France, 1848-1945 by Theodore ZeldinReview by: Robert A. NyeThe American Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 3 (Jun., 1978), pp. 738-739Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1861917 .

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738 Reviews of Books

ity that must distinguish a historian is understand- ing of human affairs. Albrecht-Carrie displays this requisite in his biographical essay.

MARY LAURANNE LIFKA

Mundelein College

THEODORE ZELDIN. France, I848-i945. Volume 2,

Intellect, Taste and Anxiety. (Oxford History of Mod- ern Europe.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1977. Pp. 1,202. $29.95.

The book under review is the second volume of Theodore Zeldin's study of modern France for the Oxford History of Modern Europe. In the first massive volume Ambition, Love and Politics (1973),

Zeldin analyzed the varieties of bourgeois career- ism, the unifying emotional effects of middle-class marriage and family life, and the colorful spectrum of political expressions in the Second Empire and Third Republic. In the present even more massive volume he plunges into investigation of the mental culture, the tastes, and the anxieties of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen living between 1848 and 1945.

It is Zeldin's belief that the historian stands to gain greater insight into France by studying the forces and attitudes that united the French rather than the "usual" exploration of the issues that divided them. An approach as purportedly uncon- ventional as this requires appropriately uncon- ventional investigative methods, and, as Zeldin fi- nally describes them in his conclusion, these are more artistic than historical. Thus he is engaged in "a kind of pointillisme" and a cubistic "portrait of the individual simultaneously from several differ- ent sides, as though I were painting not just the obvious face, but the back of the head also, and the features rearranged so that they may all be seen at once." He contrasts this method of "juxtaposi- tion" with that of causal analysis which he has forsworn here, since "to talk of causes means to talk of proof and it is difficult to prove motives, character or interpretations" (p. 1,157). His dis- taste for traditional techniques extends even to the "tyranny" of chronology. Accordingly, there is no provision for development within each of the book's major sections; descriptions of attitudes or behav- iors must often do equal service for both the I850s and the 1940s. As if to underline the book's anti- chronological bias Zeldin regularly cites the re- sults of sondages taken in the 1950S and I960s as insights into nineteenth-century opinion. The book's strengths and weaknesses more or less flow from these methodological crotchets, though Zel- din breaks his own rules often enough to allow his readers an occasional glimpse of the forest through his brilliantly rendered three-dimensional trees.

Far and away the most effective sections of the book are the chapters on the culture of education. Zeldin presents "educationism" as the intellectual elite's alternative ethic to "industrialism," a mode of self-assertion and self-validation which allowed this caste to tyrannize over the national literature and language in a way possibly unique to Western Europe. In a more systematic manner than else- where in the book, Zeldin extends his analysis to educational structures themselves, to the texts they used, the examinations they gave, and the corpo- rate mentalities of their faculties and their stu- dents. Despite their different political labels, the educated classes had more in common with one another by virtue of a certain cognitive style than with other Frenchmen. It was this preoccupation with the forms and modes of expression, he argues, that was at once the greatest glory of French cul- ture and the best explanation for its lamentable failures in the realm of material culture.

In the matter of general culture Zeldin explores the changing fortunes of taste in fashion and the arts, humor, popular literature, the press, applied technology, and eating and drinking. Throughout these sections, however, Zeldin advances the doubtful notion that variations in taste are gener- ally unrelated to changes in social or economic structures or to any new or demonstrable needs. He prefers to argue that taste follows its own inter- nal laws of development and is propagated me- chanically from social superiors to social inferiors. Elsewhere Zeldin explores the abundant medical literature of the day for clues about the fears and emotional problems of contemporaries, and exam- ines the colonial, military, and criminal classes for insights into the relationship of authority struc- tures and violence. His conclusions here are decid- edly superficial, however; he says only that Frenchmen in hierarchical structures suffered a certain "mutual incomprehension" (p. 947).

Apart from some marvelously deft character- izations and a surpassingly clear style, Zeldin's history of the individual and his attitudes is not much more than a history of some celebrated per- sonages whose attitudes are unlikely to have been typical of others. The lives of these individuals are presented throughout the book in long strings of mini-biographies and anecdotes summarized from secondary sources. Such unanalytical exercises ul- timately explain little about the relations of mate- rial structures and their cultural expressions. If we are to understand the individuals who inhabit these structures as anything more than elaborate reflexes, we must see them shaping their culture in response to problems they face in some real world. The central shortcoming of this vast synthesis is not merely a failure to satisfy the historical special-

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Modern Europe 739

ist, which it shares with all other syntheses, but the unfortunate effect of a clear choice to write history without causes.

ROBERT A. NYE

University of Oklahoma

FELIX-PAUL CODACCIONI. De I inegalite sociale dans une grande ville industrielle: Le drame de Lille de I850 a 19I4. Lille: Universite de Lille III. 1976. Pp. vi, 444. 50 fr.

This contribution to the social history of industrial society is an abridged version of a doctoral thesis presented at the University of Lille in I971. Using the archives de l'enregistrement of Lille, the author has constructed cross-sectional views of the city's wealth, as reflected in the wills of its citizens, during four periods of time: i856-58, I873-75, I891-93, and I908-IO. His aggregate data show that in the half-century during which Lille became one of Europe's great industrial centers the upper classes (les classes dirigentes) accounted for 8.94 per- cent of the deaths and 90.6 percent of the inherited wealth; for the middle classes (les classes moyennes) the percentages are 28.34 and 9.07, and for the mass of lilloises (les classes populaires) the percent- ages are 62.69 and o.26 respectively.

The "drama" which gives the book its subtitle concerns fluctuations in the ratio of wealth be- tween rich and poor. In the middle of the nine- teenth century the mean value of the estate of a deceased industriel of Lille was 758,862 francs and that of a worker was 78 francs (a ratio of 9,728 to one); shortly after the fall of the Second Empire the mean values were 1,248,875 and 6i (a ratio of 20,473 to one); in the Belle Ipoque they were 1,396,823 and 68 (a ratio of 20,541 to one); and on the eve of the Great War they were 2,023,443 and 207 (a ratio of 9,775 to one). These figures are staggering! While supporting the familiar con- tention that the condition of France's working class improved in the decade or so before I914, they also suggest the degree to which vast social inequality had become part of its daily life and death (a structure which, not incidentally, persists to this day).

Specialists in the use of quantitative methods will appreciate how Codaccioni has refined and expanded the research techniques introduced by his mentor, Adeline Daumard, in her work on the Parisian bourgeoisie, and also the fact that he has extended the project of codification socio-professionnel into the twentieth century. Furthermore, he is more sensitive than many others have been to the human context of social structure, which might remain invisible if one depended on numbers

alone. For example: a ninety-two-year-old widow dies in i9 I0, leaving only I 20 francs worth of prop- erty behind her. Should she be classified as belong- ing to the lowest ranks of the working class? No, as a proprietaire because she lived with her son, a physician with an office on the wealthy rue Royale.

Having ably established the dimensions of social inequality in Lille, however, Codaccioni does not tell us enough about the implications of his find- ings. I was disappointed by the chapter on the election of Paul Lafargue to the Chamber of Depu- ties in I89i, intended as an essai d'etude territoriale, and think that the author missed an important opportunity by offering only fleeting comparisons between patterns of worker residency and labor militancy in Lille and other French cities. The failure to address large historical questions, if only indirectly, means that Codaccioni's work has less value for American historians of Europe than do the recent theses of Maurice Garden and Michelle Perrot.

ROBERT J. BEZUCHA

Amherst College

MARTIN BLUMENSON. The Vilde Affair: Beginnings of the French Resistance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. I977. Pp. 287. $IO.OO.

In this work on the "beginnings of the French Resistance, " Martin Blumenson tells the story of a small group of French patriots, men and women, who, from the earliest days of the occupation in I 940, undertook to resist the Germans. Their leader was Boris Vilde, a linguist at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris, and under his direction, accord- ing to the author, a far-flung network of resistance developed in France even before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. Based on the Musee de l'Homme, the group engaged in a variety of activi- ties: aiding allied soldiers to escape to England, gathering intelligence for the British and De Gaulle, distributing tracts against the Germans and Vichy, and, briefly, publishing a newspaper called Resistance.

Apparently betrayed by one of their number, most of the group's members were rounded up by the Germans early in 194I and were later tried and condemned, most of them, to prison or to death. Vilde and seven others were executed early in 1942,

but not before they and their comrades had "helped to bring France from the stupor of defeat, the panic of the exodus, the disillusionment of the German conquest, the paralysis of the national will to a reawakening of morality and dignity and hope. "

In preparing his book, Blumenson had access to

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