reichspatriotismus was a negative one, leading him to oppose the view of Friedrich
Carl von Moser as expressed in the latter’s Von dem deutschen national-Geist. To
Möser the Empire was a confederation of historically evolved territories where national
character was more important than constitutional reality. By the same token he was
antagonistic to a strong centralized authority, the absolutism of his day. Hence he
rejected all the fashionable contemporary plans for codifying the laws. His negative
view of the early part of the French Revolution stemmed from his rejection of Rous-
seauism. He did not believe in universally valid human rights; as Christians people
may be equal but not as political subjects. Indeed, although he occasionally made use
of natural-law concepts, Möser did not accept a system of natural law undergirded by
some abstract contracts. Whereas Welker carefully and chronologically examines and
analyzes virtually all the published works, he gives surprisingly short shrift to Möser’s
best-known work, the Osnabrückische Geschichte. On the other hand he discusses his
Patriotischen Phantasien more thoroughly since it presented Möser’s interaction with
the public at large. While Welker does not say so explicitly, Möser here played a role
in that creation of public space that occurred after the Seven Years’ War.
Möser’s public career is treated in the second volume, under the heading of practice.
Using manuscript materials hardly exploited before, Welker attempts to show how
despite Möser’s concurrent accumulation of often conflicting offices, such as syndic to
the estates of the knights and as consultant to the Osnabrück territorial government, he
was able to retain a measure of independence, which afforded him influence at the
expense of power. The exception to this was the short period during the Seven Years’
War when as territorial deputy he took total responsibility for the political organization
of Osnabrück in the face of military threats and the English attempt to secularize the
prince-bishopric. But, for the most part, the author uses separate incidents to show how
Möser handled each matter as it arose. In most of these cases that involved constitu-
tional and legal questions unresolved by the Peace of Westphalia, Möser applied history
with a pragmatic turn.
Did Welker achieve his professed goal of freeing Möser from the conflicting labels
that have been pinned on him for two centuries? The answer is not clear. Welker
certainly demonstrates that in Möser’s practice, which had hitherto been only treated
inadequately, Möser acted more pragmatically than emerges even from his published
writings. For instance, in his negotiations with Catholic members of the cathedral chap-
ter, Möser, a loyal Lutheran, displayed considerable malleability in the question of the
existence of Protestant subsidiary schools and the problems resulting from the sup-
pression of the Jesuits. Yet ultimately Welker’s work displays not only the very best
in German scholarship, namely its thoroughness, but also some of its worst features,
namely an unbearable prolixity. It is not enough for Welker to belabor the details; he
analyzes each point he makes endlessly and repetitiously. A close reading of the book
leaves the reader in a fog of bewilderment.

HANNS GROSS
Loyola University, Chicago
 Book Reviews 249

Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth
Century. By Richard J. Evans.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. x`278. $35.00.

Despite a burgeoning interest in the history of modern German civil law in the last
decade or so, with the exception of juvenile justice German criminal law prior to the
establishment of the Nazi regime in 1933 is still largely terra incognita. But the recent
historiographical insistence on resisting the sway of the teleological model of German
history, which sees all developments in German society, including those in the law,
under the shadow of Nazism, has now begun to shape the approach to the social history
of crime and criminal justice. The undisputed leader of this trend has been the Cam-
bridge University historian Richard J. Evans. Fresh on the heels of his magisterial
account of capital punishment in Germany, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment
in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1996), he has produced an illuminating study of the
criminal underworld and official attempts to repress it in nineteenth-century Germany.
Whereas Rituals of Retribution was driven by the vicissitudes of political, intellec-
tual, and cultural reactions to the brooding omnipresence of an increasingly contested
penal tradition, in this book the biographies of four ordinary criminals—a forger, a
female vagrant, a political confidence trickster, and a prostitute—become prisms that
refract various aspects of German penal policy: transportation, corporal punishment,
police surveillance, and the regulation of prostitution. In one chapter Evans traces the
personal decline from respectability to infamy of Wilhelm Aschenbrenner, a convicted
forger who was included in the first convoy of Prussian felons to be transported in
1801 to Siberia. Aschenbrenner’s plight forms the point of departure for a finely grained
description of the criminal careers of several other deportees in the same convoy, the
strenuous voyage of these inmates from Prussia to exile in Siberia, and shifts in the
policy of transportation in Prussia and other German states. After this odyssey through
early nineteenth-century crime and society, the chapter rediscovers the trail of Aschen-
brenner himself, who despite all odds seems to have ingratiated himself with Russian
officials enough to earn a pardon and thus escape the cruel fate of his fellow convicts
in the mines of Siberia. In another chapter Evans describes the unfortunate fate of the
vagrant Gresche Rudolph, an apothecary’s daughter who was reduced to prostitution
through no fault of her own. Although expelled from the city of Bremen, she would
not be denied, only to be rearrested and sentenced to beatings with a cane after each
of several returns. Evans uses Rudolph’s story to illustrate the endurance of corporal
punishment in Germany even after it had been officially discredited.
The merits of Evans’s study are manifold. In older historical accounts, German penal
reforms have a disembodied, insular, exclusively high-minded quality. Evans embeds
such policies in their social context. For instance, he ascribes the Prussian initiative to
transport convicts to the frustration of authorities with the high rate of escapes of
dangerous felons from overcrowded prisons. In turn, the introduction of prison reform
in the mid-nineteenth century, especially the cellular system, was prompted by the
refusal of foreign countries to accept German convicts anymore. Evans locates the
official abolition of corporal punishment in Prussia in 1810 in the disintegration of a
status-bound, feudalistic form of rule. Yet Evans also demonstrates the gap between
lofty statements of principles and penal practice. The banning of corporal punishment
encountered stiff opposition; in effect, whipping and caning were displaced from the
public sphere to closed institutions like the prison and the workhouse. This gap often
reflected outright hypocrisy. Liberals who championed individual rights in criminal law
were quite prepared to countenance punitive administrative remedies, including whip-
250 Book Reviews

ping in prison, when these were integrated into the disciplinary regime of the prison
whose inmates were social outsiders. Moreover, Evans shows the disjuncture between
policy expectations and the unforeseen. To the chagrin of Bremen’s officials, Gresche
Rudolph remained unintimidated by the harsh administration of the cane. The twenty-
year career of Franz Ernst, the con man who, when he was not exploiting the obsession
of reactionary governments with the threat of democratic movements by impersonating
police agents charged to infiltrate the radical Left, was wooing propertied young women
into matrimony only to abscond with their money and possessions, is testimony to the
porous quality of German police surveillance. Moreover, Evans vests agency in the
marginalized inhabitants of the underworld. Evans argues that not all prostitutes were
powerless objects of middle-class male exploitation. He suggests that many prostitutes
were able to circumvent registration by the morals police and choose the conditions
under which they worked.
Many of Evans’s findings challenge the increasingly embattled legacy of Michel
Foucault’s account of nineteenth-century authority and obedience. If Evans is correct,
the disciplinary system of the supervision and control of social deviants was anything
but impervious, allowing resourceful people like Franz Ernst to navigate its interstices.
Furthermore, the institutionalization in the prison of what Foucault calls “gentle pun-
ishment,” that is to say, a discursive disciplinary practice designed to be internalized
by inmates by the time of their release and then replicated by them in everyday life in
the absence of outside pressure, was frequently eclipsed by old-fashioned beatings and
other forms of physical indignity. Finally, whereas Foucault seems to be indifferent to
power differences between social groups, Evans shows that power occasionally oper-
ated bidirectionally to the benefit of the marginalized denizens of the darker side of
the nineteenth-century world.
The study is not without faults. Whenever Evans digresses from the life stories of
the book’s protagonists, these figures, who are meant to arouse our interest if not our
sympathy, largely vanish from view. Moreover, Evans alludes to a fair share of human
suffering, mental as well as physical, that is caused by excessive state-sponsored cru-
elty. But despite a valiant effort, Evans is hard-pressed to capture this suffering, in part
because even these marginalized people, be it through the written word of their own
hand or through transcripts of police interrogations, have bequeathed to the historian
highly stylized, and therefore not totally reliable, accounts of their trials and tribula-
tions. Suffering is an excruciatingly elusive historical subject, even for a historian of
Richard Evans’s caliber. Nevertheless, the author’s originality of insight more than
compensates for these deficiencies.

GABRIEL N. FINDER
Susquehanna University

Migration and Urbanization in the Ruhr Valley, 1821–1914. By James H.

Jackson. Studies in Central European Histories. Edited by Thomas A. Brady and
Roger Chickering.
Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997. Pp. xix`452. $85.00.

Urbanization and migration—these two terms are usually used to describe the two
central demographic and socioeconomic processes that lie at the heart of the develop-
ment of the largest and most significant German industrial district, the Ruhrgebiet.
Nineteenth-century contemporaries were already aware that the exceptionally fast
 Book Reviews 251

growth of the settlements and cities of the heavy-industry district were mostly a result
of immigration, and they often reacted to this process with a host of fears, stereotypes,
and rural-romantic projections that are generally known as Großstadtfeindschaft, or
animosity against urban centers. Such stereotypes of migration’s “uprooting” or “alien-
ating” effect—depending on one’s political affiliation—on life in the growing areas
of agglomeration are still widespread today. Historical research on internal German
migration—especially studies by Wolfgang Köllmann, Dieter Langewiesche, and Wal-
ter Kamphoefner—has exposed these stereotypes as untenable and has corrected and
differentiated our understanding of migration patterns. Accordingly, it has been proven
that the immigration to the cities of the Ruhrgebiet, as far as it has been documented
in the demographic statistics, represented only a small proportion of the overall migra-
tion. Immigration to the cities was always complemented by a high emigration rate out
of the cities. Temporary, seasonal, and circular migrations, generally over relatively
short distances, were the norm. In addition, migrants were not generally poorly educated
peasants who, once they reached their destinations, were victims of a process of mar-
ginalization. Rather, qualified occupational groups, such as skilled workers or rising
entrepreneurs, were particularly mobile. Similarly, interurban migration was of much
greater significance than the often overrated rural-to-urban migration.
James H. Jackson’s superb case study of the growth of the city of Duisburg between
1821 and 1914 confirms the major conclusions of these recent migration studies at the
same time as it provides a more differentiated and concrete analysis of substantial areas.
The central merit of Jackson’s readable and methodically thoughtful study lies in the
author’s ability to produce a sufficiently differentiated picture of the diverse processes
of population development through a concentrated focus on one city in the Ruhrgebiet.
Jackson successfully integrates the different expressions of this population develop-
ment—that is, both migrations and “natural population movements”—with unfolding
economic structures and urban development. Jackson achieves this goal by extending
his evidentiary base beyond city statistics and information about immigration and em-
igration to include the censuses of 1810, 1843, 1867, and 1890, as well as registration
documents, which were required in Duisburg beginning in the 1860s. Only through the
quantitative analysis of such sources, which provide information about particular fam-
ilies or individuals, can the destiny of the immigrants in the population centers be
reconstructed in detail. Questions about the origins of Duisburg’s immigrants, their
demographic and social profile, their gender and religious divisions, as well as their
integration into the new urban community and the length of their stays are answered
with a precision and methodological reliability unique in the field of German migration
studies. Jackson’s approach opens a new way for this historical subdiscipline, from
which we can expect further results in this important area of social history.
Jackson’s central thesis is not surprising, but rather very plausible to experts: the
immigrants into the rapidly growing, heavily industrialized Duisburg were not anon-
ymous peasants threatened by poverty. The most important criterion for choosing a
destination was generally the possibility of accessing existing social relations and loy-
alties. As Jackson demonstrates through numerous statistical calculations and tables,
the persistence and stability of relatively intimate social bonds was the central char-
acteristic of immigrants; the supposed marginality of immigrants is exposed as a myth
(see the title of chapter 5, “Myths of Marginality”). The essential achievement of the
study, however, lies in the convincingly executed methodology. Jackson’s sources re-
veal such a wealth of information about thousands of individuals, families, and house-
holds that, even with the aid of computers, the amount of data had to be reduced through
sampling. Jackson justifies his sampling techniques and explains the remaining—and
252 Book Reviews

still remarkably large—source base in two detailed appendices, which make the con-
clusions of the study very traceable and, in light of the remaining uncertainties, easily
assessable. Jackson does not limit himself to quantitative analysis, however. In the first
part of the second chapter the author provides a fictive city tour through turn-of-the-
century Duisburg, supplemented with photographs and maps, which opens up the city
to his readers.
The chronological emphasis of the study is definitely placed on the second half of
the nineteenth century, a bias obscured somewhat by the title. For the first half of the
century the evidentiary basis is incomparably worse, so that the reader is left to wonder
why Jackson did not put less emphasis on this part in both the study and the title. The
book is based on the author’s dissertation (unfortunately not available to me), which
was completed in 1980. It is not clear why the publication of this stimulating and path-
breaking study took so long, but one consequence of the long delay is that the passages
in which Jackson describes the technical aspects of data processing can only evoke a
smile from the reader.
Jackson continuously demonstrates his expert knowledge of Duisburg’s history, and
little remains to be corrected. Particularly in the sections addressing the economic
development of the city the author tends to confuse the general term Ruhrgebiet, which
refers to the industrial district, with the geographical description Ruhrtal. This confu-
sion is associated with the author’s false conception about the course of the Ruhr River,
which runs through the industrial district only in the west, in the area of Duisburg and
Mühlheim/Ruhr, and not in the eastern urban centers, which it circumvents in the south.
This misconception leads to a number of other small mistakes, such as the assertion
on page 128 that the Ruhr was not navigable. In reality, the Ruhr was already opened
up for navigation in 1780, but it did not attain much significance as a major shipping
route because it ran south of most of the industrial districts.
Finally, the often careless editing of the book is regrettable. There are numerous
orthographic errors in the German quotations and citations. The quality of the print is
less than ideal, especially in the reproduction of the Prussian maps for the years 1845
and 1907, which could have proved very enlightening on the city’s development had
they been printed legibly. The author should not, however, be blamed for such minor
details.

STEFAN GORIßEN
Universität Bielefeld

Britain and the German Zollverein, 1848–1866. By John R. Davis.

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Pp. x`238. $69.95.

This book sets out to correct distortions in the picture of British trade policy toward
the Zollverein in 1848–66. Because the story has been written mainly by German
historians concerned with the struggle for mastery in Germany, British policy has been
been treated less on its own terms than as a factor in that struggle, and sometimes as
an instrument for imposing British commercial supremacy on the Continent. Davis’s
picture, based on British and German archives, shows the British policy of free trade
to have hardly been policy at all in the sense of a concrete end pursued by coordinated
means. Free trade was instead essentially an ideology almost unchallenged after the
repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Sustained by Britain’s commercial and industrial
supremacy, invulnerability, and enormous influence and prestige, it came in three ver-
 Book Reviews 253

sions: pure Ricardian economics, a moralistic universalist version linked to evangeli-

calism and Whig liberalism, and a more cautious pragmatism focused on concrete
results. The late 1840s and 1850s, argues Davis, were remarkable for the decline of
the last version and the dominance of the unilateral-evangelistic variety.
This dominance was reinforced, paradoxically, by the Board of Trade’s decline in
governmental influence and responsibilities with the end of mercantilism. Given the
Foreign Office’s traditional distaste for commercial affairs, it now enjoyed a virtual
monopoly in this arena, giving unilateralists freedom to spread the gospel of free trade
abroad. A reliance on propaganda, persuasion, and the power of Britain’s example
rather than hard bargaining was further promoted by Britain’s defective system of
gathering information and statistics on trade, which prevented the British from seeing
the actual emergence of the Zollverein as a potential competitor early on. Yet objec-
tively the pattern of mutually beneficial trade relations justified the British view of the
Zollverein as generally a good thing, tending to liberalize trade to Britain’s and every-
one’s benefit.
The Germans reacted to this campaign mainly with suspicion born of a love-hate
feeling toward Britain generally and Friedrich List’s and German nationalist historians’
charges of a British conspiracy to suffocate nascent German industry. In clear if some-
what plodding fashion, Davis traces Britain’s promotion of free trade as largely without
political purposes. At the same time, he trades the efforts of various German states and
groups to resist or manipulate it for their own mainly political ends through various
phases, from the initial attempts at German commercial union in the Revolution of
1848 through the tense German negotiations and crises involving the Zollverein in
1849–54, the British campaign for lowered tariffs on iron, the era of war and major
political change on the Continent in 1855–1860, and finally the crucial years of Austro-
Prussian confrontation beginning with the Franco-Prussian commercial treaty of 1862
and ending with the Anglo-Prussian treaty of 1865. Important shifts in British policy
are noted and discussed—a more activist effort after 1855 to eliminate transit duties
and other barriers to international commerce as a way of gaining Britain better access
to Eastern markets, and the switch to greater pragmatism signaled by the Cobden-
Chevalier Treaty of 1860. Davis stresses, however, that British support for free trade
remained essentially principled and politically disinterested. The political effects of this
support were admittedly substantial, especially in Germany, but unintended on Britain’s
part; British foreign policy continued to aim at peace through a reformed Vienna sys-
tem.
On the commercial side, Davis’s interpretation is convincing. To be sure, in refuting
Listian and other German nationalist charges against British policy, to an extent he
runs at an open door; few German historians have believed these for a long time. His
conclusion that Britain’s ultimate support for Prussian leadership of the Zollverein did
not mean a conscious choice for Little German unification also fits well with the recent,
thorough examination of British policy toward the Reichsgründung by Klaus Hilde-
brand (No Intervention: Die Pax Britannica und Preussen, 1865/66–1869/70 [Munich,
1997]). But one or two minor criticisms remain, prompting another one not so minor,
and suggesting a major question left untouched. While Davis includes a fairly impres-
sive bibliography of the recent literature, little evidence of its use appears in the foot-
notes, which make frequent reference instead to outdated nineteenth- and early twen-
tieth-century accounts. As a result, some Continental developments important to the
story get missed or distorted.
More important, Davis seems to me to take British statements in foreign policy too
much at face value, giving both too benign a portrait of it and at times an inadequate
254 Book Reviews

impression of the grounds for opposition to it. Not just misunderstanding, anti-British
propaganda, and reactionary paranoia led some German states, especially Austria and
South German ones, to oppose British foreign policy. These states had concrete ex-
perience of the harm and threat British policy presented in supporting Swiss Protestant
liberal-revolutionaries in 1846–47 and Sardinia-Piedmont in 1848; of British insistence
on the decisive political and military defeat of Russia in 1853–56 and on rewriting the
map of Europe; and of Britain’s welcoming the defeat of Austria and triumph of Pied-
mont in 1859–61. These British policies could not be presented as support for peace
under a reformed Vienna System. It was not pro-Russian sentiment, but resistance to
being dragged into a great war for British and French interests, that animated the
German middle states in 1854–55. It was not just protectionism, but the knowledge
that Austria’s historic mission and the German states’ independent existence were at
stake, that drove Austrian and South German resistance to Prussian control of the
Zollverein.
If the reply is, “But the British did not realize this,” then at some point one must
say, “Well, they should have.” Davis recognizes that the British concept of balance of
power here, as ever, meant equilibrium in Europe as the condition and means for British
supremacy overseas. What is not noted, but is clearly illustrated in this book, is the
contrast between British sensitivity to the delicate requirements of this balance in West-
ern Europe, including the independence and integrity of several smaller states (the Low
Countries, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark), and British inattention to the most basic
underpinnings of equilibrium in Central and Eastern Europe, including the survival of
a host of independent states in Germany and Italy and the continued historic compo-
sition and function, as opposed to the mere existence, of the Habsburg Monarchy.
This leads to a closing observation (not a criticism). Important in British free trade
ideology was the belief—certainly defensible, probably justified—that liberalization
of trade helps promote international peace. Yet there is an unexamined assumption
here. Just as free trade undoubtedly weakens and destroys individual firms, leading
supposedly to their replacement by other more efficient ones, so it also can weaken
and destroy individual states or other international actors. Are these as fungible, readily
replaceable without intolerable conflict, as are firms in the marketplace? Davis may
well regard this question as outside his brief. It needs, however, to be raised, both for
history and for present policy.

PAUL W. SCHROEDER
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National

Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914. By Pieter M. Judson. Social
History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany. Edited by Geoff Eley.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Pp. xiii`304. $49.50.

Much of the historiography on Austrian liberalism has interpreted it as a kind of epi-

phenomenon within a political culture that was dominated by the volatility of nation-
alism, the growth of mass parties, and the negative influence of a dynastic monarchy.
Carl Schorske’s enormously popular work on fin-de-siècle Vienna has done a great
deal to further that impression: it depicts Austria’s German liberals as overwhelmed
by the first two of these forces and seduced by the third through the aesthetic escapism
held out to the sons of liberal fathers by the Habsburg-oriented Gefühlskultur of the
 Book Reviews 255

aristocracy. This view of liberalism, however, says more about our fascination with the
death of imperial Austria than it does about the historical reality of liberalism and its
influence on the life of the Austrian state. In Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics,
Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914, Pieter
Judson provides an important corrective to this image by focusing his analysis on the
wide-ranging and enduring impact of liberalism as a force that helped determine the
social and cultural, as well as the political, character of Habsburg Austria in the modern
era.
Citing a tendency to see Austria through Sonderweg-tinted glasses similar to those
used for observing nineteenth-century Germany, Judson seeks to dispel the misappre-
hensions about the originality and influence of Austrian liberalism that have resulted
from this approach. Although his argument is more restricted than that of David Black-
bourn and Geoff Eley in their revisionist Peculiarities of German History (Oxford,
1984), it is no less important as a means of setting the record straight. Instead of seeing
Austrian liberals as dependent on foreign models for ideological inspiration, he main-
tains that they were sufficiently original to develop their own version of the ideology
and were vigorous in acting on it when the opportunity presented itself. Therefore,
1848 was not a permanent loss to the movement, but a prelude that better equipped it
for the coming struggle of the late 1850s and early 1860s that resulted in the triumph
of a liberal constitutional monarchy in 1867. The story thereafter is of a liberal move-
ment that fleshed out the constitutional order with laws on education, church-state
relations, and other topics important to the civic ideals of liberalism. Unfortunately,
success bred complacency and discord among liberals, while also creating a political
system that nurtured the rights, interests, and power of their conservative and nationalist
opponents. Ironically, the Habsburg state also benefited from the victory of liberalism.
It found that constitutional government could augment the authority of the crown by
giving it a broader political base and a parliamentary system that, as Count Eduard
Taaffe’s ministry demonstrated, could even be used against its liberal authors. Despite
its ups and downs, however, liberalism proved remarkably durable.
The basis for this durability was both ideological and structural. As in Germany and
other European states where constitutional monarchy triumphed, in the Austrian half
of the empire liberal concepts of constitutionalism, the rights of the individual, popular
participation in politics, and laissez-faire economics proved broadly attractive, either
wholly or in part, to most segments of the population. Accordingly, these elements of
liberalism were incorporated into the general political culture of the day and survived.
Similarly, the social and organizational structure of liberalism helped to legitimize and
internalize its values within Austrian society through its bourgeois character and dom-
inance in the associational life of the time. As a bürgerlich phenomenon, liberal values
were identified with the prominent accomplishments and prestige of this class, while
as virtually the sole creators of political Vereine in Austria, liberalism constructed a
means of political mobilization that not only helped it to survive but that also became
the model for other political movements and the parties that grew out of them. Austrian
political culture owed a great deal to liberalism, but it was a debt that generated little
gratitude.
Austria’s constitutional system allowed for the growth of mass- and nationality-based
politics, and as they came to dominance the class and ethnic antagonisms that went
with them exerted a transforming influence on liberalism. The Kleinbürgertum and
workers resented the elitist emphasis placed by liberalism on wealth and education,
while non-Germans could not accept German culture and the universalism of liberal
values as synonymous. By the 1880s class conflict, nationalism, and a resurgent con-
256 Book Reviews

servatism were pushing traditional liberalism off the national stage. To survive it had
to adapt. Gradually, liberalism found its refuge in regional politics where it could focus
on receptive German constituencies and a class-based suffrage system that remained
largely untouched by democratic reforms at the national level. Under these circum-
stances liberalism was able to continue as an influential force, but at a price. Its politics
became almost exclusively Germanic and were tinged by ethnic intolerance and anti-
semitism. By 1914 there was little left of the original liberalism that had struggled for
the rights of man and universal progress.
The story of Austrian liberalism is ultimately a sad one, but in the telling of it Pieter
Judson makes it clear that the protagonist was far more dynamic than previous accounts
have allowed. The liberal legacy was so wide-ranging and influential in imperial Aus-
tria, and its essential character so similar to that of liberal movements in other European
societies, that it is hard to justify dismissing it as part of a deviant Sonderweg. Although
Judson’s analysis is impressive, it can also overreach itself. This is most noticeable in
his handling of the Central European concept of the Rechtsstaat. Though he concedes
a role in its development to the preconstitutional Habsburg state, Judson’s definition
of the Rechtsstaat is equated with the liberal creation of 1867. This tends to ignore
how much that creation owed to and was made possible by the preliberal version of
the rule of law already adopted by the Habsburgs in the late eighteenth century. Still,
while Judson’s claims for liberalism may not be all that he asserts, they are convincing
enough that any analysis of modern Austrian history must take his interpretation into
account.

JAMES SHEDEL
Georgetown University

Das Preussische Herrenhaus: Adel und Bürgertum in der Ersten Kammer des
Landtages, 1854–1918. By Hartwin Spenkuch. Beiträge zur Geschichte des
Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, volume 110.
Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1998. Pp. 651. DM 138,32.

Parliamentary upper houses were situated on the byways of nineteenth-century political

developments. Designed in early liberal political theory, following Aristotelian and old
regime–corporate precedents, to limit the influence of popularly (if not always demo-
cratically) elected lower houses of parliament, upper chambers had a wide range of
legal and de facto powers. Hartwin Spenkuch’s book is a study of one of the lesser
known of such parliamentary bodies, the House of Lords of the Prussian parliament,
the Herrenhaus.
Spenkuch frames his work, a revised doctoral dissertation, around an investigation
of the influence of the nobility and the state bureaucracy in the nineteenth-century
kingdom of Prussia, which would dominate the German Empire of 1871. The question
of the relative influence of these groups vis-à-vis the bourgeois middle class is an
important part of the Sonderweg question, the long-running historical debate (in which
Spenkuch’s dissertation adviser, Berlin professor Jürgen Kocka, has been a prominent
participant) about the extent to which modern German history took a separate and
different path from that of other countries in Europe and North America. At first glance,
the Prussian House of Lords, a parliamentary body dominated by nobles and state
officials, would seem like an ideal site for consideration of this debate.
Spenkuch carefully lays out the institutional history of the Herrenhaus from 1850
 Book Reviews 257

to 1918. He explains the different categories of membership—hereditary, for the upper

nobility, elected representatives of specially chosen groups of owners of noble estates,
representatives of the universities and of the municipal governments of the major cities,
and royal appointees. Most of the book is taken up with a collective biography of each
of these different categories of members, including some capsule sketches of individ-
uals whose lives are particularly well documented. The author also explores the power
and influence of the Prussian House of Lords, discussing its activities as a parliamentary
body, its role in shaping legislation, its relationship to the House of Deputies of the
Prussian parliament, and to the monarch and executive branch of the Prussian govern-
ment.
The author would like to argue that the Herrenhaus was a bastion of aristocratic and
bureaucratic power, an example of the domination of the state by prebourgeois elites.
In the end, though, the author, for all his trying, cannot prove that the Prussian House
of Lords was a particularly powerful or even especially active arm of the government.
It rarely altered legislation, coming from the lower house; in fact, it did not meet or
debate very much at all. Spenkuch has a revealing quote from the botanist Johannes
Reinke, a member of the Herrenhaus for the University of Kiel, who was enamored
of his membership in the Prussian House of Lords, because it was completely com-
patible with his professorial duties, since it took so little time.
The author makes a good deal of the upper house’s opposition to liberal legislation
in the early 1860s and 1870s, and even ascribes it a key role in the failure of the “New
Era” ministry of the years 1858–62, Prussia’s brief interlude of liberal government
between the post-1848 reaction era and the appointment of Bismarck as prime minister.
However, his account is not particularly convincing. The upper house’s attempts in the
1860s and 1870s to block legislation concerning real estate taxes and local government
in the domain of the landed aristocracy in East Elbian Prussia were defeated by royal
appointment of just a few additional members. As the author must admit, the failure
of the New Era government, and the modest extent of the liberal reforms of the 1870s,
owed much more to the refusal of the Prussian monarch, and particularly of his military
advisers, to support them than to any opposition from the House of Lords.
It seems rather more plausible to stand the author’s argument on its head. The House
of Lords was a relatively unimportant governmental body precisely because the aris-
tocracy, the bureaucracy, and the military dominated the other parts of the Prussian
government: the lower house, with its plutocratic electoral system and apportionment
of seats favoring rural strongholds of the nobility; the government ministers, appointed
by the king and not responsible to parliament; the armed forces, commanded by the
monarch. Comparisons with other countries would have been helpful, but Spankuch
never gets beyond a few mentions of the upper houses of other German states. He notes
but avoids discussing the struggles of the British House of Lords with the Liberal
government at the beginning of the twentieth century, a discussion that might have
thrown light on the very different situation in Prussia—whose political system ensured
that there would never be an elected liberal government for the House of Lords to fight.
Consideration of the French Senate in the Third Republic and especially the U.S. Sen-
ate—then as today, the most powerful parliamentary upper house in the world—might
have reinforced the idea that weak upper houses rather than strong ones are character-
istic of authoritarian and undemocratic governments.
The book also contains a good deal of information about the members of the House
of Lords that the author employs to support the Sonderweg thesis. He argues, for
instance, that the relatively good economic circumstances of the members representing
the noble landowners shows that the Prussian nobility was in better shape economically
258 Book Reviews

at the beginning of the twentieth century than is usually thought, or that the few busi-
nessmen appointed to the House demonstrate that the government felt no need to pro-
vide honors for the bourgeoisie. In these sorts of arguments, however, Spenkuch pro-
vides no proof that characteristics and circumstances of members of the House of Lords
were representative of broader social groups.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that this book is the result of a dissertation
topic that did not turn out as expected. Investigating the power and influence of the
Prussian House of Lords, the author found relatively little to report. Consequently, he
filled his work with other material. Some of it is trivial, such as his extended discussion
of the architectural history of the House of Lords’ building; some repeats previous
scholarship, while adding little that is new, as in his discussions of governmental crises
in Prussia; and some, such as his forays in the direction of a social history of the East
Elbian nobility—the topic that seems to have attracted the author most—are interesting
fragments of another book altogether. The book as it exists, however, ends up being a
scattered and unconvincing work.

JONATHAN SPERBER
University of Missouri, Columbia

August Bebel: Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften. By August Bebel. 10 volumes.

Munich: K. G. Saur, 1995–97. DM 2072.

August Bebel lived the model bourgeois life: he exemplified solid, loving family re-
lations. He invariably dressed in suit and tie, always maintained a civil comportment,
and succeeded in business and in politics. He lived the work ethic of the bourgeois
ideal, squandered no monies, and built a large fortune. In addition he demonstrated
concern about the miserable situation of women. Yet he remains the monumental figure
of German Social Democracy during its classical era of establishment and growth to a
mass party before World War I. He hoped for and anticipated a social revolution to
alter relations of power and possession. Simultaneously he informed other countries of
the dangers of Prussian military intentions. Will this edition of his speeches, writings,
and letters make the paradox understandable?
According to the short introduction, the intention of the editors was to make available
the “extremely rich political, parliamentary and publicity activities and creations of the
cofounder and leader of German Social Democracy and the path breaker for women’s
emancipation” (1:1). Hence Bebel’s private and immediate social worlds are hardly
touched. This series presents primarily the political man. However, he does emerge as
a man with deep concern for and profound emotional ties to his family, wide-ranging
interests, a profound interest in historical understanding, a desire to encourage the
capable among the next generation, and the presence of mind to see implications in
ideological debates.
Bebel had correspondents in all parts of Europe and the United States. The charming
way he thanked colleagues and opponents for books, exchanged ideas, and carefully
comported himself contrasts with the flightiness of Wilhelm II and the arrogance of
Otto von Bismarck. The latter’s letters may be fuller, but Bebel’s show a deeper hu-
manity and often humility. The letters Bebel exchanged with his wife may help to
reveal even more of the man, and many have just been published separately (Ursula
Herrmann, ed., Briefe einer Ehe: August und Julie Bebel [Bonn, 1997]).
The publication history and technical details of such a large collection often help to
 Book Reviews 259

understand quality of results. The ten volumes, some with two parts (making fourteen
books), average over six hundred pages each for a total of over eight thousand pages.
Some volumes contain texts that are reprints of the German Democratic Republic
(GDR) series where the project commenced in 1970. Out of that early work volumes
1, 2 (in two parts), and 6 had appeared by 1983 with Dietz Verlag. Volumes 3–5,
which had been prepared at the time of German reunification, and volumes 7–10 are
the results of the cooperation and integration of East and West German historical ex-
perts since 1990. Volumes 7 through 10 were edited by the Institute for Social History,
Amsterdam. However, the introduction, prefaces, and most references to secondary
literature in the Dietz GDR-published volumes have been removed and new ones sub-
stituted in keeping with the western German homogenization of the east and the erad-
ication of GDR history.
Volume 1 contains speeches, writings, and letters from 1863 to 1878 with explan-
atory notations, a very comprehensive date guideline to Bebel’s political life from 1840
to 1878 (pp. 656–85), a bibliography of Bebel’s writings, and a bibliography of liter-
ature to which Bebel referred in his writings and speeches as well as an index of
mentioned persons with biographic details. As in all volumes this is done in a thorough,
workmanlike fashion, though the sources for the date guideline are not given and no
subject index offered. Together with the listings in volumes 5 and 9, some 3,375 items
which Bebel authored are identified.
Volume 2 contains speeches, writings, and letters (in pt. 2) from 1878 to 1890. The
same pattern of notations, date guideline to Bebel’s life, bibliographies, and person
index follow the text. Volumes 3, 4, and 5 are a grouping that covers 1890–99 with
the very extensive notes and bibliography to all volumes in volume 5 with the letters.
But the important date guideline to Bebel’s life is absent—rationalized as unnecessary
due to numerous recent Bebel biographies. The continuing lack of a subject index is
frustrating. For example, one cannot readily find Bebel’s inquiry into the conditions of
work in the bakeries unless one has memorized the date of its publication; only the
introduction to that significant early piece of social science research is reprinted in
volume 2, part 1, pages 792–811.
The main editorial introduction to the whole set appears oddly enough at the begin-
ning of volume 3. In fifteen pages it explains the complicated background to the earlier
publication, this reprinting, and what new materials have been utilized to create the
collection. It explains, for instance, that from the 950 known speeches, writings, and
letters from the 1890s, 65 documents and 72 letters have been selected for inclusion
with emphasis placed on Bebel’s role as party leader. A typescript of volumes 3–5
already existed in 1989, and that GDR manuscript formed the basis of volumes 3–5
after editorial review by West German historians. Indeed, the interpretative introduction
that was intended for this part appeared as an article by Gustav Seeber, “Reform und
Revolution, demokratischer Kampf und sozialistisches Ziel: Zur programmatischen und
strategischen Arbeit August Bebels in den neunziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts” (Zeit-
schrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 2 [1990]: 99–113). The new introduction lists the
major biographies (p. 3, n. 6).
The chronological breaks that the GDR historians employed utilized the great events
in the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD’s) history, which were also significant
to Bebel: 1863, the founding of the German labor party; 1878, the beginnings of the
antisocialist laws; 1890, the termination of those laws. After that the cuts were evidently
more difficult to make. No reasons are given by the western editors for choosing 1900
and later dates, or why the memoirs (vol. 6) are placed ahead of Bebel’s major work
on women, which originally appeared in 1879. The study on women is volume 10 (in
260 Book Reviews

two parts, with the original 180-page book as part 1; the 550-page fiftieth reprinting
of the 1909 revised edition is part 2, supplemented by the most extensive and infor-
mative annotations in the series). Would it not have made more sense to go to 1903 in
volumes 3–5, to coincide with the termination of the debates about the revision of
official SPD (Marxist) ideology, since Bebel’s letters and commentary on that important
question end in midstream? His letters from 1898–99, especially those to Konrad
Haenisch, show Bebel wanting Eduard Bernstein to declare himself publicly and “if
[Bernstein] writes his true beliefs, then he would be putting himself outside the party
. . . and we would no longer [have to] consider him to be a party member” (5:114).
Such letters provide a fuller understanding of the personal and political maneuverings
during that party crisis about tactics and fundamental direction. Those letters provide
significant additions to knowledge about Bebel and the SPD.
Volume 6 breaks the chronological pattern and reprints Bebel’s memoirs, covering
the period from birth to 1882. These had first been published from 1910 to 1914 and
have been reprinted numerous times. An appendix contains the original preface and
afterword by Karl Kautsky, who had edited the third part after Bebel’s death in 1913.
Here notations, a bibliography, and index of persons are included.
Volumes 7–9 contain new materials and demonstrate what international cooperation
and access to archival sources can achieve. The documents are drawn from many
archives including those in Amsterdam, Berlin, Switzerland, and Moscow. The letters
in volume 9 reveal Bebel’s clearsightedness on ideology and tactics. By letter he cor-
rected many persons’ comments and claims regarding his writings or statements. He
encouraged younger party members. Above all he kept a watchful eye on party devel-
opments, yet recognized the limits of his own authority. He informed those such as
Gustav Noske when they acted against the interests of the party that they had lost his
confidence. He could tell an executive colleague quite bluntly that she should stop
making scenes and get on with the work. He could explain wisely what tactics would
work under the legal restraints of Imperial Germany. Always the interests of the party
were primary. Yet what is to be made of the fact that hardly any letters are addressed
to the next generation of SPD leaders (Otto Braun, Friedrich Ebert, Hugo Haase, Her-
mann Müller, Philipp Scheidemann, Otto Wels; the last noted in the index to vol. 9
with no page number)? Some exist and they should have been included; others have
been published; collections such as the Bebel-Kautsky correspondence, among other
documentary editions, will have to be consulted in conjunction with this set.
Do the introduction and notes to Bebel’s book on women justify the term used in
the preface about Bebel as “path breaker” on the “woman question”? The introduction
provides a fairly thorough overview of that book’s publication history and its many
translations. However, the editors avoid most of the significant questions—how widely
read was the book, whom did it influence and how? What was Bebel’s impact on SPD
members and the women’s movements with this best-seller that was the most borrowed
book from workers’ libraries? And why has the book disappeared from the conscious-
ness of feminists seeking emancipation in the twentieth century; or, as a recent author
commented, before 1914 the question was “Who has not read Bebel’s Woman?”
whereas today the question is “Who has read Bebel, or even who was Bebel?” (Moira
Donald, ed., Woman in the Past, Present, and Future [London, 1988], p. i). The help
Bebel enlisted with revisions to the later editions is well presented, but the book’s
historical role is not defined. Most hints at answers are buried in the copious notes.
This huge collection provides insight into the massive and thorough amount of in-
formation that Bebel collected, collated, and organized on every issue. Two items stand
out, despite Bebel’s use of a terminology that is now dated. Bebel and his colleagues
 Book Reviews 261

employed a rational approach to political discourse that included informing oneself on

developments in a very precise manner. These socialists convinced their audience be-
cause they were factual (sachlich). Second, the statistical materials that were available
on Imperial Germany were used forcefully to support the socialists’ cause; in fact, the
Social Democrats may have exploited those materials better than have historians of
Germany. Whether on the situation of women in the family or at work, whether on
laboring conditions in other countries, on mortality, or on housing, it was the Social
Democrats who made German public and parliamentary discourse substantive with
statistics and comparisons. Bebel’s writings and speeches are a wonderful demonstra-
tion of how well they did that while asserting their ideals.
This collection is very valuable and useful. Yet solving the paradox of Bebel the
bourgeois—but simultaneously the peace activist, the middle-class radical, and the
patriot with hatred toward aspects of the Prussian-German state—cannot be achieved
with these sources. The public man is stripped bare, but his private soul remains hidden.

DIETER K. BUSE
Laurentian University

Artists and Society in Germany, 1850–1914. By Robin Lenman.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Distributed by St. Martin’s Press.
Pp. xii`273. $69.95.

Robin Lenman’s Artists and Society in Germany, 1850–1914 presents the reader with
a social and cultural panorama of German art and its production during this dynamic
period of political upheaval and social transition. The extended range of its selected
themes defines the book as ambitious in its scope, but the work unfortunately never
acquires the happy balance of content and sagacity that it promises. It is, on the one
hand, an exceedingly well-researched study that raises several issues of interest to
nineteenth-century Germanic studies. It fails, on the other hand, in finding a compelling
and unifying perspective: it sometimes paints complex aesthetic situations and move-
ments with too general a brush stroke.
The weakest part of the book is the introduction, which seems to have been viewed
by the author as the platform to announce his political orientation and to serve as an
apology both for his German subject matter and for art history in general. Thus we
learn, among other less than incisive observations, that during this period the working
class “remained practically invisible to artists” (p. 7), that “some 80 per cent of work-
ing-class incomes were spent on basic necessities” (p. 10), that “women played a far
less prominent role in the art world than men” (p. 12), and that nude female studies
from the 1890s onward—with the exception of those painted by Paula Modersohn-
Becker in 1906—“were created solely by men, and thus inevitably reflected male
fantasies, fears and erotic predilections” (p. 15). The reader knows not whether to be
happy for those workers who were spared the moral indignities of art or to feel shame
for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner!
Occasionally such sermonizing spills over into the main body of text, as when the
author explains that Franz Kugler’s reference in 1837 to Das Volk (the people) really
“meant educated men of property” (p. 34). With friends of art such as Lenman, it would
seem that university presidents might now call for a day of reckoning for art history
departments: both to protect the gullible student against these historical impertinences
and to punish art for its more egregious sins against humanity. On a more serious note,
262 Book Reviews

the reader is left to ponder just how enthused the author is about his chosen subject
matter and whether, with such a defensive attitude, he is able to treat it with any
disinterest or sensitivity.
The bulk of Lenman’s research is focused in the first two chapters, which form the
heart of his study. The first, “History, Art and Nation,” speaks to the national persona
of German art in the second half of the nineteenth century, symbolically centered
around Cologne Cathedral. Here, too, the author’s politics pejoratively informs his
analysis, as Lenman in a somewhat simplified reading collates German artistic tenden-
cies into liberal (good) and conservative (bad) factions.
If large national monuments such as the Walhalla or the colossal equestrian state of
Wilhelm I at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers are always to be decried as
negative symbols of “francophobia, anti-ultramontanism, and, increasingly, anti-
Socialism” (p. 18), the same cannot be said for the Cologne Cathedral, indeed presum-
ably because “Cologne and other large cities were still strongholds of liberalism, and
widely regarded as test-beds for enlightened social and cultural policies” (p. 23). Such
reasoning, however, completely overlooks or downplays the essential religious under-
pinning to the resumption and, in 1880, the completion of the Cologne Cathedral.
Elements of the Prussian bureaucracy or court (prior to 1871) may have seen the ca-
thedral as a (conservative) symbol of national unification, but this was scarcely the
case in the Rhineland where concerns for religious autonomy were always preeminent.
An instructive counterpart to the Gothicists Ernst Zwirner and August Reichensperger
(the two men most responsible for rebuilding the Cologne Gothic work) was Augustus
Welby Pugin in England. The latter preached a return to Gothic building forms and
ways of life not so much for nationalistic reasons as because he sought to reconvert
the Church of England to Catholicism. Here, as in Cologne, there was a militant Goth-
icism, and it was hardly liberal.
A similar confusion surrounds Lenman’s conflation of the altdeutsch (old German)
spirit with Renaissance (Dürerzeit) reforms of the 1870s and 1880s. These two move-
ments were scarcely synonymous; in fact they sprang from very different impulses. If
Georg Hirth and Rudolf von Eitelberger (representing two distinct wings of a very
broad movement) praised Renaissance times and their artistic forms, it was not out of
sentiments of nostalgia or nationalism but because this period represented a cosmo-
politan alternative to a more xenophobic medievalism. Humanism was exalted as a
counterpoint to the altdeutsch Gothic not for stylistic reasons but as a way to wean art
away from controlling tendentious influences. In fact, Hirth (and ideological successors
such as Alfred Lichtwart) was leading a German reform movement within the deco-
rative arts—one that paralleled the efforts of William Morris and Walter Crane in
England but that has received far too little historical scrutiny.
It is when Lenman dispenses with his political facade and lets his scholarship speak
for itself that his work begins to achieve high merit. His sections on museums and
historical painting are to be lauded, as is the entire second chapter entitled “Move-
ments.” The reader now begins to see that the multitude of approaches to German art
in the second half of the nineteenth century were as much affected by regional percep-
tions, schools, patronage, museum directors, and such technical innovations as the
camera as by any aesthetic preferences. Lenman’s important section on realism (as a
prelude to abstraction) is especially to be praised. I would only add that discussions of
abstraction were a part of Germanic aesthetic theory as early as the 1880s and did not
have to await the appearance of a Wassily Kandinsky to foment themselves.
The third and fourth chapters, on artistic centers within German and international
markets, again bring to light much that is new and noteworthy. If the second half of
 Book Reviews 263

the book is disappointing in any way, it is in the little attention that it devotes to the
period 1900–1914. The short epilogue makes an attempt at summarizing the war years,
but, between the trends of impressionism and realism and such a phenomenon as Max
Berckman’s series Hell (1918–19), there is indeed an almost unbridgeable chasm in
artistic sensibilities and media selection. Perhaps if nineteenth-century German art can
one day be analyzed without the dissimulating filter of the 1933–45 period, on its own
historical terms, this gulf may be bridged. Lenman’s book makes a contribution to this
end, but its political assumptions lead it to fall short.

HARRY FRANCIS MALLGRAVE

Getty Research Institute for the
History of Art and the Humanities

The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World
War. By Ute Daniel. Translated by Margaret Ries. The Legacy of the Great War.
Edited by Jay Winter.
Oxford: Berg, 1997. Pp. xii`343. $18.50.

The 1989 publication of Ute Daniel’s Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft elicited

deserved acclaim in Germany. Taking on the virtually unexamined topic of working
women and the home front across Germany in World War I, Daniel brought to her
work a blend of social scientific and “experience”-oriented methodologies, bringing
the contours of home front society to life. The study addressed above all the “eman-
cipatory” quality of women’s wartime experience, as measured through work and fam-
ily life, for its implications beyond the war years. This important volume, now in
translation, is a welcome addition to the others appearing in the series “The Legacy of
the Great War.”
Daniel carefully examines the circumstances of women’s engagement in wage labor
during the war. Observing that taking standard sources such as insurance contribution
lists at face value has misled earlier inquiries, Daniel asserts that women’s participation
in the labor market did not after all undergo an enormous increase during the war years.
Rather, she notes, the changes were primarily structural: women moved out of home
work into factory work, out of the “peace” into the “war” industries, out of jobs defined
as female into positions men had occupied before the war. Insofar as there was an
increase in women’s participation in the labor market at all, it fit the trend begun
decades before the war. The great structural transformations were, Daniel notes, tem-
porary, rapidly undone by demobilization as soldiers returned and demanded their jobs
back, with the blessing of government, industry, and organized labor alike. The book
makes clear, moreover, the limits of “advantages” to women even during the war: even
increased wages never kept up with inflation, and the wartime lifting of protections for
working women subjected them to difficult and often treacherous conditions in, among
other industries, munitions and gunpowder factories. Unsalutary conditions only grew
worse as the military government tried to coerce women into war factories from late
1916 on. This was so despite the lavish bureaucracy of women’s services that developed
under the military administration. Conversely, the military government was ultimately
unsuccessful in meeting its own ambitious wartime goals of replacing potential soldiers
through women’s labor, as women demonstrated independent-mindedness in refusing
war industry jobs or switching from one factory to another when their own needs were
not met.
264 Book Reviews

Daniel then turns to the setting of the family, taking on the latter’s role as site of
reproduction and of production/consumption. Here she asserts that the reproductive
role of the family was severely diminished as a consequence of the war, while the
family’s role in production and consumption was heightened. Daniel claims that “the
family” was moreover politicized, and that efforts to counteract this politicization were
unsuccessful. The chapter looks first at the effective physical breakdown of the family,
through examination of fertility, sexuality, communication between spouses, child rear-
ing, and the “socialization” of older children into society. Daniel observes a notable
drop in the number of marriages consummated in wartime overall which, coincident
with the death or absence of so many husbands, left increased numbers of women
living alone. This inspired public fear and sometimes resentment, as in, for example,
the case of women who received Family Aid in their husbands’ absence and seemed
thereby to have greater disposable income for luxuries. Authorities particularly seemed
afraid of the potentially transgressive sexual activity of women whose husbands fought
on the front, denoting any such activity as prostitution, punishable by law. Relations
between married people were carried out largely through the “letters of lament,” as
authorities called the letters that traveled through censors between home and war fronts,
through which spouses wrote of the misery of their material conditions on both these
fronts, and through which a deepening alienation was visible as the spouses endured
their separate difficult circumstances.
The drop in fertility, like the situation of women living alone, created public tensions
and provided yet another arena for the government to intervene in women’s lives. This
applied finally as well to the socialization of youth, on whom authorities imposed
“forced savings” plans, on the logic that mothers were incapable of disciplining their
working children to contribute appropriately to the family economy. Here again, Daniel
notes, these youth sought ways to subvert government efforts and retake control of
their income. Despite the wartime changes the author observes, she again notes con-
tinuities. A declining rate of fertility and rising numbers of youth populating the streets
and spending their money on new leisure activities began well before the war; public
concern about both trends preceded the war as well.
Continuing the chapter on family, Daniel looks at the family’s role in consumption
and production, and particularly at government policy concerning this activity. Daniel
takes up the issue of Family Aid to soldiers’ wives in greater detail, tracing its devel-
opment as a “moral” requisite from the mid-nineteenth century. Despite such support,
soldiers’ wives, along with other working-class women and families, were forced to
rely primarily on growing their own food and on acts illegal under the wartime con-
trolled economy, including barter, hoarding, and theft, in order to feed themselves under
the wartime food scarcity. The official economy, planned in principle to aid in equitable
distribution of food and other necessities, became only one more means through which
officials sought to penetrate and control the lives of working women and their families.
The book then moves to a brief chapter entitled “Meaning Endowment” (Sinnstif-
tung), where Daniel makes an argument for working women’s ability and desire to
distance themselves from government propaganda and from the coercive demands of
the dominant culture in wartime. The author asserts this on the basis of these women’s
deficit of investment in the dominant culture from before the war began, a function of
their lack of contribution to it and even of their ability to receive it. She also observes
working women’s aloofness on the basis of the society’s inability to serve their needs
in wartime, providing inspiration to songs, jokes, rumors, and other alternative means
of communication that served to challenge officials’ best efforts at propaganda. Daniel’s
final chapter summarizes the book, posing anew the questions of the “emancipatory”
 Book Reviews 265

effects of the war for working-class women, and of women’s powers of resistance to
the rallying cries of the regime and its increasing intrusiveness. Her conclusions high-
light the ambiguity of the war experience on both counts.
This is an illuminating study, a broad brushstroke offering a wealth of information and
important challenges to received interpretations of German women’s wartime experi-
ences, such as they exist. I wish that Daniel had done still more of what she says she
will do, a concern that must be qualified by the impressive scope of the study. Her claims
to show women’s own perceptions of and participation in this story could have been still
more strongly supported. Discussion of working women’s sexuality moves rapidly to
public and official concerns for that sexuality. Promised discussion of child rearing and
of relations among mothers and children devolves quickly into examination of fertility
and mortality. The poignant observation that the relative lack of rise in children’s mor-
tality probably related closely to compromises to their mothers’ health, and the description
of difficulty in obtaining child care while working a factory job, don’t tell us enough.
When Daniel uses them, the “letters of lament” provide invaluable insight into women’s
own perceptions, motivations, and real-life circumstances; one hungers to hear more from
this unique source, which emerges little compromised by the censors’ pens. Some better
sense of change over time even within the four years of war might also have been
desirable. The argument for continuities with and changes from the preceding and fol-
lowing periods needs to hinge on a sense of transformation in the course of the war. But
the book’s examples often move without comment from early to late war. While Daniel
clearly recognizes the role of the military regime in shifting the political and social
landscape in midwar, for example, the reader does not see this so well.
My most serious criticism concerns the “translation” of this book into English, in all
the senses of the word. The German style of chapter and subchapter notation does not
work as it is adapted: the book is divided into six chapters, but the middle two, concerning
work and family, respectively, are each approximately a hundred pages; the others, around
twenty. The two central chapters are filled with a hierarchy of subchapters and sub-
subchapters meaningless to an American audience, all the more without the numerical
notation used in the German original. Daniel has made minor cuts for the English edition
and has expanded the very useful bibliography to include work that has appeared since
the original. But frequent footnotes that reference the original German edition seem odd.
Her new, brief forward asserting that her approach is now much more accepted than it
was in 1989 will appear perplexing to a general Anglo-American audience of later de-
cades. This speaks to where cuts might far better have been made: in the lengthy tracts
throughout the book defending its methodology. The long summary conclusion might
also have been usefully trimmed. The translation, here in the most literal sense, from
German to English, is a distraction on every page. This important study deserved better.

BELINDA DAVIS
Rutgers University

Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich. By David Clay
Large.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997. Pp. xxv`406. $32.50.

David Clay Large’s evocative image of ghosts walking in the streets of Munich is
effective, perhaps the more so as several meanings are available to the reader. Before
considering other important issues raised by the title, I think it is important to praise
266 Book Reviews

Large’s narrative style. I am tempted to say that Large writes in such a vibrant way
that his “ghosts” actually come alive in the process. His narrative is both quick-moving
and exciting, providing the reader with a substantial amount of information and de-
scription. I have no doubt that it will satisfy many readers, while leaving a good number
of professional historians uncomfortable with what is missing.
What is “missing” from Large’s narrative? To begin with, his book really only
describes the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement (less so the party), concen-
trating as much as possible on what took place in Munich. Problematically, much that
took place in Munich depended on events far away, and these are either described
briefly or alluded to, with an unconscious assumption of knowledge of these events, in
order to keep the focus on Munich. Large includes some new material in his study, but
most of it is well known to historians and students of the period.
Ironically, what is missing, primarily, is Munich. Both the “where” of the title and
the protagonist (“Munich’s road”) are lacking. Of course, the word “Munich” recurs
on every page and nearly every paragraph. The role of the governmental, political, and
artistic leaders of Munich is described in varying detail with the imputation that this
is “Munich” acting. But, with the exception of a few pages of matter early in the work,
there is no extended treatment of the city as such, of its citizens, taxpayers, subdivisions,
neighborhoods, or, for that matter, internal political structures. The reader is left asking
what this city was like, what the people were like and what they wanted. No matter
how interesting the descriptions of Schwabing may be, this is only one small part of
Munich. Would such material have added to the narrative? Perhaps not. Indeed, it might
well have meant a very different book. But this book does not deliver what the title
indicates.
What decisions did Munich make? Was Munich a protagonist? As much as this was
a major element in the postwar world in retrospect, it plays little role in Large’s treat-
ment of the twenties and thirties. With the emphasis on Hitler and the Nazis, Munich
and Bavaria and the citizens of both become, in this narrative, essentially reactive. Here
the Nazis are the agents of change, not the city fathers of Munich. If the message is
that Munich allowed itself to be dragged along in the wake of the jackbooted Nazis,
as one finds on occasion in the text, that ought to be emphasized. But, if this is an
accurate portrayal of Munich, then the image of the “road” in the title ought to be
changed.

JAMES F. HARRIS
University of Maryland

Die NSDAP auf dem Dorf: Eine Sozialgeschichte der NS-Machtergreifung in

Lippe. By Caroline Wagner. Geschichtliche Arbeiten zur westfälischen
Landesforschung Wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtliche, volume 11.
Münster: Aschendorff Münster, 1998. Pp. 285. DM 58.

Microhistories appeal to researchers because of their manageable scope and the interest
they evoke from local foundations, publishers, and historical associations. In the Ger-
man academic establishment, it is not untypical that graduate students conduct their
dissertation research as aspects of larger projects organized by their advisers. In this
genre, Caroline Wagner has combined a wide variety of social-historical methodologies
into a technically impressive research project on the social bases of Nazi Herrschaft
(domination) in Lippe, a diverse, independent enclave within Prussia. Also typical of
 Book Reviews 267

this genre, however, she has mostly reiterated insights from comparable studies. Mi-
crohistories may provide local evidence in support of conclusions drawn from national
studies, but they should also do more.
At the start of each section, on Lippe as a whole or on one of its villages, Wagner
recites precise voting statistics that do not significantly alter existing interpretations;
the thrust of her work lays after 1933 in any case. Rejecting the myth of a “seizure of
power,” she traces the infiltration (durchsetzung) of Nazi Herrschaft into this locality
over the course of the 1930s. Conceptualizing this process in terms of party institutions
and membership, she argues that the Nazi party was, by and large, an organization of
the independent, old middle classes. In addition to the bureaucrats and teachers who
joined for professional reasons, the “typical” Nazi functionary in Lippe was a farmer,
master artisan, merchant, or small-factory owner. Due to the survival of a relatively
high percentage of personnel files in Lippe’s archives (10 percent), Wagner was also
able to qualify these statistics with biographical accounts. Most of the local party
functionaries had quite unremarkable career paths: in spite of service in the Great War,
they were undisturbed by under- or unemployment and often achieved social status in
the career of their choice. Sticking close to conventional wisdom, she concludes that
these functionaries were social climbers. Threatened by the specter (but not the reality)
of proletarianization, they strove to better their status through the Nazi party (pp. 110–
16, 162).
Two groups especially were discontented in the villages of Lippe: nonlocals (teach-
ers, pastors, seasonal workers) and the adult heirs of farms or businesses. They faced
an established elite that wielded authority on the basis of residence, nativeness, own-
ership, and social and kinship networks: most notably, the owners of large farms
(Großbauern). Wagner argues that these “fields of social conflict” (pp. 18–19) facili-
tated the recruitment and expansion of the Nazi party but also set its limits. Both the
old and new elites could join the Nazi party as a means to preserve or challenge the
local power and status of their competitors.
Catholics were reluctant or slow to support the Nazis, but Wagner argues, interest-
ingly, that they still “sought arrangements with the Nazi party” in ways that ran sur-
prisingly parallel to their Protestant neighbors (pp. 257, 89). That revision notwith-
standing, her overarching contentions follow theories of modernization. She compares
“communal” patterns of village life to the alienation of modern “society”—democratic
or fascist. She concludes that the Nazi party infiltrated the villages of Lippe by offering
power and status to disenfranchised groups, effectively “modernizing” village life. Yet
this infiltration also found its limits in village “traditions”: the social authority of old
elites and the cultural traditions of local independence (pp. 177, 251–56).
Her conceptual problems stem from the term “infiltration.” Wagner defined local
party functionaries as “the actual mediating agent[s] between party and society,” re-
sponsible for the infiltration of Nazi ideology and Herrschaft into a locality that had
been a “closed-off living and working community” (pp. 71, 75, 119). Political lead-
ership was certainly a condition for Herrschaft, but it was not a sufficient one. Herr-
schaft also necessitated a fundamental transformation of social and cultural life on the
part of ordinary people as well as party functionaries, such that the villagers of Lippe
realized fascist principles in their daily life. Wagner hints at this when she finally
escapes the tyranny of statistics and weaves the motives of social climbers, the pressures
of dictatorship, and the fields of social conflict into an intriguing account of local events.
At the heart of her account stand cultural struggles expressed through informal, sym-
bolic practices like greetings, oaths, singing, uniforms, flags, trees, “voluntary” contri-
butions, newspaper subscriptions, hunting rights, and so on. Yet she treats these prac-
268 Book Reviews

tices dismissively, as mere reflections of more essential social dynamics (see pp. 130,
259).
Such symbolic acts of conformity or nonconformity are part of a long-term cultural
process of negotiating status and power, a process that we should theorize and histor-
icize, not naturalize.1 Wagner makes precisely this error in her argument that a “tra-
ditional” culture of insularity enabled villagers to resist Nazi “politicization” (pp. 20,
56). A poststructuralist perspective that looks at such categories of experience histori-
cally would suggest instead that these elites “re/invented” such “traditions” as part of
their strategy for preserving authority in new historical circumstances,2 and that the
Nazi “infiltration” and the elite defense of “tradition” belonged in fact to the same
cultural-historical contest for Herrschaft in the locality.
Such an approach would help Wagner come closer to the historical reality of life
during the Third Reich. She admits that conformity and nonconformity to the Third
Reich coexisted in the same life histories. Yet she dwells so much on examples of the
latter at the expense of the former that the villagers of Lippe (especially the
Großbauern) emerge from her account as if they were the victims of a Nazi invasion
from beyond their villages—a “pretension for power” that they resisted due to the
strength of their “traditional” social and cultural mores (pp. 141, 170, 249, 258). She
even claims that the villagers of Lippe stood outside ethical questions of participation
or resistance because their habits and rules of daily life were so deeply ingrained that
they could not think outside of those parameters (p. 259). Wagner paints the villagers
of Lippe in their own romantic motif, as if they actually did live in rural isolation,
political naı̈veté, and ethical innocence.
In reality, Großbauern reaped the fruits of forced labor and their sons helped Hitler
fight “Asiatic barbarism.” Neighbors denounced each other and made “racially inferior”
neighbors unwelcome, whereupon they were deported to their deaths. Wagner mentions
such acts of collaboration only sparsely and never integrates them into her conclusions
(pp. 171, 187, 192, 213, 215–16, 246–48). Perhaps this oversight resulted from the
kind of sources she utilized—party personnel records—which tend to report acts of
nonconformity more than conformity. Still, this oversight prevents Wagner from com-
ing to grips with the essential nature of Nazi Herrschaft in the locality. Local tactical
conflicts did not prevent but actually helped the Nazis advance toward their long-term,
strategic goal: the racial reorganization of Europe.
Wagner’s work is impressive in its statistical and biographical detail. Yet it suffers
from the institutional context in which it was produced, one in which historical jour-
neymen are expected to research within the frameworks, both organizational and
conceptual, of their masters. Moreover, events in the locality cannot be treated as
epiphenomena of historical processes emerging from the national center. Good mi-
crohistories—like those written by Mack Walker, Rudy Koshar, and Alon Con-

1
Following Martin Broszat, “Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus,” Mer-
kur 39, no. 5 (May 1985): 373–84; Heide Gerstenberger, “Alltagsforschung und Faschismus-
theorie,” in Normalität oder Normalisierung? Geschichtswerkstätten und Faschismusanalyse, ed.
Heide Gerstenberger and Dorothea Schmidt (Münster, 1987), pp. 35–49; and Oskar Negt and
Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Pro-
letarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1993).
2
Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773–97;
and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
 Book Reviews 269

fino3 —show how local, everyday dynamics also influenced national and world-
historical events.

ANDREW STUART BERGERSON

University of Missouri—Kansas City

Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich. By Neil Gregor.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xii`276. $30.00.

Daimler Benz has not had a fortunate history—in a double sense. In the first place, the
political story of the activities of one of Germany’s largest armaments producers and
employers of slave labor is scarcely one that is likely to be very appealing for the firm’s
current self-image. And, second, histories of the firm have until now been very unsat-
isfactory. There was an “official,” authorized history in the 1980s that simply glossed
over or whitewashed any problematical episodes from the 1930s and 1940s (Hans Pohl
et al., Die Daimler-Benz AG, in den Jahren 1933–1945: Eine Dokumentation [Wies-
baden, 1986]). Then, in large measure as a response, there was a radical counterhistory
(Karl-Heinz Roth et al., Die Daimler-Benz AG, 1916–1948 [Nordingen, 1987]), which
Neil Gregor dismisses, perhaps rather too harshly, as “deeply unscholarly and polem-
ical” (p. 4). Bernard Bellon’s Mercedes in Peace and War (New York, 1990) dealt
mostly with labor relations and treated the Second World War as an epilogue, the final
and logical outcome of Daimler’s prior history. The controversial issue of slave labor
was the subject of an extensive and competent recent German study (Barbara Hopmann,
Zwangsarbeit bei Daimler-Benz [Stuttgart, 1994]). Compared with these predecessors,
Gregor’s work certainly provides some modest improvements and supplements. Instead
of seeing the Second World War as the end of a tradition, Gregor looks at it as a
beginning of a new trajectory.
Gregor is mostly concerned with two historiographical debates, which form a perhaps
rather rigid casting mold for his argument. The first is rather well worn: the role of the
National Socialist era in the longer term continuities and discontinuities of German
history, and particularly the question of how far National Socialism acted as a mod-
ernizing force in a fundamentally premodern society. In regard to the history of a
company, this means not only investigating the emergence of a consumer market in
the 1930s but also making an inquiry into how far production for war set the foundation
for production in peace. There is some fascinating material in this account on how the
postwar future, and the economic miracle of the 1950s, already formed an increasingly
large part of the firm’s wartime planning. According to Gregor, the firm looked less at
the contemporary politics of National Socialism than at securing the postwar future.
But during the war this meant a desire to produce at all costs, even if this meant the
hyper-exploitation of slave labor and an internalization within the firm of the regime’s
racist ideology. The best and most revealing chapters of Gregor’s work concern the
slave labor issue and demonstrate turn by turn the influence of supply factors (the large
number of Russian prisoners from the fall of 1941; labor shortages from the summer

3
Mack Walker, German Home Towns (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971); Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local
Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986); Alon Confino, The Nation
as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).
270 Book Reviews

of 1942 as a consequence of the destruction of human life; shortages that required a

better treatment of the firm’s slave labor) and demand (the worsening treatment at the
end of the war, as Allied bombing raids reduced the capacity for output). These chapters
irrefutably reveal that the firm actively sought the recruitment of slave labor: it was
not just acting on government or party “orders.” At the same time, a puzzle remains
regarding the general argument that planning for the future involved production at all
costs, as Gregor acknowledges that the firm spent little on new investment in plant at
the end of the war, when a rational calculation about the incipient inflation might have
required such a “flight into real values.”
The second debate that Gregor uses to situate his work is a much more technical
one, about the extent to which Germany’s industrial tradition implied a dependence on
general rather than universal machine tools, which limited the capacity for rapid war-
time mobilization (especially by contrast to the United States, with a tradition of spe-
cialized machine tools). Gregor observes ways in which the use of low-skilled foreign
(slave) labor required a revision of traditional German managerial priorities and helped
to lay a foundation for postwar success. Here again, he is concerned to show exactly
how National Socialism brought about economic modernization.
These two arguments, and the extensive documentation of the slave labor issue, are
interesting. But unfortunately the book does not succeed in providing an overall history
of the company in this era. To start with, the title is misleading: the book deals chiefly
with the war years, while the 1920s (as a prelude) and the peacetime years of the Third
Reich are dealt with rather superficially. There is little on how the firm and its invest-
ments were financed, or the extent to which these decisions were influenced by state
policy. The author is very interested in trucks—where the production could be switched
relatively easily from civilian to military use and then back, and which thus fit in nicely
with his general thesis—but not in tanks, which are mentioned only in passing. He is
also not really concerned with technology, or with technical developments, which are
crucial for a firm of this kind. He thus offers an extensive discussion of aero engines,
but it is in terms simply of numbers of engines produced. The critical issues of the air
war—the speed of planes, and the height at which they could operate—are not con-
sidered. Gregor’s work can thus no more claim to be a successful history of the com-
pany than the previous works, whose conclusions he dismisses. The partial and spotty
nature of the history also limits the extent to which he can really hope to solve the big
historical problem of National Socialism and modernization, and the relation of wartime
planning and production to the postwar Wirtschaftswunder.

HAROLD JAMES
Princeton University

Demokratische Erneuerung unter dem Sternenbanner: Amerikanische

Kontrolle und Verfassunggebung in Bayern 1946. By Barbara Fait. Beiträge
zur Geschichte des Parliamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, volume 114.
Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1998. Pp. 618. DM 138,32.

The success of the Bonn Constitution, or “Basic Law,” in the democratization of post–
World War II Germany has long overshadowed the individual state constitutions that
were initiated by the U.S. Military Government only nine months after the total sur-
render of Nazi Germany. As Fait points out in this impressive Habilitationsschrift on
the drafting of the Bavarian constitution, these constitutions of the three southern Ger-
 Book Reviews 271

man states of the American Zone, which were all in force by the end of 1946, in fact
laid the essential foundations for the 1949 Basic Law and successful constitutional
democracy in Germany. She argues that it may, in fact, have been the cooperative spirit
peculiar to the first postwar year or so, when Germans were still under the shock of
Nazi tyranny and its total collapse, that allowed the members of the constituent assem-
bly to look past specific party goals toward the shared principles of democratic con-
sensus and compromise, which are essential for good constitutions. This was particu-
larly striking in Bavaria where the Christian Social Union (CSU) actually had a solid,
if internally often divided, majority in the constituent assembly and yet sought con-
sensus with the other large party, the Social Democrats, who in turn forewent insisting
on the full measure of their own socialist program.
For Fait, the other key to the successful constitution is the wise and discreet posture
of the American Military Government, which exercised its influence through informal
suggestion and persuasion whenever possible—a policy that General Lucius D. Clay
ordered and fiercely defended against zealous local occupation officials and Washing-
ton. She concurs here with recent scholarship, which, in contrast to the New Left works
of the 1970s and early 1980s, has stressed the essential American contribution to Ger-
man democratization. Oddly, she does not acknowledge, in contrast to her impressively
comprehensive German bibliography, essential scholarship in English that has elabo-
rated this point, except for Jean Edward Smith’s Clay biography (Lucius D. Clay: An
American Life [New York, 1990]). Daniel Rogers’s Politics after Hitler: The Western
Allies and the German Party System (New York, 1995) especially dovetails directly
with her argument about political parties, and Edward N. Peterson’s The American
Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory (Detroit, 1978) anticipated, albeit in a
much-simplified summary form, the skeleton of Fait’s conclusions on Clay’s posture
and his battle with local military government and Washington in the chapter, “Letting
Bavarians Do It Their Way” (pp. 214–70).
Fait’s is not the first book on the making of the Bavarian constitution, but it is the
first full account of the fascinating processes of the initial American command, the
early drafting, lively debates, and final realization of that document. Her approach,
which leads the reader through the main stages of the constitution’s evolution by
topic, is most effective and regularly intersperses thoughtful reflections about the
political process, the extent and nature of the American control, and the Bavarian
understanding of democracy at the time. The big issues of debate were the electoral
system, the extent of economic planning and nationalization (socialization), and the
peculiarly Bavarian hot topics of schools separated by religious denomination, an
upper house of notables, and a state president who was to symbolize Bavarian au-
tonomy. Beyond an obvious all-Bavarian consensus for a strongly federalist future
Germany, the parties reached quick agreement on essential questions like a bill of
rights, the role of family, the extent of gender equality, and the civil service. Issues
of worker codetermination, economic planning, and socialization were largely set
aside. Oddly, the most hotly contested cause was that of the state president. While
this quasi-monarchical position was ultimately voted down by the narrowest of mar-
gins, it and the inclusion of a rather powerless “Senate” of notable citizens spoke
volumes about the essentially patriarchal/authoritarian conception of democracy,
which all postwar Germans shared for at least another decade, but which was par-
ticularly strong in Bavaria. Even after a popular vote only in February 1998 to abolish
the anachronistic Senate, this elite body is still fighting its demise in court at present.
Yet, as Fait argues convincingly, these paternalistic democratizers were genuinely
determined to create a democracy by “educating the people.”
272 Book Reviews

Even though there were fiery partisans of socialism among Social Democrats and
Communists and of free-market capitalism in the CSU (Johannes Semler’s Economic
Policy Committee), the majority of constitutional delegates, like most postwar Ger-
mans, were ready for pragmatic cooperative solutions to overcome the dire economic
crisis. Class divisions and other interest-group lobbying remained strikingly subdued
in the Bavarian constitutional debates. Fait identifies the farmers’ association as the
most vocal and successful lobby, whereas the labor unions were not able to organize
until the fall of 1946. Even when the socialization debates and labor’s demand for equal
representation on economic policy bodies heated up the following year, which the book
does not cover, the main proponents, labor unionist Andreas Piehler and Social Dem-
ocratic Economics Minister Rudolf Zorn respectively, always sought pragmatic solu-
tions in the interest of economic reconstruction. Fait even believes that Americans,
including Clay, were genuinely ready to accept noncommunist socialism, although her
evidence here is hardly conclusive. As elsewhere in Germany, Bavarians favored tra-
ditional corporatist socialism, above all agricultural and artisan cooperatives.
The book’s last major chapter draws a most sensitive and convincing picture of the
nature of the American “control” over the creation of the constitution. The supervision
was a remarkably skillful, subtle, and self-restraining process, which clearly contributed
greatly to the long-term success of democracy, as Clay predicted it would. Fait sees
Clay’s motivation as primarily economic—an enlightened American self-interest in the
face of rising occupation and European reconstruction costs. Unfortunately the written
records on the American role in constitutional drafting in Bavaria are particularly slim,
so that, despite the apparent promise of the title, the book could not substantially revise
or confirm what we have known about the extent of U.S. pressure. All in all, this is an
excellent book and an essential contribution to our understanding of democratization
in Germany and the vital American contribution to that project.

DIETHELM PROWE
Carleton College

The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany,

1945–1956. By Patrick Major. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by R. R.
Davies et al.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xiv`335.

In the annals of inept politics, the program issued by the Communist Party of Germany
(KPD) in 1952 certainly deserves a prominent place. Amid the glimmers of economic
revival and democratic stability, the KPD called for a “national liberation struggle
against the American, English and French occupiers in West Germany, and for the
overthrow of their vassal government in Bonn” (p. 139). These kinds of statements
propelled the KPD, once the pride of the Communist International and still a significant
force in the immediate post–World War II years, into political irrelevance. It had
become an appendage, not even of Moscow, but of lowly East Berlin. By the time it
was officially banned in 1956, the KPD had lost even its most fervent pockets of support
in the Ruhr and the Bergisches Land.
Patrick Major’s book is one of very few scholarly studies of the KPD in the Federal
Republic, certainly the first that uses to full advantage the archives opened since 1989.
One wonders immediately whether there is any point to a study of a party and move-
ment that failed abysmally, that degenerated into a mere sect. But such fears are quickly
 Book Reviews 273

allayed. Major’s broadly cast study goes beyond the party itself to explore the political
culture of the Federal Republic and the shifting character of German society in the
1950s. Major demonstrates that the fate of minor parties can illuminate far larger his-
tories, especially when that party is the focus of such exaggerated fears on the part of
ruling elites. In terms of its own aspirations, the KPD failed, yet its existence proved
critically important in shaping the West German consensus of the 1950s and 1960s.
Antifascism was an essential component of the official, legitimating ideology of the
German Democratic Republic (GDR); anticommunism played an even more powerful
role in the Federal Republic.
After an introduction to the KPD in Weimar and Nazi Germany, Major begins his
study proper with the reconstitution of the party after the end of World War II. Often
forgotten today is the KPD’s initial success in a number of the old, classic bastions of
the labor movement, like Remscheid, Solingen, and Hamburg and the Ruhr towns of
Bottrop and Gelsenkirchen, among others. The KPD won significant support in Landtag
and works council elections, and in virtually every Land the KPD held a few ministries.
Party members dominated labor representation in a few mines in the Ruhr and won
substantial backing in large factories that, in the Weimar Republic, had proven virtually
impenetrable.
The initial successes were fleeting, however, and the bulk of Major’s book consists
of analyses of the KPD’s various and sundry failed campaigns—for unity with the
Social Democratic Party (SPD); opposition to remilitarization; the “People’s Congress”
movement for national unification; opposition to the ban of the party. With the use of
effective quotations, the author shows that many old communists were still attached to
the militant, proletarian cult of struggle that had characterized the party in Weimar,
and they proved singularly unable to adapt to the changing realities of West Germany
in the 1950s. Moreover, the old proletarian milieu, already under siege in the 1920s
from the lure of mass commercial culture, and in the 1930s and 1940s from Nazism
and total war, decomposed further in the 1950s. Yet the party’s activists could only
repeat old, tired slogans, and displayed little desire to form coalitions with nonprole-
tarian groups or to accept the burgeoning consumer culture of the West. Even cam-
paigns that did have widespread appeal, like those against rearmament and membership
in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, foundered on the KPD’s blanket support of
Soviet military policy. The party’s organizational fetishism, a charge Major continually
levels, could hardly attract a population that felt it had already been over-organized in
the twelve years of the Third Reich. Most fatally, the KPD could never free itself, never
even wanted to free itself, from the stigma of association with the German Democratic
Republic and the Soviet Union. The GDR’s Socialist Unity Party set the KPD’s poli-
cies, decided on the tactics, and bankrolled the efforts. More ominously, in the context
of the repressive wave that moved across the Soviet bloc in the early 1950s, the Socialist
Unity Party (SED) purged the KPD and subjected some West German communists to
imprisonment and torture.
In his analysis, Major continually challenges cherished notions on the right and left,
which he substantiates through his detailed local and archival investigations. Sentiment
in favor of SPD-KPD unity right at the end of the war was exceedingly fragile; common
suffering in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald could not erase the profound political and
social divide between socialists and communists. Anticommunism had deep popular
roots in Germany and was never simply a manifestation of Christian Democratic or
American manipulation. Moreover, U.S. and British intelligence agencies and the West
German government were well aware of the grave weaknesses of the KPD, and for
most of its legal existence, the party actually pursued quite moderate policies. The
274 Book Reviews

move to ban the KPD served Chancellor Adenauer’s political goals, especially his
unceasing drive to isolate the SPD, which he happily lumped together with the KPD.
Yet the ban undermined the democratic principles enshrined in the Basic Law and
placed the Federal Republic in league with such stellar regimes as Antonio de Oliveira
Salazar’s Portugal and Francisco Franco’s Spain.
In the end, Major sees the KPD’s failure as a result of a complex of factors: the
party’s unwillingness even to consider independence from East Berlin; the anticom-
munism that served as the central ideology of the Federal Republic; the changing
character of West German society, to which a communist party with a bunker mentality
had little to offer; and the internationalization of politics in the aftermath of World War
II, which made communist representation even in a small mine a focus of concern far
beyond the boundaries of the Ruhr, the Land North Rhine–Westphalia, and the Federal
Republic. With this multicausal analysis, Major has produced an intelligent study not
just of a small communist party, but of the formation of German politics and society
in the aftermath of total war and in the context of cold war.

ERIC D. WEITZ
University of Minnesota

Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. By Jeffrey Herf.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. 527. $29.95.

This study makes an important and fascinating contribution to our understanding of

contemporary Germany. It traces the way in which the Holocaust was addressed in the
public life of West and East Germany, mediated through the statements of selected
German political leaders. Jeffery Herf’s verdict on them is often startling yet invariably
impressive and well founded.
Herf begins by asking why post-1945 German politicians embarked on a public
discussion of the Holocaust given the strength of popular support for Nazism (and their
need to gain and retain public support), and why that discussion was different in the
two German states. Before providing answers, he analyzes the words used and the
differing outcomes they were intended to design. His fundamental thesis is intended to
surprise: it was the West German rather than the East German leaders who made
restitution to Jewish survivors and to Israel a core policy for a post-Nazi German state—
surprising, since it was East Germany, rather than West Germany, that declared its
origins and its enduring purpose to be “antifascist.”
While valuing Konrad Adenauer’s personal propriety and his insistence that repa-
ration be made both to Jewish survivors and Israel, Herf follows Joerg Friedrich and
Norbert Frei in regarding Adenauer as overcautious about the possible dangers of pun-
ishing war criminals, and overkeen to peddle amnesties and pardons for serious crim-
inals under the pretext of “letting the past be the past” (p. 271). In contrast, Kurt
Schumacher (often critical of Adenauer’s alleged “weakness” in dealing with the
“frightful tragedy of the Jews” [p. 273]) and Theodor Heuss are in Herf’s eyes more
forthright and thus effective in ensuring the fact of the Holocaust was unmistakably
etched into postwar German politics.
As for the East Germans, Herf is at his most revealing when he describes the mis-
erable line adopted by leading German Communists toward survivors, and their hound-
ing of the few (most notably Paul Merker) who made a stand for the Jews and the State
of Israel. As early as October 1945 Jenny Matern accused Jewish Germans of behaving
 Book Reviews 275

in a “special and unfortunate” way (implying that they were simply after money)
(p. 83); Jewish property confiscated by the Nazis, and taken over by the Commu-
nists, was neither returned nor compensated for; Jews were repeatedly vilified for being
hostile to socialism. By 1948 the Socialist Unity Party (SED) could state, “If we rec-
ognize the collective claims of the Jewish state, we are also recognizing the claims of
the leaders of trusts and monopolies” (p. 91). Herf is surely right to call this “a persis-
tence of anti-Semitic discourse” (p. 93).
Taking the story to the present, Herf praises the Social Democratic Party (SPD)
for its readiness to confront the issue of unpunished Nazi war crimes (although he
properly chides Helmut Schmidt for a 1977 speech at Auschwitz which failed to
mention it was a death factory for Jews). While showing justice to the unfortunate
Philipp Jenninger, Helmut Kohl (who voted against abolition of the statute of limi-
tations for war crimes) and Ronald Reagan are given very short shrift (“Reagan’s
Bitburg comments were noteworthy for their ignorance, sentimentality and cynicism
. . . no American President had so badly misunderstood the links between memory
and politics” [p. 354]). Kohl’s apparently contorted attitude on Bitburg and Israel
deserves greater discussion.
All provocative theses are selective, and gaps are inevitable. Adenauer’s attitude, as
Frei has shown, seems less culpable when set in the sinister context of a real fear of
Nazi resurgence, the persistence of antisemitism, and both a Roman Catholic and a
Protestant backlash against war crimes trials, all compounded by bitter opposition to
his policy on restitution from within his own government. The Free Democratic Party
(FDP) leader Thomas Dehler, whose own party was being increasingly subverted by
old and new Nazis, was a particular threat, as was the Christian Social Union (CSU);
Herf does not merely misspell the justice minister’s name, but mistakes his party,
making him a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) member rather than a CSU man,
thus underplaying the institutional implications of his line. What is more, Adenauer
knew he could count on the United States and Britain to do what he believed the
Germans themselves would never do: decisively criminalize Nazism.
Perhaps, too, Herf overstates the interpretational weight given to East Germany’s
apparent antifascism. Was it not always clear that it was never anything more than a
cynical attempt to create an alibi for the brutal Stalinization of East Germany, and for
an ongoing program of human rights abuses (which, in some respects, suggest a con-
tinuity between the Third Reich and East Germany)?
Despite some truly irritating errors in the spelling of proper names and a propensity
to wordiness and repetition, Herf’s concept of “memory” will prompt persistent fruitful
debate. Do states actually have a “memory” (rather than a “history,” or a propagandistic
interpretation of one)? Is it correct to regard a state as a concrete political entity,
definable and to be reconstructed chiefly from the public statements of political leaders?
Even if such a “memory” does exist (and Herf seems entirely convincing in his con-
fident assertion that it does), is it “memory” with which we should engage, or the
tangible policies and options used to wrestle with, and move on from, bitter and evil
pasts? Germans were subjected to three kinds of policy in this area: retribution through
judicial punishment, the bartering of truth for justice, and forgetting the truth altogether.
Had West Germany’s political class spoken with one voice and supported timely justice
early on, the Federal Republic and the victims of the Third Reich might have found
inner peace more rapidly. On the other hand, democracy, even the reinvented and
managed democracy of Bonn, had to deal with Germans the way they were, or risk
destruction. In this sense, circumlocution and an initial ambivalence toward a full dis-
closure of Nazi racism may, paradoxically, have created today’s German political class
276 Book Reviews

which is so much more mindful of its obligation to history than its post-1945 prede-
cessor. Limited “memory” has been turned into fuller recognition.

ANTHONY GLEES
Brunel University

Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the

Twentieth Century. By Rudy Koshar.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xiv`422. $59.95 (cloth);
$24.95 (paper).

Old buildings are often cited as evidence of the distance between past and present. The
disposition of such buildings thus becomes a measure of attitudes toward history and
change. That sense of change is essential to modernity, as Rudy Koshar defines it. He
argues further that nationality is a constitutive element of modernity. Koshar shows
how buildings have been held up as a measure of various group identities—class,
gender, regional, even European—but especially of the German nation. His book ex-
amines historic preservation from the 1890s to the 1970s. The several changes of regime
during that time raise the question of continuity, or lack thereof, in national identity,
and Koshar makes that question central to his book. By combining a concrete focus—
historic buildings and sites—with a long view, it enriches and complicates the often
abstract discussions of German national identity.
The focus throughout is on preservationists, their organization and activities, with
evidence drawn from all over Germany but especially from the Rhineland. Koshar reads
preservationist discourse through the lens of recent debates about German national
identity; he is interested in responses to buildings rather than the buildings themselves.
For Koshar preservation grew out of the “formation of a national optics” (p. 23) of
monuments, architecture, and landscapes. In its origins he sees a bourgeois desire to
measure the growing difference between past and present—an attempt, in other words,
to measure progress. Preservation was thus a part of, not the opposite of, modernity,
part of a discourse of “bürgerlich hopefulness” (p. 22) that sought to link a cherished
past to a turbulent present.
The book’s first three chapters, on the periods before, during, and after the First
World War, develop some themes familiar from other recent studies of the German
bourgeoisie and professions: an educated elite trying to bring order to a turbulent culture
and to establish its own authority; a desire to educate the public tempered by a mistrust
of the masses; after 1914, an attempt to harness the preservationist cause to that of the
bellicose nation; and in the Weimar Republic, a hesitant accommodation to democracy
and party politics on one side and their radical nationalist critics on the other. In chapter
4, with the coming of the Third Reich, questions of continuity become thornier. Koshar
describes a “privileged marginality” in which preservationists continued their work
amid a greatly expanded official emphasis on German heritage. At the same time,
however, Nazi reverence for the German past radicalized preservation by putting the
past entirely in the service of a new racial utopia, thus abandoning both the bour-
geoisie’s reverence for the past and its modernist agenda of progress. Koshar uses
preservationist activities to argue persuasively that an understanding of the relationship
between modernity and Nazism requires abandoning the “nineteenth-century dichoto-
mies of progress and reaction” embodied in the term “reactionary modernism” (p. 153).
He does not, however, offer a new formula to replace it.
 Book Reviews 277

The year 1945 was one of abrupt transitions that challenged efforts to maintain a
national memory. Once again we find continuity in the form of preservationist person-
nel and thus of practices, but new challenges arose from wartime destruction, compli-
cated by abrupt changes of regimes and of borders. Preservation is always a matter of
selective memory, but for the postwar years that selection takes on an urgent moral
charge, for Koshar as for many other observers. The last three chapters of the book
observe the continuing preoccupation with the price of modernity as well as the ad-
aptation of Heimat discourse to a more individualistic era, but Koshar always returns
to the question of the Third Reich’s place in German memory, even if the preserva-
tionists he studies do not. The postwar fascination with iconic German buildings, ruined
or intact, served to write the Third Reich out of German history but also to embrace
the national traditions out of which Nazism arose. While the preservation efforts of the
1950s and 1960s typically insisted on the normality of the German nation, their “po-
tentially critical perspective” (p. 287) could, as German politics changed, yield to
newer, more critical assessments of the place of Nazism in German history. This was
largely a West German discourse; Koshar draws on examples from the German Dem-
ocratic Republic mainly for comparison.
The book’s wealth of detail supports both the chronological narrative and numerous,
interwoven arguments. Although theories have clearly informed his choice of material,
Koshar relegates them to the background; the book puts forward less sweeping theo-
retical arguments than some of the author’s earlier articles on preservation. The result
is a book that demands, but repays, close reading. The title argues against the fixity of
national memory: the many and varied attempts to preserve German icons paradoxically
reveal the indeterminacy of national memory. But Koshar also argues against the idea
that national identities are as transitory or “imagined” as castles in the air. Buildings
acclaimed as historic are among the symbols that mediate such identities, which are
rooted in specific places, objects, and social relations.
Most important among these roots were the efforts of educated bourgeois, a century
ago, to give their society some fixed points of identity. Koshar traces this bourgeois
agenda, including its mistrust of the masses, into the postwar era, even in East Germany,
and even as it was modified by a broadened constituency for monuments, by links
between preservation and new political movements, and by attention to the relics of
Nazism. Koshar shows that some trends widely believed to be recent, such as a broader
definition of monuments and the role of tourism in promoting preservation, are actually
as old as the century. His long view, and his attention to preservationists as the insti-
tutional bearers of memory, show how every German regime of this century has vari-
ously manipulated similar impulses. He thus cautions against the proliferating refer-
ences to “invented traditions,” arguing that the symbols of national identity are rarely
invented abruptly or out of whole cloth. Nationality may be a fiction, then, but it is not
an arbitrary one.

BRIAN LADD
American Academy in Berlin
278 Book Reviews

Politique et culture en Russie, 18e–20e siècles. By Marc Raeff. Studies in History

and the Social Sciences, volume 65.
Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, with the assistance of the
Goodbooks Foundation, 1996. Pp. 288. 150 F.

During all of Marc Raeff’s university career in the United States, he maintained very
close ties of collaboration and intellectual exchange with Russianists in France. This
collection of studies first published between 1952 and 1993 testifies to his creative
contributions to Russian historiography in French. In a short preface, the author himself
indicates that their common denominator must be sought in the political and cultural
history of Russia, long marked by the “conflict between ideas drawn from abroad and
practices elaborated by the institutions of the state” (p. 5).
Raeff first attempted to reconcile the opposition between ideas and practices in his
doctoral thesis, in which he examined the active participation of second-generation
Slavophiles in reform efforts and the work of preparing the emancipation of the serfs.
His analysis of the empiricism and pragmatism of Jurij Samarin (chap. 1) allowed him
to explore the case of a system of thought which became increasingly removed from
its starting principles, opening the way for a “revision of former prejudices and theories
which no longer respond to contemporary needs” (p. 19). He located the moment of
transition between abstract, purely doctrinal discussions and the consideration of in-
stitutional forms of Russian byt, judged according to the observation of real conditions
and historical factors. For Samarin, the peasant commune was first of all an economic,
not a political unity. Although he continued to use the terminology of Slavophiles, for
him the commune ceased to be a “question of principles,” an “article of faith,” and
became a “technical problem of agrarian economy and social policy” (p. 19).
But it was especially when he began his study of moderate reformer Michail Sper-
anskij’s ideas (see Michael Speransky, Statesman of Imperial Russia [The Hague,
1957]) that Raeff examined the problem of the duality of sources constituting the
political culture of Russia in the nineteenth century (chaps. 2–3). Alexander I’s sec-
retary of state understood that institutions must reflect the attitudes and the state of
mind resulting from the historical development of the country, since the “true nature
of government” is determined not by “exterior forms” but by “social and cultural re-
ality” (p. 30). This view led to the task of giving a solid base to the nobility and creating
a natural hereditary elite, the first step toward the stratification of a society that was
still composed of members deprived of rights in relation to the sovereign. Speranskij
shared with his contemporaries an increasing attention to the notion of historical evo-
lution and organic development. He saw this as the surest guarantee of a solid insti-
tutional restructuring: “The political life of a nation . . . must be the expression of a
system of values and fundamental principles which germinated in the spirit of the
people over succeeding generations” (p. 31). But reform plans remained completely
ambiguous, an ambiguity directly related to “the contradiction between ‘liberal’ goals
and autocratic methods of realizing them” (p. 38). Russia’s political tradition was that
of an “interventionist” state that adopted a “globally Russian” (vserossijskij) point of
view in its legislative, judicial, and administrative practices, ignoring regional condi-
tions, local problems, and particular needs. On the other hand, elites had only a vague
knowledge of the reality and traditions of the country and little technical and profes-
sional knowledge. Influenced by the abstractly rational and universalistic opinions of
the Enlightenment, they sought solutions in terms of a general theory or absolute prin-
ciples, instead of following a pragmatic and evolving empiricism.
The idea of a fundamental contradiction between a “system of ideas” and a “system
 Book Reviews 279

of values” is at the center of an essay devoted to the history of the circle (kruzhok)
around Andrej Turgenev and his friends (chap. 5). At the dawn of the nineteenth cen-
tury, a new generation broke suddenly with the ones that preceded it, denouncing the
coexistence of an individualist, rationalist, and utilitarian vision with that of blind
submission to the authority of the monarchy. The search for personal identity was
conducted by returning to the national element, aiming for self-realization through
service to the community, in an organic line between people and nation. But Raeff also
strongly emphasized the complex relationship established between different sources of
Russian culture. Thus, invoking the new possibilities for research revealed by the works
of E. Haumant (on French influences) and E. J. Simmons (on English influences), in
“Les Slaves, les Allemands, et les Lumières” (chap. 6), Raeff attempted to take into
account the “new historiographical orientation” formed in East Germany with the
school of E. Winter, and he welcomed the idea that Russia’s principal means of access
to intellectual modernity had been represented by the Ostpolitik of Aufklärung.
Later, the insistence of nineteenth-century writers on the specific characteristics of
a nation and its civilization led Raeff (chap. 9) to become interested in Anatole Leroy-
Beaulieu (1842–1912). Leroy-Beaulieu was the heir of a tradition that—starting with
Montesquieu and using a method progressively refined by Mme de Staël, François
Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville—considered any country in relation to its geo-
graphic, climatic, and historical situation in order to discover the psychological traits
and moral qualities of its population, as well as the particular nature of its institutions.
Nevertheless, this pioneer of Russian studies in France avoided the danger of deter-
minism. His analysis of the reciprocal action of religious, social, and economic factors,
on the one hand, and political structures, on the other, established the basis of a plu-
ralistic investigation in which each element is only “one factor in a complex relation”
and “constantly in the process of transformation” (p. 193). This method was deeply
indebted to sociology and anthropology, and was thus extremely attentive to the de-
velopment of social structures and rich in consequences for the history of “mentalities”
of the Russian people. Raeff also stresses the “chronological perspective” (of long or
medium duration) which led him to contend that nineteenth-century Russia was only
comparable to western and central Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: “The
particular character of Russia’s social and political organization and its religious life
cannot be explained by a supposed Slavic or Russian soul, but rather by this gap in
time” (p. 195).
Another area of interest highlighted by this collection (chaps. 10–13) is that of Russia
“beyond the frontiers”: the million and a half citizens who found refuge after the
Bolshevik revolution in several European states (particularly France, Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, and Germany). The author was himself a child of this emigration,
which he considers still an integral part of the nation from which it was obliged to
separate itself. This zarubezhnaja Rossija not only represented itself in different host
countries as a historical and geographic “extension” of the home country, but became,
thanks to numerous creative personalities, a “significant” element in the intellectual
evolution of the West between the two world wars (p. 216). Moreover, during several
decades, Russian émigrés were capable, in an effort common to ecclesiastical institu-
tions and secular schools, of preventing “denationalization” of new generations, safe-
guarding representative bodies, guaranteeing cultural production and exchange between
communities, and favoring the conservation and transmission of their historical, reli-
gious, and linguistic heritage. Raeff is not very interested in the political attitudes of
the émigrés (although one of these articles examines their press in relation to a vitally
important event in French life between the two wars: the Popular Front and the first
280 Book Reviews

government of Léon Blum). In general, he considers the political choices of émigrés

to have only a “marginal” role for the historian of culture (p. 239), thus tending to
privilege philosophy and history, along with literary and philosophical-religious de-
bates. But if he accords a great importance to religious elements in the reflection of
elites on Russia’s “past,” it is because he is convinced that it is impossible (even
“inadmissible”) to disassociate “secular thought (political and social) and religious
thought (moral and philosophical)” (p. 286) in Russia’s intellectual history. One can
surely subscribe to his claim that “there has been little study of the works of émigrés”
and that interest in their culture, especially in philosophy and literature is, all things
considered, quite recent (p. 238). Raeff himself filled this gap with his Russia Abroad:
A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990). It is
nonetheless necessary to add how much the specifically historical sciences have been
underestimated and to hope for large-scale investigations of the work of these intellec-
tuals, who settled during the course of the 1920s in the principal European centers of
emigration (from Prague to Belgrade) and pursued their researches on Russia’s history
and who were often measured along with the genealogy of events by which they were
overtaken.

ANTONELLA SALOMONI
University of Siena

La secte russe des castrats. By Nikolaı̈ Volkov. Originally published 1929.

Translated by Zoé Andreyev. Introduction by Claudio Sergio Ingerflom. Histoire.
Edited by Michel Desgranges and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995. Pp. lxiii`168. F 140.

Khlyst Sekty, Literatura i Revoliutsiia. By Aleksandr Etkind. Novoe literaturnoe

obozrenie nauchnoe prilozhenie, number 12.
Moscow: Kafedra slavistiki Universiteta Khel’sinki/Novoe literturnoe obozrenie,
1998. Pp. 685.

The publications of Aleksandr Etkind and Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, and the reprinting
of Nikolai Volkov’s 1929 study, represent welcome contributions to a much-needed
exploration of the nature and function of religion in Russian history. Each examines
the linkages between religion and revolution at the turn of the century; unveils the
historical experiences of Russia’s “mystical” religious sects; places Russia’s experience
with Christianity into the larger context of European Christendom; and provides a
window onto questions of sexuality and the body in Russian culture. In addition, their
studies reveal the porous boundaries and mutual influences between “high” and “low”
culture, the secular and sacred, and among different religious groups in Russia.
For all they have to offer, however, both of these books are disappointing in their
own ways. They suffer from a tendency to explore complex events and processes in
Russian history solely through the lens of revolution. Moreover, while Etkind and
Ingerflom utilize a cultural approach to history, they do so in a way that neglects the
important question of how cultural systems were translated into, or interacted with,
social, political, economic, and religious practice. Finally, Etkind and Ingerflom make
only halting steps toward exploring popular religion on its own terms and through its
own voice. Too frequently, the religious nonconformists are denied agency, acted on
by elite culture and political power.
 Book Reviews 281

In Khlyst, Aleksandr Etkind has produced a momentous tome in which he explores

elite discourse about Russia’s “mystical” religious nonconformists in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Etkind draws on a vast and impressive source base of
archival and published materials. He also brings to bear a phalanx of theoretical ap-
proaches from literary criticism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, gender studies,
cultural theory, sociology of religion, and anthropology. While doing so, however, he
consciously places himself outside the parameters of these disciplines, able to dabble
when he wants but unbound by the rigors or conventions of any one scholarly tradition.
Etkind makes clear from the outset that his is not a study of the sects per se. Rather,
Khlyst is an exploration—a Foucauldian “archeology of texts” (p. 6)—of the percep-
tion and cultural appropriation of these sects by Russia’s Silver Age elites, and how
these appropriations then fueled and channeled revolution in Russia. He writes, “This
is the history not of events, but of people and texts and their relations with each other”
(pp. 4–5). For Etkind, “texts” are the motor forces of history. “Russian literature,
philosophy, and political thinking do not mirror the Russian revolution. The opposite
is in fact the case: Revolution is accomplished first in texts and from there sees itself
in its historical reflection” (p. 21). In making this argument, Etkind asserts that the
opposition of Russian intellectuals to both Enlightenment rationalism and the influence
of the West in Russia led them to a fascination with the folklife of mystical sectarians.
Russian elites drew on these folk religious beliefs to develop the cultural and political
texts that, in turn, generated the Bolshevik revolution (pp. 675–77). The author argues
that by “sacralizing the people, problematizing social and gender relations, inviting
readers to the Apocalypse, Russian Symbolism constructed models for the transition
from nineteenth-century folk utopia to the ideological utopia of the twentieth” (p. 676).
Etkind succeeds admirably in demonstrating the profound preoccupation with the
sects of Russian cultural elites and revolutionary intellectuals, and here he makes a
substantial contribution to the historiography. Following a lengthy series of thematic
sections, Etkind dedicates a chapter to twenty-five leading cultural and political figures,
such as V. S. Solov’ev, V. V. Rozanov, A. A. Blok, A. Belyi, M. Gorkii, M. I. Tsve-
taeva, G. E. Rasputin, and V. D. Bonch-Bruevich. Each of these elites latched onto, at
times imagined, particular characteristics of these sects—communalism, pacifism, non-
traditional family structures, and sexual renunciation, for instance—and then utilized
these constructed realities to suit their own cultural needs and interests. He makes clear
that the sects, as mediated by Russian elites, became a mutable and multivalent site
with enormous cultural resonance in high-culture circles.
However, Etkind is far less successful in his efforts to provide a reevaluation of the
revolution. Despite clear erudition and careful readings, Etkind fails to show the mech-
anisms through which high culture and political action interact—the transition from
“literary polemics” to “armed formations” (p. 676)—nor does he demonstrate the cru-
cial links between text and revolution, and cultural vision and social change. The
causes, course, and fate of revolution in Russia remain only faintly tied to Etkind’s
discussion of elite fascination with religious dissent and the “texts” that this syncretism
produced. Etkind would have done well to learn from the successes and failures of
scholarship that explores cultural-political connections with regard to modernism and
fascism.
Moreover, despite all of his research, Etkind’s narrow focus on revolution precludes
him from tackling other rich themes raised in his work, particularly in regards to Silver
Age history. One wonders what Etkind could have illuminated about this vibrant period
of Russian (and European) culture if he had engaged more directly with the nexus
between the sects and other cultural concerns—“religion, nationality, . . . , poetry, sex-
282 Book Reviews

uality” (p. 5)—that the author himself acknowledges were dominant preoccupations
of the period. While Etkind is interested in questions of sexuality, for instance, he does
not undertake a broad discussion of how the body was understood, or the ramifications
of such constructions in Russian social and cultural life. Similarly, Etkind’s assertion
that “in Russia the relations of intelligentsia and people represented a special variant
of colonization and later decolonization” is intriguing but also frustrating for the lack
of detailed evidence and in-depth explication (pp. 59–60). Repeatedly these sorts of
morsels are thrown out to the reader, but they simply whet the appetite rather than
satisfy it.
Nikolaı̈ Volkov’s La secte russe des castrats was written in the late 1920s in the
Soviet Union and only recently translated into French. His work is an ethnographic
and historical investigation of the religious community known as the Castrators
(Skoptsy in Russian), so-called because of their conviction that the road to salvation
depended on abstinence from sexual relations through male and female castration.
Claudio Ingerflom introduces Volkov’s study with an extended and thought-provoking
essay, “Communistes contre castrats (1929–1930).” Ingerflom suggests that Volkov’s
book functions on two levels for contemporary readers. On the one hand, it is a source
of information about the little-known world of the Skoptsy. On the other hand, it is an
artifact of the interaction between Soviet power and popular religiosity in the late 1920s.
During these years, the fate of religious dissenters took a turn for the worse, and Volkov
himself was directly involved in trials against, and formulation of policy toward, the
Skoptsy.
As an entrée into Skoptsy history, La secte explores a variety of topics: the origins
of the sect in Russia, its religious beliefs and practices (especially prayer meetings and
ritual dances), methods of recruitment, daily life, and the perilous situation in early
Stalinist Russia. His analysis of the different stages of castration (including first-hand
accounts and photographs) is particularly gripping. Importantly, Volkov included pre-
viously unpublished songs, prayers, and oral testimony collected during lengthy eth-
nographic field research.
As an artifact of Soviet history, Ingerflom raises two issues for us to consider when
reading Volkov. First, he examines “the connections between the castrators and Russian
culture” and demonstrates that “those who practiced the specific rite of castration re-
ferred to conceptions and beliefs that were shared by large sectors of the population
and were constituted from the common fund of Russian religious culture” (p. lvi).
Second, Ingerflom attempts to “decipher the dialogue between communist power and
the sect in ways other than in terms of simple repression of religion or of practices
against the law, such as the amputation of organs” (p. xvi). Here he makes three primary
arguments. First, the Skoptsy represented a destabilizing force in Soviet society in the
late 1920s because they challenged the idea of rational progress. Second, there was
significant variation in how Soviet intellectuals and bureaucrats viewed the Skoptsy,
evolving from toleration among early Bolsheviks toward repression. Third, Ingerflom
illuminates a process by which Soviet efforts to weed out religious forces ironically
ensured their longevity. Through antireligious texts, non-Soviet notions of society and
polity were indirectly appropriated by, and preserved in, Soviet discourse. In the cul-
tural seepage between Soviet goals and Skoptsy visions, Ingerflom finds nothing less
than “the failure of modernity in Russia” (p. lvii). Unfortunately, the author does little
to flesh out this far-reaching assertion, or to define what he means by modernity in the
Russian context.
While Ingerflom expands our understanding of the dynamics of Soviet authority, his
essay could have benefited from an examination of Soviet treatment of the Skoptsy in
 Book Reviews 283

the larger context of European constructions of sexuality, gender, the body, and human
rights. The dilemmas posed by the Skoptsy’s insistence on castration were not unique
to the Soviet Union, nor were they simply an instance of Soviet authority attempting
“to destroy all structures which united people horizontally” (p. xii). Ingerflom misses
an opportunity to use the Skoptsy as a vehicle to explore the boundaries of the body,
and the rights and responsibilities of individuals in twentieth-century Russia and Europe
to dispose of their bodies as they might choose.
Overall, Etkind, Ingerflom, and Volkov make significant and insightful forays into
Russia’s religious past. However, their omissions and shortcomings remind us how
much further Russian historiography must advance before the role of religion in Russian
history is adequately understood.

NICHOLAS B. BREYFOGLE
The Ohio State University

Russia through Women’s Eyes: Autobiographies from Tsarist Russia. Edited by

Toby W. Clyman and Judith Vowles. Russian Literature and Thought. Edited by
Gary Saul Morson.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. x`393. $35.00.

The study of Russian women writers has only recently come into its own, and the
situation with regard to available source material is changing so rapidly that the picture
has already altered since the appearance of Russia through Women’s Eyes in 1996. As
the editors acknowledge in their “bibliographical note,” some major survey works have
been issued since the preparation of this volume (notably Catriona Kelly’s A History
of Russian Women’s Writing, 1820–1992 and her Anthology of Russian Women’s Writ-
ing, 1777–1992, both Oxford, 1994, and Joe Andrew’s anthology Russian Women’s
Shorter Fiction, also Oxford, 1996). This, however, does not detract from the essential
value of this book, which makes accessible for the first time in English translation the
autobiographical writings of eleven nineteenth-century Russian women. Rather, the
primary documents reproduced here should both support recent work on Russian cul-
tural history and, as the editors hope, supply a set of standard texts that will inspire
more analytical and comparative investigation of Russian women’s writing and auto-
biography, a large and largely untapped body of work.
The texts assembled in this anthology belong to the genre generally known these
days in the West as autobiography, although they originally appeared under other head-
ings as well—reminiscences, memoirs, notes, family chronicles—and thus much of
their value lies in their contribution to literary history. In the Russian context, however,
the relevant term is “documentary literature,” reflecting the substantial documentary
value that has traditionally been assigned to memoir writings. Not included in this
collection are diaries or private letters; the works that were chosen are significant partly
because as published documents they helped to shape the context in which women
wrote. The authors are women from various social backgrounds and walks of life,
certainly equal in stature and interest value to most of the better-known women auto-
biographers in nineteenth-century England, for example (the likes of Elizabeth Sewell,
Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Humphrey Ward). The list of authors includes, among others,
Varvara Kashevarova-Rudneva, the first woman to obtain a physician’s degree in Rus-
sia; Natalia Grot, the wife of Nicholas II’s tutor and renowned scholar Iakov Karlovich
Grot; and Liubov Nikulina-Kositskaia, a former serf who became a successful and
284 Book Reviews

influential actress. Several professional writers are also represented, including Na-
dezhda Sokhanskaia, Sofia Khvoshchinskaia, Emiliia Pimenova, and the turn-of-the-
century best-selling author Anastasiia Verbitskaia.
Like their authors, the texts themselves vary widely; the selection is intentionally
representative of the several strains of autobiographical writing that flourished in Russia
during the nineteenth century. Among these are family histories, childhood autobiog-
raphies, school autobiographies, and professional accounts. In order to preserve the
integrity of the texts, shorter narratives were chosen where possible; six of the selections
are given in their entirety, and five are excerpts from longer writings. The editors, who
are known for their work on Russian women writers, readily acknowledge that the
recovery and presentation of these texts is basically a feminist enterprise. Yet they shy
away here from any sort of theorizing in realms feminist or aesthetic. What emerges
as a common thread among the texts, then, is the social-historical context they share.
The editors are correct in noting that while Russian women’s autobiography has many
points of contact with life narratives written by women in the West, there are also
important differences resulting from the social and cultural climate in which the writing
and reading took place. Increased acquaintance with Russian women’s writing should,
in fact, spur some rethinking and adjustment of general, universalizing theories of
women’s autobiography based on Western European norms.
Written between 1847 and 1910, and published mainly in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, these autobiographies amount to a dialogue in which various
opinions and accounts of women’s experience during this period can be heard. Many
of the writings, including those not belonging to the “school autobiography” type,
focus on women’s education, perhaps the single most significant issue involved in
the so-called “woman question,” and therefore important in both a personal and a
public context. Another common theme is the clash between the possibilities these
women saw open to them in the progressive intellectual atmosphere of the late nine-
teenth century, and the traditional cultural conceptions that still governed women’s
lives. Ekaterina Slanskaia’s vivid accounts of her visits in the capacity of a public
physician to the urban poor of St. Petersburg provide some fascinating contrasts
between old and new ways.
The translations themselves are smooth and accurate, rendered in colloquial (Amer-
ican) English. By necessity some of the emotional nuance of the original Russian is
lost, yet the texts have not been homogenized and still retain much of their distinc-
tiveness. In addition to the introduction, which provides a basic overview of both
women’s writing and the autobiographical tradition in Russia, the editors have
supplied brief prefaces to each text. These are extremely useful in providing di-
gestible information on the author’s biography, career, reception, and situation in the
literary tradition. The autobiographies are lightly annotated, so that the notes give
enough information about specific cultural references to be helpful to nonspecialists,
without the scholarly apparatus overwhelming the stories themselves. One minor
complaint might be that the notes were evidently prepared separately along with the
individual texts, and thus they are not coordinated with one another. Bibliographical
references, both primary and secondary, for each text, as well as a selected bibliog-
raphy of nineteenth-century Russian women’s autobiographies in Russian and En-
glish, situate these eleven autobiographies in the cultural context of women’s pub-
lication in nineteenth-century Russia, and provide points of departure for further
investigations.
In sum, Russia through Women’s Eyes is a well-assembled and elegantly presented
collection of valuable documentary literature. It should be of interest to students of
 Book Reviews 285

Russian culture and history, and important as well to non-Russian-reading scholars of

women’s studies and autobiography.

CAROLYN J. AYERS
University of Groningen

Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921. Edited by Edward

Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi`782. $59.95.

The turmoil brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union also affected the founda-
tions of historical research. Of course there were some scholars who had predicted,
some time ago, the eventual collapse of the “totalitarian system.” But these predictions
were not borne out by the course of events: who would have imagined that the party
leadership itself, in the latter half of the 1980s, would take up the cause of “perestroika,”
of “reconstruction,” and take the first steps toward putting the country on a course of
more democratic, free-market development? Further, the observers who put their faith
in the explanatory powers of “social history,” who expected to find one of those mass
social movements that are supposed to condition and even determine the actions of
individuals, also had a hard time with the Gorbachev era. For it can hardly be denied
that the “masses” themselves reacted to, rather than determined, the course of events.
Where groups actually did take to the streets, they did so for the most part not for the
sake of political or social programs such as a right to participate or higher wages. On
the contrary, they were busy resurrecting the supposedly long-deceased, prerevolution-
ary “national past.” They demanded autonomy, even independence from Moscow. That
development, too, conflicted with the established theories of social history.
The perplexities provoked by the Soviet Union’s abrupt demise quickly came to
engulf its historical beginnings, the revolution and the civil war. Symptomatic of the
loss of perspective was a new, grandly one-sided synthesis that once again sought to
reduce all the events of the revolution to political history and a history of ideas. At its
center stood the Bolsheviks, Lenin and his supposedly rigidly organized cadre party,
as though more than twenty years of intensive research in social history had not long
ago undermined this very thesis. But adherents of the opposing point of view were
equally perplexed. They wondered whether an excessive emphasis on social history
had led them to pose the wrong questions, or to portray a false “discourse.” Some went
so far as to begin to doubt the verifiability of “reality” at all. It should be mentioned,
too, if only in passing, that the perplexity and uncertainty felt by historians with regard
to the Soviet past were, and are still, experienced much more profoundly in the former
Soviet Union itself.
That being the case, one may fairly describe the present volume as extremely wel-
come. It proposes no new explanation of the revolution or of the civil war years. Rather
it draws together, in some seventy individual articles, what is currently known about
these events, all that international research has been able to bring to light in the course
of recent decades. The span of issues included is broad. The reader will be grateful for
the fact that the editors, following an introductory section, have organized the essays
not in simple alphabetical order but rather into seven topic areas. After the introduction,
the second section focuses on “The Revolution as Event,” examining in eight individual
essays the course of events from the world war and the February and October revolu-
tions, through the civil war and the foreign intervention, and up to the tenth party
286 Book Reviews

congress and the inauguration of the NEP. The third section devotes similarly detailed
attention to “Actors and the Question of Agency.” In addition to Chernov, Kerensky,
Lenin, Martov, Trotsky, Tsereteli, and Spiridonova, individual essays are also devoted
to Miliukov, Nicholas II, and the generals of the White Army. “Parties, Movements,
Ideologies” are the subject of the fourth section. In addition to the “traditional parties,”
from the cadets to the Bolsheviks, one also finds the anarchists and the left-communist
opposition to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. Section 5, the longest in the book, describes
“Institutions and Institutional Cultures.” Among its sixteen articles one finds “The
Soviet State,” “The Cheka,” “The Constituent Assembly,” “Education, Schools and
Student Life,” “Family, Marriage and Relations between the Sexes,” “The Press and
the Revolution,” and even “The Russian Orthodox Church,” just to give some indica-
tion of the breadth of the topic. There is some overlap with the material of section 6,
whose subject is “Social Groups, Identities, Cultures and the Question of Conscious-
ness.” Here can be found discussion of the various social groups and social strata, from
the aristocracy to the working class, as well as such topics as “The Emigration,” “The
Women and the Gender Question,” and “The Role of Ritual and Symbols.” Section 7
is the briefest of the book, with only three essays. Surely this is not because “Economic
Issues and Problems of Everyday Life” is a less significant topic. Some of the relevant
issues are admittedly discussed in other chapters. Nevertheless, this is an area where
there is still much to be learned. The eighth and final section is concerned with the
subject of “Nationality and Regional Questions” from the Baltic to Central Asia. For
a long time, this topic remained relatively untouched by students of the revolution. In
light of the actual events of the late 1980s it has now come to occupy center stage.
Many of the recent national movements drew on traditions that had fallen into obscurity
during and after the revolution.
For all the individual essays, the editors have succeeded in attracting recognized
experts, so there is no need to single out particular contributors for special mention.
Not one of the articles seemed to me superfluous. On the contrary there are some
additional topics I regret not seeing included: in the third section on “Actors” some
mention of the bourgeois politicians (L’vov, Guchkov, Tereshchenko, Nekrasov); in
the fourth section on “Parties and Movements” a discussion of the right wing of the
political spectrum; in the fifth section on “Institutions” an examination of the economic
and judicial structures; and, finally, any mention at all of art and literature. Complete-
ness, however, is an impossible goal, and these omissions in no way diminish the value
of the book. It will be useful to all who have an interest in the Russian Revolution and
its issues, both as an accurate reference work and as a stimulating collection of readings.
It will also be suitable in academic settings. In the interest of fairness and accuracy one
ought to call attention to one matter not sufficiently stressed in the editors’ confident
preface. This compendium on the Russian Revolution is not the first of its kind. In
1988 Harold Shukman published The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolu-
tion. One year later George Jackson (in collaboration with Robert Devlin) brought out
a scarcely less voluminous work entitled Dictionary of the Russian Revolution. Some
of the authors who contributed to those volumes reappear in the new companion.

HELMUT ALTRICHTER
University of Erlangen
 Book Reviews 287

Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish

Homeland. An Illustrated History, 1928–1996. By Robert Weinberg. With an
introduction by Zvi Gitelman.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. ix`105. $55.00
(cloth); $19.95 (paper).

As a group, the Jews of the new Soviet Union posed a serious ideological problem for
the regime. Too many made a livelihood in ways that were anathema to communism—
over a third were involved in trade. Their integral role first in the feudal and later in
the capitalist economies of Poland-Lithuania and the Russian empire had not always
been recognized as “useful,” and certainly not by postrevolutionary Marxist forces. The
Bolsheviks pressed for the rapid transformation of the petty bourgeoisie, an enemy
class, into the recognized categories of “peasant” and “worker,” punishing those who
resisted with a deprivation of rights. During the 1920s and into the 1930s the gradual
proletarianization of the Jews reached impressive proportions.
A smaller number of Jews ended up as agriculturalists, encouraged to be tillers of
the soil by the regime throughout the 1920s. Many of them settled into farming villages
in the Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula. The movement to turn Jews into peasants
reached its apogee in 1928 when it was decided to establish a special region for Jewish
settlement where they would be engaged mainly in agriculture. Coinciding with the
drive for collectivization, the project envisioned Jewish collective farmers living on
kolkhozy in the area, serviced by the principal regional center, Birobidzhan.
The story of the ill-fated Jewish Autonomous Region, the subject of Robert Wein-
berg’s illustrated history, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion, is full of irony. Anxious to destroy
the ethnic and religious divisions which were seen as a barrier between peoples, the
regime nevertheless set up a new region where they promised that Jewish culture would
flourish. Jews were encouraged to pick up and move to this new “Zion,” which was
seen as in direct competition with the widely recognized project for the resettlement
of the historic Jewish homeland, Palestine, then under British Mandatory rule. Here
another irony set in. While the traditional home of the Jews of the Russian empire had
been in the Pale of Settlement—the lands of the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic states—
the Jews were now being asked to live in a remote place thousands of miles from the
area that had historically housed them. Birobidzhan was near the Chinese border, a
place of rigorous winters and harsh summers. The only advantage seemed to be that
there were few people native to the area who would be displaced or discommoded by
an influx of outsiders. (This fact could be highlighted to contrast with Palestine, where
clashes with indigenous Arabs were becoming increasingly severe.) Further, while
boasting of their own Soviet Jewish homeland, the authorities eventually attacked lead-
ing Jewish figures in Birobidzhan and ultimately arrested many of them; they closed
down the theater and left the community without any cultural framework for decades.
The irony can also be seen in the way that the policy of settling the Jews on the land
in the Birobidzhan region turned out: the majority of them ended up in urban, not
agricultural, occupations. Finally, the “Jewish Autonomous Region” never had a ma-
jority—or anything even approaching a majority—of Jews among the population. It
was a misnomer from the beginning.
Historical parallels abound. Reading about the Birobidzhan experiment, one is re-
minded of the attempts of the tsars (Alexander I and Nicholas I) to settle Jews on the
land. In these cases—as in the twentieth-century experiment—the government failed
to provide for the basic needs of the people they sought to turn into farmers, although
ultimately tens of thousands of Jews did succeed in settling on the land in New Russia.
288 Book Reviews

But there was never a feeling that the government was backing up its intentions with
effective measures to make the experiments a success.
Weinberg’s book has a wealth of black-and-white photographs, mainly from the
Stalinist period. Some are of propaganda posters from the early years of Birobidzhan.
Others are photographs of early settlers either out on the land or in town (many likewise
taken for propaganda purposes). Some are really quite moving, like the one of a Jewish
family standing outside its mud hut dug into the ground in the late twenties or early
thirties. The squalor of these early years is visible in many of the pictures: the utter
poverty, the mud, the bare boards. Of the happier pictures, at least one—of farmers
out in the field—is almost indistinguishable from photos of halutzim in Palestine during
the same period.
Stalin’s Forgotten Zion was written to accompany a photographic exhibition at the
Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. While the pictures in the book add an important
dimension to the history which Weinberg has competently presented, the reader is
nevertheless left feeling on the edge of understanding the Birobidzhan story. The es-
sence remains elusive. The question of the motives for moving there or the amount of
coercion that was applied is not adequately considered. Weinberg read source materials
and interviewed people who had lived in Birobidzhan, but he does not present more
than the odd quote. The book could have been much more informative had it made
more use of the oral history that is available.
This is nevertheless a very valuable addition to the growing corpus of material on
the history of the Jews in the Soviet Union, and Weinberg is to be congratulated on
collecting and presenting the information. Bradley Berman was responsible for putting
together the selection of compelling photographs in the volume (and in the original
exhibition). There is a fine introduction by Zvi Gitelman.

EDITH ROGOVIN FRANKEL

Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Bolshevik Women. By Barbara Evans Clements.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv`338. $24.95.

Despite all its backwardness, the Russian Empire was the world leader in the late
nineteenth century when it came to women’s participation in the revolutionary move-
ment. This trend reached its climax in the revolutionary year 1917 and also manifested
itself in the Bolshevik party, the “victor of the October revolution.”
Despite the often lamented lack of usable sources about ordinary and, especially,
female members of this organization, Barbara Evans Clements has managed to compile
545 more or less fragmentary biographies of Bolshevik women after years of meticu-
lous research involving newspapers, magazines, memoirs, anthologies, manuals, and
encyclopedias. Clements’s sample includes 318 women who had joined the party before
the revolutionary year 1917; this number constitutes more than 10 percent of the female
party membership of the time. The other 227 joined during the civil war years. Despite
the female revolutionaries’ numerically impressive strength of several tens of thou-
sands, most remain “unknown soldiers” of the Revolution. Their names are little known
today even to experts of the period, even though many women held important party
positions in 1917. Some served in the “women’s department,” which was specifically
created to fight for the liberation of women from traditional oppression and ignorance—
a commitment that achieved remarkable results until the department was abolished in
 Book Reviews 289

1930 due to internal party opposition. As a result of the stabilization of power at the
beginning of the Stalin era and the ideological hardening of the party, which clearly
functioned according to masculinist principles, women rapidly lost their power within
the party, including their influence on policy issues concerning women, and were
quickly consigned to historical oblivion. The only exceptions to this unfortunate rule
were probably Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, and the enigmatic and controversial
Aleksandra Kollontai. Clements published a well-known biography of Kollontai twenty
years ago, and for this new work she had originally intended to write only four addi-
tional biographical portraits of important and interesting, but today generally unknown
Bolshevik women—namely, Elena Stasova, Evgeniia Bosh, Inessa Armand, and Kon-
kordiia Samoilova. But in the course of her research, Clements’s project turned into a
collective biography of all identifiable Bolshevik women who had joined the party by
the end of the civil war in 1921. The result is a multifaceted group portrait of the first
generation of female soviet communists that traces their personal and political devel-
opment, analyzes their motivations, and evaluates their contributions to the party and
the Soviet Union in general.
The study is written in a refreshing, straightforward style and is not overloaded with
technical terms or footnotes. It addresses a large readership, which can profit from the
book without much prior knowledge of Russian history, especially since the author has
incorporated the standard Russian and English literature on the subject. In addition, the
volume contains numerous photographs of the protagonists, as well as a series of sta-
tistics offering detailed information about the 545 Bolshevik women studied and form-
ing the basis of a sociological profile of female party members. A knowledgeable
introduction—in which Clements contextualizes her material in terms of social history,
the history of women, and the history of the party in this period—is followed by six
chronologically arranged chapters that trace the path of the female Bolsheviks from the
time they joined the party to their old age.1 According to Clements, these women
fulfilled important organizational and technical functions in the various hierarchical
levels of the organization from the beginnings of the illegal socialist movement at the
end of the nineteenth century to the rise of Stalin. From 1914 on, they were also engaged
in formulating a socialist-feminist emancipatory program—which, however, was never
realized.
Using the example of Rozaliia Zemliachka, Clements demonstrates that it was pos-
sible in principle for women to occupy politically influential positions during the Stalin
era. In order to do so, however, they needed to renounce all utopian-feminist ideas and
be content to play by the rules dictated by the male party majority. Although women
were not excluded from this male organization per se, everything remotely resembling
doubt or pity was. Only a small number of women were prepared to act as unscrupu-
lously as the male leadership on a permanent basis. Most women limited themselves
to silent toleration of the increasingly dictatorial development of the party and to jus-
tifying it in their memoirs, which were written under conditions of external and self-
imposed censorship. According to Clements, this conduct reflects the collective identity
of party members. She emphasizes that the integral component of this collective identity
was the typically Bolshevik tverdost’ (firmness). The primary loyalty of all party mem-
bers, male and female, belonged not to themselves or to their families, but always to
their comrades, the revolutionary movement, and the party (which was always right).

1
For information about the motivations for joining a revolutionary underground party, see Beate
Fieseler, Frauen auf dem Weg in die russische Sozialdemokratie, 1890–1917: Eine kollektive
Biographie (Stuttgart, 1995).
290 Book Reviews

I wonder, however, whether the paradigm of identity, which was so popular at the
time of this book’s publication, does justice to the otherwise impressively treated topic
of this study. Does this paradigm even begin to grasp what is really at issue in the case
of the bolshevichki—namely, their loss of individuality and their abandonment of uto-
pian political goals in exchange for membership in a group whose definition of power
infiltrated all aspects of life? Would it not be better to interpret this as a loss of identity
rather than an expression of collective identity?

BEATE FIESELER
Ruhr-Universität, Bochum

Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union,
1932–1939. By John McCannon.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii`234. $49.95.

John McCannon’s Red Arctic is a unique combination of Soviet institutional and cul-
tural history that examines the rise and fall in the 1930s of the Main Administration
of the Northern Sea Route (Glavsevmorput), the Soviet agency responsible for scientific
exploration and economic development of the Arctic. McCannon combines a narrative
of institutional infighting with a dramatic tale of mythmaking in the Stalin era, as
Glavsevmorput’s polar explorers and aviators became the quintessential Soviet popular
heroes of the 1930s. Both aspects of McCannon’s work draw on extensive Soviet
archival research that became possible only in the early 1990s, as well as on a wide
array of printed sources.
McCannon begins with a straightforward and comprehensive survey of Russian ex-
ploration of the Arctic from 1500 to 1932. He details the rise and fall of Glavsevmorput
and its colorful leader Otto Shmidt in chapters 2 and 6. McCannon argues that Glav-
sevmorput, created in 1932, was an example of Stalinist “supercentralization” and
represented the creation of a “state within a state” (p. 34) that controlled nearly a quarter
of Soviet territory. Ultimately, however, Glavsevmorput “overreached itself” (p. 58)
and failed to keep up with Moscow’s ever-increasing expectations. McCannon explains
how the purges, sea and air accidents, unfavorable climactic conditions, and the rise
of a powerful rival, Dalstroi, the NKVD’s Main Administration for Construction in the
Far North, led to Shmidt’s replacement by Ivan Papanin, and Glavsevmorput’s sub-
ordination to the People’s Commissariat of Marine Transport in 1938. Tragically, as
McCannon points out, with the demise of Glavsevmorput it was the GULAG “that rose
up to exert its baleful influence over the Soviet North” (p. 173). McCannon concludes
that the case study of Glavsevmorput reveals the failures of Stalinist administration:
its tendency toward inefficient gigantomania and unrealistic demands that led to waste
and disruption, and its ultimate reliance on unfree labor to make up for its faults.
Another reason for Glavsevmorput’s downfall was its diversion of precious resources
to publicity-oriented and record-breaking expeditions such as the landing at the North
Pole in 1937, rather than building economic infrastructure. These exciting but costly
endeavors are the subject of chapters 3, 4, and 5, and comprise the heart of the book.
Chapter 3 provides a lively and entertaining narrative of Soviet Arctic exploration
between 1932 and 1939, including the Sibiriakov and Cheliuskin expeditions, the
flights of Valery Chkalov, Boris Gromov, and Sigismund Levanevsky, and the North
 Book Reviews 291

Pole expedition. The next two chapters explore how the Soviet regime sought to “mo-
bilize, inspire, educate and communicate” (p. 8) with its people in the arena of popular
culture through the dissemination of the Arctic myth.
Chapter 4 examines the contours of the Arctic myth, its representation of the struggle
with nature, its articulation of the Soviet Union’s place in the world, and its depiction
of the ideal relationship between the individual and the state. McCannon’s rich and
multifaceted analysis of these issues makes this chapter the most compelling of the
book. He demonstrates that the “great dream” promulgated by the Arctic myth was
that every Soviet citizen “could become—indeed, must become—a hero” (p. 109).
In the fifth chapter, McCannon turns to the mechanics of mythmaking, surveying
the various groups and individual figures who created the Arctic myth, showing both
the constraints they faced and the power they had to shape the myth. Here McCannon
also discusses public response to the myth, from love letters written to Shmidt to
underground ditties mocking the Cheliuskin voyage. McCannon concludes that while
the public was saturated with Arctic propaganda, they did not always “grasp the set of
messages and values encoded within the Arctic myth” (p. 144). The public may have
enjoyed Arctic adventures but did not necessarily translate their positive feelings toward
heroes into “admiration for the Stalinist regime” (p. 144).
In his conclusion, McCannon speculates that the Arctic myth “contributed directly
to the shaping of Socialist Realism” (p. 179), which he calls “the hegemonic cultural
framework of the Stalin period” (p. 9). This intriguing suggestion reveals one place in
which McCannon’s excellent book raises a question that he cannot answer without a
more in-depth textual analysis of his source materials. McCannon might also have
probed deeper into the special relationship of youth to the Arctic myth. The creation
of predominantly male Arctic heroes could be examined to explore Soviet masculini-
ties. A scandal on Wrangel Island, where a Soviet official was accused of mistreating
Eskimos, might be further analyzed to explore the relationships between Soviet Eu-
ropeans and the native peoples of the North. A more detailed analysis of the pattern of
denunciations in 1937 in Glavsevmorput could better illuminate the question of pa-
tronage and the workings of the purges.
That McCannon’s book leaves us with unanswered questions does not diminish the
originality and scope of his work which successfully combines social, political, insti-
tutional, economic, and cultural histories. Like the works of Kendall Bailes on tech-
nology and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Katerina Clark, Richard Stites, and Hans Günther on
Soviet culture, Red Arctic is a major contribution to understanding the complex world
of Stalinist politics and culture. McCannon’s inclusive focus, his awareness of the
relevant European and American literature, and his witty prose make this book of
interest to all those who study popular opinion in political dictatorships, political myth-
making, popular culture, technology, and exploration.

KAREN PETRONE
University of Kentucky
292 Book Reviews

Sharing Secrets with Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence, 1941–1945. By
Bradley F. Smith. Modern War Studies. Edited by Theodore A. Wilson.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Pp. xix`307. $35.00.

Forging Stalin’s Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military

Innovation. By Sally W. Stoecker. Foreword by David Glantz.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. Pp. xiv`207. $59.00.

War and Diplomacy: The Making of the Grand Alliance. Documents from
Stalin’s Archives. Edited by Oleg A. Rzheshevsky. Translated by T. Sorokina.
Foreword by Lord Bullock. New History of Russia, volume 2. Edited by Harold
Shukman.
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. Pp. xxiv`325. $63.00.

Research on the Soviet Union in World War II is still at an early stage, but the broad
sweep of the theme, its epochal qualities, and the extensive sources have engaged the
attention of an increasing number of scholars. The three works reviewed here mobilize
newly available materials to make valuable contributions to Soviet history in this pe-
riod.
Bradley Smith’s Sharing Secrets with Stalin: How the Allies Traded Intelligence,
1941–1945, based primarily on research in the National Archives and the Public Record
Office, is a much broader and more revealing study than the title suggests. After the
German invasion of Russia, the British dispatched a combined-services military mis-
sion to Moscow (“30 Mission”) to broker the exchange of military intelligence. An
American counterpart of 30 Mission did not arrive until summer 1943, although the
United States already had military representatives in Moscow, led by the senior attaché,
Major Ivan Yeaton. Using the dispatches and diaries of these military missions in
Moscow, the author explores in detail their often difficult and frustrating relations with
the Soviets.
Both sides had valuable intelligence to trade. The Soviets, facing most of the German
army, were accumulating huge amounts of information on German weapons and Order
of Battle. British ULTRA, the code name for the information acquired through de-
cryption of German radio signals, was generating an increasing flow of first-rate intel-
ligence. Nevertheless, neither side was willing to entrust the other with its best intel-
ligence, for fear of compromising the sources. The British also undermined their own
efforts by sending as mission leaders officers who offended the Soviets with their
arrogant and patronizing behavior.
Initial American efforts to establish an effective intelligence exchange in Moscow
were also hampered by the attitudes of American military attachés, but by summer
1943, the situation had markedly improved, setting the stage for the new American
mission established under the leadership of General John Deane. Preparing for the
Normandy invasion, the Americans urgently needed technical and operational intelli-
gence on the German army, and were eager to cooperate with the Soviets on all aspects
of their military operations. Soviet-American intelligence sharing blossomed in 1944
and continued into the winter and spring of 1945, with the allies providing the Soviets
with reports from their ULTRA-MAGIC decrypts.
In the general picture that emerges from this book, the success of the Americans and
the disappointing performance of the British reflect differences in wartime policies.
After 1942, argues Smith, the U.S. government adopted a very clear policy: the Soviets
were carrying the heaviest burdens of the war, and the United States would do what it
 Book Reviews 293

could to help them. George Marshall’s openhanded implementation of this policy ul-
timately resulted in the successful exchange of intelligence. The British, despite Chur-
chill’s energetic leadership, failed to hammer out a coherent policy toward their Soviet
ally. Thus, recognition of the need to share intelligence was accompanied by a reluc-
tance to cooperate too much with a power that seemed likely to dominate postwar
Europe. This may be too harsh a judgment. The author himself recognizes that Great
Britain had much less to offer the Soviets in return for their cooperation and could
make only limited use of their most valuable asset, the ULTRA intelligence.
Sally W. Stoecker’s Forging Stalin’s Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Poli-
tics of Military Innovation draws on new archival sources, including Tukhachevsky’s
massive study, Future War, and German archival materials in the Bundesarchiv-
Militärarchiv (Potsdam). As Stoecker notes in her introduction, hers is a study of
“the process of doctrinal, technological, and weapons innovation . . . during the early
years of industrialization in the Soviet Union, 1928–1933” (p. 1). In the late 1920s,
Soviet military leaders faced the need to build a modern army and the necessity of
persuading Stalin and other leaders to give rearmament a higher budgetary priority
in the First Five-Year Plan. In 1931, Kliment Voroshilov, the war commissar, criti-
cized the Communist Party and the Supreme Economic Council for neglecting de-
fense priorities. He pressed actively for higher defense investment. Especially inter-
esting here is Stoecker’s assessment of Voroshilov as a skillful and independent
spokesman for military interests.
Stoecker focuses on Mikhail Tukhachevsky as the driving force for military inno-
vation during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Tukhachevsky was one of many Soviet
military leaders who realized that the Red Army’s experiences in the civil war were
largely irrelevant to the technological and operational challenges posed by future wars.
His five-volume study, Future War, attempted to provide the basis for a new tactical
and strategic doctrine. Stoecker does not, however, attempt a comprehensive discussion
of Tukhachevsky’s ideas and thus does not assess the relationship of his theories to
Soviet operational doctrines in subsequent wars against Finland and Germany. Hope-
fully, the author will explore these questions in a future study. Meanwhile, readers will
find this book an important contribution to Soviet history in the 1930s.
War and Diplomacy: The Making of the Grand Alliance, edited by Oleg Rzhe-
shevsky, is a collection of largely unedited documents from the files of Stalin’s personal
archive, which is now open to researchers. The documents record the Soviet side of
the negotiations with the western allies over the political and military issues underlying
the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers. The documents cover four specific epi-
sodes: Anthony Eden’s mission to Moscow in December 1941, Molotov’s visit to
London in May 1942, his subsequent trip to Washington later that month, and, finally,
his negotiations in London en route back to Moscow in June. The major issues in these
negotiations are well known: the Soviets urgently needed war matériel from the West,
they were desperate for a second front in Western Europe, and they wanted Allied
acceptance of the territories they had annexed in 1939–40 at the cost of Poland and
the Baltic nations. The negotiations over these issues, documented in the published
diaries of Eden, Alexander Cadogan (Permanent Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs),
Harry Hopkins, and other sources, have already received the attention of American and
British historians. Nevertheless, the documents in this volume are valuable because
they provide the views of Stalin and his foreign minister Viacheslav Molotov.
In his foreword, Alan Bullock notes that the “most dramatic and fascinating” of these
documents are those of the Stalin-Eden discussions in Moscow in December 1941,
because they reveal “the vehemence with which Stalin pressed his demands, at a time
294 Book Reviews

when the German army was in occupation of a large area of the Soviet Union” (p. xx).
Eden had traveled to Moscow to negotiate a treaty that would strengthen the Anglo-
Soviet alliance, but Stalin insisted that the treaty include British acceptance of the Polish
and Baltic territories annexed by the Soviet Union. In the face of Eden’s refusal and
Stalin’s intransigence, negotiations failed to produce a formal political and military
agreement.
Tactical developments in early December, especially the massive Soviet counterat-
tack launched against German Army Group Center on December 5, probably encour-
aged Stalin’s intransigence, since it gave him reason to believe that the war with Ger-
many had turned in favor of the Red Army. But the Soviet counteroffensive did not
deal a decisive blow to the Germans and was followed by major German victories in
the following spring. These military reverses help explain the more flexible position
taken by the Soviets when Molotov went to London in late May 1942. Molotov tried
to get British agreement to a treaty under the terms earlier proposed, but after two days
of intense negotiations, Eden submitted a draft treaty that made no concessions on the
question of Soviet borders after the war. Molotov wired the proposed treaty to Moscow,
along with his view that the treaty was an “empty declaration” and therefore unac-
ceptable. Stalin, however, faced with a major German offensive in the south, and thus
more concerned with getting the allies to open a second front, cabled Molotov his
approval of Eden’s draft, noting that the question of Soviet frontiers would ultimately
“be decided by force” (p. 122).
The documents relating to Molotov’s Washington visit (pp. 163–258) are perhaps
less dramatic but nonetheless revealing. In his primary objective—securing American
commitment to opening a second front by late 1942—Molotov found the American
leaders no more forthcoming than the British had been on the question of Russia’s
western borders. Indeed, Molotov faced what seemed to be a deteriorating situation.
On the one hand, the Americans told him that the second front would require a major
reduction in the tonnage of war matériel the Soviets had requested; on the other hand,
however, the Americans were extremely vague about when the front would be estab-
lished. While Molotov, who read Roosevelt quite accurately, had no illusions about a
second front in the foreseeable future, Stalin was quite hopeful and readily agreed to
the reduction in deliveries.
Molotov’s return visit to London in the second week of June 1942 (pp. 264–308) is
interesting less for Churchill’s transparent attempt to dodge the issue of a second front
than for Molotov’s June 10 meeting with General Władysław Sikorski, chairman of
ministers of the Polish government in London. Molotov’s account of this meeting
suggests that Sikorski, and by implication the Polish government in London, danger-
ously underestimated Soviet economic and military capacity, while holding to a grossly
inflated view of Britain’s political leverage with the Soviet Union concerning the Polish
Question.
Rzheshevsky has provided us with a collection of documents that should long remain
a basic source for the diplomacy of the Grand Alliance. A paperback version would be
immensely useful in courses on Soviet history or on the history of World War II.

EDGAR MELTON
Wright State University