David Coward

Reviews : Montesquieu. By Judith N. Shklar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. 136. £11.95

etc. Personally, I should have welcomed even more quotations from original sources which would have thrown more light upon the character not only of the King but also of Guise and Montmorency. I should also have liked the author to have been a little less hesitant in his appraisals. Give the facts as impartially as possible, certainly, but let us have clear conclusions which may be open to debate but

Reviews : French Studies Philosophers and Pamphleteers: Political Theorists of the Enlightenment. By Maurice Cranston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, I986. I90 pp. £I2.95:

Ruth Bohan’s &dquo;Joseph Stella’s Man in Elevated (Train)&dquo;). The problem is one of context. As, to use Estera Milman’s telling phrase, &dquo;the cultural and social imperatives of a particular period of time&dquo; (p. 167) are forgotten, so the specific nature of Dada as one possible avant-garde &dquo;response&dquo; is also obscured. As these meta-stylistic, &dquo;ontological&dquo; (p. io5) imperatives are remembered, so the various possibilities inherent in Dada the &dquo;negative&dquo; and &dquo;positive&dquo; speeds of the movement as Janco succinctly put it (p. 131) emerge as alternative responses which preclude the need, as Allen rightly implies, to reduce the movement to a unity in surface terms.

Reviews : French Studies Mortal Politics in Eighteenth-Century France. By George Armstrong Kelly. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: University of Waterloo Press, 1986. xxiii + 334 pp

Man, born to die, may well be as water spilt on the ground which cannot be gathered up again (2 Samuel, 14:14), but the dampness left by the eighteenth-century dead still shows up strongly enough on the historian’s humidity meter to nourish the current crop of death studies. In the wake of Chaunu, Aries, Vovelle, Favre, Cobb, McManners et al., Mortal Politics ploughs an interesting furrow without ever seeming like a book which has had to seek out soil left unturned by others. Professor Kelly’s concern is not with the microhistory of dying but with the changing content of the public, official idea of death from the age of Louis xiv to the Revolutionary Terror. Man was mortal but society, in the person of the deathless King, was immortal. The beheading of Louis cm was therefore a highly symbolic moment which had been prepared by the erosion of the traditional forms of permanence and the gradual shift from monarchy to Nation: absolutism was finally perceived to have been merely one of the possible forms of governance. The case is argued by reference to

Reviews : Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy. By James Miller. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984. 272 pp.

How democratic is Rousseau’s political thought? Textually, he often seems pessimistic: democracy is for gods. Yet historically he has presided over its apotheosis. This excellent book examines both the texts and the legends, and ends with a view of Rousseau as a founding father whose dreams were more powerful than his arguments. His political thought is a &dquo;reverie&dquo;, an agrarian, patriarchal &dquo;Alpine fantasia&dquo;. Had he left it at that, he could be safely classed as a utopian or an admirer of the bourgeois &dquo;petite republique&dquo;. But he insisted on setting his vision of a just society of good-hearted men in what he proclaimed to be a living model of a democratic society: Geneva. The Genevan establishment was in fact oligarchical and was much embarrassed by his persistent attempts to make it fit his compulsive view of it. Dr Miller plays down the psychological background to Rousseau’s Geneva fixation which can appear like a return to the womb, and could perhaps have made more of the sense of loss which dominates his thought. But the Contrat social is interestingly analysed as enigmatic &dquo;by design&dquo;: fear of the censor and of the Genevan government led him to express in general terms a specific encouragement to the democratic party in Geneva which had for years been calling for a truly sovereign General Council. Rousseau’s aim was thus at once immediate and open-ended. In addition to giving a practical lead, it offered an &dquo;idea of freedom within an ennobling social order&dquo;. With the Lettres de la Montagne, this democratic principle became &dquo;a self-conscious myth&dquo;. The problem for those who read him was that while in the Contrat social

24.50

comparison of the relevant texts suggests strongly that Racine merely took his cues from D’Aubignac in his self-interested strictures on Cornelian complexity. A valuable chapter entitled &dquo;Peripety and Discovery&dquo; improves considerably on Scherer’s insights in this domain, showing how Aristotle’s notion of material discovery is transformed by Racine into a more subtly tragic form of psychological discovery; this is followed by a chapter mainly on rhetoric, which challenges Jacques Morel’s contention that &dquo;trial scenes&dquo; of various kinds abound in Corneille but are virtually absent from Racine. The final chapter, on &dquo;Tragic Quality&dquo;, is characteristically circumspect, with its scholarly refusal to impose &dquo;anachronistic concepts&dquo; on either dramatist. Barnwell stresses the contrast between Corneille’s &dquo;linear&dquo; and Racine’s

Reviews : French Writers and their Society. By Haydn Mason. London: Macmillan, 1982. vi + 261 pp. £20.00:

How did the eighteenth-century consumer, to use Dr Hobson’s inelegant word, apprehend art? This densely-written and stimulating book is not a survey of enlightenment aesthetics nor even a history of the perception of art but a remarkable attempt &dquo;to describe a historical change in the way of conceá’l1lg man’s perception of art&dquo;. Was the paint surface transparent, allowing direct access to the matter of a picture? Or was it a mediation between art and life, consciously devised to &dquo;ravish&dquo; the conniving observer? If disbelief was willingly suspended in the theatre, was it because the actors had ceased to exist, submerged in their roles, or was it because the spectacle was a tolerated

Reviews : The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-century France. By Marian Hobson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 397 pp. £25.00

matters affecting the poor slavery, for instance, or prostitution the case for mass education was made by minor writers moved by largely charitable impulses. Philosophic enlightenment was for the elect, the rest of humanity being good enough to put meat on the thinking man’s table but not good enough to have a share in the swirl of ideas. When the philosophes said democracy, they meant acquiring a share of aristocratic power but were careful not to pass any of it on to their inferiors on the not always tacit assumption that the well-being of society depends on a labour force existing on or below the bread line. As Harvey Chisick acutely points out, modern developed nations still take this view which is a legacy from what we like to think of the liberal Enlightenment tradition. In theory, it was quite straightforward. Ignorance was denounced as a great evil and Locke’s sensualist psychology made perfectibility-through-education a reasonable proposition. But denouncing ignorance did not lead to calls for