France in Modern Times: 1760 to the Present by Gordon WrightReview by: John BowditchThe Journal of Modern History, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Dec., 1961), pp. 441-442Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877242 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 441

ences to her own works. There is no acknowl- edgmnent of the many other modern works on the treasury or its dependent boards or their personnel, except a single footnote referring to Arthur H. Basye's The lords commissioners of trade and plantations (New Haven, 1925). Miss Clark would never permit her students to use such a system. Why should we be less strict? There are very few errors of detail. The treasury machine, as I have pointed out elsewhere, came to maturity not in the eight- eenth century but in 1675. Miss Clark seems to feel that the office and its personnel were all born in 1688. Thus: "William Lowndes, originally appointed by William III, was one of the most distinguished secretaries in the history of the office" (p. 7). He entered the treasury under Charles II; and the secretary's place, as it happens, was not in the gift of the crown in his day. These are minor flaws, but Miss Clark's thesis and her annotation just will not do.

STEPHEN B. BAXTER University of North Carolina

FRANCE IN MODERN TIMES: 1760 TO THE PRESENT. By Gordon Wright. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1960. Pp. xiii+621. Fortunately there is no stopping the flow

of good books about modern France. The effort to unsnarl the tangled threads of French political life, to throw light on the inner structure of a highly sophisticated so- ciety and culture, to explain, if you will, the decline in prestige of what was once a great European and world power, has provided a continuing fascination to historians and jour- nalists alike. One need only mention Herbert Leuthy, Denis Brogan, and Albert Gu6rard, three of the most recent of those who have attempted general works of synthesis and in- terpretation, to underline the point that the subject, in addition to its perennial appeal, has attracted a galaxy of distinguished writers. Of Gordon Wright's qualifications to join such company there is no question; the problem he faced, I would gather, was how to offer a fresh approach to a familiar and well-worked subject. In that endeavor he has achieved a large measure of success. If he has not written the kind of book that will supplant those now in print or discourage others from making new attempts, his study has the considerable virtue of being radically

different in structure and content from those of his predecessors.

The most unusual feature of the book, and one that will win the plaudits of any graduate student, is the inclusion of a series of bibliographical essays following each of the four sections-1760-1814, 1814-70, 1870- 1919, and 1919-60-into which the book is divided. In the first of these essays, where most of the attention is focused on the litera- ture of the Great Revolution, he makes a concerted effort to classify titles according to the ideological position of their authors, and one gets the impression throughout this first section that he had hoped to apply the same technique within the substantive chapters as well. In the three succeeding bibliographical essays, covering the literature of the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries, however, he admits that such a schematic classification tends to break down. In these essays what he can do, and he does it well, is to provide the reader with an introduction to the better- known general works and a critical review of the more important monographic literature, particularly of the books that have come out in the last decade. It is gratifying to note in this connection that an increasing percentage of the significant monographs are by Ameri- can historians.

The second novelty of the book lies in the emphasis placed on raising questions of in- terpretation. With virtually every personality or topic brought up for discussion the reader is confronted with a series of questions and hypotheses, some the creation of the author, others suggested by the research and findings of other specialists. As a consequence, the book provides an excellent survey of the present state of our knowledge about modern France and of the kinds of questions scholars, especially recent scholars, have been asking. Since this kind of question-posing technique is the one adopted in the classroom, or at least in the seminar, by most of those who work in academic surroundings, professors as well as graduate students will find much of what Wright has to say both stimulating and congenial fare, and the novelty of this aspect of the book lies less in the technique employed than in the extent to which it is carried.

The analytical approach, for all its ad- vantages and current popularity, has its limi- tations. Within each of his four major chron-

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442 BOOK REVIEWS

ological sections Wright devotes individual chapters to such topics as political events, social structure, economic developments, and intellectual and cultural trends. If it is not easy to avoid such morseling of the web of history, there are occasions when the inter- relationship of the many factors conditioning a particular event or development can easily be distorted or lost entirely. For instance, by tracing the course of political events for the period 1815-70 in one series of chapters and then following them with discussions of the impact of industrial change on nineteenth- century French economic, social, and intel- lectual life, the author finds himself in the anomalous position of trying to describe a social phenomenon of the magnitude of the revolution of 1848 in a necessarily restricted and purely political context. For some read- ers, too, the heavy emphasis on posing ques- tions, many of which are speculative or un- answerable, may lead to a sense of bewilder- ment. If the book has a thesis, it is not easily discernible; instead, it conveys the impres- sion of a kind of high-level eclecticism in which such a variety of interpretations are put forward that no one can be identified as belonging to the author or as being prefer- able to another.

If these last remarks suggest that Wright might have written a different kind of book, they are not meant in a critical spirit. Within the limits of what he set out to do, he ac- complished a great deal, and I expect his book to be used widely by those, like myself, who offer courses in the history of modern France.

JOHN BOWDITCH

University of Michigan

THE CALAS AFFAIR: PERSECUTION, TOLERA-

TION, AND HERESY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

TOULOUSE. By David D. Bien. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. Pp. x, 199. $4.00. This is a fresh and important interpreta-

tion of the case of the Protestant Jean Calas, whom the parlement of Toulouse put to death in 1762 for the murder, supposedly, of his son. The court had concluded that the son had become a convert to the Catholic religion, and that this was the motive for the murder. Voltaire's view, which ascribed the verdict of religious bigotry, to l'Infdme,

became the classic interpretation of the motive of the judges, at least with those who have held (as most have) that there was a gross miscarriage of justice. David D. Bien rejects Voltaire's thesis, as saying at once too little and too much. He agrees that religious prejudice was important, but not in the way Voltaire supposed. The prejudice had be- come, so to speak, secularized. Bien's study is a judicious, subtly reasoned, meticulously documented analysis of opinion and of mores as they provide the context for the case and affect its development. The book is based upon a mass of archival sources, together with many that were printed then or since, and these are supplemented by a great many secondary publications about the case, the town, and the institutions of the province.

The records of the Calas trial are especially valuable for a study of this nature about opinion because of the very large number of depositions from persons of the shop- keeper and artisan classes who would not otherwise have written down their thoughts. But anti-protestantism at Toulouse was not at all complicated by class hostilities such as would have had to be taken into account in a Protestant center like Montauban, for in- stance. Toulouse had few Protestants, per- haps 200 in a population of over 50,000. They were to be found at all levels of so- ciety below the aristocracy of the robe. They did not form a community apart but mingled with the Catholics. As for any derivation of anti-protestantism from Catholic feeling, the catholicism of Toulouse in 1762 had little bigotry about it, and indeed (for all the multitude of religious organizations and cele- brations) it was not devout as it would have been a generation or so earlier. On the score of Protestant dogma, the Toulousains were at this time pretty indifferent. Their anti- protestantism did not arise from religious differences but from the acceptance of a Protestant stereotype to which, at certain times, any individual Protestant stood in danger of being assimilated.

The Protestant stereotype was a fanatical man who because of his loyalty to a dogma would do violence against other men and against the laws. The unlettered believed that Calvin had sanctioned child murder for defection from the faith. The judges of the parlement did not so believe, but they shared the popular memory, hostile to protestantism,

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