Georges Dupeux

Reviews : John M. Merriman, The Margins of City Life; Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991; xi + 318 pp.; US

aux probl~mes de ravitaillement y ont d6velopp6, plus qu’~ Caen, les antagonismes entre riches et pauvres. Enfin, les divisions internes £ la bourgeoisie ont permis celles-cl de jouer un r6le politique par le biais de la societe populaire. On le voit, Paul Hanson accorde aux structures dconomiques et sociales de chacune des villes 6tudides une place importante. Plus que la defense d’une id6ologle politique, la r6volte f6ddraliste ou le rattachement ~ la Convention montagnarde ont ete celle des int6r~ts rdgionaux et ont

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to lobby for an expansion of the local sénéchaussée court: and to prevent the expanded body sitting in the neighbouring, and rival, town of Dax.) The aggregate of these pressures was indeed the construction, or expansion, of the state. But the structure of politics which made the state possible remains decidedly murky. Finally, le m6c6nat. Knecht’s publishers tell us that Francis ’presided over’ the Renaissance in France. This uncomfortable expression hardly does justice to the range and sensitivity of the author’s investigations into royal patronage of the arts. Jacquart’s s

Reviews : C. James Haug, Leisure and Urbanism in nineteenth-century Nice, Lawrence, The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982. xviii + 167pp

This is a book which French historians will welcome with warmth and fellowfeeling, since it is a high quality contribution by American histonans to the development of urban history in France a field often held to be unduly neglected in contemporary French historiography. The aim of the book is to ’gauge and understand the impact of the process of urbanization on the political hfe of the nation’, or in other words to illustrate ’the interaction between urban development and politics’. In the introduction, J. Merriman presents what he calls a mise en scène, the purpose of which is to outline the specific characteristics of French urbanization. He shows very clearly that the rhythm of urbanization in France was much slower than that in England or Germany, and that this was because France had by comparison too few really major cities. There were two reasons for this deficiency: firstly (and

Reviews : John M. Merriman, ed., French Cities in the Nineteenth Century, London, Hutchinson, 1982. 304pp. £17.50

RENCH sociologists have an advantage over their British colleagues 8 in disposing of a rich documentation on all that has to do with elections. On the other hand, their task is made extremely arduous by the extraordinary complexity of French political life, and by the existence of numerous political parties and groups (whether represented or not in the Chamber of Deputies). Out of this emerge some of the specific traits of sociological research as it is conducted in France. This abundant documentation is bound up with legislation. Electoral manceuvres have their place within the framework of the smallest administrative unit, the commune; and when even this framework is found too large, it can be broken up into yet smaller units. In urban communes, for example, in order to assure the rapidity of electoral operations, the communal territory is split up into sections de vote to which the electors are assigned. From the closing of the scrutiny, the counting of the votes begins, and the results are entered at an official report. These are then sent to the principal places in the electoral districts, svhere the general counting of the votes takes place and a new report is drawn up containing all the results for the district. After this the election of the candidates svho han e obtained the requisite legal majority is announced. These reports therefore constitute the essential foundation for all studies in electoral sociology. From them is knoxvn Nrith precision the number of votes obtained for each candidate in each commune or section de vote in France. As in addition the commune is not only an electoral district, but also an administrative one, statistics of all kinds (enumeration of population, occupational census, agricultural production, prices and salary enquiries, etc.) can be established. Electoral data can easily be compared with economic, occupational and social information. The sociologist thus sees his job made easy by this coincidence of districts and is naturally tempted to adopt the frame of reference thus given to him, choosing either, in an extreme case, a single commune or the group of communes which make up the administrative temtory 328