Allan Megill - Figural Realism Studies in The Mimesis Effect

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect by Hayden White
Review by: Allan Megill
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 72, No. 3 (September 2000), pp. 777-778
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/316051
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Book Reviews
Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Edited by Anthony

Molho and Gordon Wood.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. ix490. $65.00 (cloth);
$24.95 (paper).
In their introduction to this thoughtful and stimulating collection, Anthony Molho and
Gordon Wood note with some satisfaction that the ending of the cold war did not lead
to an outburst of triumphalist history stressing once again the uniqueness and par-
ticularity of the American experience (p. 14). On the contrary, many if not most U.S.
historians seem to have concluded that the United States no longer has the special,
historically sanctioned role to be the path setter of humanity. The nations moral
character . . . is not different from that of other nations, and Americans have no
specially transcendent part to play in the world (p. 15).
Molho and Wood are not the first to point out that U.S. historians can no longer be
routinely counted on to be patriotic and that the prevailing stance of most Americanists
is critical, not celebratory. Indeed, this was the essential difference separating those
who approved and those who criticized the new national history standards. Critics
charged that the standards embodied a politically correct series of indictments of
Americas past and neglected its common heritage. Supporters responded that the new
standards merely codified and brought into the curriculum the results of recent research
and the prevailing interpretations of the generation of scholars who came of age in the
past twenty-five years.1 Both sides were right: the standards did largely reflect the
current consensus, but yes, that consensus was largely critical.
The present volume provides a particularly useful vantage point from which to re-
examine the debate about American history. It is the product of an ambitious under-
taking, begun at Brown University in 1994 and culminating in a weeklong conference,
with thirty papers and no less than sixteen European discussants, at San Marino in June
1995. The organizers/editors sought to do two things in their meetings and in the essays
collected here: the first was to assess the present state of writing on the history of the
United States; the second was to ask whether there is, or has been, a distinctive Amer-
ican contribution to the writing of other peoples histories. What links the two objec-
tives, at least in the vision of the editors, is the sense that Americas perspective on
the past, both of Europe and of itself, is changing and changing fast. Only now,
they feel, could the papers included in this book have been written.
Underpinning this altered view of American history is a transformation in the his-
torical profession itself. As Molho and Wood explain, various changes came to be
1
The effort to create new national history standards is chronicled and defended by those most
responsible for the project in Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial:
Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997). It is criticized in the essays
by Diane Ravitch, John Patrick Diggins, Sean Wilentz, and Walter McDougall in Reconstructing
History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society, edited by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 23798.
Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.
Book Reviews 767
manifest in the 1960s. The civil rights movement allowed the voices of black Amer-
icans to be heard in increasing numbers. This together with the remarkable growth of
immigrants from non-European areas of the world . . . created a new sense of American
diversity and pluralism that have [sic] brought into question older conceptions of Amer-
icas identity. These changes in turn have contributed to a dramatic democratization of
higher education. Never before have so many Americans from so many different social
and ethnic backgrounds gone to college, earned higher degrees, and studied history.2
The entrance of large numbers of women into the profession was especially important
and, in general, with these changes in the character of the nation and the historical
profession it was natural therefore for historical perspectives to shift (p. 11). The main
consequence of this shift was a decline in the salience of the notion of American
exceptionalism, a concept whose fascinating history is intelligently recounted by Dan-
iel Rodgers, and a broader reorientation of perspective from one that celebrated Amer-
icas unique virtues to one in which the often sad realities of American history were
regularly contrasted with the nations rhetorical commitments to equality, freedom, and
democracy.
The very terms used to describe and explain this transformation suggest that the
editors regard it as basically a good thingindeed, good enough for it to be ex-
portedand would lead the reader to expect the essays to demonstrate in some detail
the achievements in research and understanding that it has made possible. The essays
are invariably very impressivethoughtful, comprehensive, and insightful. But
whether they confirm the judgment of the editors is less clear, and reading them in
light of the debate about the recent direction of American history produces a rather
mixed verdict.
On the positive side, the essays on American history reveal a field that is extremely
lively and interesting. Both the topical chapters on race, gender, and immigration and
the three chronological surveys of the colonial period, the nineteenth century, and the
twentieth century describe an array of research projects and findings that is stunningly
varied and creative. Thomas Holts fine piece on race, for example, shows that histo-
rians of the United States have recognized and taken to heart the necessity of placing
race at the center of the American experience. Linda Kerbers essay on gender is
especially good at tracing the origins and evolution of womens history and of history
focusing on gender, and it suggests that the efforts of people like Joan Scott to get
historians to accept gender as a useful category of historical analysis have been
extremely successful. Likewise, the historical study of immigration, ably reviewed here
by Philip Gleason, has effectively illuminated the role of successive waves of immi-
grants in making the United States a genuinely multicultural society. Rodgerss chapter
on American exceptionalism, though focused on the argument rather than on a par-
ticular field of study, nevertheless documents indirectly the rich harvest of work on
labor history and the broader social history of the laboring population. The related
essays on cliometrics and on social science history also make clear the tremendous
range in topic, method, and interpretation of work done over the past quarter century,
even if research done under these particular rubrics has remained somewhat marginal
in its impact on the profession.
These impressive essays might nevertheless also be used to provide evidence that
2
Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob make a similar argument about the transfor-
mation of higher education in their book, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton,
1994), and suggest that it has led to a new and democratic practice of history (p. 11).
768 Book Reviews
supports the critique of the recent redirection of American history. The fact that there
are chapters devoted to race, gender, and immigration, for example, but none on poli-
tics, diplomacy, culture, or religion would seem to validate at least one complaint
against the prevailing style of work in American history. Critics claim that American
historians tend these days to emphasize the importance of women and minorities while
downplaying the role of others who have taken part in the creation and transformation
of Americas highly contested but unusually open political culture. More substantively,
it is argued that the focus on the underprivileged necessarily highlights the negative
side of the historical record and neglects the nations genuine achievements. The narrow
range of topics selected for inclusion in this large volume would seem to indicate a
rather circumscribed perspective on what counts for useful research in the field.
Even if questions of race, gender, and immigration have attracted some of the best
students and therefore stimulated much of the best recent work in American history, it
does seem especially odd to leave out political history per se. The neglect of politics
would appear particularly inappropriate in view of the fact that, as the editors make
clear, the transformation in the writing of American history has had so much to do
with politics, both domestic and foreign. What did more, after all, to shift perspectives
on the U.S. role in the world than the revisionist rewriting of the history of American
foreign policy during the early cold war era?
It is true, of course, that research on race and on gender is itself political to some
extent. And it can be forcefully argued that a focus on race or gender, or on immigration
and the response to it, can serve to recast the study of politics by exploring dimensions
of political behavior, and especially the language of politics, that have long remained
obscure. But surely not all politics can be subsumed under these categories of analysis.
There are, after all, enormous bodies of research on political culture, electoral behavior,
and policy making in which other concerns were paramount. Leaving these out does a
disservice to scholars working in these areas and presents a very partial rendering of
what is important in the field. The neglect of culture and religion is similarly limiting,
for even if issues of belief are invariably linked to questions of race and gender, they
also have internal logics that cannot be reduced to these categories.
The other reason why these essays might be harnessed to a critique of recent Amer-
ican history writing is that they are markedly unwilling or unable to deliver synthesis
and interpretation. Indeed, both the topical essays and the articles focused on particular
periods end up with lots of intriguing citations but no clear sense of how all of this
interesting work has changed our general understanding of these topics or periods. It
is thus disappointing to see a historian as accomplished as George Frederickson backing
away from synthesis because, as he explains, the central themes on offer are insuffi-
ciently inclusive. As he puts it, one potential organizing conceptdemocratization
can be justly criticized for forgetting the fact that equal citizenship and political par-
ticipation were strictly limited to white males. Its converse, a focus on the contest
between the radical republican tradition and the stark realities of class in a rapidly
industrializing society might likewise be open to the criticism that it idealizes a white
male tradition that, for the most part, condoned the subordination of women, blacks,
and Native Americans (p. 164). Faced with these politically unacceptable alternatives,
Frederickson proceeds to structure his essay around the far less exciting question of
whether to regard the Civil War as truly revolutionary in its consequences or as some-
thing less radical. However valid the objections to the central themes that gave coher-
ence to earlier accounts, it would seem that a fear of getting it wrong has impoverished
Fredericksons current vision. More substantively, it is hard to understand just why a
focus upon democratization should be regarded as too narrow, for a stress on the
Book Reviews 769
expansion of citizenship surely provides a purchase on the practices of exclusion as

well as on the processes of inclusion.
James Patterson concludes his otherwise highly useful essay on a similar note, ex-
pressing doubt that academic historians of twentieth-century America will come to
agreement about any single synthesis of the era (or, for that matter, any era.) We live,
after all, in an age which highlights relativistic and personal ways of looking at things
(p. 197). And even Gordon Wood, who has produced brilliant synthetic work on the
American Revolution, eschews the task of venturing a synthetic interpretation of the
colonial era. Interpretive modesty of this sort could stem from a variety of sources. It
might well reflect an aversion to theory among Americanistsalthough it is obvious
that a refusal to theorize explicitly leads to the triumph of unacknowledged theory
masquerading as narrative or descriptionor it may stem from a research culture that
is highly particularistic. It might even be argued that the advances produced by an era
of fragmentation have been so great and so hard to assimilate to established views that
synthesis is still premature, although it is hard to make a convincing case that good
research can proceed without regular recourse to theory, interpretation, and synthesis.
But this tendency to avoid synthesis could also be seen as confirming what critics of
the dominant trends in recent American history have repeatedly asserted: that the focus
on difference and diversity leads both to fragmentation of research and to a fragmented
sense of the nations past.
The essays on how Americans have written the history of other peoples and regions
also lead to a somewhat mixed verdict on the usefulness of the recent transformation
of the practice of writing history in the United States. Like the chapters on American
history, these pieces are consistently interesting and provocative. Eugen Webers dis-
cussion of the rise and fall of the western civilization course is delightfully disen-
chanted, and the descriptions of how Americans have viewed the ancient world, the
Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the decline of Spain make fascinating reading. What
the chapters do not show, however, is any particularly consistent American perspective
that translates across fields or any recent turn that moves the writing of these different
histories in a common direction. Indeed, a recurring themesounded in passing by
Charles Maier and Volker Berghahn in their piece on European history, by Martin
Malia in his discussion of Russian history, and even by Keith Baker and Joseph Zizek
in their impressive review of writing on the French Revolutionis that, except on rare
occasions or on particular issues, the writings of Americans do not normally have a
major impact on the evolution of national historiographies in other lands. Still more
important is the fact that American historians writing on the history of different coun-
tries did not bring to their studies any common framework or agenda. The sharpest
contrast can perhaps be found in treatments of the French Revolution and the Soviet
Union. Thus the Anglo-American contribution to the study of the French Revolution
helped to undermine the social interpretation, which owed its inspiration largely to
Marxism, while the past quarter century of American work on the Soviet Union in-
volved by contrast what Malia calls an ideological effort to de-demonize the Soviet
adversary. It is, of course, no great surprise to find that Americans working in different
fields should adopt differing interpretive frameworks. On the contrary, it suggests a
suppleness and flexibility of which American scholars can be justly proud. But it does
mean that the recent turn in the writing of U.S. history has been of less significance
than the tone and structure of this volume imply.
Though these many essays are uniformly well done, then, they do not provide any-
thing like the demonstration apparently intended by the editors. They show in great
detail the variety and quality of recent historical writing in the United States, both on
770 Book Reviews
the history of the United States and in other fields, but at the same time they do not
demonstrate that the critical stance of most American historians represents a genuine
advance in understanding. And the editors themselves seem aware that there is a down-
side to the shift in perspective. Molho and Wood remark toward the close of their
introduction upon the consequent fragmentation and apparent disarray revealed in
the chapters that are to follow. More pointedly, Wood ends his review of colonial
history by posing a series of questions that manifest a clear disquiet:
The question now to be faced is whether such a quickening of interest in non-Western cultures
[he is referring here to research on Native Americans] . . . will eventually weaken popular interest
in early American history. . . . There may be a limit to the degree to which the American people
will put up with having a colonial history that pays no attention to the nation, except, in John
Highams words, as a villain in other peoples stories. . . . If the colonial era is to be simply an
arena for criticizing American culture and is to be cut loose from the story of American nationhood
or identity, will it continue to be meaningful to most Americans? (p. 160)
Wood frames his concerns as if they are concerns about what the consumers of history
will accept, but it is clear that he is one worried producer.
Woods misgivings are apparently shared by his colleague, James Patterson. Patter-
son accepts the absence of synthesis as the price of diversity, but he notes in passing
that a good deal of recent academic writing about twentieth-century America has
highlighted the flaws of civilization in the United States. This he attributes in part to
the existence of real problems in the United States. But more important, as he sees it,
are the way in which the escalation of rights-consciousness . . . has expanded expec-
tations and the fact that U.S. historians, most of them progressive in their politics,
seem especially to reflect such feelings, and tend as a result to downplay the extraor-
dinary technological, scientific, and political changesmany of them promoting freer,
more comfortable lives for peoplethat have taken place in our lifetime. Patterson
goes on to suggest that this stance would be difficult to maintain if U.S. historians
were to do more to compare the United States with other countries and if they paid
more attention to major currents of European historiography (p. 195). The implication
is that they do not, and that their work suffers in consequence.
This is on the whole a curious book, then, a volume whose parts seem to contradict,
or at least fail to confirm, the arguments that hold the whole together and that constitute
its raison detre. It is not for that reason uninteresting or unimportant, but it does suggest
the need to read the book somewhat against the grain of its argument and structure. It
suggests, too, the need to look more closely at the recent turn in the writing of U.S.
history in order to assess more fully both the great gains that have been made and the
price of these advances.
To me it argues as well for facing up more squarely to the politics of history writing.
The editors decision to link the transformation of American history writing to the
changing demography of higher education and the historical profession seems in this
regard both misplaced and misleading. The big changes in how history has been written
owed far more to shifts in the political and intellectual climate than to the slowly
evolving sociology of history writing. As Holts essay demonstrates, the great books
in the history of race and of slavery were more often than not written by white scholars.
Nor can the proliferation of social-historical studies of workers, peasants, and the poor
in general be attributed to the presence of workers, peasants, and poor people (or their
children) within the ranks of publishing historians. The only meaningful exception here
is the preponderant role played by women in the history of women and of gender. Still,
Book Reviews 771
Linda Kerbers article makes it clear that the roots of this historiographic tradition were
in the New Left, which was a political rather than a social phenomenon.
Neglecting the largely political origins of the new history and mislabeling them as
essentially sociological also makes it nearly impossible to understand two of the more
salient facts about contemporary work in American history. The first is the barely
suppressed rage with which the new consensus is received by historians who feel left
out of it. The antipathy displayed toward the publication of national history standards
is one example; the recent founding of the Historical Society is another. At issue
here are not merely substantive disagreements about matters of historical interpretation
but also the apparent refusal of the generation of 1968 to acknowledge both the political
nature and the political origins of their distinctive and novel perspective. The second
fact that gets slighted by describing recent historiographic turns in sociological rather
than political terms is the clear connection between the political and hence intellectual
trajectory of the generation of 1968 and the present state of American history. As we
veterans of 1960s and 1970s radicalism get the opportunity to rewrite our own and our
nations past, we inevitably bring to the task a complicated inheritance. We largely
retain our antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and populist (now perhaps multicultur-
alist) commitments but have for good reason lost our utopian optimism and vision of
the future. We have in particular lost faith in Marxism, which for many provided the
most compelling synthetic account of recent world and American history. But having
abandoned Marxism and, by implication, the socialist alternative, few of us are willing
to embrace the market. How appropriate, given this trajectory, that the history they, or
we, write should be marked by inhibition rather than inspiration, by separate histories
that do not come together, and by criticism rather than by appreciation. In short, the
present state of American history, its strengths and weaknesses, make much more sense
when seen as part of the progress of a generation of historians marked by a particularly
intensive political experience that shaped their subsequent intellectual development.
There is nothing to be ashamed of here and no reason not to confront head-on the
political and intellectual roots of the current predicament. On the contrary, it is the way
to understand where we are and how we might yet move forward.
JAMES E. CRONIN
Boston College
Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik.
By Susan Heuck Allen.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xiii409. $35.00.
The nineteenth century was the heroic age for the archaeology of ancient Greece. Cities
long considered figments of poets imaginations were unearthed and given historical
reality. From this century of heroes Susan Heuck Allen has chosen to relate the story
of a figure who failed to gain such stature despite sharp insights and the most honorable
of intentions. Frank Calvert was not an antihero but a person swept aside by the panache
and machinations of the greatest archaeological showman of the age, Heinrich Schlie-
mann. Calverts story is worth the telling for the manner in which it illustrates the
character of archaeological science before its professionalization. Allen provides a
splendid and lively narration of these events, providing the reader with a highly ac-
cessible introduction to the theories, personalities, and practice of nineteenth-century
archaeological excavation.
772 Book Reviews
Calvert (18281908) belonged to an English family that had lived for decades in
the Levant, making its fortune from trade. Over the years he became deeply drawn to
the exploration of ancient remains in what is today western Turkey. His dream, in part
aroused by the proximity of the possible location, was to identify the site of ancient
Troy. Even to undertake the quest, despite living in the region, was to challenge the
professionalized classical knowledge of the mid-nineteenth century. The question of
the historicity of the Homeric epics and the possible location of ancient Troy had
divided the modern scholarly world since the end of the eighteenth century. The debate,
flowing from F. A. Wolfes theory of Homeric authorship, fired scholarly imaginations
across Europe and led many writers to deny the historical reality of the Trojan conflict.
The lure of Troy, as well as of other sites of archaic Greece, throughout the nineteenth
century had really been the lure of finding the sites described by Homer. Those sites,
unlike far more impressive ones in Mexico, the Yucatan, and Peru constructed by native
Americans, interested their excavators because of the literature associated with them.
The shadow of Homer made them exciting, although for some the sites themselves led
to a lowering of their estimation of the Homeric achievement itself.
Most of those who did ascribe truthfulness to the Homeric epics long thought Pi-
narbasi to be the most probable location of ancient Troy. But a few topographers
considered Hisarlik more likely. Calvert was among the latter, and he and his brothers
purchased the site both as an investment and as a place where they might carry out
excavations. They did excavate but in a limited manner because of lack of capital. Then
disaster struck the family as it was accused of commercial fraud in its business dealings.
Frank Calvert was not personally accused, but his reputation suffered by family asso-
ciation. He was simply the wrong man at the right spot.
About this time1868Schliemann appeared on the scene, and the vulnerable
Calvert shared with him his theories of Homeric location. Schliemann had the money
to undertake the extensive excavations that made his name. Calvert, upon whose land
the excavations occurred, became a casualty along the way. While essentially acqui-
escing in the loss of fame and glory, Calvert would not let Schliemann have the last
word on the interpretation of the Trojan excavations. The problem, which long re-
mained unsolved, was the presence of gaps between prehistoric strata, identified by
Schliemann as Trojan, and later Greco-Roman ones. Those gaps pertained to the period
of the Trojan War. Schliemann got around the problem by conflating various strata;
Calvert thought more simply that later builders on the site had removed materials from
the Trojan era. Other personal quarrels erupted, and Schliemann triumphed primarily
from his discovery of Priams treasure. This coup allowed him to move again into the
arena of self-publicity, where he excelled over the diminutive Calvert. Later in the
century, Wilhelm Dorpfeld continued the excavations, commencing where decades
earlier Calvert had originally dug. Dorpfeld discovered the missing strata, and again
fame went to another.
Calverts story raises the issue of the place that historians of the sciences should
assign to those people who aid more prominent discoverers. Calvert, for reasons that
are not wholly clear, backed away from seeking the publicity that Schliemann so
sought. At the same time, Allen establishes the connections that Calvert enjoyed among
some of the most prominent figures of contemporary archaeology, including Charles
Newton of the British Museum. What was lacking between Calvert and Schliemann
was the gentility that existed between Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. The latter
certainly never attained the glory of the former, but was always openly and warmly
recognized by the Darwin circle. Such was not Calverts fate. One reason was that
archaeology remained much more the world of the amateur and particularly of the
Book Reviews 773
amateur with money. Writing the speculative or even correct article was not really
sufficient to gain recognition. The trenches had to be dug and the discovered treasures
returned to the metropoles to be encased in museums. Calvert had not the money, the
determination, or the energy.
What strikes the reader in considering this rather sad tale is quite simply how far
away from many credible witnesses the work of archaeologylike that of other nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century exploration and discoveryoccurred. Much of
Calverts sharpest commentary appeared in local Levantine newspapers. There were
no groups to assure fair play. Indeed one suspects that part of the attraction of this age
of archaeology was the very roguishness of the enterprise.
Allens book is an exceptionally fine work of scholarship based on a very extensive
exploration of archival and printed sources. It should take a proud place on the now
happily expanding bookshelf of excellent works on nineteenth-century archaeology and
classical studies. It deserves a wide readership and should find one outside as well as
within the scholarly community.
FRANK M. TURNER
Yale University
The Pity of War. By Niall Ferguson.

New York: Basic Books, 1999. Pp. xliii563. $30.00.
In 1979 George F. Kennan described the First World War as the great seminal
catastrophe of this century (The Decline of Bismarcks European Order [Princeton,
N.J., 1979]). To do Kennan one better, Niall Ferguson, a young Oxford historian,
concludes that this struggle was nothing less than the greatest error of modern
history (p. 462). The author reaches this verdict after posing ten rhetorical questions,
which he proceeds to answer, as the books dust jacket suggests, to explain World
War I. The reviewers task, given Fergusons methodological construct, must be to
address several of these critical questions. Fergusons answers are impassioned and
radical, as well as distorted.
First, who committed the greatest error of modern history? For Ferguson, the war
was caused by Britain, the worlds greatest financial power, in general, and by Sir
Edward Grey, its foreign secretary, in particular. The author argues that Britain always
appeased (there is that malevolent term!) those powers which appeared to pose the
greatest threat to her position (p. 55). By 1914, Germany was a pacific power, the
United States a great power; thus, Britain appeased the latter and built up a hostile
coalition against the former. Greys Germanophobia, combined with Sir Henry Wil-
sons Francophilia, determined Britains prowar stance in 1914. The German navy no
longer was a threat; Germanys colonial ambitions were moderate. And as for poor
little Belgium, the case is simple: if Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality in
1914, Ferguson baldly states, Britain would have (p. 67). On this we are left without
evidence.
Second, need the war have happened at all? No, Ferguson claims, had Germany just
been a more militaristic country (p. 142), such as France and Russia, and had Britains
generals and diplomats not secretly plotted Germanys demise. As the author assures
us, Alfred von Schlieffens military first strike was simply designed to pre-empt a
deterioration of Germanys military position (p. 153). Thus Ferguson, who published
a book titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London, 1997), arrives
774 Book Reviews
at what he calls Ludendorffs counter-factualif the 1913 Army Bill had passed,
Germany would have been strong enough to avert war! With regard to the secret cabal
on the part of Britains statesmen and soldiers to bring Germany down, Ferguson argues
that the real war council was not the one assembled by Kaiser Wilhelm II at Potsdam
on December 8, 1912, but, rather, the meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence
of August 23, 1911. Just how that gathering set the course for a military confrontation
between Britain and Germany (p. 65) we are left to deduce on our own.
Third, what were the more than nine million deaths worth? An economic historian
by training, Ferguson is able to calculate precisely the worth of each one of the 6,046
soldiers killed every day of the Great Folly. While it cost the Allies $36,485 to kill a
Hun, the Central Powers could do the job for a mere $11,345 (p. 336). Put differently,
the Central Powers were at least a third better at killing. Moreover, they fought the war
much more efficiently than did the Allies. Thus, we learn that the Germans never
suffered from serious shortages of shells (p. 260), and the evidence that anyone
starved . . . is not to be found (p. 277). Obviously, the Germans should have won the
war. Those of us who have spent decades researching in the archives and on the basis
of this have reached diametrically opposite conclusions are charitably dismissed as
otherwise sensible historians.
Third, the timeless question: Why did men fight in that hell called the Western Front?
Ferguson weighs the options carefullysticks such as courts martial and discipline
and carrots such as food, drugs, rest, leave, and religiononly to come up with the
chilling thesis that men kept fighting because they wanted to (p. 357). The evidence
for this Ferguson finds not in todays neo-Darwinian genetic determinism but, rather,
in Sigmund Freuds theory of the death instinct as well as Eros. The gentry killed
because it was fun and good sport; the lower rungs from hatred and revengeand
because there was no other option. Surrender, Ferguson tells us, was the key to the
outcome of the First World War (p. 367). Without, again, offering evidence, the author
suggests that from the start, soldiers were killed (out of a sense of fear, mistrust,
revenge, impatience, jealousy) after they had surrendered. Thus, it was only in the
summer of 1918, when the Allies showed they were willing to accept German prisoners
en masse without fear of killing, that the Allies were able to win the war.
Finally, what, if anything, did the war prove? First off, the Great War, by costing
somewhere around $208 billion, undid the first, golden age of economic globali-
zation (p. 438). Second, Woodrow Wilsons cherished principle of self-determi-
nation (organized hypocrisy) simply confused Europeans; only in the Balkans and
Anatolia did leaders understand that repatriation (ethnic cleansing in todays
parlance) alone could redress the ethnic heterogeneity of Central and Eastern Eu-
rope (pp. 44041).
Most important, Britain, by allowing a conspiratorial clique to push it into war,
merely delayed for eight decades the inevitable: the creation of some kind of a European
Union under (putative) German domination. For eight decades, Ferguson argues, his-
torians have failed to realize that the alarmist claims by British leaders of a German
Napoleonic design (p. 75) not only were erroneous but were recognized as such by
British intelligence. In the end, standing aside would have been the preferred option
for Britainindeed, for all of Europebecause German objectives, as prewar German
diplomats argued ad nauseam, never posed a direct threat to the Empire (p. 444). In
fact, had Britain allowed Germany to achieve its first bid for European Union, the
world would have been spared Adolf Hitler, V. I. Lenin, the Russian civil war, and the
Second World War. We are left with a much misunderstood Wilhelm II as the scorned
would-be architect of European union. In Fergusons words, it would have been in-
Book Reviews 775
finitely preferable if Germany could have achieved its hegemonic position [sic] on the
continent without two world wars (p. 461). A. J. P. Taylor could not have put it better.
Perfidious Albion revealed at last!
If the passion of this review is any indication, then Ferguson has succeeded brilliantly
in his (albeit unstated) objective: to bring about a total rethinking of the Great War.
The author has managed to mine a plethora of superb research books, selecting material
carefully to weave together his tale of British cabal and cunningand Teutonic in-
nocence. It is almost as if Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Franz Conrad von Hotz-
endorf, Erich Ludendorff, and Wilhelm II never existed. History not as it was but as it
should have been. And if it runs up against four decades of research, so much the better.
For Fergusons audacious tour de force is in the best British tradition of being clever,
without always being convincing.
HOLGER H. HERWIG
University of Calgary
The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century.

By Francois Furet. Translated by Deborah Furet.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. xiii596. $35.00.
The conjunction between the end of the Soviet Union, the end of the century, and
perhaps the end of the millennium as well is producing a growing number of lengthy
books summing up long-term secular trends, focusing particularly on some of the con-
sensus ills of the century: hypertrophic statism, totalitarianism, and communism. A
number of these accounts have an implicit or even explicit autobiographical component,
suggested by the authors interests or career trajectory. All of this work is cautionary.
The twentieth century is impossible to celebrate. As the millennium arrives, the volume
of this literature is likely to increase.
One of the most interesting examples thus far is Francois Furets The Passing of an
Illusion, published originally in French in 1995. Furet is, of course, best known for his
attack on Marxist or Marxisant histories of the French Revolution, and he brings a
similar approach to bear on its Russian descendant. The unremittingly French perspec-
tive is likely alternately to interest, divert, and irritate an American readership. Instead
of the usual gallery of (largely) British or American anticommunist heroes or gullible
fellow travelers, we are given capsule biographies of such figures, less well known to
the English-speaking reader, as Pierre Pascal and Boris Souvarine. The effect is most
often fresh and stimulating. Only George Orwell plays his usual role as the lynx-eyed
man who cannot be bamboozled.
Furet is a brilliant writer. Although the specialist will find no new information in
these pages, both specialists and more general readers will find much to savor. The
first chapter on the revolutionary passion is a wonderful analysis of the contradictions
of the rise of the bourgeois world and especially of the figure of the bourgeois, whose
odious qualities did so much to stimulate radical leftism and (in a related way) fascism.
Furets account of the universalization of the October Revolution (pp. 68 ff.) is also
very good. He also reminds his readers of howcoming after the horrible carnage of
the First World Warthe October Revolution had the effect of linking revolution with
peace. It was Russia that tookor seemed to have takenthe first step to break the
spell of the war.
Furet keeps an interesting balance between what he calls the catastrophic course of
776 Book Reviews
the Russian Revolution and the extraordinary effort at autointerpretation, which made
it appear the accomplishment of universal history. In fact, he regards the ability of
the USSR to mythologize its own history to have been one of [its] most extraor-
dinary performances (p. 144). He also keeps close track of the growth of heretics and
renegades, to use Isaac Deutschers phrase. Throughout the twentieth century, he
writes, Communism has been like a house that each generation has gone in or out of,
according to circumstances (p. 99). As a result, very early on, parallel to and insep-
arable from the history of Communism proper, a history of the break with Communism
was established. And this parallel history was to continue, with each generation, right
up to the present (pp. 11415).
The central interpretive point of Furets book, however, is that the most important
weapon in the arsenal of Soviet communism was its ability to identify itself in the
thirties with the struggle against fascism and to preserve some of that linkage almost
until the end of the regime. In the period after 1935, Furet shrewdly observes, the
issue of the Soviet regimes true character was put on the back burner, whether because
the anti-Fascist policy of the USSR and the Comintern were sufficient proof of the
regimes democratic character, or because the priorities of the anti-Nazism battle mit-
igated or suppressed doubts about the status of freedom in the Soviet Union (p. 223).
The result was that anti-Sovietism could seem the prelude to Fascism (p. 224). Hitler,
of course, greatly helped this outcome. By demonizing Communism and designating
it as the main enemy, Hitler earmarked it for democratic good will, and his hatred
earned Communism a democratic certificate of merit (p. 237).
The chapter on the Hitler-Stalin comparison and the broader one between com-
munism and fascism is a bit stale, but even here Furet manages some splendidly
aphoristic writing: the most convincing part of their [Bolshevist and Nazi] propa-
ganda came from hostility to what resembled them (p. 206). With the liberation
of Europe from National Socialism in 1945, communism was not only in power
but was the incarnation of freedom (p. 350). The expansion of communism to a
global stage during the cold war is well told, but the further we advance from the
historical period the author knows best toward the end of the regime, the more con-
ventional his story seems to become, especially in his cameos of Mao, Castro, and
Che Guevara.
There are somebut not manylapses. Furet knows Hannah Arendts work well,
but it is surely wrong to speak of her hatred of the nation state (p. 431). To describe
Trotsky as too literary to be a terrorist is a most uncharacteristic piece of navete (p.
439). Khrushchev was certainly not one of the major victims of the 193639 purges
(p. 448). On the other hand, I would argue that Khrushchevs foreign policy did not
descend in a direct line from Stalins (p. 480). But the latter are points that a historian
of Russia is likely to notice; they do not seriously detract from Furets overall account.
In a similar vein, it seemed to me that Furet draws too sharp a contrast between the
older historians of Russia, of whom he seems to approve, and a younger generation
too inclined to incriminate its own country. Here he paints with a very broad brush
indeed. On the interesting question of what Gorbachev intended the outcome of his
reforms to be, Furet comes up with a striking idea, new to me at least. As Gorbachev
scanned the future, he may have had some Slavic version of modern Mexico in mind
as the destination of the Soviet Union, with an institutionalization of the revolution
like that produced by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) (p. 499). If that is
true, however, it would seem that such a development could have prolonged the survival
of the Soviet Union by only a few years. Mexico could scarcely have been an inspiring
model for the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
Book Reviews 777
In sum, this is a well-told tale from a historian-moraliste; the moralism seldom

becomes oppressive; the observation is keen; the writing is vivid, witty, and ironic.
ABBOTT GLEASON
Brown University
Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. By Hayden White.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. xii205.
Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect is the fourth book by Hayden White in
a series that began with the raw, ungainly, and brilliantly suggestive Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973). Taken to-
gether, Whites books and essays have done much to alter the theory of history. Al-
though his focus on trope and narrative is far from what most historians are interested
in, they are all aware of his work. This does not mean that it has been carefully read,
but it does mean that in some slightly perverse way it now registers as part of the
disciplines cultural capital, getting cited in such otherwise unlikely contexts as
American Historical Association presidential addresses. Who would have figured it in
1973? But it seems to be so, and perhaps in retrospect it is not surprising.
Most of the essays in Figural Realism will be of only marginal interest to most
historians, although parts of the book ought to be of interest at some level to all. Whites
preoccupations in the collection are heavily literary. The book is best approached if
one sees it for what it mainly isan attempt to make sense of literary modernisms
apprehension of history. Of least interest for historians are chapters 6, 7, and 8. Chapters
6 and 7 analyze, respectively, Freuds theory of the dream-work and a passage from
Prousts Sodome et Gomorrhe, in the light of the four master tropes of metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche, and irony; chapter 8 reflects on the applicability (or not) of
literary theory to music. More interesting for historians is chapter 1, Literary Theory
and Historical Writing, which amounts to an excellent brief overview and defense of
Whites approach to the theory of history. Chapter 2, Historical Emplotment and the
Problem of Truth in Historical Representation, is the one essay in this collection that
many historians will already be familiar with: it was originally published in Saul Fried-
landers collection, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final So-
lution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Here White discusses the problem of how the Ho-
locaust is to be represented in language. Chapter 3 discusses formalist and contextualist
strategies of explanation. Chapter 4 explores the alleged tendency of literary modernism
to derealize the notion of the singular, specific event, which, White suggests, melts
away under the combined pressure of modernist narrative techniques and a surfeit of
documentation. Chapter 5 brilliantly discusses Erich Auerbachs Mimesis: The Rep-
resentation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), which White regards as an ex-
emplification of a specifically modernist historicism.
I shall content myself with making two general points. The first has to do with
Whites nimbleness and daring (some would say foolhardiness). Time and again White
has undertaken to investigate intellectual objects and materials lying far beyond any
technical field of competence that he might claim. He is able to do so because he has
mastered a nontechnical field of expertise: he is a rhetorician, in the classical sense of
a person who has learned how to produce speech that is appropriate to every particular
occasion. The rhetorician holds in mind sets of rhetorical commonplaces or topoi (e.g.,
the master tropes) that are potentially available to be brought to bear on whatever matter
778 Book Reviews
lies at hand. The rhetorician also generally does not reject but, instead, works within
the conceptual framework of the audience that he or she is addressing. Thus the dis-
tinction between formalism and contextualism in chapter 3 came from conference or-
ganizers. In chapter 4 White begins with a commonplace of contemporary literary
criticism, namely, that modernism dissolves away the event. In chapter 6 psychoanal-
ysis is never questioned. And so on. With his topoi and with his willingness to meet
his audiences far more than halfway, White is able to speak fluently and interestingly
on an astonishingly wide variety of matters.
This way of proceeding has both defects and virtues. On the one hand, rhetorical
topoi do seem to embody an inherited wisdom: at any rate, one is quite often surprised
at how much they actually do illuminate the objects and discourses to which they are
applied. One can also learn from exploring the discursive structure of positions without
questioning the positions themselves. On the other hand, one is here engaged in the
pursuit of something close to what Giambattista Vico called vulgar wisdom (in the
sense of common or popular wisdom). Admittedly, Whites vulgar wisdom is often
the wisdom of modernist intellectuals, but it is still vulgar in the sense that the
question of its validity is more or less self-consciously held in abeyance. Thus White
proceeds as if the formalist/contextualist distinction were adequate, as if what modern-
ists say about the dissolution of the event were true, and as if Freuds theory of the
dream-work actually holds up under empirical scrutiny. White sometimes expresses
reservations about these conceptions, but he does not throw them out, because if he
did that the speech-generating machine would grind to a halt.
My second point has to do less with Whites project than with historiography. White
sees historiography itself as an embodiment of vulgar wisdom. Another way of putting
this is to say that White is concerned with historiography in its interpretive aspect (and
with its descriptive and explanatory aspects insofar as they are matters of interpreta-
tion). He leaves aside the argumentative or justificatory aspect, whereby historians,
engaging in extended dialectical debate, seek to infer to the best descriptions or expla-
nations. At one point White notes offhandedly that the precise nature of the relation
between arguments and narrativizations in histories is unclear (p. 182, n. 1). White is
interested in the narrativizations (or interpretations) of the past that we offer from the
perspective of our constantly changing present perspectives. These narrativizations are
multiple, for they involve a continual and potentially infinite retroactive re-alignment
of the Past, to use Arthur Dantos phrase (Analytical Philosophy of History [New
York, 1965], p. 168). White helps us to see both the possibility and the interest of the
multiplicity. But on both epistemological and ethical grounds such multiplicity also
needs to be winnowed down. One of the roles of the historian (which White, in his
sunny optimism and sublime exuberance, is not much interested in exploring) is to
engage in such a winnowing.
ALLAN MEGILL
University of Virginia
Lawyers, Litigation, and English Society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks.

London: Hambledon Press, 1998. Pp. xiii274. $55.00.
I do not think it points to a real difference between Christopher Brooks and myself
when I say that historians do not yet know enough about early modern English law to
get very far with the social history of the law (especially on the civil side). Brooks
Book Reviews 779
concedes as much. He goes on to write well about legal history, to the degree that it
can be studied from the outside point of view, which is to say, without primary attention
to the state of the law applied in the courts, in its eternal and shifting equipoise between
the fairly settled and the controverted. Perhaps our divergence is that between the
optimist and the pessimist, with Brooks in the sunnier role. In this book of connected
essays, the principal subjects of which are litigation rates and the legal profession, he
carries on from his earlier work with an admirable combination of research in the
records and critical analysis. The former furnishes important explicanda; the latter
conveys a strong sense of the complexity of the explanations and puts to rest a number
of speculations by social historians who have touched on the law. Granting, then, that
the book advances the field considerably, the residue of my still somewhat melancholy
response comes to the sense that it advances the social-historical approach to the field
about as much as possible. The more future work is internalist, the more likely it is
that the pieces Brooks has made visible will fall into place. Although one cannot expect
quick results, getting to know the law from the cases is easier work than circling around
it in the hope of catching how an unknown might fit into wider descriptions or theories
of society. These words do not imply that Brooks is anything but well informed when
he uses general features of the substantive law; it is a success of this book that it
reemphasizes the need for a more refined picture.
The most striking phenomenon discussed in the book (from different angles, includ-
ing a usefully broad sweep in the fourth chapter, from 12001996) is the falling off
of litigation in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from its golden age in
the later sixteenth and early seventeentha falling off from which there was not a
proportionate recovery in the still more modern period, despite enormous growth in
population and economic activity. Factors in this change are richly explored, including
the legal professions (higher and lower, the bar, and the attorneys), the number and
character of whose members figure among both the causes and the effects of the shift
downward after the Civil War and of qualified recovery as modern times came on. It
is of course ambiguous whether gold or dross should supply the epithet for the age
when greatest use was made of the mainline legal system (common law and equity).
Brooks writes well about that ambiguity; that is, about the history of attitudes toward
litigation and litigiousness. Unclear law and wicked people ought to swell litigation
(and it is this on which most of the deplorers in history have dwelled). Yet it seems a
social good for people with actual or possible legal rights to be able to vindicate or to
test them. It seems better that such claimants should not be deterred by expense, by
the forbidding distance of the legal apparatus and the difficulty of dealing with it, by
cynicism or despair about the best mans winning, or at least having a chance to have
his say through adequate professional representatives. It is likely that this good came
closest to being realized (quite democratically) when Elizabeth I and the first two
Stuarts (with their undemocratic principles) sat on the throne (the chorus of deplorers
all the while raising the volume of lament).
Everything Brooks says toward establishing the phenomenon and making sense of
it merits careful consideration by legal historians, whether their point of departure is
internal or external. The heart of remaining perplexity lies in the fact that statistics of
litigation depend top-heavily on debt collection. Indeed, an important showing of these
studies is that, after due adjustment, the graph of other forms of litigation is remarkably
flat. (Never mind, e.g., the horrendous mess in property law in the wake of the Statutes
of Uses and Willsrich people fishing for control of land in those troubled waters
make scarcely a blip). Debt collection, so long as the benign formalism of medieval
contract law predominated in commercial practice, has the curious feature of looking
780 Book Reviews
like litigation without really being such. That is, many lawsuits were brought in which
the prospect of contention in court about either the law or the facts was extremely
remote; suing was just starting the wheels of execution turning, to the end of coercing
the debtor, first by the threat of coercion and, failing that, by the actual screws. Brooks
has useful information on changes in debt collection as the seventeenth century turned
into the eighteenth, but there must be more to the story. And how much of the golden
age survives when debt collection is discounted? Two final essays in the volume are
on another track, the contribution of lawyers to political discussion around the inter-
pretation of Magna Carta and the so-called ancient constitution, to which my only mild
caveat would be, beware of lawyers when they opine outside cases and controversies.
CHARLES M. GRAY
University of Chicago
Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 15611629. By Theodore K. Rabb.

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii412. $55.00.
Sir Edwin Sandys enjoyed a gentlemans birthhis father was Archbishop of York
and more than a gentlemans education, gaining a command of Latin and Greek, and
probably Hebrew, advancing to the degree of master of arts while at Oxford, before
moving on to the Middle Temple for legal learning. Despite his erudition, Sandys
remained obscure until he was nearly forty years old. Then, at the opening of the
seventeenth century, Sandys embarked on three careers that brought him to national
prominence: as religious pamphleteer, as a leader of opposition to royal policy in the
Commons (p. 54), and as a colonizer. These three enterprises provide the framework
for Theodore Rabbs account of Sandyss public career. While there is much of interest
concerning Sandyss tolerationist response to religious conflict and about his sometimes
dubious role in the ill-fated Virginia Company, it is the middle of these matters
Sandyss parliamentary careerthat commands 75 percent of the books pages and
provides the reason for Rabbs intense admiration for the man.
Of greatest use to readers will be the highly detailed account of Sandyss parlia-
mentary career from his first speechagainst the new King Jamess proposal for the
Union of Scotland and Englandto his fading from public life in the mid 1620s amid
accusations of corruption, collusion with courtiers, and Arminian spiritual tendencies.
The start of James Is reign does mark a divide (p. 53), both in the life of Sandys
and in the life of the nation, an important conjunction given that Rabbs Sandys rep-
resents the nation itself or at least its independent gentry. Thus this book is not a
biography as much as it is a narrative of the early Stuart House of Commons. Indeed,
the sources for a study of private characterpersonal letters, diariesby and large do
not exist. We are left only with the sources for the telling of an active and intriguing
public life as a way of reviewing the history of an institution as it apparently prepared
for the political apocalypse of mid century.
What will surprise readers more than the details of the narrative are Rabbs analytic
ambitions. The shocks of the 1610s . . . provided the first major impetus toward the
dissolution of the unity of Englands ruling elite (p. 205). The result was that MPs
were assuming an independent position in the polity (p. 173). Promoting this required
a conscious, directing mind: Sandyss. His commitment to a kind of gentry democ-
racy (p. 118) led him to take an important part in criticizing the king and in defending
the House of Commonss growing assertiveness. He did this most prominently in his
Book Reviews 781
work on the Apology of the House of 1604, which became a beacon in the devel-
opment of ideas of freedom (p. 107). If the House of Commons was not winning the
initiative made famous decades ago by Wallace Notestein, Sandys certainly was.
The more one reads, the more apparent becomes an unresolved tension between the
attention to detail in recounting Sandyss activities and the grand vision of what these
details should mean to us. Unfortunately, for this vision to work, Sandys himself is
caricatured. Complicating features of Sandyss life apparent in the detailsincluding
his work with prominent courtiers as well as Sandyss ethically questionable behavior
in the Virginia Companyare flattened to make Sandys into an epic, if admittedly
flawed, libertarian hero. This analysis also requires that Sandyss king be a caricature
too. Contrary to much recent scholarship, Jamess simplistic analyses ignored the real
undercurrents of the age (p. 170). Rabbs James failed to detect that these currents
were sweeping all before them along lines of development that stretched from the
1604 to the 1624 sessions of Parliament (p. 205). Sandys and his peers by the early
1620s were now setting examples for the generation that would lead Parliament (and
the King) into the Civil War (p. 214).
That the king and the books central character should be made into caricatures is
unfortunate given what a reading of Sandyss public life in light of recent studies of
the early Stuart era might reveal. In particular, more flesh might have been put on
Sandyss bones by uniting the insights of the books three separate sections. For in-
stance, it would be interesting to consider further Sandyss consistent tolerationist,
sometimes Arminian, position relative to the opposition role he played in Parliament
given the classic assumption that such early political foes were religious foes too. The
spiritual commitments stressed in revisionist scholarship on politics is overlooked,
so the ways in which such a complex figure as Sandys could reveal the complexity of
the age are left unexplored. Intriguingly, Sandyss interest in the religious ideas of
others, especially Catholics, is as much like the theological curiosity of James I as that
of anyone else.
In a similar vein, Sandyss connections with various court figures, especially with
the duke of Buckingham late in his career, belie Sandyss position as spokesman for a
feisty country politics. Indeed, Sandyss involvement with the country is posited
rather than demonstrated since we see little of his actual contact with people in the
country, particularly in his own county of Kent. Given that we know little about his
connections to people there and about the political concerns of those people, we are
left to wonder why a man who ostensibly represented a broadly held set of independent
gentry concerns (p. 171) had such a hard time finding a parliamentary seat in the mid
1620s, and why he failed altogether in 1628. By then, it would appear, fewer were
listening to Sandys, the voice of the gentry (p. 119).
Certainly, some will want to read this book for its narrative of the day-to-day work-
ings of the Commons during the reign of James I. But given the clear analytic tilt given
to the interpretation of events in the House, it is a pity that more was not done to engage
the considerable scholarship that raises serious questions about Rabbs vision of San-
dys. Rabb suggests that revisionism makes it impossible to explain or understand the
career of an Edwin Sandys (p. 61). While there may some truth to this, the failure to
respond to rather than simply dismiss the scholarship that falls under this awkward
label leaves the reader with the details of an interesting life, yet with an interesting
analytic opportunity not taken.
PAUL D. HALLIDAY
Union College
782 Book Reviews
Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590

1690. By Daniel C. Beaver. Harvard Historical Studies, volume 129.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii462. $49.50.
Local studies of religious conflict in the century or so that followed the Reformation
in England are normally justified by their particularity, by their capacity to get behind
the larger generalizations to the actualities of lived experience. Daniel C. Beaver has
chosen a different tack. Rather than approaching the small communities of Tewkesbury
and its surrounding parishes with what he terms the functionalist approach, which
he dismisses as generated by a modern search for coherence and an evocation of a
mythic rural isolation . . . described in nostalgic terms of kinship, friendship, and neigh-
borhood, he wishes to examine instead the symbols and ritual action that alone
could create communities from the dispersed settlements in vale parishes (pp. 46
47, 74). Here the parish communities were too widely dispersed to be formed and
sustained by personal contact, so the local historian must investigate its symbolic
life and ritual (p. 50). Admittedly, kinship, friendship, neighborhood and status were
the flesh and bone of parish communities, presumably if viewed without nostalgia,
but it was only symbols and ritual action that could create communities (p. 74).
Since the centerpiece of the study is Tewkesbury, not a dispersed settlement but a small
town of fewer than five thousand inhabitants, where surely face-to-face relationships
must have prevailed, and where the corporation gave institutional structure to personal
relationships, it is not clear why a sense of community should have depended solely
on shared symbols and rituals, but he insists that only symbols created the corporation
and the parish (p. 84). Beavers ideal is that of the ethnographic study as practiced by
Clifford Geertz, surely neither an ignoble nor inappropriate model for historians, but
if the resulting study is not entirely successful, it seems due less to Beavers ambitions
than to his failure to provide that thick description that characterizes Geertzs work.
Agency tends to disappear; change is not due to human action but to the rituals and
symbols that shape and give meaning to relationships of the largely faceless and blood-
less inhabitants of the Vale of Gloucester. Death in the vale, we are told, was as
much a social and cultural event as it was a biological condition. The meanings of
death were symbolic interpretations of a biological condition (p. 87), which, while
doubtless true, may not strike the reader as a particularly new or interesting insight
into the history of northern Gloucestershire.
If some conclusions seem blandly obvious, other generalizations seem to rest on the
flimsiest of evidence. After the 1590s, he claims, lay and clerical Puritans in the
vale attempted to promote a more radically Protestant purification of ceremonies in
parish churches, an example of which is the assault on the mortuary rites of the
parish (p. 107). The best local source for this turns out to be a funeral sermon
preached a century later in 1691 in which the Anglican minister attacked what he
claimed were dissenters who denied the resurrection of the body at the Last Judgment,
but what such a belief has to do with mortuary rites a century earlier is not evident.
Beaver does note that a couple of wills dating from the 1630s call for burial without
worldly pomp, but we are not told what evidence exists for identifying these testators
as Puritans. In fact, who were Puritans and who were not is a major problem. Church-
wardens and most of their neighbors in the Vale of Gloucester perceived Nonconfor-
mity in the early 1630s as the result of irresponsible behavior by a small number of
clerical radicals (p. 193). Nevertheless, John Geary, the incumbent in Tewkesbury,
who had apparently preached inflammatory sermons, was reported to the Court of
High Commission in 1631 not by the churchwardens but by an anonymous informant
Book Reviews 783
(p. 179). Under pressure from the Metropolitical Visitation of 1635, the churchwardens
of Tewkesbury presented thirty nonconformists, and those of nearby Ashchurch pre-
sented forty of their parishioners for gadding to sermons preached by Geary and by
William Blackwell, the Puritan preacher in Beckford (p. 180). Such numbers suggest
substantial Puritan communities, an impression increased by the fact that the ministers
of Deerhurst and Forthampton also apparently belonged to the same charismatic
crew. The few clerical malcontents seem to have included most of the active local
clergy, and they apparently commanded important local support. Humphrey Fox, in
trouble in 1634 for baptizing a child while suspended, had a long and checkered career,
having been suspended from Tewkesbury in 1602 and then presented to the curacy of
Forthampton in 1616, from which he was suspended in 1619 and again in 1630. Geary,
suspended in 1634, continued to preach at Tewkesbury with the permission of his
replacement, Nathaniel Wight. In fact Tewkesbury seems to have had a not insignificant
Puritan presence in the corporation since the 1590s, since the local incumbent was
nominated by them and presumably financed by them, the living being worth only 10
per annum. Despite all the turmoil of the revolutionary decades, the dissenting element
in the corporation apparently survived, for their incumbent in the Restoration was
admonished in both 1671 and again in 1676 for emending the Prayer Book service and
for failing to wear the surplice, before being finally deprived in 1681 for delivering a
sermon in which he had inveighed against the immorality of court and king (pp. 271
72).
Ritual and symbol are obviously an important index of religious sentiment and prac-
tice, but the exclusive focus on these aspects of religion to the exclusion of others has
prevented Beaver from presenting a coherent and convincing picture of religious con-
flict in the Vale of Gloucester. Even so basic a question as how Tewkesbury and its
neighboring parishes came to have such a series of Puritan incumbents is never asked,
let alone answered, because the issue of clerical patronage is obviously not part of the
world of symbol or ritual. Yet when not hamstrung by theory, Beaver reveals impres-
sive powers of historical imagination, as his ingenious and convincing analysis of the
import of the various versions of the Thomas Hickes story evidences. This could have
been a very much better, if necessarily different, book.
PAUL S. SEAVER
Stanford University
Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain. By G. R. Searle.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xii300. $85.00.
Over the years, starting with The Quest for National Efficiency (Berkeley, 1971), a still
indispensable study of British political thought at the turn of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, G. R. Searle, a professor of history at the University of East Anglia,
has steadily built up an impressive body of modern historical scholarship. He is a
political historian, though not of the conventional sort; with one exception his books
have consistently fled the confines of party, parliament, and cabinet into the more
elusive realms of corruption or entrepreneurial influence. But here, in what is, by my
count, his sixth substantial monograph, he for the first time quits politics altogether to
take on what is, in his estimation, the essential conundrum at the heart of Victorian
life. How is it, he asks, that Victorians were able to reconcile their capitalism and their
Christianity, their political economy and their public morality? Taking as his (somewhat
784 Book Reviews
anachronistic) point of departure Maynard Keyness famous indictment of modern

capitalismabsolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit,
often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuershe sets out
to examine the ways in which in the century before Keynes, intelligent middle-class
Britons who broadly sympathized with the development of a commercial society grap-
pled with the problem of how the logic of the market could be reconciled with what
they took to be their irreducible religious, moral, and social duties (p. vii).
What follows, then, is a painstaking and nuanced study in Victorian ambivalence.
Rather than to add to the already swollen literature on the critics of capitalism
those much-studied sages, proletarians, and socialists who were irreconcilably hostile
to the theory and practice of modern commerceSearle dwells on those more para-
doxical (and usually Liberal) figures who admired the economic achievements of their
day, saw no viable alternative to some version of the market philosophy which had
made these achievements possible, but who suffered uneasy consciences (p. x). These
uneasy consciences are themselves hardly Searles discovery. Liberal misgiving is a
venerable theme in Victorian studies, and one need only pick up the nearest copy of
John Stuart Mills Autobiography to find it on prominent display. But Searle has traced
it to some new, less prominent venues; more important, he has attended more carefully
than anyone else has to its political implications. How in fact did Victorians moralize
the market? How did they practically distinguish wage labor from slavery, investment
from speculation, entrepreneurial acumen from fraud? These are the sorts of questions
that Searle takes up in a series of discrete essays. After an opening introduction of his
theme, he proceeds topically (not chronologically) through a number of Victorian at-
tempts to establish the boundaries of market behavior and lay down the ground rules
that would prevent or mitigate abuse (p. 7).
Of these attempts, the earlier and most familiar, surely, were abolition, the factory
laws, and (albeit in a more commerce-friendly vein) the New Poor Law. Here, Searle
does not add appreciably to what we already know nor does he really mean to. He is
more interested in the modern than the ancient abuses, and his book effectively begins
with the fifth chapter on criminal capitalism. Fraudulent speculation and food adul-
teration were two especially blatant manifestations of the sorts of new corruption
that confounded the hopeful expectations of economic Liberals, and Searle deftly dis-
cusses efforts to mitigate their demoralizing effects. The following chapter on the regu-
lation of the legal and medical professions goes to show that even in the heyday of
laissez faire, some areas of social life were thought too sensitive to be subjected to the
full rigours of market competition (p. 133). The family, too, was out of bounds. For
all Mills efforts to import the contractual and civilizing spirit of political economy
into the home, the dominant ideology of mid-Victorian Britain, Searle persuasively
shows, stood Mills theory on its head by presenting family and the home as the social
agencies that would civilize the ruthless, competitive, cutthroat world of business, or
at least provide a much-needed refuge from commercial pressures (p. 153).
From these attempts to insulate certain areas of lifethe professional and the do-
mesticfrom the operation of market forces, Searle turns to the problems involved
in the implementation of market principles in specific fields of policy where this was
found to generate controversy and misgivings (p. 167), namely, poor relief and war-
fare. In both cases, political economy ultimately failed to discredit the older imperatives
of, respectively, benevolence and patriotism. In the moral sphere, in addressing the
abuses of Sunday trading, prostitution, intemperance, and the like, Victorian authorities
(once chastened by the furor surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts) prudently
avoided excessive regulation. Yet neither was free trade allowed to rip (p. 251). Here,
Book Reviews 785
too, Searle amply (even, it could be said, repetitiously) renders the art of Victorian
governance in terms of a delicate balance between the conflicting imperatives of mo-
rality and the market.
It was no happy accident, this delicate balance. It depended on the determined efforts
of civil and religious authorities and small, paternally minded employers to restrain the
corrupting effects of modern commerce and thus preserve a culture of moral purpose.
Only in recent years, Searle argues, with the decline of church and chapel, the eclipse
of the public service ideal, and the extinction of the small employer, has market
liberalism broken free from all restrictions and claimed its right to rule the world (p.
273). The overstatement is forgivable. Searle no doubt knows that many social, envi-
ronmental, and regulatory institutions, some of them of unassailably Victorian pedigree,
continue to exert a civilizing influence. But the delicate balance between acquisitiveness
and probity the Victorians achieved has in fact been lost, and by not giving in to Searles
excessively despairing conclusion, one may all the more readily join him in his hopes
that it may yet be recovered.
STEWART A. WEAVER
University of Rochester
Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain. By K. D.

Reynolds. Oxford Historical Monographs. Edited by R. R. Davies et al.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. ix 260. $65.00.
The high-born of Britain have not, in recent years, lacked attention from historians.
David Cannadine (The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy [New Haven, Conn.,
1990]) and Peter Mandler (The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home [New Haven, Conn.,
1997]) have recently published substantial work investigating both the impact and the
subsequent decline of aristocratic power. The lives of aristocratic women have formed
the principal point of investigation for the early work of Leonore Davidoff (The Best
Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season [London, 1973]) and, more recently, of
Patricia Jalland (Women, Marriage and Politics, 18601914 [Oxford, 1986]) and Judith
Schneid Lewis (In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760
1860 [New Brunswick, N.J., 1986]). K. D. Reynolds offers an important and well-
researched contribution to this history in her recent monograph on aristocratic women
and political society in the nineteenth century. She purports to focus not on private
intimacies, as she sees other historians of aristocratic women as having done, but,
rather, on these womens contributions to the dominantly masculine world of politics
and power.
Reynoldss work is rooted in her insistence that for women of the aristocracy, their
membership in a privileged class at the very source of political power was a more
compelling identification than their sense of a gendered identity. The result of this
claim is an intriguing reperiodization of the nineteenth century in which continuity with
the eighteenth century is more prominent than some historians might allow, and in
which the substantial feminist achievements of the later nineteenth century sometimes
brought less, rather than more power, in the way of the elite woman. Furthermore,
Reynolds explicitly rejects the idea of separate spheres as a concept with neither prac-
tical nor ideological relevance in the everyday lives of women whose functions as
hostess, as estate manager, and as courtier she so ably lays out.
Reynolds provides a wealth of close detail to further her argument, and she has
786 Book Reviews
delved into an impressive array of papers in search of sometimes elusive clues as to

the lives of these women. If she sometimes relies too heavily on a few women
presumably whose papers have been better preserved and who may, themselves, have
been diligent correspondents and record-keepersthat is a minor fault in what is,
after all, a study of a small elite. Generalizations from particular cases may not be
as egregious a problem as would be so in a larger data set. And, indeed, Reynolds
makes a persuasive case for seeing Lady Palmerston, Lady Londonderry, Frances
Countess Waldegrave, and others as deeply involved in, committed to, and cognizant
of the big political issues of their day, as well as competent managers of large labor
forces on their estates and in their city dwellings. In distinguishing aristocratic net-
works from those of the newly dominant bourgeoisie, and in understanding their
layered and far-reaching kinship structures, she makes a good case, too, for her point
that the public and private lives of aristocratic women converged, that in elite circles,
the social and the political were not separate but alwaysand cruciallyconnected
entities.
These are healthy reminders of the dangers of homogenizing our view of nine-
teenth-century society and of forgetting that, alongside the new structures of politics
and participation, the old elite continued to wield considerable power and influence.
Yet, I wonder about what has to be sacrificed in this analysis. Reynolds is insistent
that, as she puts it on page 4, the duchess and the wife of the factory worker shared
little, as was also the case for their husbands. And certainly this is true in a host of
important ways. But to assert, thus, that class and status go beyond gender, much
else has to be ignored or relegated to irrelevance. Though duchesses and working-
class women would have found sustained conversation with one another an odd idea,
though the physical spaces in which they lived had almost nothing in common (even
if the proletarian woman worked as a domestic servant in grand surroundings), they
were nonetheless yoked in less visible but still tenacious ways. Neither could vote,
despite the considerable property the rich woman might enjoy, if only in trust; both
might experience the bruises and insults of marital violence, even if the remedies
available to them were not equitable; and both were cognizant that their pregnancies
were seen as opportunities for the birth of sons, whether those sons inherited unfath-
omable lands or the lowly occupations of their fathers and grandfathers. In short,
though the aristocrat and the washer-woman lived in different worlds, Reynoldss
argument must and does flatten out the differential privilege accorded through gender
in order to maintain its primary argument that class is more important than gender
in assessing the lives of nineteenth-century women. I would argue that a substantial
amount of her evidence suggests that, despite their ample privileges, elite women
nonetheless understood and lived with the contradiction imposed by this duality of
class and gender status in their lives. Reynolds cites, for example, the case of Char-
lotte Buccleuch, who waited more than a decade to fulfill her wish to convert to
Catholicism and delayed expressly because of her husbands career aspirations (pp.
76 77). And she notes that though women routinely supervised large households,
and did so with formidable skill, regulations were nonetheless issued largely in the
names of their husbands (p. 31) who also retained ultimate control of expenditure.
In some ways, such practices were not as far removed from working-class households
where women managed the budget but did so on what men chose to hand over from
their pay packets, as Reynolds perhaps suggests.
This is a superbly researched and an important study, and my disagreements with
the authors analysis are a mark of the liveliness and the intelligence of this study and
of the seriousness with which her argument must be taken. Well written, meticulously
Book Reviews 787
evidenced, and brave, this is an important study that will be read fruitfully by a wide
range of historians.
PHILIPPA LEVINE
University of Southern California
The Hammonds: A Marriage in History. By Stewart A. Weaver.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. viii349. $49.50.
Stewart Weaver is assuredly right. Books like The Town Labourer (1917) and The
Bleak Age (1934), standard reading as late as the 1950s and then updated (so to speak)
by E. P. Thompson, are hardly known to students of the 1990s. Once upon a time, one
spoke of the Hammonds and their immiseration thesis; then, J. H. Clapham and T. S.
Ashton were brought into the story to round out and balance the historiography of the
social consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
Today the work of Lawrence and Barbara Hammond seems archaic, their language
(the voice was his) soaring but overwrought. Yet it is Weavers contention, at least
implicitly, that the issues they raised are still the issues relevant to postindustrial so-
cieties (or for that matter, industrializing societies), best summed up in the phrase,
however trite, of quality of life. What should it avail a man to gain a kingdom but
lose his soul, or todays gender-neutral version of that?
The kingdom was gained. It was a kingdom of material wealth, eventually, as the
Hammonds reluctantly agreed, trickling down to the working classes. But the transition
was slow and rocky, and the adjustments wrenching and disruptive. The new towns
probably the central point that the Hammonds madepresented daunting hourly chal-
lenges: open spaces disappearing, pollution and congestion increasing, as well as the
spread of disease and gimcrack housingin sum, the classic problems of urban en-
vironments.
Who were these once famous authors in any case? In a biography that never declaims,
that is a question that runs through this relatively brief account of a marriage in history,
with the emphasis rather more on Lawrence than on Barbara (though she outlived him).
However, it was she who received the equivalent of First Class Honors at Oxford in
the days before women could take the actual degree, and he who pulled up short with
a Second, which put him in the company of his friend, R. H. Tawney, the intellectual
and moral heart of the Labor party.
Not a First Class mind, in the parlance of the day, Lawrence Hammond nevertheless
had a first-class career, or as much of one as he appeared to want owing to health and
disposition. He held various government appointments, in which the Old Boy network
played a part, and he served in the Great War at an advanced age before being declared
medically unfit. He edited and wrote for great Liberal periodicals like the Nation and
New Statesman, but he spent most of his journalistic time with the Manchester Guard-
ian in the heady days of the monumental C. P. Scott, continuing on under Scotts
successors. For this great organ of Liberal opinion, Hammond was an outstanding
leader writer during the Second World War. Barbara stayed mainly in the country at a
farmhouse in Oatfield in Hertfordshire, sleeping more or less outdoors. She was an
indefatigable researcher and tended a menagerie of beat-up and unwanted animals.
Photographs show the couple to be characteristic of their professional social class,
careless in appearance, indifferent to domestic comfort, austere, and eccentric.
The Hammonds were leftover Victorians or Edwardians, Gladstonian Liberals in fact
788 Book Reviews
born in the 1870s, and this is the especial interest of the biography. They were true to
their complicated heritage. Barbara did not, for example, like Virginia Woolf, but, of
course, that was predictable, as it was precisely High Victorianism and its hypocrisies
(we can be more generous) that Bloomsbury mocked. The Hammonds admired the Grand
Old Man, although in reviewing the facts of Gladstones life and writing extensively
about him, they came to understand that he was a wily politician governed by self will
(p. 258). Their Liberal trajectory from the Edwardian period onward was essentially this.
They were Little Englanders and disliked Empire. Hence they were pro-Boer, pro-Irish
(Barbara even expressed enthusiasm for Sinn Fein), and, after 1946, somewhat suspicious
of the spread of American military power. Despite being heavily wooed by Fabian So-
cialists and members of the Labor Party, they were wary of state-led collectivism, al-
though, with reservations, they welcomed the fabrication of the post-1946 Welfare State.
Of trade unions, they were suspicious, and they were positively against the General Strike
of 1926. Of course, they feared Soviet communism while some of their friends like the
Webbs cheered; but, during the war, they criticized British intervention against the com-
munists fighting in Greece. Naturally, they deplored the rise of the Nazis, but in a curious
way that Weaver does not develop. Instead, he quotes from a letter of 1931 by Lawrence
Hammond to his lifelong friend Gilbert Murray: the failure to give Germany an outlet
now will seem a bad, perhaps a fatal, failure of statesmanship (p. 231). Weaver says
that this seemed prophetic, but in an endnote quietly adds that this is the letter that
earns Hammond an unhappy place in Martin Gilberts The Roots of Appeasement (p.
311). Right up into the 1930s, Hammond was mentioning possible colonial concessions
(whatever that means) to Germany, believing with others that the terms of Versailles had
been too high. But he steadily maintained the need to protect Czechoslovakia, which
Neville Chamberlain subsequently abandoned.
A certain consistency is evident in these ambivalences and hesitations that might be
termed sympathy for the presumed underdog. Judgment could and did go astray here,
but a Liberal as an idealized Gladstonian was not so much a statesman as a moralist,
and the morality could be that of Tory romanticism as represented by authors such as
William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, and John Ruskin. The Ham-
monds personally knew two others in the tradition, their contemporaries Hilaire Belloc
and G. K. Chesterton. They were not, as many easily imagined, writing as socialists,
so their remedies for the fateful consequences of industrialism were really Dickensian:
an appeal to conscience, voluntarism, and human sympathy, solutions consistent with
their own family roots and with Idealism as taught by Oxford tutors. Weaver does not
examine the tradition of moral protest in any detail, borrowing material, shall we say,
from Raymond Williams, although he nicely summarizes the arguments of the Ham-
mond books. Oddly, given the Hammond association with Chesterbelloc and J. A.
Hobson, all three of whom have been implicated in one or another form of antisemitism
by historians, Weaver is not drawn to the theme of how a carry-over Liberal of the
Hammond disposition responded to that ugly development. And no material in the text
or pertinent references in the index explain how the Hammonds dealt with details of
the Holocaust or the Soviet murder of Jews when the facts became known after the
war. Perhaps, then, nothing was revealed in correspondence or writings? If so, this is
a curious omission for even cautious Gladstonians.
Weavers presentation is disciplined. His style is careful, often witty, and altogether
pleasing.
SHELDON ROTHBLATT
University of California, Berkeley, and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Book Reviews 789
Ernie OMalley: IRA Intellectual. By Richard English.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xv267. $75.00.
The Irish revolutionary movement of 191623 can lay claim to great originalityand
deep comparative interest. Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) were the
first organizations to use a mass political front to build a parallel underground state,
coupled with sophisticated guerrilla and international propaganda campaigns. Never-
theless, the Irish model has been roundly ignored by both revolutionaries and those
who study them. One reason for this neglect, perhaps, is its failure to produce a Lenin,
Guevara, or Mao, or a theory or manual. As practiced until recently, Irish revolutionary
history has similarly failed to produce enough heat or illumination to attract the scholars
who swarm around the bright lights of collective action, insurgency, and political and
ethnic violence.
What the revolution and its chroniclersscholarly or otherwisehave mostly pro-
duced instead is a host of memoirs and biographies, almost all following the same set
of uncritical narrative conventions. Such is the dominance of this genre that we still
lack a reliable general account of the period or of the I.R.A. Now, howeverfollowing
the pioneering work of David Fitzpatrick and Charles Townshend in the 1970sa new
wave of scholars are using the extraordinary documentary sources available to mount
an analytical assault on this territory. One such is Richard English, whose original and
thought-provoking book, Ernie OMalley: I.R.A. Intellectual, is the first to explicitly
tackle and interrogate the autobiographical paradigm.
OMalley is the perfect subject for such an enterprise: at once a leading figure in the
I.R.A., one of its most dedicated historians, and the author of its finest memoir, On
Another Mans Wound (London, 1936). English makes full use of the archived
OMalley papers and has tracked down a great deal more in private hands. He has also
been able to interview some of the principals in OMalleys life. His reconstruction is
a careful, sensitive one, especially where OMalleys family is concerned. The final
section of the concluding chapter, in particular, is a superb speculative portrait of the
man and his life. However, it is OMalleys imagination and personality rather than his
adventures that are of primary interest here. As a result, the book is succinct and
thematic in structure. The chapters progress step-by-step through different regions and
periods of his life: a detailed outline of his background and life is followed by explo-
rations of his careers as a revolutionary and writer, his personal relationships, and finally
his place in history. The psychological spirit of inquiry here is itself practically unique
in revolutionary autobiography, and a valuable model for further work.
Each of these overlapping essays addresses key debates in current historiography.
One such concerns the motives and backgrounds of the revolutionaries. How and in
whom was the revolutionary mentality created and sustained? Movement historians
thus far have tended to seek group explanations based on age, class, locality, or edu-
cation, but English sees critical biography as a necessary counterweight to these ag-
gregated blurred images (p. 208). The revolution was not just one of organizations,
but also one of dynamic individuals, so it is in the specifics of individual experience
that we will find the most intellectually satisfying explanations of the Irish Revolution
(p. 127).
In OMalleys case, however, many of these specifics do resemble the collage of
factors used in more general explanations: urban, lower-middle-class parents; education
by the nationalist Christian Brothers; a like-minded peer group (medical students); and
generational solidarity and resentment. In this respect, English is right to suggest his
subject might stand as an emblem for his comrades (p. 129). But he also goes on to
790 Book Reviews
ask what made the role of revolutionary so attractiveso satisfying, indeed, that
OMalley spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the experience. His reading
convincingly points to a heady combination of youthful liberation and professional
wish-fulfillment: the university drop-out transformed into a successful and heroic sol-
dier.
Probing further, English inquires into the nature of heroism and soldiership as
OMalley imagined them, and he plausibly presents them as largely drawn from British
models, whether broadly cultural or specifically literary. OMalley was both nationalist
zealot and Anglocentric Anglophile. Revolutionary role-playing, ironically, resolved
or accommodated this tension in a most gratifying way. The parallels with John Buchan
may be somewhat overdrawn, but the argument is a fascinating and fruitful one.
A second key theme is the content of OMalleys republicanism and, more particu-
larly, his attitude toward electoral politics. This is, as English is very much aware, a
question with great contemporary and comparative resonance, and it is also the subject
of a rising debate. Was the I.R.A., or revolutionary republicanism in general, antidem-
ocratic?
Englishs careful conclusion that OMalley and the I.R.A. had a complicated rela-
tionship with democracy (p. 84) captures well the ambivalence and tension between
the two Irish republican concepts of sovereigntyof the people (expressed politi-
cally in elections) and of the nation (revealed spiritually in rebellions and their he-
roes). However, the authors description of the I.R.A. as elitist (p. 84) misses the
guerrillas sense of embodying a kind of direct democracy in opposition to what they
saw as a manipulative and corrupt political and social hierarchy. Nor does his presen-
tation of their military strategy as one of inspiration, intimidation, and provocation
(p. 78) quite ring true: there is an absence of clear evidence to support it and a wealth
of contemporary documentation and memoirs to suggest differing ways of thinking.
Again, though, there is much here to advance and clarify the debate.
Englishs OMalley is constructed of contradictions: the antiimperialist Anglophile
who fought for the people while ignoring electoral majorities, the internationalist writer
obsessed with local patriotic glories, and so on. The book is structured to elucidate
these creative conjunctures of personality and imagination and to focus on the very
matter most often ignored or suppressed in revolutionary autobiography. It is, histori-
ographically, a great leap forward and will undoubtedly provide one of the starting
points for work on nationalism, republicanism, and violence for some time to come.
PETER HART
Queens University of Belfast
The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. By David Cannadine.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. xv293. $29.95.
David Cannadines new study focuses on how and why the British see themselves as
part of a class-based society. He asks many questions about both the historical and
contemporary basis for such categorizing of individuals, occupations, geographical
settings, cultures, and even nations: Why do the British do it? What purpose does it
serve? What exactly do they mean by class? Have they always understood the term
in the same way? Has it always been important as a means of understanding what it is
to be British? Does it mean anything now? How can class have any relevance in
describing society when the key to its applicationcommunismhas collapsed in
Book Reviews 791
Europe? All are good questions and certainly provocative ones, particularly as the title
of his book implies that such categorizations have lost meaning and significance over
the decades. Or, as Cannadine begs the question, have they?
Cannadine offers a new approach to class and its applications in the historical lit-
erature: instead of understanding class to explain history, he makes the case that history
should be used to understand the evolution of the concept of class. Suggesting that
class may have always been more imagined than real, he looks critically at the varied
definitions of class from competing camps of both historians and politicians. Looking
closely at the Marxist interpretation, as well as the most recent interpretations that refer
to accepted concepts of class division, Cannadine accuses both of misrepresentation.
Marxists and Thatcherites alike are attacked for their selective use of history and for
playing the class card in political rhetoric and electioneering. The only way to un-
derstand class and how Britons understand and describe their social worlds, he con-
tends, is to examine their history. In comparison to any other study of class in Britain,
this truly is, to borrow a phrase from one of the great Marxist historians, the world
turned upside down.
To say Cannadine takes on the historians is to say that he calls into question basic
conceptions students of history have embraced as standard methods of inquiry over the
past few decades. In examining how the profession has understood social rank and
hierarchy, he argues that the importance of class has changed significantly at various
stages of economic expansionboth emphasizing and undermining the importance of
dividing British society into categories based on wealth and social standing. Sources
contemporary social commentators and politicianshave all provided some useful
evidence to satiate the historians particular approach. All three common conceptions
of class are examined: the hierarchical model of ranking and ordering individuals so
as to make sense of the world; the understanding of collective groups that gives mean-
ing to individuals in society by an understanding of their contributions and abilities to
society; and the creation of adversarial groups that are in competition with one another
on all levelseconomic, political, and cultural.
From the late eighteenth century, what could be understood as the more familiar
hierarchical ranking of society changed into a kind of populism that pitted the masses
against those at the highest levels of wealth and power. Radicals demanding parlia-
mentary reform and equality denied any further social divisions than the power-mon-
gering aristocracy and the virtuous, but oppressed, people. Victorian capitalism merely
complicated matters by adding more potential categories and ranks to society and, thus,
made the idea of a united working class or middle class more unlikely. The Marx-
ists, of course, did not agree, seeing the world as merely competition between those
who provided capital and those who provided labor to the economy. But general bouts
of prosperity and a greater distribution of both money and political power undermined
these class arguments. Thus, many Victorians denied the idea of a class-divided nation
and, instead, viewed Britain in terms of a growing cultural unity that was merely
hierarchically based. The British Empire and imperialism merely reinforced this inter-
pretation. Rather than class warfare in the new factory-laden cities, new orders of
knighthood rewarded rank (allegedly based on service), thus perpetuating a particular
notion of class. The postWorld War I society saw new versions of the class-defined
society, with factory owners and the government pitted against striking trade unionists
and the growing presence of a socialist political party. But Cannadine also points out
that much of the rhetoric and argument evoked at the time catered to a nostalgic inter-
pretation of earlier periods in British history in which people understood themselves
and their society as hierarchically based and class based. Social rank and deference
792 Book Reviews
may not have been real for the majority of individuals in the early twentieth century,
but that perception was there and became one means by which the British cultivated a
modern cultural identity. As a result, Margaret Thatchers vehement attack on class-
based Britain was strongly denounced.
Whether this book answers the questions it sets out, or even raises all the pertinent
questions, is really up to each individual reader. The majority of the text focuses on
reviewing and critiquing much of the social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, while the arguments demonstrating the misuse of politics and class are largely
reserved for a single chapter on Thatcherism. The final chapter takes a look at the new
Britain under Tony Blair with an eye to the future. The question of a classless society,
juxtaposed against contemporary political and social behavior, only further demon-
strates that Cannadines study is merely the beginning of an important and uncom-
fortable period of self-examination for the British. Understanding themselves and where
they come in a class-based society might be the first step toward eliminating class-
based thinking about their society. Or, as Cannadine muses, it may only confirm the
perceptions that have been nurtured, rightly or wrongly, for many generations.
NANCY LOPATIN
University of WisconsinStevens Point
Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of

Remembrance. By Alex King. The Legacy of the Great War. Edited by Jay
Winter.
Oxford: Berg, 1998. Pp. xi274. $55.00 (cloth); $19.50 (paper).
The study of war memorials has burgeoned in the 1990s. In 1991, a group of scholars
from around and beyond Europe met at Les Invalides, beside Napoleons tomb, for
possibly the worlds first conference on Monuments aux Morts. Under the benign
supervision of Antoine Prost, pioneer of the subject, and Maurice Agulhon, peerless
iconographer of nationality, they helped each other to make many discoveries (includ-
ing the one that monument aux morts does not have quite the same meaning as war
memorial). Also in 1991 appeared Alan Borgs War Memorials from Antiquity to the
Present (London, 1991), an elegant survey from the vantage point of an art historian.
Meanwhile the Imperial War Museum, on the initiative of Borg as director, was un-
dertaking an inventory of war memorials in the United Kingdom that, when accom-
plished, will be the first for any country except Australia and New Zealand.
Alex King is among scholars who have been given access to this accumulating data
base by the projects coordinator Catherine Moriarty, herself a notable contributor to
research in the field: the title of her doctoral thesis, Narrative and the Absent Body:
The Mechanics of Meaning in First World War Memorials (University of Sussex,
1995), signals the transformation of its subject from a hobby for amateurs to a preoc-
cupation of the new cultural history.
King has written the first thoroughly professional book on British war memorials, a
work exemplary both as empirical history and for its reading of the literature on sym-
bolism and ritual. He confines himself mainly to public memorials intended to represent
whole towns or villages, excluding those made by churches, clubs, firms, and other
kinds of association. Six chapters tell the stories. Who erected the memorials, and what
conventions prescribed their work? What were the prewar and wartime origins of those
conventions? What discussions preceded the making of memorials, and what forms did
Book Reviews 793
the creators choose? Whose advice and skills did they enlist? What imagery, inscription,
and symbolism did they settle on?
The memorials were everywhere, as King shows. They were voluntary enterprises,
constructed by ad hoc committees that enjoyedor enduredcomplex relations with
municipal governments and that drew on memories of earlier monuments and cere-
monies, whether connected with wars or more generally civic. People debated vigor-
ously whether a memorial should be purely commemorative (a cross, an obelisk, or a
statue) or utilitarian (a hospital, a park, or a scholarship). Factions formed on this and
other issues. Their conflicts, breakdowns of communication, and eventual accommo-
dation are sensitively observed, especially in a Geertzian account of discord and its
resolution in Stoke Newington. Here, as elsewhere, King is good at picking the apt
quotation. A more unBritish action, by holding a packed meeting, declares an out-
raged member of the British Legion, one would fail to discover (p. 97).
Once in accord, the committees engaged artists, architects, sculptors, and monu-
mental masons (about whom we might have been told more, since they made so many
of the homelier monuments). King has shrewd observations about the images delivered
by these various makers. Soldier figures could be ambiguous, at once representing the
dead and mourning them. Cenotaphs were blanks on which viewers were free to in-
scribe meanings of their own. Although the original cenotaph, in Whitehall, has by
now attracted a considerable literature, King finds something new: in the Public Record
Office, a Cabinet decision not to let Sir Edwin Lutyens incorporate carved and painted
flags. Rightly, the author says, in a rare flash of his own aesthetic judgment: those
Lutyens imposed on his memorial at Leicester are reminiscent of the decorations on
an ice-cream van (p. 144, n. 41).
Three final chapters inquire into meanings. What didactic purposes did memorials
serve? What moral qualities did observers attribute to the men whom they honored?
What conflicts of interpretation emerged during unveilings? More generally, Why did
the commemoration of the dead have to bear such a burden of political issues? (p.
208) To that question, King suggests two answers, the one public, the other personal.
First, the political platform which commemorations had always offered now became
available to mass organizations especially concerned with the war and its aftermath,
principally the British Legion and the League of Nations Union (p. 209). Second,
making sense of the war entailed some form of political action on the part of people
wanting to remember, mourn, and honor dead friends and relatives, and they insisted
on saying what it should be. In a society deeply divided on fundamental issues, the
opportunity to propose meanings for commemorative symbols was, inevitably, the
opportunity for an argument (p. 210).
King does not agree with Bob Bushaway and others that idealization of the dead
inhibited criticism of Britains social and political structure. The men honored on me-
morials, he finds, were invoked in radical as well as conservative causes. He does
allow, though, that limits were set to dissenting rhetoric by what he nicely calls an
etiquette of commemoration which regulated relations between participants with dif-
ferent aims and views, an etiquette that was not merely voluntary but if need be
physically enforced . . . by civic authorities, employers, crowds or private individuals,
who might act, sometimes violently, to protect the sacred times and places of com-
memoration (p. 16). Protestors at war memorials on Armistice Day and at other times
had to accept the decorum of these occasions (p. 212).
Indeed, behind all differences of interpretation King discerns sufficient sense of
unity . . . for remembrance of the dead to remain an almost universal public observance
(p. 216). Sacred Union, he entitles the last chapter. He is not quite satisfied by what
794 Book Reviews
might be called the grief school of historians, among whom Jay Winter is the most
eloquent. Memorials are usually in public places, not at sites traditionally chosen for
individuals and families to grieve. Moreover, acts of commemoration were so drawn
out over the years that no one ceremony can have formed a definitive leave-taking of
the dead. Guilt and anxiety, King proposes, were no less important than grief in the
culture of remembrance; and he discerns political as well as psychological reasons for
the prolongation of public grieving. The argument here is subtle, and includes, I think,
one lapse, an attribution of agency to an abstract noun: Commemoration thus played
on the pathological aspects of grief, and set out deliberately to prolong them, in order
to improve, morally and politically, postwar society (p. 221). Since commemoration
can do no such thing, who, in the authors view, did what, to that end?
A modest conclusion points to two uses of this work for comparative study: into
other forms of reflection on war, such as political rhetoric and literature, and into the
commemorative activities of people in other countries. On the first score, the book
can usefully be read alongside others in this valuable series, such as Annette Beckers
War and Faith (Oxford, 1998) and David W. Lloyds Battlefield Tourism (Oxford,
1998). On the second, readers will be prompted to ask their own questions. Did any
other belligerent nation have an equivalent to the local shrines erected during the war
in London and elsewhere? How unusual on the map of Europe was the voluntary
character of the British movement? Likewise, the controversy over monumental ver-
sus utilitarian forms. And why, as the author asks, did Weimar Germans find it so
much more difficult than people in Britain (and France and Italy) to create local
memorials? Thanks to King, we now have a solid base for these and other interna-
tional comparisons.
Illustrations are so essential to such a book that they are better called visual text.
The publisher has allowed the author thirty of his own photographsa generous ration
these daysbut reproduces them rather murkily and gives no captions, requiring the
reader to look back thirty times to an identifying list.
K. S. INGLIS
Australian National University
The British Conservative Party in the Age of Universal Suffrage: Popular

Conservatism, 19181929. By Neal R. McCrillis.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. Pp. x314. $41.95.
This is an oddly uneven book: Neal McCrillis makes great claims for his findings, and
he does indeed add considerably to our knowledge of the British Rights successful
survival of the transition to democracy in the 1920s. But ultimately he rather disap-
points, since he cannot provide more than a plausible hypothesis as to the effectiveness
of all that he describes.
His text begins and ends with chapters anchored on franchise extensions and the
elections that followed them in 191718 and 192829. This is effectively done, though
since neither election was predominantly fought on franchise issues, it is not clear why
these two campaigns deserve more extended treatment than the elections of 1922, 1923,
and 1924 (which receive no detailed attention at all). This is largely a framing device,
though, and the real weight is contained in four inner chapters that describe the Con-
servative Partys innovative efforts in the 1920s, respectively, for women, younger
voters, the working class, and in broader political education.
Book Reviews 795
These central chapters make exceptionally good use of the partys own papers, now
safely archived in Oxford (but unavailableonce thought indeed to have gone for war
salvage in 1940to the previous generation who worked on the Tories and are now
pilloried for their inattention to such documents!). These bureaucratic files have pro-
duced material of great richness, supplemented here with politicians personal papers
and diaries, and press sources. McCrillis has also investigated in depth the Tory record
in a dozen sample constituencies, and this often enables him to add the flesh of real
activity and response to the bones of organizers aspirations and exhortations. He can
thus show with chapter and verse how successful the Tories were in integrating women
into party work after they finally got the vote in 1918, how indeed women rapidly
became the mainstay of fundraising and local party activity. Similarly, Stanley Bald-
wins reiterated belief that Conservatives must in every generation recruit from the Left
and from the young was reflected in a parallel burst of organizational activity among
younger voters: the Junior Imperial Leagues Imps soon outnumbered every other
British youth organization except the Boy Scouts. In the wider area of propaganda,
Conservatives were tireless in exploiting new technology (e.g., cinema and radio); in
flooding the country with posters, leaflets, and trained speakers; and in collecting to-
gether the keenest members in discussion groups, conferences, and even special courses
at a party college, whence they could return to reinvigorate their friends and neighbors
with arguments against socialism. Tories saw this as a defensive battle of survival, for
they were very conscious of an electorate inexperienced in democratic activity (and
thus thought vulnerable to the charms and snares of the Left), and of a Labour Party
with an exaggerated, if not entirely imaginary, capacity to capture the hearts and minds
of the masses. Only in one field, the attempt to enhance working-class participation in
Toryism, did these organizational efforts clearly fail: few real workers ever secured
candidacies or senior organizational posts.
So crudely summarized, the book may seem to contain little that is unfamiliar to the
assiduous reader of earlier literature, and indeed at the macrolevel this is true, but such
a judgment would undervalue McCrilliss work, for its strength is in the evidence,
example, and quotation of cases on the groundhe is, for example, particularly attuned
to songs, doggerel poems, and playlets as evidence. Through these detailed additions
to the fabric, our knowledge of the subject is much advanced, even where the big
picture remains unchanged.
The good news does not, however, go much further. In some detail, the book is just
plain wrong, and at times approaches the man from Mars approach to British history
by American writers that is now so extremely rare. Stockton on Tees never was a city,
and Stratton (hardly more than one street in the 1920s) was certainly not a town;
knighthoods seem to be systematically antedated, and citations of peerages consistently
misunderstood. The bibliography contains the most egregious of such gaucheries: Rich-
ard Austen Butler, later Lord Butler of Saffron Walden, becomes Lord Robert (sic)
Austen Butler, which would make him the younger son of a duke rather than a life
peer; Lord of (sic) Beaverbrook manages to lose his surname altogether. These (and
others like them) were not exactly obscure, backwoods figures, and we have a right to
expect better standards of accuracy from a university press.
There are problems, too, with the overall argument. First, while organizational effort
can be checked out in files and minute books, described, analyzed, and summarized, it
is very hard indeed to know if it all made any real difference. After all, though Tory
organizational efforts rose to a great climax in 1929, the party lost the election of that
year, while two years later, with their organization in serious disarray as a result of the
economic crisis, they won their biggest parliamentary majority ever. The correlation
796 Book Reviews
between effort and achievement was not, of course, claimed to be as close as this might
suggest, but historians of party activity really do need to show more skepticism than
we get here. None of this would matter much if the author did not oversell his product
as the (or at least a) key to the understanding of the Conservatives long-term success
in a democratic century; both the preface and the conclusion, for example, begin with
references to the Tories 1997 defeat and suggest that the book sheds light on such
long-distance events (it does not and could not).
It is certainly true that the Conservative Party took important steps toward reforming
itself for a democratic battle in the 1920s, but then it also made similar adjustments
after the franchise changes of 1832, 1867, 1884, and 1948, each of which was followed
within a few years by a majority Conservative government. No one decade explains
the Conservative Partys modern success, and it especially will not do to stake out such
a claim and then fail to explore the period since 1929 to which it is supposed to relate.
Nevertheless, even if its ramifications are asserted rather than demonstrated, in high-
lighting the Conservatives advances toward becoming an effective, modern, campaign-
ing party long before the supposed revolution wrought by Woolton and Maxwell-Fyfe
in the 1940s, McCrillis has contributed signally to the emerging consensus that holds
that the Second World War was not the turning point in Tory history that it was for so
long cracked up to be.
J. A. RAMSDEN
Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London
Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosleys Blackshirts to the National Front.

By Richard Thurlow.
London: I. B. Tauris, 1998; distributed by St. Martins Press. Pp. ix298. $19.95
(paper).
The publication in 1987 of the first edition of Richard C. Thurlows Fascism in

Britain (Oxford: Blackwell) marked a significant advance in the historiography of
the British ultranationalist right. Effectively synthesizing the existing literature on
the subject and making extensive use of recently released Home Office files as well
as material held by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Thurlow concluded that
both the scale and the significance of British variants of fascism had been overesti-
mated by contemporary observers and scholars alike. Although disillusionment with
the shortcomings of the British political system, the social upheaval caused by the
Great War, the economic crises of the interwar years, and a persistent strain of ra-
cialism in British society did create an opening for movements like Rotha Lintorn-
Ormans British Fascists and Sir Oswald Mosleys much more sophisticated British
Union of Fascists (BUF), none of these factors ran sufficiently deep to enable fascist
organizations to make more than a limited appeal. While the loss in 1934 of free
publicity and financial support provided by Lord Rothermerethe most powerful,
though one of the most fickle, of the BUFs domestic patronsand a variety of
subsequent tactical and strategic missteps on Mosleys part were to diminish the
movements prospects still further, nothing fascism might have done, Thurlow per-
suasively argued, could have brought it anywhere close to power in so hostile a
political and economic environment. Nor did the BUF and the galaxy of smaller
extreme right organizations in existence at the beginning of the Second World War
ever constitute a credible Fifth Column threat: with the exception of a relative handful
Book Reviews 797
of pro-Nazi activists such as Arnold Leese, head of the rabidly antisemitic Imperial
Fascist League, most fascists either rallied to the national cause or confined their
activities to antiwar propaganda. The suppression of the BUF and the internment of
some 750 of its members after the fall of France in 1940 was thus a panic-driven
overreaction on the part of the authorities, for which the activities of two genuine
Fifth Columnists on the fascist fringes, Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoffneither of
whom, ironically, was Britishprovided the catalyst. At the time, however, few
within the government, or elsewhere, were in any mood to draw fine distinctions,
and the popular equation of fascism and pro-Germanism proved impossible for Mos-
ley and the other internees to overcome even after their release in the closing stages
of the war. Similarly, the failure of a new postwar generation of right-wing extremists
to separate themselves from the tainted legacy of their predecessors largely vitiated
their attempts to capitalize upon such opportunities as were provided by public hos-
tility to the growth of New Commonwealth immigration in the 1950s and 1960s and
by the economic and political instability of the Heath and Callaghan years.
In the decade since the first publication of Thurlows work, a sufficiently large
volume of scholarship on British fascism has appeared to justify an attempt at a new
synthesis. This second edition, however, falls far short of the fully revised and up-
dated version promised by its publishers. The only significant change from the 1987
edition is the abbreviation of some of the original text to make room for a new ten-
page chapter containing a somewhat cursory overview of the progress of far-right
movements between 1985 and the most recent general election. These organizations,
Thurlow contends, are today exhibiting many of the symptoms of continued disinte-
gration, if not terminal decline (p. 269). Such an assessment fails to give due weight
to the efforts made by a number of radical-right organizations, notably Ian Andersons
National Democratsthe latest iteration of the National Frontto break at last with
the antisemitic and antiparliamentary tradition of British fascism and to tap into the
populist, Euroskeptic, and xenophobic sentiments that movements like the French
Front National and the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) in Italy have harnessed with
such success. A more serious deficiency in the book is the failure to integrate more
effectively the insights of a number of new, detailed investigations whose findings are
forcing the abandonment of many of the airy generalizations made sans peur et sans
recherche about fascism in its British incarnation. Thus, Martin Durhams work on the
role of women in the BUF, Brian Simpsons encyclopedic survey of the operation of
Defence Regulation 18B, Tom Linehans valuable local study of the Mosleyite heart-
land of East London and South-East Essex, and the analyses by James Loughlin and
Stephen Cullen of Celtic fringe fascism, to take four prominent examples, receive
no more than fleeting references in the text or footnotes or are ignored entirely. Nor,
despite Thurlows recognition of recent theoretical debates within the field of fascist
studies (p. xviii), is there any serious attempt to reexamine British fascism in the light
of the newer explanatory models proposed by such scholars as Roger Griffin, Roger
Eatwell, or Stanley Payne.
This new edition of Fascism in Britain, then, represents something of a missed
opportunity. Although it will remain for the moment the best one-volume introduc-
tion to its subject, there is still scope for a truly up-to-date overview that will sur-
vey the field as authoritatively and accessibly as, for its time, did Thurlows original
text.
R. M. DOUGLAS
Colgate University
798 Book Reviews
Au miroir de lhumanisme: Les representations de la France dans la culture

savante italienne a la fin du moyen age, c. 1360c. 1490. By Patrick Gilli.
Bibliotheque des Ecoles Francaises dAthenes et de Rome.
Rome: Ecole Francaise de Rome, 1997. Pp. 638.
This exhaustive study of the representations of France in the milieu of the Italian
humanists in the second half of the fourteenth and in the fifteenth centuries is exemplary
in its careful documentation, its modesty, and its honesty in evaluating its own success
in terms of the authors original research hypotheses. Patrick Gilli has chosen to tuck
his research between two highly charged moments: Petrarchs strident denunciation of
France and the incursions of the French King Charles VIII, which marked the beginning
of a long period of French interventions in Italy. This delimitation has the advantage
of avoiding exaggerated formulations emitted in the heat of passion, but, on the other
hand, the author deprives himself of the drama and crystallizing force that such mo-
ments afford. Further, in limiting his corpus to humanist documents in Latin, he ex-
cludes the vast set of questions raised by texts in the vernacular, above all, the rich
poetic productions of authors such as Boyardo, Pulci, and Ariosto. In his modesty, the
author reveals that, when embarking on this project, he had hoped to discover a patch-
work of contrasting and contradictory opinions advanced in the various areas he had
chosen to explore. He found instead that a remarkable consistency of opinions char-
acterized the period. But while Gillis study lacks the intensity of drama or open con-
flict, it nevertheless traces a rich portrait of a set of Italian identities as they defined
themselves in relation to one another and to France. The importance of the study is
directly proportional to the place France occupies in the humanist literature of the
period: no other country or realm, including even the empire, evokes the same intense
reactions that France does (p. 557). Gillis study not only demonstrates that France was
used as a kind of negative image against which the Italian states defined themselves;
it also shows in great detail how in specific situations particular states and parties made
use of a set of topoi concerning France.
The book is organized into three sections. The first section describes how France
was used in political discussions as the primary (and generally negative) example of
the monarchical type of government. Here Gilli introduces the principal characters who
will reappear to speak on the different themes he treats in the course of his study:
Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Galvano Fiamma, Filippo
Villani, the Acciaioli family, and Francesco Filelfo. Enriching the polyphonic texture
of the study, a rich cast of secondary characters accompanies this primary group. The
second section explores the role of Gauls and Franks in the founding myths of the great
Italian cities: Florence, Milan, Pavia, Sienna, and Venice. The final section examines
representations of French nobility, of chevaleresque literature and culture, and of the
house of Anjou in its Sicilian adventures. The basic elements of the negative com-
monplace remain relatively constant: Frances lack of culture, its arrogance, and its
military weakness beyond an initial furious charge. The force of Petrarchs character-
ization of the uncultured French monarchy remains constant throughout the period
discussed. The awareness of the risk of French intervention only serves to strengthen
the humanists distrust of their northern neighbor. Gillis thorough treatment of the
Siennese Enea Silvio Piccolomini, both as an imperial propagandist and later as Pope
Pius II, reveals a particularly strong example of the intensity of anti-French feeling.
Even the recognition of Frances standing as the principal defender of the faith and a
necessary key player in the realization of his dream of a European crusade against the
Turks cannot lead Piccolomini to overcome his fear of a French presence in the King-
Book Reviews 799
dom of Naples. The great exception to these negative representations is to be found,

of course, in Florence, the heart of Guelph opposition to the empire. Gilli carefully
works through the tensions of turning to the French monarchy for sustenance in nour-
ishing a republican tradition. Further, he demonstrates how the representations of
France in other Italian states vary according to a complicated and constantly shifting
set of internal and external political developments.
Two patterns within this study are particularly striking, even though they remain
somewhat underanalyzed. The first is the force of what might be called the ideological
capital accumulated by the French monarchy: the effective power of its claims of
dynastic continuity, of its pretensions to be the principal defender of the faith and leader
of the crusades as well as the ultimate resting place in the process of translatio studii,
and of its glorification of a chevaleresque culture. Gillis humanists feel obliged to
engage the French model precisely because it occupied such a broad set of crucial
cultural positions. The second is the centrality of the figure of Charlemagne in the
discussions. From his role as a (re)founding figure of Florence, to his status as the
originator of an immemorial hostility between the Milanese and the French, to his
legitimating presence in the self-representation of the Anjouvins in Naples, the emperor
is affirmed in this study as the common denominator in a wide range of originary
discourses. While Gilli does not raise the issue, it is clear that the interplay of the set
of tropisms, affinities, and oppositions he describes, the complex workings of these
affirmations of self and other, constitute the very foundations of a sense of European
identity.
One would have liked to have seen Gilli engage some of these larger questions and,
above all, adventure into the territory of vernacular poetic production, where many of
the same figures and forces were at work. But as it is, this carefully researched and
well-documented study (which furnishes the original Latin text for most of the quo-
tations) is a rich and useful work that will interest not only students of the Italian
Renaissance and French history but also those attempting to deal with questions con-
cerning the use of history in the construction of a European identity.
ROBERT MORRISSEY
University of Chicago
The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France. By

Paul Duro. Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism. Edited by
Norman Bryson.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xii300. $80.00.
When the new art history first became a feature on the academic scene in the 1980s,
it seemed to represent a serious challenge to the established practices of the discipline.
Since that time it has become a variant of orthodoxy in itself, now enshrined in the
Cambridge University Press series in which Paul Duros new study of the seventeenth-
century Academy of Painting in France appears. At first sight, the topic does indeed
seem to be broaching new ground, for most of the new art history has concentrated
on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, for all its virtues, Duros study
does not substantially change our understanding of this formative period. It is based
on a close reading of the aesthetic and practical texts produced by the Academy and
its members in the period, in conjunction with a series of careful analyses of often
obscure Academic paintings and decorations of royal buildings from the period. Much
800 Book Reviews
attention is paid to the definition of the limits of painting, both in terms of its rela-
tionship with artisanal crafts and in the sense of its framing, as described by Jacques
Derrida. Duro sets out to convince his readers that the Academys own notion of history
paintingthe representation of scenes from antiquity, the Bible, or modern history
as an arena far more congenial to the creative spirit than the minor genres of land-
scape and still life was broadly accurate and indispensable to the formation of mod-
ernism. In this analysis, the history painter is a free agent, with no need to conform
to the demands of appearancesunlike the genre painter, who is constrained to operate
within the preordained field of mimesis (p. 89). As the author is careful to observe,
there is a certain ambiguity here and elsewhere as to whether the view described is that
of contemporaries or of the historian. There is a further distinction to be made between
what the Academicians said they were doing and what they were actually doing. Yet
despite his subtle elaboration of such nuances, Duro asserts that in a real sense the
Academy was constructing a future for itself independent of these contingencies. . . .
The Academy was different precisely because it said it was different, and because it
worked, to the limits of its authority, to reproduce those differences in practice (p.
251).
Thus, the writing about painting and the public discussion of painting established
by the Academy after its foundation by Louis XIV in 1648 were indispensable to the
creation of painting as a liberal art, opposed to craft practice regulated by the painters
guild. In the tradition of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, Duro sees history paint-
ing as a form of discursive practice, which marked its difference from the guild painters
more limited endeavors. Duro often quotes Henri Testelin, secretary of the Academy,
as asserting that beyond the Academy there was only general barbarism precisely
because such discursive practice was specific to the Academy. The famous conferences
organized by the Academy in the 1660s at the bidding of no less a figure than Jean-
Baptiste Colbert marked the high point of this programmatic alliance of theory and
practice, given palpable form at Versailles. The volume concludes with an account of
the rhetorical transformation of the Academy by the color theorist Roger de Piles
and the painter of fete galantes, Antoine Watteau.
How new is all this? In terms of subject matter, the field has often been covered, as
the bibliography attests, by traditionally oriented scholars such as Thomas Puttfarken,
Bernard Teyseddre, and Jacques Thuillier. Duros semiotic analysis has also been an-
ticipated by Norman Bryson and Louis Marin, both of whom feature surprisingly little
in the discussion. Nor, I am constrained to point out, does my own dissertation on this
very topic in similar methodological style to that of Duro feature here (Nicholas Mir-
zoeff, Pictorial Sign and Social Order: LAcademie Royal de Peinture et Sculpture,
16381752 [Ph.D. diss., University of Warwick, 1990]). Readers of this journal might
also be struck by the marginal place of historical discussion and the lack of importance
attributed to historical experience and change. Duro notes that the Academic version
of its relationship with the guilds was less than entirely accurate (e.g., see p. 157) but
asserts that these exaggerations are only important in so far as they allowed the Acad-
emy to define itself against this straw man. Yet Louis XIVs campaign against the
guilds was a significant part of his reassertion of royal power in the aftermath of the
Fronde (164853). Indeed, the Academy itself had been forced into a union (jonction)
with the painting guilds during the Fronde, a complex event in which an initial move-
ment of urban reformists was later overtaken by a Fronde of leaders (Christian Jou-
haud, La Fronde des Mots [Paris, 1985], p. 239). Louis XIVs achievement was, in
considerable part, the absorption of these tensions into the structure of the absolute
monarchy where he was able to control them. Within the Academy of Painting, the
Book Reviews 801
Fronde was symbolized by Abraham Bosse, a Frondeur, Huguenot, and partisan of

perspective as the answer to all artistic problems. Even after the reestablishment of the
monarchy, Bosse continued to believe in the reform project of 1648, meaning in this
case a new relationship between artisans and artists, expressed in his new artistic lan-
guage and perspective-based technique. As a result, he was expelled from the Academy
in 1661 after prolonged disputes, for his strategy represented an alternative, if inevitably
unsuccessful, effort to redefine painting as a discursive practice in terms other than
those of the absolutist Academy. Duros narrower presentation of the affair as a debate
on the way in which an adequate means of representation might be achieved in ceiling
painting (p. 168) highlights the limitations of his semiotic approach. A similar for-
malism leads Duro to omit any discussion of issues of gender and sexuality in his
reading of Watteau, even though the latter is held up as being the first modern artist
(p. 250). While one is quibbling, let it be said that Cambridge University Press has
done the author a disservice in printing his hard-found illustrations in such small format
that they are often illegible and in allowing far too many typographic errors into the
text, surely unacceptable in such an expensive book. Such disputes aside, Duros book
serves as another significant contribution in the ongoing reassessment of the origins of
modernism and as an indispensable survey of the range of Academic pictorial theory
in the ancien regime.
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doleances of

1789. By Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, with contributions by Timothy
Tackett and Philip Dawson. Foreword by Charles Tilly.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxxi684. $75.00.
In the spring of 1789, as if to fulfill the dreams of future historians, the French paused
to document their grievances before launching the first great revolution of the modern
era. As the first meeting of the Estates General in 175 years approached, royal subjects
from all quarters of France and from all walks of life drafted more than 40,000 lists of
demands, known as cahiers de doleances, to guide the actions of their newly elected
representatives. Since that dramatic moment, the cahiers have become an invaluable
source: every serious historian of the origins of the French Revolutionfrom Tocque-
ville to Lefebvre to Cobban, to name the most famoushas looked to the cahiers to
discover what was bothering the French as they stepped to the threshold of revolution.
Indeed, the cahiers are such a well-exploited source that we may ask if this lengthy
new study by Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff is really necessary. The answer is an
emphatic yes, for both methodological and analytical reasons.
Methodologically, Revolutionary Demands supersedes all previous work on the ca-
hiers. Over half the book is aimed at social scientists; it details the careful steps by
which the authors and a team of assistants selected documents, coded their content,
and compiled data into a massive electronic archive. Although most historians need
not venture too far into this extensive discussion of method, those daring souls willing
to tackle Boolean functions and black box instruments will find a surprisingly
accessible introduction to the discipline of content analysis, a thorough account of the
process by which the cahiers were cataloged and coded, and a strong defense of the
usefulness of the cahiers for studying French opinion. (On this last matter, the authors
802 Book Reviews
argue persuasively that parish cahiers, whose value as a source has long been ques-
tioned, were not subject to the undue influence of elites and, therefore, accurately reflect
peasant grievances.)
The scientific rigor with which Shapiro and Markoff have compiled data on the
cahiers is simply unprecedented. Whereas previous studies either relied on an arbitrary
selection of documents or classified demands according to a narrow range of categories,
the Shapiro-Markoff data archive employs a sound sampling procedure for the selection
of parish cahiers and gives each demand its due. Containing tens of thousands of
grievances gleaned from all extant general cahiers (cahiers composed at the bailliage
level by the nobility and third estate) and from a representative sampling of parish
cahiers, this data archive and its retrieval system grants the researcher enormous leeway
to examine the variety and frequency of demands voiced by three social groups from
different parts of the kingdom. Although the omission of clerical cahiers is a drawback,
the creation of this archive is a major achievement. Woe to any future scholar who
ignores this data and uses the cahiers impressionistically!
The fourth part of the book, which at long last analyzes the data, will be of greatest
interest to historians. What does this database reveal about what the French were think-
ing on the eve of the Revolution? Do the cahiers, as Tocqueville would have us believe,
foretell the Revolution, calling for the complete destruction of all French law and
custom, or were they, as George Taylor insists, profoundly conservative, betraying no
revolutionary impulse at all? Unfortunately, the last section of the book provides no
overarching interpretation of the cahiers. We are given instead several loosely inter-
secting chapters that Markoff, Shapiro, Philip Dawson, and Timothy Tackett have
published previously as articles. In light of the care with which the data archive was
created, it is a shame that the two principal authors do not provide a more comprehen-
sive analysis.
Nevertheless, the analytical chapters present an abundance of significant find-
ings far too many to survey here. The most general finding is that the French of
1789 were more concerned with matters of state than with social or economic prob-
lems. This is hardly a striking observation, coming as it does after a deluge of revi-
sionist scholarship on the political origins of the Revolution, but it is interesting to
note that the most widely discussed subjects in the cahiers were taxation and the
empowerment of provincial and national estates. The nobility and the upper third
estate were both deeply troubled by arbitrary central authority, denoting a strong
liberal consensus among elites. If the two groups attributed paternal or even sacred
characteristics to the king, they made it clear that he was primarily an executive
authority who must share legislative sovereignty with the nation. The rural third
estate, by contrast, was less inclined to constitutional discussion and more likely to
complain about specific royal taxes. But this does not mean that peasants were pa-
rochial or unsophisticated. On the contrary, in one of the books most impressive
chapters, Markoff demonstrates that villagers made thoughtful distinctions between
burdens that were to be abolished and those that ought to be reformed: indirect taxes,
associated with private profiteering, should go, while direct taxes, more closely linked
to the state, should be improved. Whereas peasants wished to throw off the imposi-
tions of tax farmers (as well as lords and clerics), they sought to reconfigure the
burdens that tied them to the state.
If the cahiers reflect a general impulse for political change, they also reveal the social
divisions that would drive the Revolution forward. Regression analyses demonstrate
that the three issues that most clearly divided the nobility from the upper third estate
were, in descending order, social mobility, seigneurial rights, and the voting procedure
Book Reviews 803
for the Estates General. Shapiro and Markoff admit that the last issue comes as no
surprise, but they suggest that the high ranking of seigneurial rights buttresses a po-
sition associated with the heavily beleaguered, conventional Marxist interpretation,
which posits class struggle between a revolutionary bourgeoisie and a landed aristoc-
racy (p. 292). A sophisticated analysis of the cahiers, it seems, will not permit sweeping
revisionist dismissals of class. Of the three divisive issues, that of social mobility
remains the most intriguing. Although the obstacles to attaining noble status were no
greater in the eighteenth century than they had been in the seventeenth, mobility was,
by 1789, the most highly charged social issue of all. Why this apparent disjunction
between experience and ideology emerged at the end of the Old Regime is left unex-
plained, but Markoff, Shapiro, and Dawson have highlighted a crucial question that
historians have only begun to answer.
The cahiers, then, give us a glimpse into revolutionary opinion in both its political
and social manifestations. They can also help us to test a variety of explanations for
the Revolution, as Markoff asserts in an ambitious chapter on the relationship between
the nobility and the third estate. Checking a variety of social, political, and cultural
phenomena in different areas of the kingdom against cahiers from the same areas,
Markoff finds that the degree to which nobles and the third estate held common views
was related above all to developments in the state and the economy. Where royal
administration was more centralized, where rural markets thrived, or where the eco-
nomic crisis of 1789 was most severe, there emerged a common culture between nobles
and urban notables that allowed the two groups to agree on many demands and to
disagree less stridently on others. How this translates into revolutionary action is not
clear, however, since some revolutionary acts were borne of elite consensus while
others were the result of division.
This book requires its readers to think hard about the origins and course of the French
Revolution. Because it simultaneously affirms and invalidates different aspects of
Marxist and revisionist orthodoxies, we are left to borrow from both traditions to for-
mulate a new interpretation. Tocquevilles concern for state formation certainly has its
place, but so do the market, the seigneurial regime, perceptions of social mobility,
religion, and the Enlightenment. Perhaps, in the end, it is fitting that the book provides
no conclusion. The authors raise more questions than they can possibly answer, but
they have produced a powerful tool for the construction of new interpretations of the
Old Regime and the Revolution that will move beyond the stale dichotomies of Marxist
and revisionist history.
MICHAEL KWASS
University of Georgia
Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution. By Patrice

Higonnet.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. 397. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95
(paper).
This is an intriguing, thought-provoking book, which does its best to redeem for our
time the actions and reputations of the Jacobins of the French Revolution, that most
maligned set of men whose prime historical association is with uncompromising Terror.
Patrice Higonnets essential thesis is contained within the first sentence of his intro-
duction: Jacobinisms doubled message was of individual becoming and altruistic
804 Book Reviews
involvement (p. 1). As he goes on to explain over the following pages, this high-
minded aspiration, to allow individuals to fulfill their true natures as citizens of an
inclusive and activist Republic, was ground down by the forces of opposition, unleash-
ing from beneath it what he terms a punitive instinct . . . derived from long habits of
absolutist politics and intolerant religion (p. 3), and thus was born the Terror of 1793
94. Once this process is understood, Jacobinism as an ideology can be liberated from
any essential connection to that negative phase and seen again as an optimistic political
creed that may even have something to offer our own time: Higonnet concludes with
a section on the Republican idea today, in which the end of the twentieth century,
our current existential situation (p. 334), is linked explicitly to the environment of
the Jacobins.
The book operates with a thematic, meditative structure. This is apparent even in the
first chapter, which claims to offer a narrative of the Revolution from a Jacobin per-
spective. Although the account is chronological, and in that sense narrative, it does
not hesitate to break its flow for reflective passages, invoking other sages of the Rev-
olution and making grand interpretive statements from early in its course. One other
element that the book claims to provide is a wide-ranging survey of Jacobinism as a
movement within all of France, not merely Paris. But this becomes problematic almost
immediately, as Higonnet is also continually concerned to reflect Jacobinism as a rela-
tively coherent ideology. This means downplaying such elements of local circum-
stances as might be argued to be crucial in the development of political allegiances and
viewpoints. Higonnet notes (p. 6) that about two hundred clubs are mentioned in the
text (his index lists 153), but they are invoked throughout to produce statements jus-
tifying the central thesis. It is when Jacobins speak the party line that we hear them
in this text.
The larger structure of the book proceeds by apparent paradox. Thus, in the first half
of the book, we have chapters entitled The Limitless Claims of Individual Liberty,
The Indisputable Claims of Civil Society, The Limitless Claims of the Public
Sphere, The Indisputable Claims of the Nation, and the Jacobins as the Free Cit-
izens of a One-Party State. Within these, examples are piled up to show how these
various demanding idols were appeased in speech and action, as Jacobins apparently
wrestled with the contradictions of their own thoughts. The cataloging of actions and
speeches ends up, however, merely magnifying these contradictions, until the point
comes when a reader may ask how any unity is being maintained that might justifiably
be called a Jacobin ideology.
One might well see this book as a survey of late eighteenth-century French cultural
attitudes that happen to have emerged from the mouths and pens of members of Jacobin
clubs. When, in the course of two pages (pp. 19899), attitudes to the drinking of
coffee and chocolate, frugality in eating, honesty, sexual restraint, and breast-feeding
can all be brought together, one strains to see how all these views can be a revolutionary
ideology and not merely a collection of modest bourgeois prejudices. Higonnet could
be forgiven if his point were that Jacobinism was indeed such a collection of views
from those middling orders who, however we see the wider picture, undoubtedly came
to the fore in the decade after 1789. But his point is supposed to be that which he
expressed in his first page, a quite specific co-location of self-becoming and self-sac-
rificea National Individualism, as he also calls it (p. 183). This is the point that,
ultimately, is not made convincingly. From the words of the Jacobins to this idea of a
coherent program, particularly one that remains valid as a description all the way from
the broad Jacobin church of the Constituent Assembly to the bureaucratic sect of the
summer of 1794, is a chasm that this text cannot successfully bridge. This is particularly
Book Reviews 805
the case as Higonnet can only explain the descent into Terror by withdrawing from his
supposed tenets of Jacobinism toward inherited social atavisms (p. 182). The issue
of Terror, however, is the one question that any examination of the nature of Jacobinism
must confront above all, and here it is fudged.
One tires quickly of the constant repetition that the Jacobins thought, or did, or
said, this or that, as if they were genuinely a political party, and their quest for national
unity less of an obsession and more of a reality. If there is a generalization to be made
here, it perhaps concerns the extent to which the Jacobins were political innocents.
Many of them proved to be able administrators, resourceful political improvisers, and
laudable aspiring citizens, but they all wished for too much. In essence, and no doubt
paradoxically in the light of their bloodthirsty evolution, Jacobins, of all shades, were
almost grotesquely naive about politics and society. Like armchair generals who cannot
understand the delays and setbacks of a military campaign, the Jacobins were unaware
of the friction that necessarily tugs at every political process. To inject this spirit
back into politics, after two hundred years, as Higonnet appears to advocate, merely
invites the same result as it did in the 1790s. Any of us can compile our list of those
we might send to the guillotine, given the chance. However, if the twentieth century
finally has shown us anything, it is that revolutionary ideologies, unfortunately, do not
work. Higonnet seems to be claiming that somehow Jacobinism might. One may prefer
innocence to experience, but it is hard to see why anyone should want to be like the
confused yet overconfident, sentimental yet ruthless, libertarian yet repressive men
depicted here.
DAVID ANDRESS
University of Portsmouth
The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution. By Dominique Godineau.

Translated by Katherine Streip. Studies on the History of Society and Culture,
volume 26. Edited by Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xxii415. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95
(paper).
Dominique Godineaus classic study, Citoyennes tricoteuses: Les femmes du peuple a

Paris pendant la Revolution francaise (Aix-en-Provence, 1988) is available at last in
an English edition. Katherine Streip is to be congratulated for a skillful translation that
shows unusual sensitivity to nuances of meaning in both languages.
Albert Sobouls major work on the Parisian sans-culottes during the Terror, Les Sans-
culottes parisiens en lan II: Mouvement populaire et gouvernement revolutionnaire,
2 juin 17939 thermidor an II (Paris, 1958), served as a model and point of departure
for Godineaus study of the revolutionary political practices of women of the popular
classes. However, while retaining a central focus on the political culture of the femmes
sans-culottes, Godineau expanded the breadth and scope of her study to cover a more
general survey of womens political activism from their involvement in the opening
events of the Revolution through their participation in the last great insurrectionary
days of Germinal and Prairial, Year III (1795). Godineaus book is grounded in an
examination of an impressive body of sources, including the papers of Parisian section
assemblies and committees; police reports; arrest dossiers of the Committee of General
Security; trial records; proces verbaux of the national legislatures, clubs, and popular
societies; journals and pamphlets literature. She has produced a dense, rich interpre-
806 Book Reviews
tation that does full justice to the daily struggles of women to locate and identify
themselves in the new political order, individually and collectively, as they claimed
and practiced citizenship.
Godineaus forceful formulation of the problem of womens revolutionary citizen-
ship stands as an invitation and a challenge to researchers who continue to interpret
womens undeniable political presence, claims, and acts in revolutionary Paris:
At the core of these relations between women and the Revolution is the question of citizenship.
Whether focusing on the female cult for the guillotine, a hunger riot, or a womens club, the
historian often ends up beached upon a shore. He or she comes to ask: But isnt studying the
female revolutionary movement to finally ask oneself how to be a female citizen, to ask how one
can take part in political life without possessing full and complete citizenship? How can one be
a part of the Sovereign People and not enjoy a single one of its attributes? (P. 367)
The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution is a suggestive, provocative ap-
proach to that question. The book is organized in four sections. Parisian Life in the
French Revolution introduces the reader to the material and political conditions of
womens lives, bringing into relief their irrepressible presence and regular passage
through the domestic and public spaces of the Revolutionary capital and their ongoing
interactions with authorities and institutions at all levels.
A second section, Aspiring Citizens, traces and interprets womens appropriation
of identities as members of a sovereign people and their practices of citizenship between
the opening months of the Revolution and the collapse of the government of the Terror
in the summer of 1794. These practices, as Godineau makes abundantly clear, persisted
in a field of linguistic and other cultural ambiguities and in the face of legal and
constitutional exclusions.
The central focus in this section is a detailed analysis of the membership, political
convictions, strategies, impacts and downfall of the Society of Revolutionary Repub-
lican Women, an exclusively female political club organized in the spring of 1793 by
petit bourgeois and sans-culotte women. The club, supported initially by Jacobin lead-
ers, was dissolved in late October 1793 when the Jacobin Convention outlawed all
womens political societies. Godineaus double explanation of the Jacobins repressive
decree is plausible and insightful: the crackdown was motivated by the Jacobins stra-
tegic need to cut themselves off from quasi-autonomous grassroots sans-culotte orga-
nizations. In addition, the heavily gendered language of the decree exposes the Jaco-
bins awareness and fear of a feminine empowerment now inextricably linked to
symbols and practices of sovereignty and plenary revolutionary citizenship.
Godineaus interpretation of the Society exposes a weakness in the analysis. Her
empathetic treatment precludes judgment, the assessment of responsibility. In her dis-
cussion of the Societys practice of a politics of Terror, she is left with little critical
leverage for analyzing the deeper meanings of her own reflection on the fate of the
Society: The women who gathered to struggle against suspects ended their careers
as suspects (p. 174).
In the chapters of her third section, Godineau analyzes the woman question in the
French Revolution thematically and from several perspectives: political culture and
female sociability; womens political behavior and mentalite; the incidence and ex-
pressions of sans-culotte womens counterrevolutionary activity; and the languages of
sexual difference and equal rights.
Although the weight of the evidence of womens attendance at executions justifies
an analysis of the sans-culotte womens cult of the guillotine and their politics of
Book Reviews 807
denunciation as aspects of their political mentalite, Godineaus explanation of the

womens driving motives in terms of love of the Revolution (p. 247) seems less than
fully convincing. To view these practices as one of the few expressions of popular
sovereignty available to women who were deprived of the right to bear arms and other
attributes of sovereignty (pp. 23340) raises the question of the price of sovereign
empowerment.
Godineau presents a broad range of revolutionary discourses on equal rights
and gender differences. She also demonstrates convincingly that, in the spaces that
opened up between restrictive gendered definitions of female citizenship and broadly
publicized universal rights of man and citizen, sans-culotte women reshaped the
meanings of female citizenship through political practices. However, it is not always
clear how (through which institutions and other channels) the full spectrum of dis-
courses on citizenship in circulation were communicated to women of the popular
classes.
In a final section, Godineau provides a detailed and revealing analysis of the revo-
lutionary journees of Germinal and Prairial, Year III (1795), during which sans-culotte
women initiated a series of insurrectionary confrontations with revolutionary authori-
ties. They demanded bread, the Constitution of 1793, and the restitution of grassroots
democratic institutions. They incited sans-culotte men to join them and marched on the
National Convention. In the repression that followed, the Convention retaliated by
passing several decrees banning women from public and political spaces. One of God-
ineaus more surprising findings is that a significant percentage of the women arrested
during the repression were targeted not for their participation in the journees of Year
III but rather for their conspicuous militancy during the Terror.
What is striking in this account is abundant evidence of the connections these in-
surrectionary women were making between subsistence issues and political and con-
stitutional matters: bread and the Constitution of 1793. Considering that rights to sub-
sistence and welfare were guaranteed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen of 1793, one wonders whether Godineaus depiction of the Revolutionary Re-
publican Womens concentration on subsistence matters in the fall of 1793, their
definitive abandonment of politics (p. 163), might not reflect her overly narrow con-
struction of political issues, priorities, and strategies as the women themselves under-
stood and acted upon them.
Godineaus pathbreaking work on the revolutionary women of Paris established sans-
culotte women, along with women of other socioprofessional backgrounds, at a vital
center of revolutionary citizenship. This translation, which communicates the full
drama, detail, engagement, and provocative insights that are the hallmarks of her con-
tribution, will bring a new generation of English-speaking students and scholars into
contact with revolutionary women who opened the struggle for womens equality of
rights and powers in the modern era.
In the decade since the publication of Godineaus work in France, scholars have
broken new ground in several areas covered by her study. These include gender and
revolutionary political culture and comparative studies in this field; womens counter-
revolutionary politics; revolutionary practices of women throughout France; revolu-
tionary rights of man, and the woman question. Again, this translation makes it possible
for students and researchers to bring her work into fruitful conversation with continuing
scholarship.
DARLINE GAY LEVY

New York University
808 Book Reviews
Les draps de Sedan, 16461870. By Gerard Gayot. Civilisations et Societes,

volume 95.
Paris: Editions de LEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1998. Pp. 579. Fr
300.
In Les draps de Sedan, Gerard Gayot recreates the objects and people populating the
woolen industry in the northern French town of Sedan, from the industrys establish-
ment in 1646 as a royally protected and privileged manufacture of draps fins, or fine
woolen cloth, to its decline in the nineteenth century. Gayot offers an exhaustively
researched entree into the industrialization process viewed from the perspective of the
longue duree. The woolen industry in Sedan provides an opportunity to view industri-
alization not only from its beginnings but also as it contended with the series of eco-
nomic, social, and political changes that marked the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nine-
teenth centuries. Through Sedans draps fins, the historian glimpses mercantilism, the
Old Regimes corporate system, proto-industry, the French Revolution and its destruc-
tion of corporate privileges, mechanization, as well as labor unrest and labor organi-
zation.
Gayot situates his study of Sedan within a larger debate over what constitutes a
modern capitalist enterprise and who deserves the title of entrepreneur. Responding to
certain economic historians dismissal of the woolen industry as a luxury industry and,
more important, as an example of protoindustry, Gayot asserts that this proto-industry
was nonetheless one that necessitated and allowed for innovation, growth, dynamism,
and entrepreneurship. His claim that Sedans manufacturers were entrepreneurs is em-
bodied in the words he uses to describe their responsibilities: manage, invest, take
control (p. 11). What label other than entrepreneur can be attached to men who over
time assumed more control over their rural outworkers, personally ordered and in-
spected the wool imported from Spain, closely supervised all the steps of the textile
finishing processes, and guided their cloth not only through the various stages of pro-
duction but also out of the workshop, into retail stores, and into the hands of consumers?
From its inception, Sedans woolen industry was a state industry, protected, regu-
lated, and endorsed by the king of France. Sedans royal privileges established the town
and its woolen industry as one site of Frances mercantilist project. Sedan was chosen
not for its indigenous woolen industry, but for its fortuitous position as a fortified border
town located near the Flemish woolen industry that French manufacturers hoped to
imitate, whose techniques they hoped to reproduce, and whose skilled workers they
hoped to attract. Sedans clients were Frances royal, rich, and famousthe royal
family, the aristocracy, the clergy, and the armyfor whom cloth in an assortment of
colors was produced. But it was luxurious black cloth that cemented Sedans reputation.
An aristocratic death in France, and especially a royal death, constituted a windfall for
Sedans manufacturers, who would be expected to provide all the necessary cloth for
mourning attire.
The fabrication of Sedans wool was a complex process. Misjudging the quality of
the wool, failing to dry it completely, handling it too much, housing it incorrectly,
dying or shearing the finished cloth badly: these mistakes, and countless others, meant
wasted time and money, poor cloth, disappointed customers, and diminished profits.
Crucial to the success of the industry were both entrepreneurial and artisanal skill. With
a difficult fabrication process, reputations to uphold, and a capricious client in the form
of the French king, Sedans manufacturers could not afford to rely exclusively on the
honor and skill of their workers. Success required anticipation, innovation, and flexi-
bility; it required manufacturers close attention not only to the production process but
Book Reviews 809
also to their labor force, the long-term strategies of their firms, competitors, new mar-
keting tactics, fashion trends, and the personal whims of their clients. While manufac-
turers could not personally control all steps in the production process and chose to
entrust spinning and weaving to rural workers, they closely controlled what Gayot
labels the strategic sector of the industry, that is, the finishing stages that created beau-
tiful, luxurious cloth: everything that delighted the eye and the touch of the client bore
their mark (p. 407).
It was, however, with the finishing process that these entrepreneurial exigencies came
into direct conflict with Sedans most highly skilled workers, the tondeurs, whose task
was to shave the finished cloth, producing the smooth, velvety nap for which Sedans
wool was known. Not only highly skilled, Sedans tondeurs were well-versed in self-
protection, self-organization, and solidarity. Their corporate conscience (p. 214) set
the stage for a fifty-year struggle between tondeurs and manufacturers, a struggle in
which neither gained the upper hand, and in which the tondeurs excelled at protecting
their interests, their honor, their wages, and their professional autonomy. This auton-
omy, however, ended in 1750 with a full-blown effort by manufacturers, aided by the
French monarchy, to curb the insubordination of their tondeurs. This effort permanently
changed the nature of relations between tondeurs and manufacturers and forced a rec-
ognition among tondeurs of their altered circumstances as waged workers, faced with
much more powerful employers, without the benefit of custom on their side. The result
was a precocious form of class consciousness. The protests of Sedans tondeurs tes-
tified to the first class struggles in a corporate society, to primitive desires for a more
equitable distribution of growing profits, and to the disillusions of an embryonic work-
ing class regarding its future as a social partner (p. 276).
Although the basic model of Sedans woolen industry lasted until the 1880s, the
apogee of its success was reached in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, after
which the innovative spirit began to fade. Although still in control of the fabrication
process, manufacturers no longer paid close attention to distribution, marketing, and
consumption. They appeared unwilling, or unable, to ascertain their principal compet-
itors, to scrutinize fashion trends, and to make the necessary adjustments. This dulling
of the entrepreneurial spirit meant that over the course of the nineteenth century, Se-
dans draps fins would be outproduced and outsold by the cotton of Elbeuf and Rou-
baix-Tourcoing, turning what had been an innovative, dynamic, and prestigious indus-
try into a modest and lethargic one content to rest on its past laurels.
ELIZABETH SAGE
Brigham Young University
Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz

Age. By Harvey Levenstein.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xiv378. $30.00.
Seductive Journey is a seductive book. It is perhaps best read in small sips, like a fine
French wine. Who, even among todays sophisticated jet profs, cannot still chuckle
(with remembrance of trips past?) at Harpers 1911 satire of the tourist who spent his
first day in Paris going from the Hotel de Ville to the Hotel des Invalides to the Hotel
Dieu in search of a room?
In a handsomely produced book, Harvey Levenstein touches upon all of the right
questions: travel as a form of distinction, as a form of conspicuous consumption, and
810 Book Reviews
as a masculine rite in the early nineteenth century and its subsequent feminization by
the end of the century. He examines gender differences in forms of travel (exaggerating
the female shopper image?) and notes how guidebooksalmost as early as travel
itselfhave always functioned as intermediaries to what John Urry has called the
tourist gaze. Levensteins own gaze is never monolithic. He contrasts opinions and
visions within one time frame: Jeffersons love of French culture/Abigail Adamss
fright at the nudity in the Louvre; puritans aghast at prostitution at the Palais Royal/
certain male visitors diaries that clearly encompass Paris-by-night. And he shows
change over time: changing ideas of the picturesque and the feminization of art
appreciation, based on emotion rather than intellect. He has scoured an impressive
number of letters and diaries of Americans who went to France and has compiled a
very delightful list of their thoughts on the country, its inhabitants, and often on each
other. In addition, he sets his more than century-long story within the history of chang-
ing manners on both sides of the Atlantic.
Levensteins main thesis has to do with the changing class character of transatlantic
travel and the changing cultural norms embedded in it. Clearly, in Levensteins view,
it has been downhill ever since the early nineteenth century. From the elite upper-class
single young men who set off for months if not years on a Grand Tour for cultural
enrichment, to the increasing numbers of upper-middle-class tourists later in the century
and the mothers and daughters who came for several months of art, music, and shop-
ping, to the World War I doughboys,1 and finally the invasion of the lower orders
(middle-class shoppers dedicated to recreational travel), Levenstein paints a relentless
tale of changing patterns of tourism. Shifts in demandfrom art to funare the
main motors of change. However, Levenstein also reminds us of the various stages of
the transportation revolution, from sail to steam, and from Samuel Cunards first fleet
of dependable steamships to Thomas Cooks invention of the organized tour. The
American tourist, from the nouveaux riches on down, is not a pretty sight in Leven-
steins retrospective. Although he begins his book with the observation that the dis-
tinction between the cultured traveler and the boorish tourist has been overdrawn in
favor of the former, there is a pervasive sense throughout his book of the world of
travel we have lost.
If Levensteins analysis reads from its early pages on as a foreshadowing of late
twentieth-century trends, it is because of an implicit comparative perspective, seeking
origins (one of the functions of comparative history noted in Marc Blochs famous
1927 article on the subject). Any reading of Seductive Journey today also necessarily
engages our own temporal comparisons. Shipwrecks and seasickness may seem far
removed until we contemplate contemporary images of plane crashes and air pockets.
There are sobering reminders of difference: first-class cabin passengers bringing along
their own mattresses for the long early nineteenth-century crossings; packets bringing
farm animals on board to replace the previously inevitable salt pork with fresh food
during the months journeyyou could anticipate the months menus by a simple visit
to the pens. Yet our own comparativist chuckles with the past are also due to the
similarities we discover with the present: hilarious French-to-English translations on
1
For a more positive view of American soldiers visits to the Leave Zones, see Mark Meigs,
Optimism at Armageddon: Voices of American Participants in the First World War (Houndmills:
Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997). On African-Americans in Paris, from soldiers to jazz musicians and
Josephine Baker to James Baldwin, see Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City
of Light (Boston, 1996); and Ludovic Tournes, New Orleans sur Seine: Histoire du jazz en France
(Paris, 1999).
Book Reviews 811
hotel advertisementsalready; enterprising restaurateurs offering American food to

the tired touristalready (in 1866); the two-day Paris, one-stop Louvre tour, already
(1863!).
Levenstein includes helpful thumbnail historical sketches on everything from the
history of department stores and consumption to Haussmanns transformation of Paris
to the rise of the citys famous inexpensive restaurants, the bouillons, meant for the
working class, invaded by tourists. Nonetheless, some problems undermine his ap-
proach. The 150-year scope of the book is admirable if perhaps overly ambitious. A
paragraph or two per event or social change from the French Revolution to the Great
Depression makes the reader breathless. The series of quotations (per every two- or
three-page theme) are invariably interesting and delightful, but just as the reader is
expecting more, the author moves on. Finally, the diary excerpts themselves are rarely
problematized. Although Levenstein mentions in the preface the way in which foreign
travel is filtered through the tourists expectations, he could have analyzed in greater
depth the disjuncture between the familiar and the unfamiliar at the root of his sources.
Nonetheless, Levensteins range and integration of such a wide variety of sources is
impressive. He also includes two chapters dealing with antitourism: one on tourists
criticizing each other (chap. 13) and one on the native gaze (chap. 18). Levenstein is
not alone in missing the cultural travelers of yore. The unhappy hosts rebelled with
attacks against American tour buses in 1926. American tourists were castigated as
destructive grasshoppers: eating our food, drinking our wine, going untaxed, and
paying ridiculously little for everything they consume, thanks to the exchange, they
furthermore complained incessantly that the French were cheating them (p. 263). The
image of the ugly American had (already) reared its head.
Anyone who has tried to avoid the tour bus crowd will be sympathetic to Leven-
steins underlying plaint about that shameful term tourist (Booth Tarkington,
1907). This is the book to take with you on your next trip. It is in itself a delightful
compromise between work and pleasure, culture and fun. Everyone will find something
of interest in this catalog of travelers tales, of their wows and of their woes.
NANCY L. GREEN
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
La terre et largent: Lagriculture et le credit en France du XVIIIe au debut du

XXe siecle. By Gilles Postel-Vinay. LEvolution de lHumanite. Edited by Jean-
Claude Perrot and Philippe Boutry.
Paris: Albin Michel, 1998. Pp. 462. Fr 180.
This work of considerable originality and importance proves that a rural credit market,
far from being a consequence of the deregulation of interest rates and the development
of modern banking institutions, flourished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
France. Applying economic theories of imperfect markets and transactions costs, and
using sophisticated quantitative methods to analyze thousands of contracts drawn up
by notaries in small towns as well as major cities over a period of nearly two centuries,
Gilles Postel-Vinay reveals the very considerable scale and significance of a system of
credit that many historians of French rural society have overlooked. The first section
of the book explains how this system developed historically and how it functioned in
time and space, while the second section examines the role of notarial credit in financing
agricultural investments during the middle decades of the nineteenth century and ex-
812 Book Reviews
plains why this system declined in the late nineteenth century. Despite the complexity
of the economic data that Postel-Vinay presents, his close attention to the social context
of credit markets makes this book useful for social as well as economic historians.
Postel-Vinay begins his historical analysis by distinguishing between a formal
sector of notarized credit, involving annuities in perpetuity (rentes perpetuelles), life
annuities (rentes viageres), and loans for a specified number of years (obligations), and
an informal sector of personal credit, involving promissory notes (billets a payer).
Although both sectors involved transactions among private individuals, which distin-
guished them from public credit, the formal sector was considerably more important
for agricultural investment than the informal sector because of the larger capital stock
that it mobilized, the longer duration of the credit that it offered to borrowers, and the
more substantial guarantees of repayment that it provided to creditors. Notarized credit
involved pledges of real property as security for payment of annuities, in the case of
rentes, or repayment of capital, in the case of obligations. Consequently, this formal
sector resembled a mortgage market, although the term mortgage (hypotheque) was
restricted in nineteenth-century France to notarized loans that were also registered at a
government mortgage office (bureau des hypotheques).
Through an ingenious methodology of sampling notarial archives in small towns as
well as large cities, Postel-Vinay estimates that the total volume of notarial credit
throughout France amounted to 6.5 percent of gross domestic product in 1780, and 6.3
percent of gross domestic product in 1840. New loans, which represent net savings,
may have accounted for only one-third of this total volume of credit, but this still means
that notarial credit accounted for a savings rate of around 22.5 percent, which probably
constituted around half of the total savings rate in eighteenth-century France. By mul-
tiplying the value by the duration of loans, Postel-Vinay also estimates that small-town
notaries accounted for around half of the total national stock of notarial credit. Fur-
thermore, he calculates that 67 percent of all the households within the credit markets
centered on small towns contracted a loan each year and that between two-thirds and
three-quarters of these borrowers resided in the countryside. Finally, he estimates that
notarial loans to rural borrowers represented around 4 percent of the value of agricul-
tural output and 6 percent of the revenue from agriculture in late eighteenth-century
France. Although all of these statistics are subject to a considerable margin of error,
they indicate that notarial credit played an important role in the rural economy long
before agricultural credit banks were founded.
Postel-Vinay also uses sampling techniques to investigate the social dimension of
notarial credit. He finds, not surprisingly, that credit flowed from wealthy townspeople
to less wealthy residents in the countryside, although large loans were restricted to
wealthy borrowers, while small loans were common among rural creditors as well as
borrowers of modest means. More interesting are Postel-Vinays findings about the age
of lenders and borrowers. He shows that credit flowed from the old to the young in
accordance with a life cycle whereby young men needed to borrow funds in order to
support a family, while the elderly needed to sell land in order to become rentiers
earning fixed income from loans. Furthermore, in an ingenious analysis of the age
distribution of borrowers, Postel-Vinay makes the important discovery that not only
young adults but also middle-aged men were net borrowers. He interprets this finding
in the context of the family cycle, whereby parents borrowed cash in order to finance
dowries and marriage portions when their children reached the age of marriage. Social
historians of the peasantry will find this section of the book (pp. 5460) especially
valuable.
Postel-Vinay characterizes notarial credit as a prison of long duration that became
Book Reviews 813
increasingly enclosed on itself during the nineteenth century. These metaphors are
intended to highlight the persistence of two kinds of institutional constraints on the
formal sector of private credit: (1) a ceiling on interest rates and (2) dependence on
local information about the solvency of prospective borrowers. During the old regime,
creditors who wanted a fixed rate of return (usually 5 percent) in the form of an annuity
needed to alienate their capital, while those who wanted repayment after a specified
period of time in the form of an obligation could not stipulate an interest rate. According
to Postel-Vinay these obligations were more flexible instruments of credit than mort-
gage loans in nineteenth-century France, presumably because an unstated amount of
interest could be concealed in the amount owed. He emphasizes that the deregulation
of interest rates, which followed the legalization of lending at interest in 1789, occurred
during a period of massive debt liquidation, due to hyperinflation in the 1790s, and
ended abruptly in 1807, when the state imposed a legal ceiling of 5 percent on notarial
credit (and 6 percent on commercial loans). Historians who suppose that the French
Revolution ended market constraints on capital will be surprised to learn that this
ceiling of 5 percent on mortgage loans persisted until 1918. Postel-Vinay develops a
subtle and persuasive argument, based on a sample of loan contracts, that lenders
adjusted to this market constraint by reducing the amount and duration of loans to small
proprietors and by insisting on more collateral for loans of a given amount in response
to the financial panics that followed the July Revolution of 1830 and the February
Revolution of 1848. In both respects, the mortgage market discriminated against small
landowning peasants. This helps explain why access to credit became a major political
issue during the French Second Republic, as other historians have shown.
The second institutional constraint on credit marketsunreliable information about
the solvency of borrowersexplains why notaries played such an important role as
financial intermediaries between individuals. Until 1771, no public information existed
about debts that encumbered property. Lenders needed access to private sources of
information in order to gauge whether a landowner who wanted to borrow money was
already heavily in debt. Notaries had detailed knowledge about the property transac-
tions of local clients, including dowries and inheritances as well as sales and mortgages.
This made them privileged intermediaries between lenders, who might reside outside
the area, and local proprietors who wanted to borrow cash. Consequently, credit markets
in the old regime were geographically dispersed around the cities, towns, and other
market centers where most notaries resided. Even after the government established
mortgage offices in 1777, public information remained inadequate because mortgages
were only registered when property was sold. On the basis of evidence from one of
these offices, Postel-Vinay estimates that one in five property sales between 1772 and
1790 involved more than one mortgage, confirming the risk of lending money to debt-
burdened proprietors. Public sources of information became much more comprehensive
in the nineteenth century because notarized loans had to be registered at a government
mortgage office in order to obtain priority over unsecured loans in the event of default.
However, Postel-Vinay shows that transaction costs for small loans were so high (as
much as 11.62 francs for notarial fees and registration fees on a 100-franc loan) that
many notarial loans were not registered as mortgages. Registration was especially use-
ful for large landowners in major cities who owned properties in several areas, which
helps explain the success of the Credit Foncier, a national mortgage bank founded in
1852. Paradoxically, the expansion of this new institution reinforced the localism of
notarial credit markets, which continued to be the main source of mortgage loans for
proprietors who resided in small towns and the countryside.
Postel-Vinays analysis of the role of notarial credit in agricultural investment in-
814 Book Reviews
cludes case studies of peasant agriculture in southeastern France as well as large-scale

farming in the Paris basin. His analysis of notarial credit in silk-growing areas of the
Cevennes during the July Monarchy, where notaries used short-term commercial loans
to expand the geographical scope of their credit operations, shows how capital was
channeled into peasant investment in mulberry tree plantations. By contrast, large land-
owners in the plains around Arras were the main beneficiaries of investment opportu-
nities in the expanding sugar beet industry of that region. Similarly, large proprietors
in the plains of lower Languedoc financed the expansion of viticulture through mort-
gage loans during the boom years of the Second Empire and used notarial credit as
well as loans from the Credit Foncier to finance the reconstruction of vineyards in the
late nineteenth century, after the phylloxera epidemic. All of the cases that Postel-
Vinay examines involved a boom-and-bust cycle of agricultural investment and pro-
duction. Indeed, he shows that a linear conception of the modernization of French
agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is profoundly misleading. It un-
derestimates the capacity of investors and producers to respond to changing market
opportunities and risks. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, notarial
credit seems traditional, but its long history of adaptability to investment opportu-
nities in agriculture provides a no less modern perspective on the French rural econ-
omy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
TED W. MARGADANT
University of California, Davis
Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France. By Michel Winock.

Translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. vii351. $55.00.
This volume presents in English two dozen occasional pieces published in France in
the 1980s by Michel Winock. Addressing French right-wing and nationalist political
culture and behavior, these essays range across the century connecting Edouard Dru-
mont, the best-selling antisemitic publicist of the 1880s, with Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose
National Front was the most successful extreme-right party in Europe in the 1980s.
Winock, a professor at Sciences Po, is a prolific historian of contemporary France
and author of the fullest scholarly study of the social-Catholic journal Esprit. His
approach in the work under review is narrative and synthetic. These pieces are good
examples of French haute vulgarisation, intended to convey the results of scholarship
to an educated general public, such as the readers of the well-designed Paris monthly
review LHistoire.
The ongoing debate about French fascism is a major theme here. As between Rene
Remond (Les droites en France [Paris, 1982]), who considered fascism a foreign import
without serious French impact, and Zeev Sternhell, for whom fascism originated in France
and reached its purest expression there where it was undistorted by the exercise of power,
Winock takes a middle course. He is close to Sternhell in finding that prefascism (p.
179) emerged first and most vigorously in France before 1914 but rejects Sternhells later
conclusion in Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley, 1986) that
fascism permeated French conservative political discourse in the 1930s.
The reasons for fascisms failure, according to Winock, are to be sought less in some
essentialist French allergy to fascism, as suggested by Serge Berstein (La France
allergique au fascisme, Vingtieme Siecle, no. 2 [April 1984], pp. 8494), than in a
Book Reviews 815
specific historical development: republican conservatisms successful retention of its

clientele despite the late Third Republics faltering performance.
Central to conservatisms predominance over fascism in France in the 1930s was the
centrist turn taken by Francois Colonel de La Rocques fascist-sounding nationalist
league, the Croix de Feu. Reconfigured after June 1936 as an electoral party, La
Rocques Parti Social Francais (PSF) found a mass following by stressing consensual
national unity and social peace (explicitly rejecting violence and antisemitism). If the
elections scheduled for 1940 had taken place, La Rocques PSF was expected to emerge
as the largest party.
The long debate about whether La Rocque was fascist or conservative has continued
since Winock wrote, with Jacques Nobecourts defensive biography (Colonel de La
Rocque ou les pieces du nationalisme chretien [Paris, 1996]) and important essays by
William D. Irvine (Fascism in France and the Strange Case of the Croix de Feu,
Journal of Modern History 63 [1991]: 27195) and Kevin Passmore (Boy Scoutism
for Grown-ups? Paramilitarism in the Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Francais,
French Historical Studies 19 [1995]: 52757). A finally convincing answer, however,
cannot overlook Winocks sensible focus on the moderating evolution over time of La
Rocques style and tactics.
Winock portrays the emergence of a new right in the 1880s and 1890s in Stern-
hellian terms as the outcome of new departures by certain renegades among both
nationalists, motivated by the quest for workers votes, and socialists, motivated by the
discovery of the nation as a mobilizing principle. Winock doubts, however, that this
novel national-socialist convergence is adequately understood in terms of its ideas
alone. The fascist synthesis has to do, in his narrative, with getting and exercising
power and with aggressive projects of national domination.
Lack of interest in expansion in the satisfied, defensive France that emerged from
World War I is another reason for fascisms failure there, according to Winock. Par-
ticularly revealing in this respect is the novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, self-pro-
claimed fascist after the riots of February 1934. In his topical 1939 novel Gilles (Paris),
Drieu preferred a pan-European fascism to a parochial French expansionism. French
national socialists failed, in effect, to deliver either socialism or nationalism.
Some of Winocks most satisfying essays examine particular personages who defy
easy categorization, such as Charles Peguy, Georges Sorel, Georges Valois, Gustave
Herve, and Georges Bernanos, who have been claimed by both left and right. They
respond well to narrative historical treatment, as their itineraries take them in an ap-
parently dizzying journey from left to right and (with Bernanos and Valois) back again.
Behind the political inconsistencies Winock finds morally consistent strivings for au-
thenticity, disinterested commitment, or human independence.
Winock is particularly interested in the tendentious and partial ways in which sym-
bols, language, or historical personages have been appropriated by French nationalists
and the French right. Joan of Arcs successful capture by the right from her initial
modern champions on the center left is a good example.
Among several essays on the salience of antisemitism in France, Winocks scrutiny
of the French lefts history of antisemitism is most original. Although overt socialist
attacks on Jewish capitalism ended officially with the Dreyfus Affair, this and other
diabolical causalities (p. 81) still lurk at the grassroots. An analysis of anti-American
sentiments usefully underlines their strength on the right.
The themes of decadence and fin de siecle morbidity are explored in the only piece
here based on primary research: an examination of the excesses in press coverage of
the gruesome death of society women in an 1897 charity bazaar fire.
816 Book Reviews
The translation, often fluent, makes a dozen or so spectacular pratfalls: When Na-
poleon succeeds to the Academy seat vacated by the banished Carnot, for example, he
is described as banished at the Carnot siege (p. 164). The editors should have ex-
plained some unfamiliar terms for non-French readers. Otherwise, these essays provide
an informative introduction to the themes, symbols, tactics, and personalities of the
French right over the past century.
ROBERT O. PAXTON
Columbia University
Rural Communism in France, 19201939. By Laird Boswell.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xii266. $47.50.
It is a familiar truism that rural France has generally been characterized by rightist
political ideologies and electoral behavior, and that the French Communist Party has
been largely an urban working-class formation. But there are exceptions: a few areas
in Frances deep rural hinterlands (e.g., parts of the Mediterranean and central regions)
have been identified with strong, more or less persistent leftist traditions, including, in
some cases, solid embrace of the Communist Party. Indeed, from its beginnings in
1920 to the present, the French Communist Party has drawn a substantial proportion
of its membership and votes from rural backwaters far removed from the working-class
settings with which it is most closely associated. These observations unsettle a number
of conventional assumptions about modern and contemporary French history, begging
questions about the relationships between country and city, the determinants and con-
sequences of rural political proclivities, the dynamics of party politics, and the nature
of French Communism.
Laird Boswell aims to address these questions through a case study of the French
Communist Party in its formative years of the 1920s and 1930s, as it took root in one
rural region having an old leftist tradition: the Limousin (comprising the departments
of Correze, Creuse, and Haute Vienne and having its capital at Limoges, its only major
city), as well as the neighboring department of Dordogne. Dissatisfied with conven-
tional claims that French Communist successes in the countryside are attributable to
locally entrenched leftist traditions straining ever further left, he aims to open the black
box of tradition to determine who was attracted to the Communist Party in such a
region, why, and how. In so doing, he means to illuminate the dynamics of French
rural Communism, which, he argues, though marginalized by the Party and its students
alike, is nonetheless critical to understanding the Communist Partys enduring presence
on the French political landscape over most of the twentieth century. To this end, he
weaves together both quantitative and qualitative data: he undertakes rigorous regres-
sion analysis of voting patterns, measuring shifts across time in voters party prefer-
ences, as well as the relationships between party preferences and the varying socio-
logical and economic profiles of municipalities or electoral districts across the four
departments; the results of this analysis are further fleshed out (and effectively enliv-
ened) with data from interviews with local men active in the Communist Party during
the interwar period, as well as contemporary reports and newspaper accounts of Party
activities.
As the excellent maps in this volume graphically illustrate, the geography of the
Communist Partys interwar implantation in this region is quite well defined: especially
concentrated in the isolated central highlands of the Limousin, where the boundaries
Book Reviews 817
of its three departments intersect, Communist territory extended south to the area
around the small city of Tulle, the capital of Correze, and also included several outlier
areas in the Dordogne and Haute Vienne. Boswells analyses convincingly lay to rest
a number of conventional explanations for Communist success in rural areas: the strain
toward ever more left explanation cannot account for why some areas of the region
moved to Communism, while others remained in Radical or Socialist camps; there is
very little evidence that Communism was imported to the countryside from urban
centers in the region or by migrants returning from more distant urban areas, and there
is considerable evidence that its appeal was essentially homegrown; and although Com-
munism had its greatest success in one of the poorer areas of the region, it did not draw
primarily the poorest or most proletarianized segments of the population (e.g., share-
croppers, landless laborers), instead appealing mainly to smallholders and to significant
numbers of artisans and shopkeepers.
These negative arguments strike me as altogether persuasive, but then why did the
Communist Party successfully take root in some areas? One of the few consistent
patterns that Boswell finds is a strong correlation between anticlericalism (measured
by the rate of civil funerals) and Communist votes. The empirical evidence is inter-
esting, but how do we know that the anticlerical gesture of choosing a civil funeral is
not a result, rather than a cause, of adherence to the Communist Party? And isnt the
attribution of Communism to anticlericalism (generally characteristic of the Limousin
region) essentially similar to the leftist tradition argument that Boswell seeks to
elaborate?
A more positive argument offered is that those rural dwellers drawn to Communism
saw in it a coherent response to unfulfilled desires for political and social reform,
fears born of the Great War, the crisis of a quickly declining rural sector in search of
salvation and identity (p. 7). But this argument is somewhat belied by Boswells
compelling description of Communist governance. Almost without exception, Com-
munists elected to political office served at the local level, managing small towns and
villages with meager budgets, subject to prefectural tutelage as well as to the long-
standing family rivalries, personalization of issues, and legacy of patronage politics
characterizing rural politics everywhere. His description rings true but suggests that
Communist office holders governed in ways essentially similar to those in other rural
municipalities, leaving even more murky the question of what the appeal or meaning
of the Communist label was to such constituencies.
In the end, the most convincing explanation for the successes of the Communist
Party in the region lies in the skill of local Party militants. Well-integrated in local
settings potentially receptive to Communism (due to leftist and anticlerical traditions
as well as crisis-stricken circumstances) and able to adapt the Party line to those settings
because of their own savvy as well as their relative autonomy from a Party apparatus
that largely ignored them, they succeeded in establishing a loyal constituency for them-
selves and for the Party. As Boswell points out, this line of argument begs a rethinking
of the limits of centralized Party powers and of ideological stances decreed from above.
Political parties, even those as centralized and hierarchical as the French Communist
Party, are, he concludes, both constructed from the top down and fashioned from the
bottom up by the actions of voters, sympathizers and militants (p. 237).
My own interest in this study arises from my recent ethnographic fieldwork in an
area of the Limousin highlands where the Communist Party was early established.
Situated at the opposite end of the Communist apogee (1950s and 1960s) from Bos-
wells study, my research concerned contemporary tourism development rather than
political history, but the legacy of that history remains intriguingly ever present. People
818 Book Reviews
in the area like to point out that even the cows here are red (referring to the Limousin
beef cattle that are a mainstay of the local agricultural economy). There is a Karl Marx
Boulevard and a Lenin Avenue in one of the few towns large enough to have named
streets; individual and collective identities and rivalries still turn around the entrenched
distinctions among Socialist, Communist, and dissident Communist votes that continue
to describe the range of conceivable variation among municipalities and voters in the
area; members of local landed gentry families grumble that this place is so backward,
they dont even know that the class struggle is passe. Nonetheless, in discussions of
social or economic issues with local people, I often found it difficult to discern the
distinctions among the leftist positions so fiercely adhered to in voting habitsor even
to identify much recognizably leftist thought at all. I had hoped that Boswells study
would provide an easy explanation for why the Communist Party came to be implanted
in such an area, and what exactly it might meanto the area or to the Partythat it
has had a continuing presence here.
He provides no such answer, and in fact, his would be a less interesting book if he
did. Part habit, part perceptions of immediate and long-term interests, part follow-the-
leader, the causes, dynamics, and consequences of political behavior are, he shows,
reducible to none of these. Boswell raises intriguing and far-reaching questions in this
study, skillfully deploying a range of research strategies and a firm mastery of his
subject to illuminate their complexity. Engaging and provocative, this book will provide
rewarding food for thought to those interested in European Communism, party politics,
and rural life.
SUSAN CAROL ROGERS

New York University
Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena. By William Caferro. The Johns
Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, series 116,
volume 1.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. xx251. $39.95.
Mercenary captains of the early Italian Renaissance sometimes admitted that their habit
was to rob, sack and kill (p. 36) whoever resisted them, and Siena, for one, soon
discovered that it was cheaper to buy them off than to fight back. Yet they were honored
and even feted by their employers. How this could be is not a question raised by William
Caferro, but his fresh findings suggest that might made right. That is to say, since an
army of several thousand mercenaries could easily hold towns and rural communities
to ransom, Siena and other small states had to make their peace with them. Indeed, by
regularly employing the likes of Sir John Hawkwood and Alberico da Barbiano for
war and defense, governments ipso facto honored them. Suddenly such men were
bandits and arsonists no longer.
Founded on a good deal of archival research, this fascinating study raises and partly
answers a string of essential questions: (1) Was once flourishing Siena undone by the
freebooting companies of the fourteenth century, as well as by pestilence? (2) Can
financial emergencies so disorient men in government as to wreck their sense of co-
herent fiscal organization? (3) Did Sienas encounter with the companies unnerve en-
trepreneurs, causing them to draw away from trade and banking to pursue landed
investment? (4) Was war in Italy a motor for the transfer of wealth from one city or
Book Reviews 819
region to another? and (5), Given imperfect sources, can we actually demonstrate the
long-term economic and social effects of war and military costs?
Caferro argues that the mercenary companies were a catastophe of the highest order
for Siena, ranking alongside plague, famine, and war (p. xvii). Making thirty-seven
major raids on Sienese territory between 1342 and 1399, they were bought off at a
total cost of 291,379 florins in bribes and other charges. The sum was paid out of taxes
and interest-bearing loans from citizens. Late in the century, Siena was imposing a
high average of four preste (forced loans) per year. Obtaining swift payment in gold
coin, the blackmailing companies verged on overwhelming Sienese fiscal resources,
while also draining specie from an economy already in crisis, owing to the Black Death.
Moreover, since Siena was a fundamentally agrarian state (p. 187), by targeting small
towns and the countryside, the mercenaries did the utmost damage, tearing away at its
wealth and hastening the depopulation of the rural hinterland. Chaotic fiscal expedients
foiled administration in government and thereby retarded state building. The agrarian
economy suffered for years from depletions of livestock. Big-banking enterprise, al-
ready blighted by the 1320s, all but disappeared. The wool trade, never a major industry,
slipped into sharper decline. And an aristocratic ethos, anchored to the idyll of landed
wealth, soon blossomed.
What happened to the many sacks of gold coin carried off by the mercenaries? In
The Pursuit of Power (Chicago, 1982), William H. McNeill holds that since soldiers
money came from taxes and was then spent, it circulated, thus reentering the economy.
Caferro credits this claim but argues that Sienas disbursements to mercenaries were
more likely to be spent in Florence or even farther afield, where material attractions
and military supplies were in far greater abundance. Hence, other economies benefited
from Sienas rural riches, and even Milan, with its major arms industry, and Venice,
with its remarkable spectrum of goods, were possibly not too far away.
Caferro has a book here of considerable importance. Its evocative tables and figures
do not, however, clinch his argument. Sienas plunging revenues, which at times made
the demands of mercenaries seem unbearable, followed from six waves of lethal plague
and awesome mortalities. Over a critical half century, income from some of the main
sales taxes (gabelles) fell by nearly 80 percent (p. 157), thereby fully conforming
with the drop in Sienas population from about 50,000 people in the 1340s to about
11,000 by 1400. In other words, the citys historic decline was a function preeminently
of spectacular depopulation. The secular impact of the companies was, by contrast,
more devious and is now far more difficult to pin down. Florence doubtless absorbed
some Sienese wealth in the form of soldiers loot and bribe money, but tax farmers
and voluntary lenders in Siena also took in large returns. Even in 1396, after a dev-
astating half century, Sienas public debt amounted to a mere 23,000 florins, whereas
the Florentine debt, standing at 3 million, was greater by a factor of thirteen. With a
population only three times Sienas (say, about 32,000 people), Florence, it appears,
was yet able to carry its debt more easily, because of a more vigorous commercial
economy.
Extrapolating from a scatter of Caferros figures (pp. 40, 66, 73), I estimate that
unskilled rural laborers earned a top wage, at best, of about 33.00 florins per year. If
we take the staggering sum (p. 43) of bribe monies paid to mercenaries between
1342 and 1399, a total of 291,379 florins, and divide it by the fifty-seven years, we get
an average of nearly 5,112 florins per year. This sum in turn, divided by 33.00 florins,
gives us the yearly wages of about 155 farm laborers: a rather modest sum even for
Sienas coffers.
In short, while the mercenary raids were ruinous for Siena, the decisive losses must
820 Book Reviews
have been in the massive, chronic theft of livestock and in the practice of large-scale
arson, as reported by Caferro. I would also add the consequent shattering of the whole
rhythm of farm work. These costs, however, have not beencould not be?quanti-
fied. Siena paid the bribe monies, but rural folk sank ever deeper into debt with the
city and its moneylenders. When a farm laborer was held to ransom for 31.00 florins
and his landlord or someone else paid, in time he had to repay the sum, surely with
more work and produce. No wonder that so many farmhands took to their heels. The
question remains: since rural income long proved to be dicey, how were the big urban
landlords able, so soon, to turn the possession of land into an idyll? Were trade and
moneylending not, after all, safer?
LAURO MARTINES
University of California, Los Angeles
How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. By Rudolph M.

Bell.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. xiii375. $25.00.
As Rudolph Bell notes, advice manuals have an ephemeral shelf life, discarded for the
next best-seller, or at least frequently revised. And they are not credited with great
intellectual depth. So there has been no scholarly interest in them. Nevertheless he
seeks to investigate Italian popular advice manuals of the sixteenth century, when
printing created a market for publishing with an eye to sales potential among an au-
dience of commercial and professional classes (p. 7). Material written earlier that did
not find a printed outlet in the sixteenth century does not find one in his pages. Also
not present in How to Do It are cookbooks, almanacs, and other subjects that were not
advice concerning how to be a manly man or a womanly woman (p. 5).
Bell goes through the contents of numerous advice manuals (as there is no bibli-
ography it is hard to count them) beginning with the topic of sex. His chapters concern
conception, pregnancy and parturition, child raising, adolescence, and marriage. His
sources range from Lorenzo Giobertis De gli errori popolari, Matteo Palmieris Della
vita civile, and Girolamo Mercurios La commare, to the official catechism of the
Council of Trent. Bells pursuit of these materials through many libraries anchors his
book in solid scholarly ground. Not conventionally scholarly is his presentationa
chatty, journalistic style, frequently addressing the reader as someone practically in-
terested in the contents (Bell confesses to trying some of it on his grandchildren). He
launches from the premise of browsing at a quite leisurely pace, soaking things in
rather than instantly analyzing, more to capture and enjoy what is said than to impose
modern interpretations and patterns (p. 11). Current readers less enamored or invested
in the contents and qualities of these advice books may find the onslaught of details
and terms mind numbing. But it has to be acknowledged that Bell has read widely and
sympathetically through a genre of neglected but practical, arguably behavior-shaping
publication.
Bell addresses two themes. One is the variety of authorities and quality of their
advice. On this score his book is certainly successful. The second theme is how
the printed word allowed authorities, or writers merely claiming to be authorities, to
enter the intimate recesses of private life (p. 8). But the conventional and long-
standing nature of the advice and knowledge in these manuals makes it hard to see
any increase of social control in print culture, as Bell alleges. Interest in sin was not
Book Reviews 821
new to the Church. Clinical medical detail or even prurient curiosity also surely were
not new.
In a final chapter tellingly entitled Then and Now, Bell discloses that, despite
the wealth of detail and long passages paraphrasing his sources, he deemed it a
waste of time to translate texts, some gems having been translated primarily as
curiosity items to display on your coffee table (p. 281). Rather, he chose to gauge
audience reaction and authorial intent, so that in the end this advice manual is my
creation (p. 281). Its very style, as noted, speaks to an audience seemingly as inter-
ested to know that a piece of garlic placed in the vagina resulting in odor in the
nostrils would indicate no obstruction to conception as they might be to obtain Viagra
or St. Johns wort. The alterity of the past is downplayed consistently in favor of the
similarity of advice seekers and the market in advice. To be sure, we as readers are
made aware of differences in knowledge (if not so much of differences in technology
or material culture). Bell appropriately begins chapter 2, for example, with a dia-
grammatic presentation of the four bodily humors and the two-seed and one-seed
theories of conception. But he is avowedly less interested in differences in theories
than in behaviors (hence more philosophical works like Castigliones Courtier do
not figure in his reading, no matter the number of editions and translations). The
result is that at several points he confronts accepted historical positions that establish
the alterity of the past and seeks to diminish, if not demolish, them. One such is
disciplining children. Italian advice writers, he says, counseled lenience and culti-
vation, not breaking, of a childs will. Thus, he concludes, Evidence to portray an
indifferent, unloving premodern European family, is often scanty, subject to different
interpretations, and easily misunderstood when looked at through the prism of mod-
ern experience (p. 136). Similarly, sixteenth-century views of adolescence were
strikingly modernto the extent that Bell evinces comfort in using the modern
term adolescence although it does not translate exactly to any Italian term. To point
to continuities, to diminish the alterity of the past, is an appropriate historical task.
Bells efforts in this regard deserve due credit. His discussion of advice on wet-
nursing, for example, is prefaced with a provocative reconsideration of some histo-
rians sense of the prevalence of the practice, especially in face of his manuals
consistent attention to maternal nursing. His is a salutary warning about practices, at
least among those not of the wealthy and nobility.
Yet too often alterity goes unremarked. Sentences such as shriveling of the babys
body may be caused by a witchs spell, and this requires parents to seek the aid of an
exorcist or a blessing from the church (p. 152) come analytically unadorned, and this
is all the more disconcerting when Bell concludes that he finds manuals with such
advice to be practical, reasonable, caring, protective without becoming overprotective,
direct and easy to follow, not at all fatalistic, and with no hint that suffering is somehow
good for the soul or a necessary part of growing up (p. 153).
Patriarchy and gender are areas in which Bell cannot dodge the alterity of the Italian
past. Here too his penchant to undercut alterity has salutary effects; he makes effective
use of his evidence to show that the cultural presumptions in favor of patriarchy did
not deny all agency to women. Countering what he takes as the presentist assertion
by Margaret King that companionship and subordination were necessarily contradic-
tory, Bell points to wives who expressed both deference and endearment toward their
husbands. He declines to join the feminist chorus decrying humanism as a negative
factor for women; even more he points to clerical advice manuals as less restrictive of
women, who needed to go to church and avoid sin and thus could be told to refuse
their husbands unwholesome desires or demands. Widows too were a challenging
822 Book Reviews
anomaly to patriarchal norms (p. 260) and could not have taken on tasks of property
management and child guardianship if they had indeed been mere passive victims of
patriarchy during marriage. That this amounted to a rejection of the ideological under-
pinnings of male control, however (p. 278), is doubtful. The space within which widows
operated was still one made available within patriarchy and was ideologically accom-
modated, if not always coherently, by his advice authors in their portraits of good
widows.
There is much to like in Bells erudite and self-effacing postmodern presentation of
all this sixteenth-century Italian advice. He has charted new historical territory (even
as he ends in contemplation of the new world of the Internet). Like many initial maps
it is rough and inaccurate in places, but the next explorer must use and perfect it. It is
to be hoped that there will be a number of explorers covering the same ground (sex,
family, gender) and also other areas (cooking, husbandry and gardening, broader medi-
cal advice). It is also to be hoped that they pay due attention to the pasts uniqueness
even as they seek to bridge the gap between it and the present.
THOMAS KUEHN
Clemson University
The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of
Philip III of Spain. By Magdalena S. Sanchez. The Johns Hopkins University
Studies in Historical and Political Science, series 116, volume 2.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. xii267. $39.95.
Early modern Spanish kings and queens are back in the news. In 1998, the four-
hundredth anniversary of the death of Philip II was commemorated by an outpouring
of exhibitions, conferences, and a wide range of publications, especially biographies,
most of which were designed for the broader reading public. Ironically, in the more
settled world of ongoing archival research, some of the most interesting work on
early modern Spanish politics, and on monarchs and courts in particular, has focused
on the reign of his hapless son, Philip III, who ruled from 1598 to 1621. In terms of
themes and methods, the better of the recent studies of high politics have sought
either to open for inspection new subjects or to venture novel approaches to old ones.
This book takes a middle way between these two paths. Its principal and most wel-
come innovation is to broaden the scope of the political world studied by drawing
attention to the roles of women in settings from which historians have long excluded
them. Its means to this end, though, is traditional history with a vengeance. Hence,
its close reading of the evolving minutiae of life at court, followed through the papers
and correspondence, both public and private, of the relatively small cast of principals
involved.
Women, especially royal women, were at the center of the early modern political
world (p. 10). Few would doubt this assertion in the wake of Magdalena Sanchezs
impressive marshaling of evidence for the constant intervention in policy making by
Philip IIIs most influential female relatives: his aunt, the Empress Mary (15281603),
widow of Maximilian II; his cousin, Margaret of the Cross (15671633), a nun at the
Descalzas Reales convent in Madrid; and his wife (and also cousin), Margaret of Aus-
tria (15841611). These women were united by not only close kin and personal ties
but also a common political interest. To that end they deployed a wide range of tactics
to pressure Philip into maintaining his fathers policy of financial and military support
Book Reviews 823
for the Austrian Habsburgs. Blocking their path was the royal favorite, the duke of
Lerma, a notoriously corrupt grandee who saw the clear advantages of curtailing Span-
ish commitments in central Europe as part of a less bellicose foreign policy. The result
was a bitter if necessarily muted struggle for ascendancy over the king. Until the
queens death in 1611 brought to an effective end the most serious challenge to Lermas
power during the first half of Philips reign, the three royal women struggled ceaselessly
to keep the king reminded of his eastern cousins, and more generally to keep Spanish
policy pointed in a strongly confessional direction.
The deeper interest of this study resides less in its close scrutiny of factional politics
at court than in its effort to reshape current wisdom about the nature and exercise of
monarchical authority in the early seventeenth century. Women within the royal family
could bring to bear different sorts of inevitably informal influence on centralized de-
cision making. Access to the king was the most potent, if unpredictable, card in their
deck. However, skillful manipulation of their specifically female reputation for fervent
piety and boundless charity endowed them with a favorable public image that could
be converted into political leverage. Much the same could be said for the strategic use
of, again, womens illnesses, especially melancholy, for similar ends. By emphasizing
this ceaseless maneuvering behind the scenes (and off the records) of formal politics,
the author also reveals the court itself to be a more porous and decentralized institution
than previously thought. Its frontiers extended well beyond the royal palace and its
administrative offices to embrace other centers of power, including such theoretically
secluded venues as cloistered convents. In like fashion Sanchez critically scrutinizes
another staple of court life, factions, which she depicts as political networks, under-
stood less in the modern sociological sense than as inherently unstable assemblages of
individuals whose conflicting obligations often gave rise to ideological inconsistency
and shifts in personal loyalties. Sanchezs portrayal of court politics is convincing and
solidly documented, and it broadens our understanding of not only a little-studied and
often-derided reign but also the hidden logics of a crucial political institution, the court,
in a period of transition toward government by royal favorites.
While this studys overall contribution is unquestionably positive, its focus never-
theless seems limited in several respects. This is partly thanks to the heavy dose of
repetition in the text; by its end, few facts have been reported only once. A more serious
problem is that at times its sights are set too low. Demonstrating that, for example,
Lerma did not fully monopolize influence over Philip III is not an ambitious enough
goal for a historian as talented as Sanchez. Much the same can be said for her taking
the demonstration of womens voices as an end in itself. Confining herself strictly to
the task of reconstructing the roles and stratagems of women, the author makes little
effort to measure the impact of the three royal womens lobbying on the governments
decision making, much less the consequences of the choices that they urged. Thus the
reader does not learn until the last paragraph that the outcome of the policies these
women defended was disastrous for Spain. More attention earlier on to these matters
would have led to a more rounded account. Still, the job that is done is done well. One
comes away from this book with a new appreciation of the numerous and sophisticated
ways in which these imperial women managed to turn political, medical, and religious
rhetoric and images designed to limit the public roles of women into sources of strength.
That the reader may also wind up feeling a little sorry for Lerma is testimony to how
convincing an argument Sanchez has made.
JAMES S. AMELANG
Autonomous University, Madrid
824 Book Reviews
Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism. By Anthony F. Upton. Cambridge Studies in

Early Modern History. Edited by Sir John Elliott et al.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxiv281. $59.95.
Sweden has figured prominently in our understanding of early modern Europe, as an

extraordinary example of a small and in many respects underresourced nation be-
coming a major player in European politics in the seventeenth century and as an
equally unusual example of parliamentary monarchy for much of the eighteenth.
Outside Scandinavia, part of the story has been made clear through the work of a
small group of outstanding historians, but with significant gaps. One of these, the
reign of Charles XI (166097), has now been filled in a way that is unlikely to be
surpassed for some considerable time. Anthony F. Uptons book builds on a thorough
familiarity both with the archival material in Sweden and with the languages nec-
essary for its use. As he makes clear at the outset, Swedish historians have themselves
in recent years been unable to provide a detailed and scholarly study of this reign,
pivotal though it is in the consolidation of Swedish absolutism and in creating the
structures necessary for the meteoric reign of Charles XII, so this book is certain to
have considerable impact there as well.
Charles XI has remained enigmatic partly because he was a poor communicator,
wrote little (perhaps owing to his dyslexia) andso utterly unlike Louis XIVhated
being in the spotlight. But, as Upton makes clear, behind the facade of this dour and
dutiful Lutheran monarch was a politician of singular tenacity and considerable shrewd-
ness, who, as his handling of the Diets from 1680 onward amply demonstrates, had
the knack of getting his way without appearing to be imposing it. The regency gov-
ernment that had been in charge after the premature death of his father in 1660 left a
difficult legacy in terms of both foreign relations and domestic finance. After 1679,
despite an enthusiasm for military exercises in his youth, the king followed an unusually
prudent course in international relations that permitted the consolidation of an imagi-
native system of support for the conscript army, the indelningsverk. He also encouraged
his officials to follow a vigorous policy of reevaluation of all grants whereby crown
land had been alienated to private interests (and in particular to members of the Council
of State itself), a process that brutally brought to account a number of families who
might have posed a threat to royal power. These policies, together with a singular
prudence and a noticeable lack of patronage at court, ensured the accumulation of a
healthy fiscal surplus by the end of the reign.
Historians with interests in parliamentary institutions, in the emergence of the ma-
chinery of the early modern military state, in the running of provincial administration
and external territories, and in late seventeenth-century power politics, will find much
food for thought in this volume. Its main aim is to give a thorough account of the key
domestic issues of the reign and the role of the king and his closest advisers in the
formation of policy. But as Upton makes clear, the consolidation of absolutism in
Sweden came about almost as a side effect. Charles XI was acutely conscious of his
lineage and the aspirations of the royal house but was so bound by his Lutheran in-
heritance and his own instincts that he never appears to have contemplated political
innovation. This is even more extraordinary given the near-contemporary Danish ex-
periment in imposed absolutism, following their much more serious military collapse
in 1660. Partly through his wife, sister of Christian V of Denmark, Charles even ex-
plored the possibility of a rapprochement with Denmark to re-create a Nordic alliance.
But he seems to have had little interest in adopting centralist or fiscal solutions akin to
those imposed in Denmarkindeed he made a point of emphasizing his different
Book Reviews 825
traditional solutions. Sweden acquired no real counterpart to the Danish Royal Law of
1665, the centralist Law Code of 1683, or the great land tax register of 1688. Despite
the carefully defined limitations within which Charles expected the Diets to operate,
there was never any suggestion that he might do without them. The king was emphat-
ically conventional, deeply conscious of his role as caretaker not only of the royal
inheritance but also of the kind of consensus politics operative in Sweden at the time.
This may help explain why his sometimes quite harsh policies generated virtually no
documentable resistance even among the magnate families who lost most. They were
well aware that the king was essentially operating within the letter of Swedish law, and
they were repeatedly caught on the wrong foot in terms of the loaded political agenda
of the Diet of 1680 and its sequels. The 1682 change of nomenclature, whereby the
Council of State became the Kings Council, was a profoundly accurate reflection of
the fact that the crown had destroyed the political autonomy of the old magnate families
in favor of a more modern service bureaucracy. That bureaucracy was controlled by
men whose loyalty and professionalism, though by no means beyond the kings re-
proach, may well have been among the best in Europe at the time. In recent decades,
historians have learned to be wary in their generalizations about absolutism in later
seventeenth-century Europe; this book, in its detailed account of one of the most ex-
traordinary examples, provides ample evidence that no generalized model does justice
to the many alternative routes to state formation.
THOMAS MUNCK
University of Glasgow
Katholiken auf die Barrikaden? Europaische Revolutionen und deutsche

katholische Presse, 18151848. By Bernhard Schneider. Veroffentlichungen der
Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte, series B, volume 84. Edited by Ulrich von Hehl.
Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1998. Pp. 412. DM 108.
Katholiken auf die Barrikaden? defies easy categorization because its arguments are
opaque and shifting in purpose. On the one hand, it represents a painstaking survey of
Roman Catholic theological opinion in early nineteenth-century Germanic central Eu-
rope regarding revolution in neighboring France and Belgium. On the other hand, it
describes the role of the German-language religious press between 1815 and 1848 in
disseminating those opinions and argues that this press was crucial to the triumph of
ultramontanism in the Roman church. The resulting narrative is a careful and enor-
mously detailed examination of Catholic viewpoints regarding these Western European
revolutions, the legitimacy of revolution as a means to achieve religious or political
goals, and the centrality of the denominational press as the forum for this debate without
in the end bringing these themes together into a coherent whole. In the process, it
makes minor revisions to the traditional image of Catholicism and revolution, although
none compels any major reinterpretation.
Bernhard Schneiders method is not so much to chart the reality of revolution as
it is to describe German Catholic perceptions of that reality from the downfall of
Napoleon to the March Days of 1848. These images are familiar enough. They por-
tray the French Revolution as the product of a conspiracy fashioned by secret soci-
eties, as the unfortunate inheritance of the Protestant Reformation, or as good inten-
tions capsizing into Jacobin sacrilege or Napoleonic despotism, to mention only the
most obvious. As such, Schneider writes intellectual history of the most traditional
826 Book Reviews
sort: it is scholarly, methodical, and detailed without being very imaginative or in-
teresting.
For most Catholic churchmen, Schneider argues, revolution was a destructive enter-
prise that disrupted ecclesiastical organization and activities, visiting real hardship on
the faithful at large. Still, as Schneider notes, theologians, ordinary clerics, and even
lay activists did not simply react against the revolutions in France and Belgium: they
learned from them and assimilated important elements of revolutionary politics into
their more traditional forms of political expression and behavior. Nowhere, he adds,
was that more obvious than in the case of the Belgian Revolution of 1830. The success
of that revolution owed something to dissatisfaction among the Belgian populace with
the political arrangements made in 1815, to growing estrangement between the Dutch
government and the Belgian upper classes, and to educational disputes that divided
Belgian church leaders and the Dutch authorities. It owed even more, Schneider claims,
to the ability of Belgian Catholics and liberals to reconcile their political and cultural
differences in a new, more progressive reform program. By 1848, Schneider concludes,
this Belgian example met with hesitant approval among even the most orthodox and
ultramontane German churchmen, offering lessons and a model for a restructuring of
the church-state relationship in their homeland.
This is an important, even controversial insight, and it deserves more elaboration
than Schneider chooses to provide. Although he has much to say about the vitality of
Catholic thought and writing, he fails both to discuss Germanys midcentury revolu-
tions and to assess the extent to which Catholics, lay and clerical alike, absorbed the
lessons of the revolutionary experience in Belgium. What is missing from Schneiders
account, therefore, is any kind of sustained and convincing effort to transcend the
narrow confines of an arcane and arid theological debate to determine the extent to
which ordinary Catholics found for themselves an intermediate position between rev-
olution and legitimacy or reconciled abstract religious principles with revolutionary
tactics to provide insight into the larger, more important issues that shaped and deter-
mined the outcome of national events in 184849.
Schneider, however, is less interested in the practical impact of these revolutionary
lessons than he is in the role of the Catholic periodical press as the intellectual forum
in Germany for this protracted theological debate regarding the Western European
revolutions of 1789 and 1830. To this end he describes with excruciating exactitude
the widespread German interest in foreign political upheavals, rising literacy levels,
and an increased appetite for news and opinion that fueled the proliferation of these
periodicals. At the same time, however, he has some interesting and useful things to
say about the limitations of censorship in Vormarz Germany, circulation figures, sub-
scription prices, and even the contribution of these theological periodicals to the tri-
umph of ultramontanism within the German church. Ultramontane journals, he argues,
enjoyed a broader appeal because they drew on international sources and networks,
emphasized up-to-date journalistic practices, and in the end proved more modern
than their competitors among other theological orientations. His description of these
periodicals, in fact, may be the books most important contribution.
Beyond these organizational weaknesses, there are other, equally important inter-
pretive problems that Schneider has not addressed. To imply a fusion between faith
and revolution or to emphasize the possibility of collusion between German Catholics
and liberals in 1848 ignores the ambiguous quality of Catholic tactics, obscures the
adaptability of the Roman church to new circumstances, and raises the question of why
an alleged potential for cooperation remained a potential and failed to become a long-
term operative reality. Catholic tactics, Schneider admits, were not unambiguously
Book Reviews 827
revolutionary: they were meant to free the church from the restrictions of the absolutist
state, to enlarge the range of freedoms it enjoyed, and to thwart its enemies. What
concessions and rights churchmen claimed in 1848, other historians have noted, they
consolidated later when reaction once more set in, by giving aid to governments against
revolutionary radicalism. These tactics were so successfully handled in Germany that
1848 became the starting point for the emancipation of the Roman church, notably in
Prussia, and the catalyst there for an uneasy alliance with the Hohenzollern state that
was to endure for nearly two decades.
These are controversial issues, and one wishes that Schneider had devoted more
attention to them. Had he done so, he might have broadened the appeal of his work.
As it standsdespite the immense effort that went into its research and writingthis
book will be of limited interest to a small circle of ecclesiastical historians.
RONALD J. ROSS
University of WisconsinMilwaukee
Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Burgerliche Kultur,

naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Offentlichkeit, 18481914.
By Andreas Daum.
Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998. Pp. xii617.
The contrast between scientific and cultural leadership versus political immaturity in
late nineteenth-century Germany belongs to the standard repertory of themes in German
historical writing. Whether for good or ill, it has been argued, the German bourgeoisie
abandoned (or at least tempered) its struggle for political emancipation after its defeat
in the 1848 revolution. Critics of this alleged turn have also noted the dire effects of
embracing nationalism, materialism, and imperialism, all part of Germanys fateful
separate path. One of the more spirited defenders of the German middle class in the
nineteenth century was the late Thomas Nipperdey, whose multivolume Deutsche Ge-
schichte (Munich: Beck, 199193) is now appearing in English translation (so far
Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 18001866, with Princeton University Press,
1996).
Another theme introduced into German historical debate by Jurgen Habermas, the
role of Offentlichkeit (the public sphere) and its particular development in Central
Europe, is closely linked to the broad scholarly attention lavished in the last two decades
on the bourgeoisie and its culture. The history of such mostly bourgeois phenomena
as university culture or professional scholarship and science has been explored in some
depth.
Oddly, however, these themes have not heretofore been brought together, especially
not to approach the somewhat neglected (and often snobbishly dismissed) subject of
the popularization of science in Germany. Andreas Daum does a splendid job of weav-
ing the themes together.
The themes Daum addresses include the origins (individual, group, geographic, and
social) of scientific popularization, the identity and interests of mediators, the institu-
tional and communicative framework of distribution, the very concept of populari-
zation itself, and the images and conceptions of nature that were projected.
The book begins with a survey of the development of the concepts of science and
popularization in the nineteenth century, moves on to the teaching of science in
Prussian higher schools, then sketches the development of clubs and associations de-
828 Book Reviews
voted to amateur science. Another chapter deals with ideological associations that
drew on science to produce organized interpretations of the world, beginning with
Lichtfreunde and liberal Catholics around 1848. Next the problems of creating a lit-
erature and book market, as well as a network of periodicals, are examined. Finally,
Daum examines the people who carried out popularization over generations, with ref-
erence to their sociocultural, psychological, and political dispositions.
The notion that science (as opposed to political ideas) could be popularized appears
in Daums account to have emerged in the context of the 1848 Revolution, although
its usage immediately changed to exclude many levels of the Volk. Indeed, it is one of
the few weaknesses of this work that it does not deal much with the reception of science
among the proletarian masses. In his chapter on science teaching in schools, Daum
concentrates on the higher schools, confrontations between humanists and realists,
political conservatives and progressives, and the introduction of Darwinism (along with
biology as a separate object of study) at the end of the century, with the attendant
Haeckel-Virchow controversy.
Daum is on more solid ground in his discussion of popularization through clubs,
lectures, and festivals (Nipperdeys pioneering work a quarter century ago is thus still
bearing fruit). Just a list of the Vereine devoted to nature study founded between 1743
and 1913 takes up five closely printed pages, so one could hardly expect the author to
do more than analyze the major features of such associations. He does render a more
nuanced picture of the work of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Artze,
the Humboldt Societies, and a number of other important organizations dedicated to
what might today be called adult education, such as Berlins Urania Society. Science
was also used throughout the period as the material for constructing ideological com-
munities (p. 193), from splinter religious groups yearning to escape from the stulti-
fying obscurantism of both Protestant and Catholic church hierarchies to the monists
and their adversaries.
The ratio of scientific to other content in the print mediathemselves changing with
astonishing speed in the nineteenth centurycan perhaps never be gauged, but Daum
raises many interesting points about the process, from the creation of a whole new
vocabulary and prose style to translate technical jargon into texts understandable by
the increasingly literate mass public, to the intention gap between scientists writing for
the public (e.g., Alexander von Humboldt, Ernst Haeckel) and commercial publishing
interests.
Finally, in one of the most interesting chapters, Daum surveys the popularizers them-
selves: professional writers, amateur or occasional popularizers, the exceptions to the
rule of contempt for popularization among university teachers, and some high-profile
public scientists such as Justus Liebig, Rudolf Virchow, Emil DuBois-Reymond,
Hermann Helmholtz, or Haeckel. He does not see popularizers, in the main, pursuing
a coherent policy of using the public realm to promote the professional interests and
dominance of readily identified subgroups of scientists, such as the physiologists stud-
ied recently by several historians of science. In Daums words, Professional and oc-
casional popularizers also represented social interests, which helped condition their
dedication to education; but they were not concerned with questions of status politics
or opinion leadership, rather with securing a living and surviving in the columns of
natural-science journals (p. 451).
This book clearly fulfills its ambition to show that scientific popularization, far from
being weak or underdeveloped in nineteenth-century Germany, was a vital enterprise,
and the impressive array of data and citations squeezed into its pages should, as Daum
intends, promote some much-needed international comparisons. Some will quibble with
Book Reviews 829
this or that interpretation, but one can admire the scholarly thoroughness, lucidity of
prose and argumentation, and adventurous spirit in advancing into poorly charted re-
search landscapes. Daums book should interest general and many specialized histo-
rians of modern Germany and Europe, as well as many readers outside the field and
even the groves of academe.
CHARLES E. MCCLELLAND
University of New Mexico
Bismarck und seine Gegner: Die politische Rhetorik im kaiserlichen Reichstag.

By Hans-Peter Goldberg. Beitrage zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der
politischen Parteien, volume 112.
Dusseldorf: Droste, 1998. Pp. 559. DM 110,28.
While historians currently debate on the linguistic turn of historiography, the author
of the book under reviewwho is not a historian but a linguistseems to suggest a
historic turn of linguistics. Hans-Peter Goldberg analyzes political rhetoric in the
German Reichstag during the Bismarck era (187190). He claims to examine parlia-
mentary speech as a part of historic-political action and stresses the openness as well
as the contextualization (Kontextgebundenheit) of political rhetoric. So far, linguistic
studies on this topic seldom amount to more than a description of grammatical, syn-
tactical, and stylistical details. Historians, on the other hand, have tended to
(mis)interpret speeches as manifestations of underlying intentions and motives of the
speakers and to overlook aspects of performance, persuasion, and political culture.
Goldberg wants to avoid this dilemma by employing what he calls the method of the
rhetorical portrait: for him, the personality of an orator is the key to scrutinizing both
the historical background of parliamentary speeches and patterns of individual elo-
quence.
Aside from Bismarck, the founder of the Second German Empire (Kaiserreich) and
its dominating political figure until his dismissal in 1890, Goldberg portrays three
leading Reichstag representatives, who were known as the chancellors most famous
opponents within the parliament: August Bebel, the spokesman of the temporarily
forbidden socialist workers movement; Eugen Richter, a left-wing liberal, who saw
Bismarck as an obstacle to constitutional progress in Germany; and Ludwig Windthorst,
the leader of political Catholicism.
Bebels political speech was characterized by his missionary spirit, which he drew
from his Marxist conception of society and history. Being a representative of the Ger-
man Social Democrats, who found themselves highly disregarded if not ostracized by
the political elite of the Kaiserreich, Bebel was eager to strengthen the (ideological)
cohesion of his movement by repeatedly predicting the collapse of bourgeois society.
However, in spite of his deterministic view, Bebel did not contemptuously ignore his
bourgeois Reichstag colleagues. On the contrary: when speaking on social questions,
he appealed to his audiences moral values and underpinned his thoroughly rational
arguments in a manner that indicates Bebels subliminal willingness to convince (and
thus to cooperate with) his bourgeois opponents.
While Bebel remained a political outcast in the Reichstag, Eugen Richter was gen-
erally accepted. He was Bismarcks worst critic among left-wing liberals. Goldberg
seems to amuse himself by quoting large passages of Richters refined rhetorical attacks
on Bismarck and the conservative Junkers. Richters unique sarcasm and irony, how-
830 Book Reviews
ever, lacked any positive outline. Even for contemporary observers, the liberals hopes
and visions had by then hardened into a more and more rigid ideology. Yet, with his
rhetorical skills, Richter successfully avoided becoming a target for his opponents. He
instead resorted to budgetary debates, in which he could criticize Bismarck and his
secretaries without the necessity of offering an alternative political model. In the end,
Goldberg depicts a tragic figure, whose political convictions were crushed by the au-
thoritarian Reichsleitung on the one hand and by a growing social-democratic oppo-
sition on the other.
Ludwig Windthorst, the parliamentary leader of the heterogeneous Catholic milieu,
was at least in the 1870s in a political position similar to that of Richter. But unlike
Richter, who not only was a sharp critic of the Reichsleitung but also a strong leader
of his own party, Windthorst was more flexible. He aimed at loosening the draconic
anticlerical laws of the Kulturkampf, which had been instigated by Bismarck and the
National Liberals in the early 1870s. But he also used the moderate position of the
Catholic Zentrumsfraktion within the Reichstag to provide alternative majorities to
Bismarck, who strived to dissolve his informal legislative alliance with the National
Liberals in the late 1870s. Windthorst was a master of dilatory speech who, contrary
to Bebel and Richter, did not tie himself to a concrete party program. Even in his
critical statements, Windthorst deliberated and considered with pragmatism and a touch
of self-irony, and thus he stayed politically credible even though he changed his and
the Zentrums position quite frequently.
Goldbergs portrait of Bismarck may be the most surprising. The powerful chancellor
appears to have been a weak orator. His speeches were less structured and given in a
clipped manner. In parliament, he spoke reluctantly and seemed unwilling to argue for
his plans and convictions. He appeared eager to clumsily emphasize his personal con-
tribution to German unification. He spoke contemptuously of his opponents rhetorical
skills, which he deplored as a means to manipulate masses and artificially construct
political opposition (Oppositionsmacherei). Bismarck hence used his (poor) rhetorical
skills for antirhetorical purposes.
Goldberg enriches his biographical portraits by considering basic structural condi-
tions of political life in the Reichstag. After his rich illumination of the Reichstags
master rhetoric, one may miss, though not painfully, some information about the
backbenchers. Except for the chapter on Eugen Richter, we learn little about the public
reception and the political effectiveness of the Reichstag speeches.
The rhetoric of Reichstag representatives during the three decades before 1900 had
to cope with a time of increasing change, had to react to heterogeneities, inconsisten-
cies, and tensions in politics and weltanschauung (p. 367). Such a general summary
may show that Goldberg sometimes relies too strongly on other biographical or his-
torical studies. He seems to confirm rather than reexamine results of recent (historical)
research, but perhaps this can be ascribed to the interdisciplinary method of his study.
Nonetheless, with his comprehensive scholarly treatment of the topic, Goldberg re-
minds us not to neglect political culture as an integral part of parliamentary studies, as
Thomas Kuehne recently pointed out in another place (Parlamentarismusgeschichte
in Deutschland, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 24 [1998]: 32338).
ANDREAS NEEMANN
Tubingen
Book Reviews 831
The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and

National Memory, 18711918. By Alon Confino.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiii280. $55.00 (cloth);
$19.95 (paper).
Alon Confinos interesting and topical book examines the struggle for identity that took
place in the kingdom of Wurttemberg after it became part of the German Empire in
1871. The end product, as in other German states then and, increasingly, in the united
European states and regions of today, was complex and multilayered. Although Wurt-
temberg had fought Prussia in 1866, and anti-Prussian sentiments persisted for decades,
a general German patriotism clearly had developed by 1914. But this did not erase a
strong sense of regional identity linked to the dynasty and rooted in Swabian history
and culture. Moreover, by the eve of the First World War there seems to have been,
as elsewhere in the Empire, a high degree of homeland (Heimat) consciousness at
local parish-pump level, promoted by teachers, antiquarians, and also small-town tra-
despeople hungry for the profits of tourism. Confino is good on the conflicts underlying
the emergence of these mainstream, sub- and micro-patriotisms, and the political agen-
das associated with them. For a quarter of a century after 1871, in fact, the Wurttemberg
political system was dominated by Liberals whose pro-Bismarckian and pro-Unification
convictions were shared neither by the court, whose sympathies remained grodeutsch
and pro-Austrian, nor by large sections of the population, and who, like their counter-
parts in Bavaria, stayed in power thanks to a combination of voter apathy and electoral
gerrymandering. (Nevertheless, the Liberal Deutsche Parteis share of the vote plum-
meted from 64 percent to 24 percent between 1889 and 1895, an upheaval that deserves
more than the couple of pages of explanation offered here.) One of the books important
early themes is the symbolic underpinning of Liberal ascendancy, most notably by the
promotion of Sedan Day on September 2 as a non-partisan patriotic festival through-
out the kingdom. Despite great efforts, however, and attempts to embellish it with
traditional regional pageantry, Sedan Day long remained an essentially sectarian oc-
casion, boosted by the usual suspects of German nationalism, the Protestant clergy,
and Bildungsburgertum, but attacked or ignored not only by Wurttembergs large Cath-
olic minority but also by the Protestant, particularist petty bourgeoisie and the emerging
Socialist proletariat. A second major theme is the rise of the Heimat movement, which
reached its apogee in the Wilhelmine period between 1888 and 1918. As in other
German regions, the constructed homeland past owed less to the demands of his-
torical accuracy than to the emotional needs of a present in which entities like Wurt-
temberg were becoming increasingly integrated into both the Empire and the wider
world beyond. Key elements of this heritage included rustic costumes (reinvented by
urban enthusiasts but donned readily enough by peasants for reasons of commercial
gain), cuisine, songs, fairy stories, and in general all the folklore considered fit to save.
They were revived and popularized both by Heimat associations and by the local mu-
seums that proliferated from the late nineteenth century onward. But books, prints, and
picture-postcards were also extremely important, and from the mass of imagessome
illustrated hereturned out by the contemporary reprographic industry emerges an
ideal Heimat stereotype: neither a village nor a modern city, but a medium-sized,
unspoiled (i.e., nonindustrialized) provincial town, either a historic center of culture
like Tubingen or a smaller architectural gem (charming to visit, but oppressive to live
in) such as Hermann Hesses birthplace, Calw. Confino is surely right to argue that a
penchant for such nostalgia-laden icons did not necessarily signify hostility to moder-
nity as such or to liberal values, but rather a need for emotional ballast at a time of
832 Book Reviews
accelerating change and the impact on even remote communities of new economic and
social forces on a scale inconceivable in the mid-nineteenth century. (Bavarian, Flem-
ish, or Scottish nationalism today reflects similar needs and does not necessarily imply
rejection of a modern integrated Europe).
In general, this is a useful, thought-provoking, and well-documented study. But at
times it rambles, and it suffers to some extent from tunnel vision. No parallel is drawn,
for example, between Heimat associations and thein sociological terms eminently
comparableart unions (Kunstvereine), although the latter, by organizing exhibitions
and sponsoring prints, made a vast contribution to the dissemination of national sym-
bols, as well as promoting the careers of painters like Benjamin Vautier, whose min-
utely detailed, large-scale narrative images of peasant life did much to create Swabian
homeland iconography. Again, the locally orientated and artefact-centered history
associated with the Heimatvereine and local museums might have been related, on the
one hand, to reaction against the increasingly rarefied concerns of university-based
historians, and, on the other, to the activities of Karl Lamprecht who, as Roger Chick-
ering showed in his recent biography, pioneered the study of local and everyday history
and the use of nonwritten evidence and drew on the support of Germanys expanding
network of grassroots historical societies in his struggles with the academic establish-
ment. By 1900, finally, there was also a growing divergence between the typical Heimat
museum, a cozy but often chaotic assemblage of items more like a private than a public
collection, and mainstream institutions in capital cities like Stuttgart organized on mod-
ern museological principles and aspiring to international status in the range and quality
of their exhibits. Notable here, in his bridging role rather comparable to Lamprecht,
was the director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, Alfred Lichtwark, who raised the gallery
from provincial to national standing by balancing mainstream acquisitions (the German
Romantics, Liebermann, Renoir) with more parochial and accessible commissions de-
signed to stimulate local Hanseatic patriotism and, as a consequence, generosity.
ROBIN LENMAN
University of Warwick
Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 19191933. By Young-Sun Hong.

Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History. Edited by Sherry B. Ortner, Nicolas
B. Dirks, and Geoff Eley.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xii289. $59.50 (cloth);
$24.95 (paper).
If it has become quite common to associate the Weimar Republic with modernity, this
is because the few turbulent years of the republics existence served as a great laboratory
in political, social, and cultural experimentation. The field of welfare reform and social
politics certainly represents a case in point. Within a few years after World War I, the
revolution of 1918, and hyperinflation, the German welfare system had been funda-
mentally transformed: the traditional system of poor relief had been replaced by a
modern, bureaucratized, and professionalized social welfare system that aimed at re-
ordering the body politic on the basis not only of new principles of social justice but
also of a vastly expanded concept of citizenship anchored in social rights.
Young-Sun Hong has made this the overall theme of her book, which she has or-
ganized in a loosely chronological order that outlines the major features of the often
rather complicated institutional development of the Weimar welfare state and the ac-
Book Reviews 833
companying debates. However, Hong has not written an institutional history in the
narrow sense. What makes this book truly original and an important contribution to
the history of the German welfare state is the impressively broad perspective that she
uses to link political and social history with a history of ideas. Welfare reform was one
of the crucial battles in the ideological warfare that raged during the Weimar Republic.
The competing Weltanschauungen were strongly grounded in the corporatism propa-
gated not only by the political parties but also by the various welfare recipients them-
selves. By keeping an attentive eye on the multiplicity of competing social reform
discourses (p. 6) within state bureaucracies, political parties, and the various rival
public and private welfare organizations, Hong is able to reconstruct the competing
ideas of the state and civil society, order and authority, and efforts to redefine the
critical space between the public and private spheres.
Of major importance in this respect is the notion of social citizenship. Ever since
the outbreak of the war, Germany had been pioneering uncharted territory in this area.
Older liberal notions of individual rights were supplanted with notions of collective
social rights. As Hong demonstrates, these rights were highly contested. The author
describes this very lucidly in the first chapter, in which she contrasts the competing
and changing notions of social rights within the labor movement and among the pro-
gressives and church welfare organizations. By emphasizing issues concerning redis-
tributive justice, the prevention of poverty, the possibilities of transforming capitalism,
and advocating a unified system of welfare in order to pursue therapeutic approaches,
the Social Democrats could ally, at least in the early phase of the republic, with pro-
gressive middle-class reformers on many points, even if the latter stressed to a far
greater degree need-based, work-centered approaches and the importance of voluntary
as opposed to state-run welfare. However, the progressives later came to emphasize
the national, social dimension of their concept of productive social citizenship while
downplaying the importance of individual rights (p. 61). Both Catholic and Protestant
church organizations were highly suspicious of this rights discourse from the very start,
in part because they were much more concerned than the progressives not only about
issues of authority, obligation, and duty but also with rights imparted directly by the
state without the mediation of private welfare groups.
The stability of the republic after 1924 did not bring an easing of the tensions between
these competing groups. On the contrary, the mid-1920s were characterized by a virtual
Kulturkampf in the welfare sector (pp. 185 ff.) in which the various religious, nonreli-
gious, and public welfare organizations clashed on almost every proposed compromise.
The starting point was the demand to reprivatize and reconfessionalize welfare. The
chances for such a demand were next to nothing at the time. To todays scholar of the
Weimar Republic, it comes as no surprise that these debates soon addressed not only
issues of social rights but parliamentary democracy, cultural pluralism, and even the
legitimacy of the political and social order.
These debates over Weltanschauung make sense only against the backdrop of welfare
legislation. Hong first examines the debates over the formulation of the National Youth
Welfare Law, a law that defined a new conception of social rights and obligations in
a manner that supplemented the individual responsibility of the parent with the collec-
tive responsibility of state and society. In the eyes of its critics, this law was nothing
less than educational communism (p. 83) and raised the fundamental issue of gov-
ernmental intrusion in the private sphere. In two chapters, Hong traces the conflicts
that accompanied the development of special welfare programs for the new poor
created by the war and inflation. As she demonstrates, these programs were extremely
important to the efforts to reform poor relief in general through the passage of the
834 Book Reviews
Social Welfare Law and the National Guidelines for the Determination of Need of
1924/25. Financial constraints and strong pressures exerted by interest groups did not
bring about a unified system of welfare that might have reflected a universally accepted
notion of citizenship but created instead a splintered system that mirrored the frag-
mentation of the political and social landscape.
It has been common to speak of a crisis that predates the political and economic
crises of the 1930s. Hong certainly confirms this on almost every count. Her brilliant
analysis of the disillusionment of the social work profession is just one case in point.
Women social reformers, who started out with so much enthusiasm for welfare reform,
ended up being generally disillusioned about the bureaucratization of work, the limited
career possibilities, and even the growing demand for entitlements to public assistance:
The crisis of the social work profession became linked in an increasingly direct manner
to the crisis of the state itself (p. 172). Within a few years, many reformers were ready
to abandon the Weimar welfare state altogether. Even more important in the long run
was the emergence of an alternative social discourse on eugenics, which was to reshape
the welfare system very rapidly after the Nazi seizure of power.
The German historian Detlev Peukert argues with respect to correctional education
that under the constraints of the depression, the ambitious, optimistic reformers were
more willing to use progressive, discriminatory measures: coercion latent in the ped-
agogical paradigm developed into the social-racist alternatives, which used segregation
and exclusion for other means. Hong emphatically holds out against this line of argu-
ment, although much can be said in favor of this argument, not least with respect to
the disillusionment of the professional social workers. Yet she rightly emphasizes the
transforming power of the rising eugenic movement and the inroads it made both in
the state bureaucracy and among Catholic and Protestant social reformers before 1933,
if to a different degree: The discourse of these eugenic welfare reformers was a new
one which was neither latent in nor compatible with the intellectual traditions upon
which the republican welfare system had been erected (p. 241). The political turning
point is not to be underestimated, and in a very lucid final passage Hong describes how
much this new concept of welfare was the antithesis to the Weimar welfare state.
In part because the author deals with complicated legal and institutional questions,
the book is not always easy to read, especially for those who are not specialists in the
social history of the Weimar Republic. However, this is a highly original study that
deserves a wide reception.
MARTIN GEYER
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich
Rudolf Hilferding: The Tragedy of a German Social Democrat. By William

Smaldone.
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii271. $36.00.
Rudolf Hilferding is one of those figures who, though they enjoyed considerable prom-
inence for a time, repeatedly became associated with losing causes and thus aroused
little interest among historians and virtually none at all among the general public. The
product of an assimilated Austrian Jewish family, he became involved in the socialist
movement as a young man and in 1906 moved to Berlin to work as a journalist and
theoretician for what was at that time the worlds largest and best organized social
democratic party. When the international socialist movement was unable to avert the
Book Reviews 835
outbreak of war in 1914, he was among the minority of socialist leaders who opposed
the German war effort, eventually joining the dissident Independent Social Democratic
Party and playing an active role in the revolutionary movement of 191819. Although
Hilferding continued to serve the German left as an articulate advocate of Marxism,
he became a staunch supporter of the Weimar Republic and during the two brief periods
during which he served as finance minister pursued policies that differed hardly at all
from those espoused by the leading capitalist economists of the day. In spite of the fact
that he was an early and prescient critic of the radical right, he rejected calls for extra-
parliamentary resistance as the Nazis marched toward power and was forced to flee
into exile soon after Hitler became chancellor, ultimately committing suicide in German
custody after the fall of France.
William Smaldone is thus justified in describing Hilferdings life as tragic. More
important, Smaldones sympathetic but critical biography reveals much about the
causes of a much larger tragedy, the failure of German Social Democracy to prevent
war or halt the rise of Nazism. Hilferding was brought to Germany primarily as a result
of the recommendation of another Austrian, Karl Kautsky, who at the time was the
most highly regarded exponent of orthodox Marxism. Following in his mentors foot-
steps, Hilferding endeavored to defend the unity of the movement against revisionist
critics on the right and impatient radicals on the left in various articles and as an editor
of Vorwarts, the partys leading daily. In 1910 he published Finance Capital, the book
that established his reputation as a major theoretician. Unfortunately, the orthodox
doctrine espoused by Kautsky, Hilferding, and others counseled a policy that focused
on educating and organizing the working class and provided little practical guidance
as to how the movement should respond to a truly major societal crisis. The centrist
bridge that, however unsteadily, continued to connect the various social democratic
factions until 1914 collapsed soon after the outbreak of the First World War.
Hilferding was drafted into Austrian service and spent much of the war as little more
than an interested observer of German politics. Nevertheless, a few days after the
collapse of the imperial regime he was appointed editor of the Independent Social
Democratic daily Freiheit and plunged into that partys efforts to push the revolution
forward toward a fundamental transformation of German society. Smaldone concludes,
however, that within six months Hilferding had abandoned any hopes he may have had
that the Independents could overcome the many obstacles erected not only by traditional
interests and institutions but also by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) that had become
an essentially counterrevolutionary force. Indeed, by 1920 Hilferding was devoting
much of his energy to combating the campaign by the recently established Communist
International to split the Independent party. Once again, however, his efforts were in
vain, and in 1922 he played a leading role in negotiations leading to the return of the
remaining Independents to the SPD.
Although Smaldone argues that Hilferding continued to adhere to the theoretical
principles enunciated in the Social Democratic Partys Erfurt Program of 1891, he also
demonstrates how thoroughly he had, by the mid 1920s, adopted the practical political
perspective espoused by the prewar revisionist and reformist critics of orthodox Marx-
ism. Building on his earlier study of the growing influence of finance capital as well
as upon his analysis of economic developments during the war, Hilferding concluded
that capitalism was becoming increasingly organized. Cartelization was replacing
competition to create a situation in which large-scale economic planning, often involv-
ing the state, was becoming pervasive. From this perspective, important progress to-
ward socialism was already taking place. Under the circumstances, the major task of
the SPD should be to establish control of the planning process by expanding its influ-
836 Book Reviews
ence over the state, which Hilferding, breaking with Marx, described as an essentially
neutral institution. The socialist movement should also expand its educational programs
in order to prepare the workers to play an increasing role in directing the productive
process.
Hilferdings participation in Weimar cabinets at the height of the inflation crisis in
1923, and again as Germany moved toward the Great Depression in 1928 and 1929,
reflected the fact that he, like most of his formerly orthodox colleagues, had largely
abandoned their earlier distrust of coalition politics. The fact that, as Smaldone points
out, he could provide no identifiably socialist response to the economic difficulties that
beset the Republic demonstrates that Hilferding was ill-prepared to apply his impressive
theoretical constructs to immediate concrete problems. Smaldone also makes it clear
that Hilferding, like many of the leading Social Democrats of his era, became increas-
ingly estranged from the partys core working-class constituency. This helps to explain
the massive growth of the Communist Party as the Republic entered its final phase. It
also provides a partial answer to the question, so often debated by historians, of why
the SPD was so hesitant to encourage the proletarians whom it had so long claimed to
lead to engage in direct action in defense of democracy.
Constrained by the paucity of sources bearing directly upon Hilferdings personal
life, Smaldone has produced what is essentially an intellectual and political biography.
Although some readers may quibble with the authors attempts to demonstrate the
contemporary relevance of Hilferdings theories, they are not likely to quarrel with his
historical analysis. This is a well-written and well-researched contribution to the history
of an important period in German history.
KENNETH CALKINS
Kent State University
Heinrich Bruning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic. By William L.

Patch, Jr.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. ix358. $54.95.
Heinrich Bruning, Reich Chancellor of the Weimar Republic during three fateful years
from 1930 to 1933, is a politician who continues to arouse strong opinions among
historians. In the early postwar period he tended to be praised as the last democratic
chancellor who became the victim of intrigues spun in President Hindenburgs entou-
rage and who was dismissed just as the German economy was about to turn around.
Subsequently, Karl Dietrich Bracher and other scholars, focusing not only on Brunings
unpopular regime of emergency decrees but also on the circumstances of his nomination
to the chancellorship, saw him as a figure who was brought in, again by sinister reac-
tionary forces, to transform the democratic republic into an authoritarian system from
which it would not be possible to reestablish parliamentary government after the end
of the emergency. Bruning himself stoked the debate when, much to everybodys sur-
prise, he seemed to confirm this dark interpretation of the plans for constitutional
reform.
A new stage in the controversy was reached in the late 1970s when Knut Borchardt
shifted the focus to the economic plain by arguing that the chancellor had virtually no
room for maneuver to consider alternatives to his brutal austerity program. It was during
the years of relative stability in the mid-1920s, and hence before his arrival, that the
Weimar Republic had been so overburdened with welfare costs that public expenditure
Book Reviews 837
simply had to be cut. Keynesian recipes of economic stimulation through renewed

deficit spending were simply unworkable. Borchardts critics retorted that Bruning was
so wedded to fiscal orthodoxy and to using the crisis at home to undo the reparations
settlementa cornerstone of the hated Versailles Treatythat alternative solutions
never appeared on his political radar screen.
In light of all this heated argument, it was clearly time for someone to take another
look at all these questions, the more so since Brunings Nachlass and other sources
had meanwhile become available for unrestricted use. William Patch has had the ex-
pertise and scholarly stamina to work through the mountains of archival papers and
secondary treatments relating to Brunings career. Years of painstaking research have
enabled him to produce a fine and highly differentiated study. Heinrich Bruning and
the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic is not a biography in the strict sense, but it
does deal with Brunings rise as a Catholic trade unionist and Center Party politician;
it ends with a longer chapter on Brunings life and activities after his fall.
Still, the bulk of this study is devoted to Brunings years as chancellor. Overall, it
is a vigorous defense. On the vexed question of constitutional transformation, Patch
concludes that Bruning did intend to restore parliamentary democracy with relatively
minor reforms when the economic crisis passed (p. 2). Consequently, it was his fall,
not his appointment to office that marked the crucial turning point. The author
believes that Bruning was a monarchist by sentiment but a republican by reason (Ver-
nunftrepublikaner) who went through a learning process in the early 1920s similar to
that experienced by Friedrich Meinecke and Gustav Stresemann (p. 10).
As to Brunings economic record, Patch concedes that he may have been fatalistic,
but that recent research has discredited many premises of the early Keynesian critics
of Bruning (p. 11). If the chancellor miscalculated, it was that he, the man who be-
lieved in Prussianism, based his political strategy on the premise that the most
famous embodiment of the Prussian tradition, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg und
Beneckendorff, would support centrist policies and defend the Weimar constitution
(p. 13). But even if in the authors view the chancellor should not be linked any longer
with antidemocratic projects that he actually opposed (p. 322), Patch does not let him
off the hook completely. Some decisions, such as the one to adhere to the gold standard
and persevere with deflation in the Fourth Emergency Decree of December 1931 were
probably unavoidable; but there were also dubious ones, such as the gamble Bruning
took with the postponement of the Lausanne Conference, hoping that the benefit from
the complete abolition of reparations then would justify the risk of virtually ignoring
the problem of unemployment (p. 323). The author also chides him for his franco-
phobia. And finally there is Brunings mistaken Prussianism, which, Patch believes,
has implications for our future: Even the most idealistic versions of the Prussian
tradition remain dangerously insular. Politicians approaching the twenty-first century
should seek to make their citizens feel comfortable in the kind of multiethnic and
multicultural society that flourishes in the global marketplace (p. 239).
Now, it is always tempting to point to the lessons that long years of research into
the past supposedly hold for us today. As a work of empirical history, Patchs book
leaves the reader with yet another impression, namely, that Weimar politics had
become chaotic and meandering in the early 1930s. One is almost overwhelmed by
the detailed descriptions of political moves and countermoves, of schemes and coun-
terschemes, of intrigues and counterintrigues. It is in this maze of tactical maneu-
vering by many other individuals that not only Bruning but also larger strategic
questions become miniaturized. Maybe some day historians will go back to the bold
structuralism of Bracher ordare I mention the name?of David Abraham. Until
838 Book Reviews
then Patchs important book stands as an impressive achievement in political history

of the most meticulous kind.
V. R. BERGHAHN
Columbia University
Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten

Reich. By Frank-Lothar Kroll.
Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1998. Pp. 368. DM 88.
This is a self-declared history of ideas. Frank-Lothar Kroll aims to understand National

Socialism by taking seriously its ideology. He is self-consciously intentionalist in his
ambitions, that is, he believes that Hitlers and the Nazis programmatic ideas explain
much about what went on in Germany between 1933 and 1945. His theoretical frame-
work is built on the twin pillars of totalitarian theory (of the Karl Dietrich Bracher
school of totalitarianism) and Ernst Noltes notion of the European civil war (which
Nolte took directly from Nazi propagandists who first invented this paradigm at the
end of the Second World War). Hence, he sees his study as a building stone on the
path to a comparative treatment of the National Socialist and the Marxist understand-
ings of history, both of which are, in his view, united by a utopian vision of a society
in which history has been halted in its tracks.
Kroll is neither concerned with the scientific historiography under National Socialism
nor with the history that was taught in German schools between 1933 and 1945. Instead,
he concentrates on analyzing the ideas of leading protagonists of the National Socialist
movement who were renowned theorists as well as politically powerful personalities
in the Third Reich: Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Richard Walther Darre, Heinrich
Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels. In the five key chapters of his volume, Kroll system-
atically analyzes their conceptions of history and their consequences for the politics of
the Third Reich.
Overall, Kroll stresses the diversity of opinions held by Rosenberg, Darre, Himmler,
and Goebbels. Often their ideas were mutually exclusive. Hitlers key role, according
to Kroll, was to integrate all the different concepts that could be found under the banner
of National Socialism. Furthermore, Kroll stresses that all five, despite their differences,
believed firmly in the category of renewal. They perceived the victory of National
Socialism as the beginning of a new era and a fundamental break with the past. It is
this faith in renewal that gave National Socialist thinking the quality of a utopia that,
in Krolls view, invites comparison with Marxism. Last but not least, the author dem-
onstrates time and again how his five leading Nazis used their notion of history to
legitimate the regime and its actions.
The scope and framework of Krolls study raise some serious problems. First, all
structural factors that explain the success of National Socialism and its dynamic after
it had come to power are systematically excluded. Structuralists will therefore find little
to recommend in this kind of intellectual history. Second, even as an intellectual history
it is not particularly convincing. For a start, Kroll overemphasizes the degree to which
his history-of-ideas approach to National Socialism is new. Since the 1920s and 1930s,
a stream of books has been published that explicitly deals with explaining National
Socialist ideology. Many of them have been concerned with tracing these ideas back
in German history. In West German historiography, these studies (by George Mosse,
Book Reviews 839
Fritz Stern, and others) contributed much to the establishment of the inverted Sonder-
weg paradigm in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Kroll claims that this is precisely what he is not interested in. He is not looking for
origins and roots, for continuities in German history that can explain the success of
National Socialist ideology. Now it is true that this approach is, indeed, not without its
problems. In particular, the almost total lack of comparative studies has made it nearly
impossible to validate those arguments that refer to peculiarly German traditions of
ideas. Only in the last decade or so have comparative studies been forthcoming on a
larger scale. However, Krolls explicit exclusion of these questions is even more prob-
lematic. By choosing not to locate Nazi ideas in the broader context of German history,
National Socialism quickly becomes a phenomenon sui generis, unconnected with the
German past and future. As, in this perception, German history can add nothing to
explain National Socialism, it is easy to exculpate German national history from its
twelve darkest years. This is precisely why Noltes writings were championed by the
new Right after 198990.
Furthermore, Krolls whole approach leads him to a history of ideas where the ideas
fly high above social, economic, and cultural-material developments. They are dis-
cussed in a sterile vacuum. It is undoubtedly important not to underestimate the im-
portance and success of National Socialist ideology, in particular its ideologies of race.
But again, this is hardly news, as unorthodox Marxists and Social Democrats alike
perceptively commented on Nazi ideology as early as the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., Julius
Braunthal, Arkadij Gurland, Rudolf Hilferding, and August Thalheimer). Yet they
never neglected to discuss ideas with reference to their links to social, economic, and
cultural-material factors. They also emphasized the heterogeneity of National Socialist
ideas. Such diversity was important, as it allowed the movement to appeal to very
disparate constituencies and their irrational hopes and desires.
Indeed, Krolls exclusively biographical approach to his topic robs him of any pos-
sibility of explaining the success of these ideas in striking a chord with millions of
Germans. Instead, what we are left with is an often tediously trivial pursuit of the
question of where these individual Nazis acquired their confused and muddled ideas.
As ideas, they are, of course, totally uninteresting, and the minutiae of Krolls attempts
to distinguish, for example, different concepts of race in Goebbels (marginal), Rosen-
berg (metaphysical), Darre (materialist), and Himmler (biological) are often excruci-
atingly boring, in particular for those readers who are not taken in by the intentionalist
illusion. Overall, it is a pity that so much laborious effort has resulted in so little gain.
STEFAN BERGER
Cardiff University
Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project: A Study in German Culture. By
Paul Lawrence Rose.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xx352. $35.00.
Once the Hiroshima bombing demonstrated to the world the reality of nuclear weapons,
the question was asked, Why did Hitlers Germany fail to produce the deadly device?
Proposed answers varied from assertions that ideological influences had subverted the
renowned capabilities of German science to rumors of conscious sabotage of the project
by responsible physicists. Later historical studies (in particular, Mark Walker, German
National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, 19391949 [Cambridge, 1989])
840 Book Reviews
attributed more importance to the 1942 assessment by Nazi officials that an atomic
weapon, even if remotely possible, had no chance of contributing to their ongoing
European war. As the American bomb project was being reorganized into an all-out
industrial undertaking with military management, German uranium research slipped
far down on the Wehrmacht priority list and concentrated on the primary goal of con-
structing an experimental reactor. The entire project remained academic in style, de-
centralized, and comparatively miniscule, which effectively ruled out any chance for
the Nazi bomb.
The historiographic controversy seemed settled with this conclusion, yet Paul Rose
revives once again the old thesis that the Nazis actively strove toward the bomb but
failed due to mistakes by Werner Heisenberg, the famous physicist. Since revelations
from previously unknown documents are rare in this intensively researched field, Rose
relies instead on the power of hermeneutic reinterpretation of the existing body of
sources. Selectively choosing information and arguments from earlier studies (by
Walker, Samuel Goudsmit, David Cassidy, and Jonothan Logan in particular), he draws
together the most comprehensiveeven if not entirely self-consistentcase for the
guilt of German physicists, one also distinguished by the harshness of its judgmental
tone. According to Rose, Heisenberg tried to design a winning weapon for Hitler in
more than one way. He initially considered enriched uranium as explosive but aban-
doned the scenario after estimating the chain reaction to require tons, rather than kil-
ograms, of the separated isotope 235. Consequently, German physicists are alleged to
have been working on a reactor-bomb (reactor run amok, Chernobyl-style). Finally,
they expected a working reactor to produce a better explosive material, currently known
as plutonium.
As its subtitle suggests, the story transcends the issue of the bomb and Heisenbergs
professional qualifications. It intends to convey a general lesson regarding German
culture, to which Rose acknowledges an aversion, citing his British background as the
reason. In his opinion, the most penetrating thing ever said about German, particularly
Kantian, philosophynamely that it has something of the Prussian drill sergeant
about itneeds to be complemented with a similar conclusion concerning German
physicists as Hitlers armorers. Rose reasserts the idea that the profoundly un-West-
ern, antiliberal nature of the German political culture and mentality was originally
caused by Martin Luthers theological distinction in 1520 between outer and inner
freedom. This deterministic model of historical causationone may call it the original
sin paradigmalso underlies his explanation of the failure of the Nazi bomb project
by Heisenbergs fallacious mistake back in 1939.
Since bias does not necessarily preclude one from finding important evidence, the
books arguments should be evaluated in their own right. There were, indeed, mis-
takes, or rather deficiencies, in the German uranium project; after all, it did not succeed
in its realistic objective of building a reactor. Roses specific choices of causes to blame
for German fates do not strike me as good logic, since these original sins were
universal. There was hardly any more liberalism outside of Germany than inside in
Luthers time. Heisenbergs theory of 1939 was about as bad or good as the best
approaches made elsewhere during that first year of inquiry. A more serious claim
that Heisenberg overestimated the critical mass throughout the entire period of the war
yearsrequires further analysis that is not aimed at proving a preconceived opinion.
German physicists did not produce a detailed calculation of the minimal amount of
uranium-235 needed for an explosion. Their guesses and possible back-of-the-enve-
lope estimates have to be reconstructed from indirect sources. Experts still disagree
on this issue and on its importance for the Germans overall assessment of the difficulty
Book Reviews 841
of building a bomb. In any case, a political and administrative decision was taken, in
Germany as elsewhere, not just on the basis of very fragmentary and inconclusive
scientific knowledge but with a number of additional factors and considerations taken
into account.
With its resources already strained, Germany decided in 1942 to proceed cautiously
with moderate funds in building the reactor rather than to embark on a large-scale
gamble toward the bomb. Despite Roses frequent reciting of the Nazi Atomic Bomb
Project, he does not bring about any new evidence of its existence. The imaginary
reactor-bomb would have been a completely ineffective weapon even if one figured
out how to transport the bulky pile close to a military target before letting it go over-
critical. Roses central claim here is frivolous to the degree that he himself sometimes
seems not to really believe in it. Misinterpreted as blueprints for an intended military
scenario are occasional remarks on the possibility of a reactor going overcritical (nec-
essary safety considerations, as a matter of fact, only insufficiently present in German
technical reports). Albeit unwillingly, the book confirms that the myth of the Nazi
bomb (Walkers expression) remains a myth, although one that never dies or at least
lives as long as the social demand for it.
Rose needs this myth for the unmasking of typical German self-delusions, half-
truths and outright lies and German physicists failure both as moral human beings
and scientists. The books moral argument could have been made much stronger had
it considered the case of Wernher von Braun and the V-2, Hitlers real wonder
weapon, alongside Heisenbergs relatively pale political compromises with the Nazi
regime. Rose undermines his accusations further by throwing samples from World
War I anti-German propaganda plus occasional Cold Warstyle vocabulary into one pot
with Nazi crimes. The challenge of writing about moral guilt, arrogant self-righteous-
ness, and nationalistic insensitivity requires one to understand the difference between
a moral stance and that of a prosecutor and between a study in culture and an exercise
in cultural mythology, making otherness and demonizing others. We must abandon
our Western rationality and sensibility, writes Rose, in order to understand the German
mentality and thinking (p. 227). I am afraid he took his own advice too literally, thus
producing an ideological treatise under the cover of an academic publisher.
ALEXEI KOJEVNIKOV
American Institute of Physics
Salzburg: Zwischen Globalisierung und Goldhaube. Edited by Ernst Hanisch and

Robert Kriechbaumer. Volume 1 of Geschichte der osterreichischen
Bundeslander seit 1945. Edited by Herbert Dachs, Ernst Hanisch, and Robert
Kriechbaumer.
Vienna: Bohlau, 1997. Pp. viii780.
Liebe auf den zweiten Blick: Landes- und Osterreichbewusstsein nach 1945.
Edited by Robert Kriechbaumer. Volume 6 of Geschichte der osterreichischen
Bundeslander seit 1945. Edited by Herbert Dachs, Ernst Hanisch, and Robert
Kriechbaumer.
Vienna: Bohlau, 1998. Pp. 285.
National and regional identity has always been a problematic issue in Austria, both
before and after 1918. The Habsburg monarchy sought to transcend the competing
842 Book Reviews
nationalisms that destabilized the state from within and without, while the Austro-
Marxist intellectuals of late imperial Vienna sought, equally vainly, to reconcile their
own internationalism, and what they perceived to be the legitimate and emancipatory
aspirations of the empires nationalities, with the preservation of the empire. In the
event, German Austria was effectively abandoned by the other nationalities, and they
left behind a rump of provinces with no common sense of nationhood. The collective
strategy for escaping the perceived dilemma of the unviability of republican Austria
was Anschlu (union) with Germany (which was forbidden by the victors of 1918),
while some of the republics constituent federal states (Bundeslander) attempted to
secede and join a more successful neighborSwitzerland, for example, in the case of
Vorarlberg, Germany in the case of the Tyrol. It seemed that the peripheral territories
of rump Austria were about to peel away like the layers of an onion. In addition, the
agrarian, conservative provinces were at loggerheads with industrial red Vienna.
There was little sign of an Austrian national consciousness, and apparently little en-
thusiasm for a common future. In the event, however, the nine federal states established
by the constitution of the First Republic not only remained together but were restored
in 1945 after the eventual, ultimately unhappy experience of Anschlu with the Reich.
Liebe auf den zweiten Blick (Love at second sight) is well put: the first Austrian republic
had not been a success, and this was a second chance.
It is with this most recent period of Austrian history that the two books under review
are concerned. They are part of a broader series on the history of the Austrian federal
provinces since 1945, comprising ten volumes under the general editorship of Herbert
Dachs, Ernst Hanisch, and Robert Kriechbaumer. The remaining eight volumes deal
with the other federal states. Such projects often tend to become monumental, semi-
institutional collections in any country, and not least in Austria where pains are taken
to preserve an intellectual Proporz, a balance between political and institutional inter-
ests and between disciplines and methodologies. These volumes, however, tend rather
to reflect the very positive changes that have taken place in Austrian historical writing
over the last decade and that have opened up the discipline to new perspectives and
new methodologies. (Both Bohlau Verlag and the school of history at Salzburg have
been important in promoting such new approaches.) To be sure, Erhard Busek is a
senior conservative politician rather than a noted historian of Vienna, and his contri-
bution to Liebe auf den zweiten Blick reflects that; it is a charming (if frequently
misleading) collection of anecdote and whimsy rather than the research findings of a
scholar. Some historians, too, will no doubt feel uncomfortable with the terminology
of the social sciences (not to mention the attendant recourse to lists and bullet points)
and others with the mental acrobatics of deconstruction.
The central theme of both volumes is, inevitably, the nature and historical role of
the region or province and the relationship between center and periphery. This is a
particularly vexed issue in republican Austria for a number of reasons. First, Vienna,
former metropolis of an enormous empire, is, arguably, a disproportionately large cap-
ital city, and its own status as a federal state as well as a municipality confuses the
relationship between capital and province. (In fact, Austria is slightly larger than Scot-
land, and Vienna is not significantly larger than greater Glasgow or Edinburgh.) Vienna
has been the object of provincial resentments of one kind or another since 1918, and
Ernst Hanisch has elsewhere described the Anschlu as an uprising of the provinces
against the metropolis (Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in der Province: Salzburg
im Dritten Reich [Salzburg, 1983], p. 9). The Viennese, of course, like their metro-
politan counterparts elsewhere, are equally disdainful of provincials, of the idiocy of
Alpine life. Second, and specifically for much of the period under discussion in these
Book Reviews 843
volumes, Austria itself has enjoyed something of a peripheral experience; semidetached

from the West by the constraints placed on its political freedom in 1955, and protruding
physically into the Soviet bloc beyond East Berlin, Prague, and Zagreb, Austria was
very much an eastern march again during the cold war. As Ronald Widder shows in
a fascinating exploration of marginal identity, this is an experience that applied even
more acutely in the Burgenland, a provincial no-mans-land trapped between Vienna
terminus, as it were, of the Western worldand the iron curtain. Third, identities in
Austria have scarcely been stable over the last century. Although most of the Austrian
provinces can claim a long and continuous history in something very much like their
present geographical form (unlike some of the German Lander), the arbitrary tinkering
with boundariesmost sweepingly by the Nazis in 1938, when the Austrian state itself
was dissolvedhas unsettled one or other claim of loyalty. The South Tyrol is a cause
celebre in this respect. It was arbitrarily separated from the rest of the province with
the creation of the Brenner frontier after the First World War and tacked onto Italy to
the fury of Tyroleans, who have subsequently directed much of their rage over the
issue at Vienna. The effect has been to fuel a regional irredentism unparallelled in
Europe and to reinforce the tendency of Tyroleans to think of themselves as Tyroleans
first and Austrians second. Appended to Michael Gehlers discussion of the develop-
ment of Tyrolean identity is a revealing letter from the British consul in Innsbruck to
the ambassador in Vienna. Not only does it repeat rather uncritically the semimythical
racial history of the early middle ages, the tales from the Volkerwanderung that often
form the starting point of both popular history and regional identities in central Europe;
it also identifies the problematic relationship between nation building and the celebra-
tion of local identity in postwar Austria: It cannot be healthy that the conception of a
National State, in this case Austria, should have so little emotional hold over so large
a section of its territory (Liebe auf den zweiten Blick, p. 260).
Nevertheless the relationship between regional identity and national consciousness
in postwar Austria has never been so unstable as to unsettle the political stability of
the republic, not least, perhaps, because those western provinces most distant from
Vienna and most restlessly antimetropolitan have also gained most in population and
have benefited most from the rapid expansion of the tourist industry and from the
increasingly close relationship between Austria and Western Europe. In other words,
economic prosperity, which has generally been adduced as an explanation for the new-
found political stability of postfascist central Europe, was more pronounced here than
in the east of the country. Moreover, in an era when regionalism (within Europe now,
rather than merely within nation-states) is in vogue, and the regionabove all the
urban region or city-stateis a much-discussed model for future political development,
Vorarlbergers, Tyroleans, and Salzburgers can feel positive about their local identities
without unsettling Vienna. Vorarlberg celebrated the Austrian millennium with an
opera that opened in Zurich. And although it is scarcely larger than an English county
and has fewer than half a million inhabitants, Salzburg, like few other provincial towns
(Venice is another), already combines an international profile with its regional Austrian
identity, thanks not least to its cultural importance: the festival, Mozart, The Sound of
Music. The contributors to Salzburg: Zwischen Globalisierung und Goldhaube explore
a range of developments in the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the
province since the war. The editors suggest that there has been a polarization between
macrohistory and microhistory, and that regional history can play a mediating role
between the grand narrative and the longue duree, on the one hand, and the detailed
description of everyday life at the parish pump, on the other. In practice, the effect of
the essays in this collection is much closer to that of the second kind of history. Salzburg
844 Book Reviews
is a small province in a small state, and its postwar history has been untroubled by
events. The experience of Salzburgers has been similar to that of all postwar Europeans:
economic prosperity (on the whole), an increasingly liberal society and culture, and the
erosion (despite the politics of the cold war) of the political and ideological certainties
of the past.
This is a series, then, that has an eye on the European and regional future, on the
Euregio, as well as on the national and provincial past. On the evidence of these two
volumes, it is a scholarly undertaking of enormous scope. The series will prove to be
both an invaluable work of reference and a collection of immensely readable essays.
TIM KIRK
University of Northumbria
Peasants and Communists: Politics and Ideology in the Yugoslav Countryside,

19411953. By Melissa K. Bokovoy. Pitt Series in Russian and East European
Studies. Edited by Jonathan Harris.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Pp. xvii211. $40.00.
Melissa K. Bokovoys monograph is an important addition to the literature on the most

intractable problem that Communist parties have historically encountered after coming
to power: the discrepancy between the ideological goals of the party and the expecta-
tions of the peasantry. More specifically, Bokovoys work revises the traditional etatist
view that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) mechanically attempted to impose
collectivization after 1948 in order to be more Stalinist than Stalin. Bokovoy instead
argues that Yugoslav agricultural policies were initially framed to try to accommodate
peasant demands and that in the long term the Yugoslav peasants were not pawns but
active players in shaping those policies.
The first chapter traces the emergence of the dubious alliance between the KPJ
and the Yugoslav peasantry during World War II. Bokovoy begins with the well-known
errors of the KPJ leadership, which initially disobeyed instructions from Moscow
and attempted to carry through a social revolution. The results, as Milovan Djilas
discussed in his memoir Wartime (New York, 1977), were disastrous, and after its
withdrawal into Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1942, the KPJ was forced to reevaluate its
stance in favor of a national liberation war against fascism in order to attract the support
of the peasantry. Bokovoy carefully traces the emergence of this tactical alliance based
fundamentally on the momentary congruence of the partys interests and those of the
peasantry.
As Yugoslavia emerged from World War II, the KPJ recognized that the victory
over fascism had been achieved largely through the cooperation of the peasantry, and
this idea became enshrined in the myth of the revolutionary alliance between workers
and peasants. As Bokovoy discusses in chapter 2, in its consolidation of power in the
immediate postwar period, the KPJ faced as its first priority the restoration of produc-
tion, which had been devastated during the war. An essential part of restoring agricul-
ture was that the KPJ had to fulfill its wartime promise to the peasants and to distribute
land. Most of this land came from the seizure of the property of various enemies
most notably, the Volksdeutsch who fled at the end of the war. Only some of this land
was distributed to the peasantry, however; the rest was placed into a general land fund
that was to become the foundation for the gradual creation of socialist agriculture.
Chapter 3 is devoted to the discrepancy between ideology and peasant ambitions
Book Reviews 845
that emerged in the debates within the KPJ as it searched for a viable agrarian policy.
In many ways, the situation of the Yugoslav communists was not dissimilar to that of
the Bolsheviks in the 1920s: the modernization of agriculture was an economic neces-
sity, but to mechanize agriculture required industrialization, which could be achieved
only through the sale of agricultural goods. Unlike Soviet peasants, however, the Yu-
goslav peasantry had been instrumental in the communist seizure of power. The party
constructed involuntary deliveries to the state in order to be able to feed the cities but,
overall, intended that the peasantry be won over to socialist agriculture through per-
suasion, not coercion. In working out the discrepancy between ideology and conditions
in the countryside, the party to some degree fell prey to its own myth of a revolutionary
peasantry, which became a critical misreading during the tension in the late 1940s.
Scholars have traditionally viewed the Tito-Stalin break as the impetus for Yugoslav
collectivization: under attack from the Soviet Union for deviations, the Yugoslav
leadership was allegedly determined to prove that it was adhering to orthodox marxism.
Bokovoy disagrees and demonstrates that, in the initial months after the Tito-Stalin
break, the KPJ did not deviate from its program of gradual conversion and, in fact,
defended it within the communist world. By the end of 1948, however, the cancellation
of trade agreements from the Soviet Union and its dependents in Eastern Europe had
wreaked havoc on the Yugoslav First Five-Year Plan. Believing that workers and peas-
ants would loyally back the embattled state, the Yugoslav leadership reconsidered the
gradualist program in the countryside and opted for an increased tempo in the formation
of peasant work cooperatives but an avoidance of Soviet-style forced collectivization.
Bokovoy presents her most interesting material in chapters 5 and 6, The Alliance
Betrayed and Ideology Reconsidered, respectively, which follow the debate as it
unfolded in records of the Commission for the Village (Komisija za selo). This evidence
clearly demonstrates the dynamic interplay between the central party institutions, which
expressed grave concern over local conditions, and the local cadres, who were at times
overzealous in their desire to please top party members. That party membership was
weakly established among peasants did not improve the standing of the local cadres,
whose situation was made more difficult because the ideological assumptions behind
agricultural policy proved unrealistic on the ground.
The records of the Commission on the Village also provide insight into the third
element in this dynamic interplaythe peasantry itself, which engaged in both overt
and covert resistance. Members of the local cadres were assaulted and even murdered;
more frequent was that peasants burned their grain and slaughtered their livestock. By
1950, the policy had become so deeply contested that in some areas of the country the
peasants engaged in outright rebellion. The most famous of these rebellions was in
Cazin, in northwest Bosnia, where the peasants seized the land and called for the
restoration of the monarchy. This rebellion, like others, was put down only through the
intervention of the Yugoslav army.
Peasant resistance and dropping levels of agricultural production forced the party to
reconsider the policy of collectivization, which was completely jettisoned by 1953. The
consequences, however, were long lasting. As the Commission for the Village put it,
We have lost the peasantry; they will never trust us again (p. 153). The party thus
moved into the 1950s to elaborate that part of the separate road that did seem to work;
the result was worker self-management, but the KPJlike other communist parties
never resolved the problem of the countryside.
Bokovoys revision of the accepted view of collectivization also opens new vistas.
She based her scholarly work primarily on materials from KPJ archives, which raises
questions about how peasants themselves viewed the process. In addition, as Bokovoy
846 Book Reviews
points out in her conclusion, scholarly examinations have ironically followed the lead
of the KPJ and described the emergence of civil society only in terms of urban elites.
In actually, Bokovoy believes, we should look at the role of the majority of the popu-
lation, which posed the first serious challenges to the East European regimeses-
pecially in Yugoslaviaalmost from the time of their birth (p. 159).
SARAH A. KENT
University of WisconsinStevens Point
Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. By Lindsey Hughes.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xxx602. $35.00.
This large volume is an ambitious attempt to examine the most momentous reign in
modern Russian history. Its fourteen chapters begin with a background section and then
move to foreign policy, the military, government, and the economy; five intermediate
chapters cover society, the arts, the court, education, and religion; and the book closes
with chapters on the tsar-emperor and his family and friends. A final chapter examines
the responses to Peters reforms. The information, which is extensive, is presented in
a lively style that facilitates reading, and the patient reader will learn all the major dates
and facts (and much more) that are essential to an understanding of that famous reign.
It does not take long, however, for the reader to discover the analytical poverty of
this book. It is an unfinished work, which exhausts the reader as much as it obviously
overwhelmed the author. It is as if Hughes was determined to cram into the forty-odd
pages devoted to each chapter everything she had unearthed about the topic, including
much irrelevant information. The treatment of the Northern War is pedestrian and that
of the Nystadt negotiations shallow, and she has little understanding of the geopolitical
situation in the basin of the Caspian Sea. It was not funny, as she seems to imply by
an exclamation mark, to try to divert the Amu Daria River toward the Caspian since it
had once flowed into that sea as recently as three generations before (p. 57). The chapter
on the army and navy is a list of agencies and is crammed with irrelevant details without
any analysis of such questions as the implications of using the military articles in trying
civilians for civilian offenses. The chapter on government is no better. Reforms just
happen; the reader is left to guess why. Hughes obviously sees no connection between
the reforms of the central government and those of provincial government. One vainly
expects some analysis or at least some explanations (why, for instance, was cutting
down an oak of any size a capital offense?), but the reader must instead be told that in
June 1711, new glass windows, stoves, desks, tables, benches, and a huge ink-well
were ordered (p. 103).
Once in a while, there is a glimmer of light, as when the author discovers that the
workings of Russian government cannot be grasped without taking into account its
personal, noninstitutional aspects (p. 113) and that, quoting Hans Joachim Torke, the
conception of state service was an extension of personal interest (p. 114). But the
reader will have to wait until page 426 to see who the persons and networks might be.
The chapters on the economy and Peters people ask no questions either, but we
must have a six-line list of goods sold at town markets and a four-line list of items a
foreign merchant wished to import. Surely Hughes might have discussed Alexander
Gerschenkrons tantalizing statement that Russia was becoming less civilized because
it was aspiring to move closer to Europe (p. 158) and might have asked about the
implications of Arcadius Kahans challenging insight that all Russian peasants were
Book Reviews 847
serfs; she might also have answered her own question, quoting a source, of course,
whether the nobility might be a ruling-class estate (p. 178), but all we are told is that
nobles had no feeling of personal honor.
By page 203 this increasingly weary reader wondered whether he should give up
but decided to soldier on and was relieved to read Hughess chapters on the arts,
education, and religion, where she is obviously much more at home. Here too, unfor-
tunately, the number of footnotes suggests that the author is incapable of rising above
a simple listing of facts: the chapter on the arts has a record 406 footnotes; that on
education, mercifully, only 274.
The last three chapters might have saved the book. They deal with the tsar and the
political leadership. But Peter simply does not emerge as a real person. We learn that
he disapproved of cards, loved dwarves, and wrote letters on planting lines of limes,
maples, and hazels and on packaging hemp in bundles, not bales (p. 382). Some thought
might have helped Hughes find out what did indeed make Peter a great man and spared
her the silly statement (also footnoted) that he wept on hearing of Charles XIIs death,
not in grief for his enemy but because he realized that this was a setback to peace (p.
54). There is a section on the common good, but that apparently meant that the tsar
had an eye for detail, as seen in his order to beat anyone who defecated in other than
appointed places (p. 380). If the concept of state was new in Russia (p. 385), then for
what purpose was Russia governed? There is a vague awareness in Hughess mind that
there might be patronage networks, but this is not developed: two sections on networks
are nothing but lists of names. We must be told that Tsaritsa Apraksina died of a surfeit
of pickled mushrooms and that the Duke of Holstein was treated to a firework display
featuring Venus in a carriage drawn by swans with the legend Happy Concord, but
no effort is made to use the work of Nancy Kollmann and Robert Crummey on pre-
Petrine Russia to sketch an outline of these networks and their relationships to the tsar,
not to mention the work of Norbert Elias on court and society and William Beik on
absolute monarchy in seventeenth-century France, in order to bring this Russian court
to life and to study its socializing role in the formation of modern Russian autocracy.
One would have expected Hughes to sum up her findings in such a long book. But
what passes for a conclusion is a nine-page section (pp. 46270) with forty-eight
citations, and the reader must conclude that Hughes does not have any conception of
what the reign was all about. Only on the last page will one find a reference to the
cursed questions, but readers will look in vain in the book for what they might have
been.
The reader will profit from a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology but will
be annoyed by the continuing practice of following the Soviet practice of citing archival
documents. To write LOI, f. 270, d. 103, 1. 240 means nothing. A document should
be titled even if the original does not have its own title, as is the custom in citing
references to Western archives.
The exhausted reader finally puts down this volume and must ask himself: For whom
was it written? It is a compendium of research findings. Not unlike the study of another
reign in which the most original statement was that, at the end of the reign, the Russians
had joined Europe and learned to live with honor, this one does not rise much above
the cliche that Peter must have done something right (p. 91). This volume will be
useful as a reference work to anyone interested in eighteenth-century Russian history
who wants to check the date of Poltava, how many children Peter had, and who was
allowed to wear Saxon topcoats and German vests (p. 283). Scholars in the non-Russian
field will derive little profit: this book is not a synthesis that will stimulate their work
in their own field. Anyone seeking to trace the transition from the seventeenth to the
848 Book Reviews
eighteenth century, to follow the processes that enabled an exceptionally gifted states-
man to carry out extensive reforms, and to examine how the elite adopted new ways
while clinging to the old and how the new reign managed to create a new legitimacy
will have to wait for another work with some original thinking behind it.
JOHN P. LEDONNE
Harvard University
Kistiakovsky: The Struggle for National and Constitutional Rights in the Last
Years of Tsarism. By Susan Heuman. Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies.
Edited by Roman Szporluk et al.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1998. Pp. xiv219.
$32.95 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).
Susan Heumans ambitious study of the Ukrainian-Russian scholar and activist Bogdan
Kistiakovsky returns us to a weathered marker of the historiographical landscape: the
late imperial Russian intelligentsia. That we come to Kistiakovsky only now also mea-
sures how much that ground has shifted in the last two decades. When first she wrote
it in the 1970s, the author acknowledges, her study of a turn-of-the-century liberal
who advocated national rights, constitutionalism, and human rights (p. ix) generated
little interest in the scholarly community. The manuscript tucked into a trunk, Heuman
traveled to teach in Zambia and newly independent Zimbabwe. There, many noted the
parallel contexts of decolonizing Africa and early twentieth-century Russia and, thus,
the contemporary relevance of Kistiakovskys theoretical alternative to Great Russian
empire and the centralized autocratic state that upheld it: a federal multiethnic state
and the set of civil, national, and human rights that, internalized by citizens, rendered
the state viable. Most dramatically, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation
of an independent Ukraine, a statehood that Kistiakovsky himself never embraced,
assured publication for this important contribution to the Harvard Series in Ukrainian
Studies (p. ix).
Especially the books first, biographical chapter, which portrays Kistiakovsky to
have been a cosmopolitan in three worlds, reminds us how negotiable cultural
identity was in fin-de-siecle east central Europe and how much choice existed within
the cultural substrata that ranged from the imperial to the ethnonational. Heuman
lays great weight on Kistiakovskys Ukrainian ethnicity. Of equal interest are the
glimpses she provides into the complex construction of identity in an imperial era.
In this telling, Kistiakovskys family, Ukrainian peasants who freed themselves from
serfdom, first emerged in the early nineteenth century. In the next generation, Kis-
tiakovskys grandfather had become a Russian Orthodox village priest. His father
and uncle by midcentury were professors at the imperial St. Vladimir University in
Kiev, where literature, law, and history provided, as throughout continental Europe,
the grounds for ethnic nationalism. Indeed, as a young adolescent, Kistiakovsky al-
ready had met the Ukrainian nationalist Mykhailo Drahomanov, whose views of
Ukrainian autonomy within a federated empire Heuman nicely summarizes. A short-
lived political activism followed, its inevitability hastened by hidebound Austrian
and Russian bureaucrats who hounded a teenagers suspected, but fictitious, contacts
with Ukrainian peasants. At age twenty-two, he had been expelled for political rad-
icalism from two gymnaziia and two universities. Family, and the Ukrainian ethnicity
it nurtured, in Kistiakovskys case, plainly shaped identity.
Book Reviews 849
So too, however, did the polyglot ethnic experience of east central Europea fun-
damental component of which was the overarching construct of empire. Kistiakovsky
enrolled at a third university, Dorpat (Tartu), where eased admission standards intended
to Russify this Baltic German institution instead created the most cosmopolitan student
community in the empire (p. 17). Arrest and expulsion yet again for nationalist agi-
tation ended his days as a political activist, but Kistiakovsky, judged by contempo-
raries as an atypical student who dressed formally and worked studiously, had consid-
erably broadened his linguistic (Polish, English, German) and intellectual horizons at
Dorpat. These he pursued further in Germany. In 1899, he completed a dissertation
(Gesellschaft und Einzelweisen) under the neo-Kantian Georg Simmel at the University
of Berlin. Until the 1917 Revolution, he would summer in Heidelberg, where he par-
ticipated in seminars on neo-Kantian legal theory with Georg Jellinek, became a cor-
respondent of Max Weber, and began a collaboration with the Russian legal Marxists:
Peter Struve, N. A. Berdiaev, S. L. Frank, and S. N. Bulgakov (pp. 2029). Heuman
devotes chapter 2 to neo-Kantianism and Kistiakovskys own contribution to an age
when dreamwork was much favored in political discourse, his attempt to formulate a
general theory of law: a near-imperial search that assumed the primacy of individual
ethical agency and rights in a culture still dominated by absolutes, be they systematizing
epistomologies or bureaucratically administered law.
The intellectual bravura of that search derived as well from Kistiakovskys place in
a third cosmopolitan world, that of a Russian intelligentsia caught in the turbulence of
the empires fin-de-siecle. One of Heumans underlying thematic concerns, which she
develops especially well in a series of chapters that examines Kistiakovskys intellec-
tual history (chaps. 37), is to portray how a tradition of dissident critique and liber-
ationist rhetoric, which scholars have often portrayed as preoccupied with Romanov
autocracy (Lenin is the obvious straw man), in Kistiakovskys case diffused as well
toward the popular and the individual. Kistiakovsky plunged into the national political
life that swept the empire into revolution by 1905. The wildly diversified social and
cultural life that it both revealed and fostered allowed Kistiakovsky to be a teacher of
law, a commentator on politics, a public man of letters, and a neo-Kantian sociologist
of law whose advocacy of individual ethical consciousness as the root of legal order
is most readily available in his Landmarks article, In Defense of Law (The Intelli-
gentsia and Legal Consciousness) (pp. 2232).
In the end, Heuman leaves us a Kistiakovsky who, good intelligent, was alienated
certainly by the Great War from the Russian intelligentsia whose chauvinistic under-
tones, echoing a nationalism that no ethnic minority of the empire could ignore, he
found in the voices of former comrades like Peter Struve. Weber lost interest in an
empire he deemed incapable of a democratic, liberal order (p. 85) long before Kis-
tiakovsky, who, congratulating his mother after the February Revolution on the es-
tablishment of political freedom in Russia (p. 36), by 1918 confronted in newly in-
dependent Ukraine an occupying German army and field courts-martial. Ultimately, he
was alienated from Ukraine. Before the Great War Kistiakovsky adhered to a vision of
Ukrainian autonomy within a federalized Russian empire that rendered him either sus-
pect or superfluous to an increasingly pronounced Ukrainian separatism (pp. 3236).
He was, as Heuman shows, a cosmopolitan in the three worlds of Russia, Germany,
and Ukraine but never at home in any of them. He died of heart failure in European
exile in 1920, at the age of fifty-two.
FRANK WCISLO
Vanderbilt University
850 Book Reviews
Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s

1990s. By Hiroaki Kuromiya. Cambridge Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet
Studies, volume 104. Edited by Stephen White et al.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv357. $44.95.
The Donbas region (Donets Basin) between Ukraine and Russia historically has been
the refuge of Cossacks, rebels, outcasts, and others who have sought freedom and
escape from the centripetal pressures of Imperial and Soviet Russia. In the present
volume, Hiroaki Kuromiya states his primary interest to be the nature and context of
political terror during the Stalin era, but he also claims that his discussion takes place
in a much larger chronological framework in order to make his main pointthat the
very freedoms that were characteristic and peculiar to the Donbas throughout its history
were also what made its experience so extraordinarily brutal and violent (p. 1). Be-
cause of this history, the Donbas was always politically suspect from Moscows per-
spective and, therefore, was one of the areas hardest hit under the Great Terror of the
1930s. But, according to Kuromiya, not even Stalin was able to eradicate the regions
entrenched freedoms.
The author also wants to examine the term enemyespecially as in enemy of
the peoplethat infamous term of abuse used by Stalin to identify prior to destroying
all those who posed even any potential threat to his absolute power. But Kuromiya is
quick to note that Moscows paranoia had some basis in reality. He concedes that there
really were enemies out there, especially in places like the Donbas. Indeed, he suggests
that Stalins perceptions may well have been accurate (p. 7). Moreover, Kuromiya
does not view Stalins new image of the enemy of the people as simply imposed from
above. Rather, in the Donbas (and elsewhere, one may presume), people created their
own images of enemies, using the official political discourse to suit their purposes (p.
7). Kuromiya then contends that his case study of the Donbas demonstrates the blurring
of the concept of enemy and, paradoxically, argues that this blurring eventually led
to the curtailing of the Great Terror.
The author asserts, without explaining what exactly he means, that it would be more
fruitful to conceptualize the frontiers that could not be controlled by Moscowlike
the free steppe and the minds of the people (pp. 89)rather than belabor the old
political issues and the rights and wrongs of internecine power struggles. Nevertheless,
he quotes Khrushchev and Molotov to very good effect in demonstrating Stalins de-
monic 510 percent rule of guilt by association: if as little as 5 percent of some suspect
categorywhether particular party cadres or entire ethnic groups like the Crimean
Tatarswere disloyal, then the whole gang ought to be shot, pure and simple.
This reasoning makes good sense if everything was all about holding on to power
(p. 217). Not surprisingly then, certain influential categories of individuals were more
susceptible to being purged: officials, managers and supervisors, intellectuals, priests,
and any potential dissidents. Having demonstrated that the Donbas political eliteas
well as their families, friends, and colleagueswere decimated by the Great Terror,
Kuromiya asserts that by late 1938 it became apparent to Stalin that he had to call a
halt to the repressions because they had become self-defeatingas though that were
perfectly obvious and self-explanatory (when in fact it is anything but clear).
What exactly in the present volume then is new? Not much really, despite the au-
thors extensive research. Kuromiya sees his contribution as filling the gap between
the period up to 1924covered by the books of Theodore Friedgut, Susan McCaffray,
Charters Wynn, and othersand the late Soviet years, as seen in the work of Lewis
Siegelbaum and Daniel Walkowitz. Although Kuromiya makes intelligent use of im-
Book Reviews 851
portant sources from several previously closed archives in Ukraine and Russia, he
notably failed to gain access to the critical (for his purposes) holdings of the Presidential
Archive in Moscow or the former KGB archives in Moscow or Kiev. Moreover, most
of what he tells us is already known through published works in Russia and the West,
and what is new may be categorized as corroborating detail, rather than significant
original material.
What is perhaps most disturbing about Kuromiyas work, however, is its ambiva-
lence about the political issues the author himself describes as central. For instance,
allegations about wrecking activities are passed on with nary a comment on the
reliability of their source (p. 263). To be sure, Kuromiyas general tone is highly critical
of Stalinist tactics, including those mendacious allegations about Ukrainian nationalist
excesses in the Donbas as justification for terror and repression. But he balances this
by noting that because of the war and the German occupation, alternatives to the Soviet
regime were actively considered at least by portions of the local population (who tended
in any case to be far too independent to suit Moscow). So there were threats to Soviet
security, after all? And what is the implication in Kuromiyas observation that many
people appeared to believe that no other leader [apart from Stalin] would have been
able to [lead the country] to a resounding victory (p. 309)?
All in all, then, despite its scholarly merits, this is an exasperating book. It uses
cumbersome language to make stilted arguments and provides transliterations of quo-
tations that are simultaneously translated. The best parts of the books narrative are
anecdotal accounts from eight interviews, along with selected archival impressions. But
these do not significantly add to, much less alter, our understanding of the main events
in the Donbas region narrowly construed during the Stalin period and tell us still less
about the full span of 120 or so years suggested by the title.
N. G. O. PEREIRA
Dalhousie University
Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism. By

Susan K. Morrissey.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. viii288. $45.00.
Studenchestvostudentity, or the Russian national student body conceived as some-

thing like a stereotypenever entirely coincided with the life and environment in
which actual Russian students actually lived. Stereotypes rarely do. Nevertheless, as
Susan K. Morrissey takes scrupulous pains to demonstrate, a powerful narrative mythos
did emerge from Russian university life in the 1860s and survived into the 1920s: a
mythos that played an imposing role in the formation of student character and behavior,
which could be and sometimes was resisted by individual students and even counter-
groups, but one that was formidably present as a fact of student life that helped shape
student activity and behavior through several generations of Russian history.
The elements that entered into this myth were various and even to some degree
contradictory. In the 1860s, as part of the Great Reforms of Alexander II, enrollments
at Russian universities were greatly expanded. The majority of students were the chil-
dren of civil servants, the intelligentsia, or merchant families. They came from all over
Russia, many from the countryside, to what were urban universities. The government
stipends that supported them were few and meager. Health care and housing were sadly
lacking. The students tended to fall back on old Russian traditions of self-help and
852 Book Reviews
mutual aid: the zemliachestvo, or organization of students who came from the same
region, and the skhodka, a kind of spontaneous representative assembly.
The government badly needed professionally trained civil servants, but, at the same
time, it was extremely fickle about allowing the initiative for reform to pass to grass-
roots organizations, very defensive about its authority, and fearful that the reform pro-
cess threatened to get out of hand. This created an atmosphere in which the most radical
critics from a previous generation of the intelligentsia began to exercise an exceptional
influenceNikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Dmitry Pisarev served
the student generation of the 1860s not only as ideologues but also as role models.
Education tended to be seen by the Russian students as a rising to consciousness. In
turn, consciousness came to be seen, more and more, as a kind of political conscious-
ness leading to self-sacrifice for progress and the good of the peoplewith the
government and its imposed authority now seen as the enemy and betrayer of the
European-oriented progress of which it had been the harbinger in the eighteenth cen-
tury. The member of studenchestvo would not consider the aim of his education the
mere acquisition of skills that enabled a professional career but, rather, the full devel-
opment of lichnost, a self-conscious individuality dedicated to the overthrow of au-
thoritarian tsarism.
There were complications. Women, all but marginally excluded from higher edu-
cation in Russia, did gain a foothold in the so-called Bestuzhov courses at Petersburg
University, and the margin became a considerable indentation in which womens issues
acquired a somewhat divisive prominence. During the severe governmental repression
of the 1880s and 1890s, the ultimate mythical self-sacrifice took the form of suicide.
A number of writers as well as the liberal press laid the supposed frequency of student
suicides at the governments door. The religious overtones that always accompanied
the image of the ascetic, impoverished, rebellious, self-sacrificing student came to a
crescendo in the martyrdom of suicide.
Morrissey pays a fair amount of attention to the relations between studenchestvo and
the professoriat, which, on the one hand, was somewhat inclined to be liberal and to
support moves in the direction of university autonomy and self-governance as well as
the legitimation of self-help organizations to aid students. On the other hand, the pro-
fessoriat was also both fearful that student radicalism might provoke deeper government
reaction and a bit leery of the student tendency to make scholarly excellence and the
acquisition of professional skills second-place concerns. During the revolution in 1905,
when, as Morrissey puts it, the street entered the university and the radical parties
used the relative sanctuary of the university to carry out their revolutionary strategy,
the split between studenchestvo and professoriat widened. With the formation of mass
political parties, right-wing groups began to invade the campuses. While right-wing
parties never rivaled the appeal of Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries to
studenchestvo, they became a definite and organized presence. An orientation to career
and professional accomplishment became more prominent factors in student life. The
religious revival as well as the second thoughts about broader and deeper social
thinking and the importance of professional competence that characterized the Vekhi
group also had some impact on the student body.
Reradicalization of studenchestvo under the impact of a wave of strikes (191014),
the Beilis case, and the Lena goldfields massacre was very much a part of the back-
ground of the revolutions of 1917. It took place in a context in which university gov-
ernance had in fact achieved a good deal of autonomy and in which the intellectual
atmosphere that prevailed was quite free. That was something the newly established
Soviet government had to deal with. It began by favoring professional competence in
Book Reviews 853
the professoriat and only slowly moved to a strong preference for party allegiance.
Entering the student body, however, quickly became a matter of real or putative pro-
letarian origin.
Morrissey makes good use of memoirs of student life. She ably demonstrates con-
currences of the mythical and the real. Her style is crisp and lucid and a pleasure to
read. She might have done more with the universities that were somewhat outside the
Russian tradition, like Warsaw or Dorpat, as well as with the influence the university
student myth had on the gymnaziia and other secondary schools, especially the church
schools. (One recalls that both Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov were the sons of priests
and attended seminaries. One wonders what happened to these schools in subsequent
generations.) In its own way and with less intensive concentration, Morrisseys book
can stand without embarrassment beside the pioneering social history of Irina Paperno.
SIDNEY MONAS
University of Texas at Austin
Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet
Union. By Martin A. Miller.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii237. $30.00.
This book gives a detailed account of the reception of Freuds ideas in the Russia of
both before and after the October Revolution. Making use of archival materials and
published accounts, its author has reconstructed the origin, development, demise, and
resurrection of psychoanalysis in Russia.
The author begins his story by providing a brief picture of the history of Russian
psychiatry up to the turn of the century. The situation in Russia was not unlike that in
other European countries: the asylums were overcrowded and understaffed, there was
no accepted psychiatric diagnostic classification system, and there were no reliable
medications. The most prominent Russian physicians interested in psychiatry (e.g.,
Vladimir Bekhterev, Sergei Korsakov, Vladimir Serbskii, and Ivan Sechenov) defended
a neurological view of mental illness and were influenced by German neurology and
physiology. Like their European colleagues, they could not very well explain, nor
provide cures for, traditionally diagnosed disorders such as melancholia, mania, epi-
lepsy, and hysteria.
It was in this situation, and against the background of a social upheaval (e.g., political
terrorism and pogroms) that seemed to call for an explanation in terms of irrational
forces in man himself, that many Russian researchers, in search of alternatives, turned
to Freud and other psychodynamic thinkers. Could not the dynamic interplay of con-
scious and unconscious forces explain the otherwise incomprehensible behavior of both
normal persons and mental patients?
The Russian interest in psychoanalysis became apparent around 1910 when the Vi-
enna Psychoanalytic Society included such Russians as Leonid Drosnes, Tatiana Ro-
senthal, Sabina Spielrein, and Moshe Wulff. Of these researchers, Spielrein contributed
original theoretical ideas that were valued by Freud and Jung. Back in Russia, Nikolai
Osipov published enthusiastic review papers on psychoanalysis as well as his own case
histories. A journal, Psychotherapy, was almost entirely devoted to the publication of
western psychodynamic research, and in 1911 Osipov and others founded the Russian
Psychoanalytic Society.
Thus the interest in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic thought at large was quite
854 Book Reviews
prevalent in imperial Russia. Then the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, and, as the
author convincingly shows, the agenda of psychoanalysts was no longer their own. At
first, although some prominent analysts emigrated, the prospects for the teaching and
practicing of psychoanalysis under the new regime seemed quite good. The State Psy-
choanalytic Institute was founded in 1922. It offered training and a curriculum of
courses and had an outpatient clinic. Leading educationalists and psychologists, such
as Pavel Blonskii, Alexander Luria, Stanislav Shatskii, and Lev Vygotsky, felt attracted
to psychoanalytic thinking and were to differing degrees active in the spreading of
psychoanalytic ideas. The State Publishing House agreed to publish a series of Freud
translations. A psychoanalytic school for disturbed children was founded, directly fi-
nanced by Minister of Education Anatoli Lunacharsky. The author makes it clear that
high officials (including Leon Trotsky) were favorably inclined toward psychoanalytic
thinking.
However, the very fact that the Russian psychoanalytic movement was supported
and financed by the Soviet authorities made it exceedingly vulnerable; when the au-
thorities in the next years withdrew their support and began criticizing psychoanalysis,
the movement gradually disintegrated.
The public debate on psychoanalysis began with a publication in the party journal
Under the Banner of Marxism in 1923. The issue was, of course, whether psychoan-
alytic thinking was compatible with Marxist thought; the articles author, Bernard By-
khovsky, concluded that it was. But in subsequent publications other theorists disagreed
and opposed the Freudian Marxists. As the debate grew gradually more vehement and
ideologized, it became clear that the authorities no longer supported the psychoanalytic
movement, and by 1928 the movement noted its first defectors. By 1930 it was clear
that psychoanalysis, like virtually all other Western currents of thought, was viewed
as oppositional and dangerous by the authorities. Articles critical of Freuds ideas
and of more polemic than scientific valuekept appearing in the press with no one to
refute them any longer. Former adherents kept silent or deemed it safer to join the choir
of critics.
It was only after the death of Stalin in 1953 that psychodynamic ideas reemerged,
first in Georgia, then in Moscow. But the time was not yet ripe for the acceptance of
psychoanalytic thought. In a paradoxical process, Freuds ideas were once again, and
perhaps in more detail than ever, discussed in the 1960s only to be condemned anew.
Although it became increasingly possible to display acquaintance with Freud and his
modern followers, the real breakthrough came only in the Gorbachev era. Freuds ideas
once again reached the public press, and publishers began reissuing translations of his
books.
The author has unearthed much material that was previously unavailable in English
and has written a thorough account of the history of the psychoanalytic movement in
imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Virtually the only critique I have is that he does
not always make a clear distinction between specifically psychoanalytic ideas and psy-
chodynamic ideas in general. Thus, if a Russian psychologist writes about the role of
the unconscious or about the role of traumatic memories, the author is inclined to view
this as an implicit reference to Freuds work. But this need not be so as other psycho-
dynamic thinkers, such as Freuds rival Pierre Janet, addressed these issues in equal
detail. This fact is of relevance because the writings of Janet and others were available
in Russian translation. Thus, a Soviet writer could discuss psychodynamic issues (e.g.,
traumatic infantile conflicts or the unconscious) and at the same time be sincerely highly
critical of Freud, a fact that the author seems to miss (pp. 12223). Nor does speaking
about war psychosis, emotional shock as an etiological factor, and so on demon-
Book Reviews 855
strate that its writer had Freudian ideas in mind, as the author implies (pp. 4950). We
should not forget that such notions as railway spine (i.e., emotional shock as the
result of a railway accident) had been described decades before Freud and were surely
known in Russia.
Notwithstanding this slight shortcoming, I warmly recommend the present book as
an authoritative source on the history of the psychoanalytic movement in Russia.
RENE VAN DER VEER

Rijks Universiteit, Leiden
Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. By

Victoria E. Bonnell. Studies on the History of Society and Culture, volume 27.
Edited by Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xxii363. $48.00.
Victoria Bonnells Iconography of Power is distinguished from other books devoted

to the Soviet poster in that it sets out to discuss its development in terms of subject
matter. In this, it differs significantly from the other scholarly work on the same subject
(Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster [New Haven, Conn., 1988]), which focuses
primarily on the pre-Stalinist period as well as on the development of the work of
particular artists. In contrast, Bonnells approach is thematic, more concerned with the
statistical analysis of motifs and an assessment of their significance, and less art his-
torical. The poster here is a historical document, its iconography intimately tied to
maneuverings and developments within party and state policy. The image of Stalin,
particularly in the 1930suntil now neglected in both Russian and Western publica-
tionstakes center stage.
But Bonnell also deals with other subjects. In line with changes in both ideology
and art over the period 191753, she tracks the image of the worker as well as those
of the peasant woman, the leader, and the enemy. Religious and doctrinal analogies
abound in her examination of this material, for it was, as she herself points out, also a
time of iconoclasm as well as of demonology. Under the circumstances an iconograph-
ical approach seems particularly appropriate, especially for an understanding of the
power of the image of the leader who is represented in posters and elsewhere as both
flesh and spiritas man and as embodiment of the state.
The main weaknesses in Bonnells book are not in her arguments but, first, in her
breadth of reference beyond the poster to other areas of Soviet culture and, second, in
the fact that after the late 1930s her interest in the subject declines and the themes
established in the chapters are not followed through. It is hard to understand why this
second case should be so, because there is no shortage of depictions of workers or
peasant women in the posters of the 1940s and 1950s. But such characters are more
settled, less dynamic than those of the 1930s and much more painterly in the way that
they are portrayed. At a time of conservatism and virulent campaigns against foreign
influence and cosmopolitanism at home, photomontage was out of date. The visual
language of the poster, like that of the fine arts, looked further back into the past for
inspiration.
In describing the image of the Soviet worker, Bonnell is correct to isolate the black-
smith as a key element that appeared between the February and October revolutions of
1917 and continued up until about 1930. Yet in asking What kinds of associations
did contemporaries have with the image of the blacksmith? (p. 29), she does not
856 Book Reviews
mention the influential group of Proletcult writers around Mikhail Gerasimov known
as the Smithy (Kusnitsy) nor the journal they produced from 1920 out of Narkompros
called The Foundry (Kuznitsa). The logo of the group was a blacksmith striking an
anvil. The Proletcult was a vital agent in establishing revolutionary consciousness dur-
ing the early years of the revolution.
In discussing the image of peasant women in posters produced during the famine
that accompanied the process of collectivization during the first Five Year Plan (1928
32), Bonnell is correct to point out the discrepancy between the idealized image and
the dreadful reality (p. 112) and also to question how such posters were understood by
those for whom they were intended. She is probably correct in surmising that these
were images of the countryside intended for the cities. It is also interesting, but unre-
marked upon here, that collective farms did not figure as subjects for paintings until
half way through the thirties, when the worst effects of the famine would have disap-
peared. Presumably poster artists could work from imagination or memory, whereas
painters were supposed to experience life on the farm.
In discussing the image of the leader, Bonnell is right to go back to the iconography
of the early 1920s when Leon Trotsky, and even others such as Grigory Zinovyev,
figured in photomontages and commemorative ware alongside Lenins more dominant
figure. The power of such images is made clear in their subsequent systematic destruc-
tion or defacement as well as of those of other class enemies after Trotskys exile
abroad in 1929. It is also clearly reflected in Stalins carefully constructed visual lineage
of himself as the inheritor of Lenins mantle (p. 156).
As part of this later process, Bonnell mentions the poster of the painting by A. N.
Mikhailovskii, which was produced in 200,000 copies in 1925. The subject was an
intimate meeting between Lenin and Stalin in Gorki in the summer of 1922, which was
supposed to establish how close Stalin was to Lenin when he was alive. It was made
at the time that Stalin was suppressing Lenins will, which was intended to alert the
Central Committee to Stalins ambition. But Bonnell does not mention that this painting
was based on a faked photograph that must have been produced just previously and
that provided the basis for a whole range of related art works, including Mikhailovskiis
painting/poster (see David King, The Commissar Vanishes [Edinburgh, 1997], pp. 84
87).
In her discussion of Soviet demonology, Bonnell entertainingly illustrates how fig-
ures of speech or neologisms used during the Five Year Plans were translated visually
into posters. The term schliapa (hat) to describe someone who was not streetwise was
coined by Stalin in 1933 to describe a kolkhoznik who hid beneath his hat, did not
fulfill his responsibilities, and accordingly wrecked the whole enterprise. This provided
the basis for a caricature of 1933 (p. 213). But in the discussion of tipazh, which was
an important element in establishing the salient features of class enemies, Bonnell and
Boris Groys (whom she quotes) are incorrect in associating this only with the 1930s
and the time of the Cultural Revolution (pp. 21617). In the early 1920s, avant-garde
film director Sergei Eisenstein had described tipazh as social and personal biography
condensed into physical form (see Naum Kleiman, Eisensteins Graphic Work, Ei-
senstein at Ninety [London, 1988], p. 14) and had enacted such ideas in the animal/
people montage sequences in films such as Strike (1925) and later also in the treatment
of both naval officers and victims on the Odessa Steps in the Battleship Potemkin. This
idea, which Eisenstein linked to the literary characters of Dickens, was considerably
more sophisticated than the antisemitic, White Russian, or capitalist caricatures that
typified the enemies of the Cultural Revolution.
The final chapter, The Apotheosis of Stalinist Political Art, ends abruptly. As a
Book Reviews 857
result, it completely misses the complexity that lies behind the different depictions of
what Bonnell describes as the serenity and joyfulness amid abundance (p. 260) that
characterized Soviet imagery of the late 1940s and 1950s. As the subject matter for
posters became well established in genres, so the style in which they were made became
a more conscious part of state ideology than before. This is in keeping with other
developments in the arts in which the Partys control had become increasingly draco-
nian. At this time, vestiges of artistic autonomy were swept away in the merging of
medium and message under the dictates of the Party. Style becomes homogenized in
images that are backward-looking in terms of their representation but modern in terms
of their presence and message.
The bibliography is broad but contains several omissions, particularly relating to
different aspects of Socialist Realism; the most important books and catalogs not listed
are Matthew Cullerne Bowns Art under Stalin (Oxford, 1991), Soviet Socialist Realist
Painting 1930s1960s (exhibition catalog, Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, 1992) and
The Aesthetic Arsenal: Socialist Realism under Stalin (exhibition catalog, New York,
PS1 Museum, 1993).
DAVID ELLIOTT
Moderrna Museet, Stockholm
Odessa, 19411944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule. By

Alexander Dallin. Foreword by Larry L. Watts.
Iasu: Center for Romanian Studies, 1998. Pp. 296. $48.00.
The historical literature dealing with the German-Soviet war of 194145 is enormous
and is becoming larger every year. For evidence of this, one need only glance at a
recent critical bibliography, nearly four hundred pages in length, produced by Rolf-
Dieter Muller and Gerd Ueberschar (Hitlers War in the East, 19411945 [Providence,
R.I., 1997]). Access to Soviet and German documents held in former Soviet archives
has reinvigorated the field, which prior to 1989 relied chiefly on German sources held
in American archives or in those of the Federal Republic. Provided that Russias ar-
chival network remains open to foreign scholars, we can look forward to many years
of fruitful research on a broad range of topics. For the time being, however, there are
some significant gaps in the literature, despite its great size. This is perhaps especially
true where the role of Germanys East European satellite states is concerned. The
reprinting of Alexander Dallins pioneering study of Odessa under Romanian rule is
therefore most welcome.
Odessa, 19411944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule was first
published in 1957 by the RAND Corporation. Like many other early works on the
German-Soviet war, its impetus was provided by the U.S. defense establishment (in
this case the U.S. Air Force), which was keen to glean as much practical information
as possible from the German experience of war with Stalins empire. Ultimately, the
American national security apparatus hoped to understand how the Soviet regime and
its people had behaved under the stresses of war and thereby predict how they might
react in a future conflict. Despite this ulterior motive, some of the cold war era studies
had considerable historical value. The best of them, including Dallins own German
Rule in Russia (London, 1957) and John Armstrong, ed., Soviet Partisans in World
War II (Madison, Wis., 1964), are still useful in many respects, despite certain critical
shortcomings brought to light by more recent works, which have benefited from better
858 Book Reviews
source material. This is perhaps particularly true of Odessa, 19411945, for, as Larry
Watts explains in his introduction to the 1998 edition, no equivalent studies have
emerged to replace it. Romanian rule in Transnistria remains a major void.
It is certainly not by default alone that this book should attract an audience, however.
Dallins stated aims are to provide an historical reconstruction of wartime Transnis-
tria and to analyze Transnistrian experience and see what lessons can be drawn from
it. He does an admirable job of achieving both. Working with an odd assortment of
captured German and Romanian documents, period newspapers produced throughout
central and Eastern Europe, Soviet and Romanian secondary sources, emigre memoirs,
and eleven interviews with emigres, he produces a clear and thorough tour of the
horizon. His sources certainly impose a number of limitations. There is little infor-
mation in the book on rural Transnistria, and most of his materials deal with the life
of the new elite in occupied Odessa, but Dallins characteristic common sense and
circumspection prevent him from overstating his case in areas where he simply lacks
information. He covers a wide range of topics, including the withdrawal of Soviet
authority in 1941, the place of Transnistria in Romanian diplomacy and domestic poli-
tics, life in the countryside, culture, daily life, politics, the Soviet underground, and the
collapse of the Romanian occupation. As always, his writing is clear and often enter-
taining.
Dallins basic argument about Transnistria is a comparative one: the Romanian ap-
proach to occupation is contrasted explicitly with that of Germany at a variety of levels.
Although he is careful to illustrate the wanton brutality of Romanian occupation forces
during 1941, Romanian complicity in the extermination of Transnistrias large Jewish
population, and the tremendous corruption of Romanian officials, overall he charac-
terizes Romanian rule as far more humane and rational than that imposed by Germany
in areas of either political or military jurisdiction. His emigre evidence very strongly
suggests that the inhabitants were well aware of how much better off they were than
their countrymen living in Dnipropetrovsk or Kiev. Despite the vagueness of Ion An-
tonescus long-term objectives in the region, the Romanian government of Transnistria
took less and invested more than the Germans, and it allowed the non-Jewish inhabi-
tants much greater freedom, especially in commerce. The results were marked, even
according to German observers. While the rest of occupied Ukraine languished, Odessa
thrived by comparison. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the fact that the flight to
rural areas noted throughout the German-occupied Soviet Union did not occur in
Odessa. Instead, people came into the city from the countryside to take advantage of
commercial opportunities. Although Romanian occupation authorities retained the col-
lective farm system, their requisitions of kolkhoz production were, according to Dallin,
lower than those of the Soviet regime. This gave the rural population some reason to
work and something to exchange with the city dwellers of Odessa. Enterprising resi-
dents (chiefly technicians and professionals not evacuated by the Soviets) established
a service economy adequate to the populations basic needs. Dallin is careful to point
out, however, that this tenuous economic revival (which he likens to a second NEP)
was only possible thanks to the population losses Odessa sustained through Soviet
evacuations and the German-Romanian extermination of resident Jews. Overall, Dallin
persuasively depicts the inhabitants as simply making the best of their situation, es-
chewing both active collaboration and pro-Soviet resistance.
The weakest aspect of this book is, as Watts notes, its exposition of Romanian policy
toward Transnistria. It is here that Dallins sources are most inadequate, but as Dallin
suggests in the foreword to the new edition, this is perhaps the best reason for having
the study reprinted at this time, that is, in order to draw attention to this persistent gap
Book Reviews 859
in the historiography. Important records are now available to scholars in the Bucharest
State Archives and the Archives of the (Hungarian) Ministry for National Defense that
could potentially shed much light on the Antonescu regimes objectives. Until these
records are looked at seriously, we will benefit from the reissue of Odessa, 19411945.
TRUMAN O. ANDERSON
London School of Economics
Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 19531991. By

Yitzhak M. Brudny. Russian Research Center Studies, volume 91.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. x352. $45.00.
Yitzhak Brudny grew up in the Soviet Union and Israel during the 1960s and 1970s;
as a result he has a native command of Russian and an intimate acquaintance with the
significant cultural developments he discusses. Based partly on his Princeton University
doctoral dissertation, his analysis is enriched by Soviet archival materials recently made
available; by examination of an immense range of published materials; and by inter-
views in Russia beginning in 1989. Consequently, the book will be very helpful for all
concerned with the final decades of the Soviet system and its immediate aftermath in
the Russian Republic.
The title follows theorizing, now widely accepted, that nations are invented or
imagined. In my opinion, however, it would have been more appropriate to use
revived, for Brudny rightly points out that literary nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s
freely acknowledged the nineteenth-century Slavophiles as their intellectual ancestors.
Most twentieth-century nationalists were highly educated at the universities of Moscow
and Leningrad, hence fully exposed to the Slavophile and Panslav heritage. Brudny
treats the chronological expression of this heritage, demonstrating how this cultural
politics significantly affected the parallel evolution of Soviet ideological policies.
The key element for the new nationalists, as for their Slavophile ancestors, was
glorification of the Russian peasantry as the source and reservoir of moral virtue. Hence
the nationalist ideology, beginning with the 1960s publications of the village prose
movement, was essentially conservative. It coincided with a rapid emptying of the
real Russian villages as peasants departed for urban centers both to improve their
economic circumstances and because of regime pressures. The village prose nationalists
constituted a reaction against this drastic change in the Russian social structure. By the
late 1970s, however, the process had proceeded so far that the ideology became nos-
talgia, rather than a feasible program for halting social change. What most writers
described was not an existing peasantry under pressure but the imagined village of the
writers childhoods (most of whom, like a majority of all Russian elites at that time,
had been born in rural families).
The negative counterpart of the idealization of peasants was a rejection of urban
society. Successors of the village writers tended to stress antiurbanism, corresponding
to Brudnys typology of movement from liberal nationalists, cooperating with other
liberal critics of the regime, to conservative nationalists and even to radical nation-
alists eager to restore a semitotalitarian regime to prevent moral decay. The trend was
sharply illustrated by Vadim Kozhinov (in The Authority of History, Literaturnoe
Obozrenie 3 [1977]: 6367; Brudny, pp. 165 and 308, n. 37, refers briefly to this article,
but my quotation is from Current Digest of the Soviet Press 29, no. 14 [1977], p. 12):
Whereas it was once common to speak of the idiocy of rural life, [Karl Marxs
860 Book Reviews
phrase] nowadays it is much more appropriate to speak of the idiocy of urban life.
. . . The main point lies in the acute, universal conflict between nature and the artificial
environment. Thus this village writer confronted head-on both Marx and, apparently,
Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo eminence on indoctrination.
While denying wholesale rejection of technological advances and ostensibly blaming
American influences for the demoralizing effects of urbanization and modernization,
many nationalists, including Kozhinov, also denounced Jewish influence for atrocities
against the peasants. Moreover, writers generally urged respect for the Orthodox reli-
gion and blamed Jews for earlier destruction of churches. More positively, the nation-
alists regarded Russian Orthodoxy as the transmitter of symbols of national continuity.
But they showed little concern for other Orthodox communities, even such an ancient
one as the Georgian.
Fundamentally, Russian nationalists rejected the concept of a civic nation, that is,
one in which territorial residence rather than national and religious heritage was the
prime criterion for citizenship. Brudnys abbreviated discussion of this point does not
do the citizenship issue justice, either in terms of alternative principles (e.g., the civic
criterion embraced by most contemporary Ukrainian nationalists) or the forcible per-
secution of national and religious minorities carried out by strictly nonintellectual Rus-
sian Cossacks.
The author notes the chronological coincidence between the ethnic nationalism ad-
vanced by the writers and the Soviet regimes alarm (during the early 1970s) at signs
of reviving non-Russian claims. He sees such concern as a major motive for inclu-
sionary politics, that is, as leeway for open expression of Russian nationalism in
cultural organs between 1965 and 1985. Ultimately, the nationalists went too far for
apparatchiks like Suslov, both in their overt rejection of Marxism-Leninism and in their
criticism of specific regime policies like agricultural collectivization, environmental
damage, and peasant mobilization for urban labor. As the economic reforms of Mikhail
Gorbachev got under way, the evident hindrances posed by nationalist objections to
the technology and foreign policy complications they caused to a pro-Western foreign
policy became more obvious.
During the moves to electoral democratization, the political weakness of the nation-
alist movement, confronted with rising consumer demands and state concern for in-
dustrial productivity, usually prevented openly nationalist candidates from winning. In
the longer run, it would appear that their ideology might be adopted by military and
bureaucratic elites eager to restore the strong state nationalists endorsed. Nationalist
concern for moral renewal is not so easily assimilated; in purely material symbolic
terms, the Orthodox revival is impressive but appears to have little effect on consum-
erism. In the final analysis, Brudnys subjects appear little more likely to influence
social policy decisively in the future than they did the evolution of Russia from the
Soviet Union to semichaotic republic during the past fifteen years. A major peril re-
mains: like the unsuccessful archaicizing movements analyzed by Fritz Stern, Russian
cultural nationalism could become a politics of cultural despair undermining civil
societys resistance to more extreme ideologies.
JOHN A. ARMSTRONG
University of WisconsinMadison

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Review

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