George Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France by DorindaoutramReview by: Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 122-123Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1867289 .

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122 Reviews of Books

cade" of legislation and regulations, French second- ary education was essentially what it had been at the end of the Old Regime (p. 249).

Criticisms of the book could include the follow- ing: it ends abruptly in 1850 and on an unnecessar- ily negative comment about the inability of the French to plan for the future; it lacks a preface or introduction and an index; it does not mention any of the important scholarship outside France done on French education; footnotes, often relatively general in nature, are kept to an absolute minimum; and, finally, the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in the minutia of education bills, ordinances, and laws without some reminder of how these details altered matters in a land where the regula- tions on education were many and frequently changing. But these are all relatively minor prob- lems in a book that will be invaluable both for those seeking a basic understanding of French secondary education during the period and for scholars wish- ing to pursue specific points.

SANDRA HORVATH-PETERSON

Georgetown University

DORINDA OUTRAM. Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionarwy France. Dover, N.H.: Manchester University Press. 1984. Pp. viii, 299. $32.50.

In this important and stimulating book Dorinda Outram sets out to correct and enlarge the historical perception of the scientific and political career of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a man whose achieve- ment of scientific and political power was unparal- leled among French naturalists of his day. 'I'he author's professed goals are to study "how science and the social-political world interacted" and "the process by which men of learning, among them scientists, became part of the new French governing class which emerged from the Revolutionary pe- riod" (p. 2). Underlying these concerns is a more general concern with the exchanges of power in the public realm of postrevolutionary France.

A variety of myths have inevitably surrounded Cuvier, and Outram takes pains to dispel them. She shows, for example, that Cuvier's scientific and political power did not go unchallenged in his day, that his politics were not conservative (at least not for France in the periods of the empire and the Restoration), and that his geology and antitransform- ist biology were not shaped by a biblical literalism. Outram's introductory chapters on Cuvier's youth and his experiences at the Academy of Stuttgart shed light on Cuvier's complex personality and the scientific ideology he developed. She then proceeds to provide a valuable analysis of how scientific and political patronage overlapped in Cuvier's day-

together with important insights on the conflicts between the two. The author maintains that histori- ans have concentrated too much on scientific insti- tutions in this period and too little on the impor- tance of personal power. Her discussion of the working of patronage within the confines of the Museum d'Histoire naturelle in Paris is an excellent contribution to the broader subject.

Outram reveals many of the problems and con- tradictions of Cuvier's career as he sought at one and the same time to capitalize on public interest in science while keeping science from becoming too embroiled in the public arena. Perhaps inevitably, however, the complexities of the author's subject and her polemical posture in the presentation have resulted in certain imbalances in her analysis. For example, while she recognizes that the poor recep- tion of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's transformist views cannot be ascribed solely to Cuvier's hostility to them, she unnecessarily exaggerates Cuvier's open- ness in his dealing with Lamarck. She suggests that Cuvier refrained from using his power at the Institut de France to silence his older colleague, but this overlooks the fact that Lamarck ceased present- ing papers at the institute before Cuvier became perpetual secretary there. Similarly, while making the very important contribution of showing that Cuvier's power was limited and subject to challenge, Outram provides the reader with too little sense of how substantial Cuvier's influence nonetheless was. A footnote provides a glimpse of A. P. de Candolle repressing some of his own views so as not to alienate Cuvier at the time Candolle was seeking election to the institute. But the reader will not gain a sufficient sense of the extent to which aspiring naturalists of the time found it necessary to pay homage to Cuvier, as for example when Pierre- Andre Latreille and P. S. Meyranx hastened to assure Cuvier of their allegiance to him after finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of appear- ing to have given scientific support to Cuvier's rival, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Outram did not intend this book to be an exam- ination of Cuvier's ideas in and of themselves. Be that as it may, her command of Cuvier's scientific ideas is not as reliable as it should be (she misidenti- fies, for example, the four embranchements that were the centerpiece of Cuvier's classificatory system and of his rejection of the idea of unity of plan). She provides a much enlarged view of Cuvier's charac- ter, aspirations, and political acumen, but she is less successful in evaluating the extent to which the content and quality of Cuvier's scientific ideas and the power he achieved were interrelated. In short, the gap between the cognitive and the sociopolitical dimensions of Cuvier's activities as a scientist still needs some historical bridging. Nonetheless, the author has made a major contribution to under-

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Modern Europe 123

standing one of the key scientific figures of the early nineteenth century. She has also, in the process, called attention to a host of important issues regard- ing the cultivation and the culture of science in this period. This is a stimulating book, one that is bound to inspire more good work in the area.

RICHARD W. BURKHARDT, JR.

University of Illinois

GERALD L. GEISON, editor. Professions and the French State, 1700-1900. Philadelphia: University of Penn- sylvania Press. 1984. Pp. x, 319. $35.00.

Anglo-American scholarship has recently discov- ered the history of professions as a topic and has produced a spate of works on the professionaliza- tion of various fields. One aspect of this process that has largely been neglected is the relationship of professionalization to the state. The present work, a selection of five papers originally read at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center between 1978 and 1980, ex- amines this aspect in the case of France, where it is inescapable. The title promises more than the book delivers, however; no attention is paid to professions other than engineering, medicine, and academic science, and only one essay is seriously concerned with events before 1800.

For John H. Weiss, French engineers in the first half of the nineteenth century provide a test case for explaining the stability of social patterns of stratifi- cation. He asks how the state's certified engineering elite, products of the grandes ecoles, defended their privileged positions against challenges from civil engineers in private employ, trained at the Ecole centrale des arts et metiers, and from the subordi- nate engineering assistants or conducteurs. His an- swer, in brief, is that the elite's defense was based on the baccalaureat, with its required classical education. Weiss admits, however, after much elucidation of this screening device disguised as an examination, that even in the 1 840s the majority of those entering the Ecole polytechnique had not even completed their lycee studies. In all likelihood, the more pow- erful barrier protecting the status of engineers was the corps structure characteristic of the French administration, not the baccalaureat-es-lettres alone.

Robert Fox contributes an elegant study of the scientists in the faculties of science in the nineteenth century. After the 1830s, he shows, the age of the scientist as notable, with personal patronage, was over. The Ministry of Public Instruction came to control scientists increasingly, turning them into functionaries who administered examinations and lectured to dilettantes. After 1870, scientists who had chafed under these conditions demanded more freedom for research and founded learned socie- ties. Ironically, though, when in 1885 and 1896 they

got the reforms they wanted, they found that the industrialists and local politicians who now sup- ported the faculties were merely new patrons to serve.

Toby Gelfand provides a glance at the profession of barber-surgeons in the late eighteenth century, showing in a narrowly drawn study the dependence of that premodern medical profession on the form and culture of the Old Regime state. Modern gen- eral practitioners did not evolve out of the prerev- olutionary barber-surgeons thanks to the growth of medical knowledge; rather, a radical discontinuity in the history of the medical profession-a Kuhnian paradigm shift-followed the revolution in the state.

Jan Goldstein traces the history of an amorphous idea, "moral contagion," from its eighteenth-century roots into the nineteenth century. This medical theory, that convulsions or hysteria were transmit- ted from one person to another like the common cold, arose, she holds, from certain pattern-stories in the Old Regime; it developed, however, as a func- tion of the professional ambitions of an emergent group of physicians whom one might style alienists or "proto-psychiatrists," who tried to legitimize their discipline by attaching it to state functions and authority. Though an engaging story, this is the weakest article here, strung on a chain of isolated and scattered quotations and events too weak to support it.

The most ambitious contribution is a comparative analysis by Matthew Ramsey of the development of the legal monopoly over the practice of medicine in France and several other countries. It might seem that the advances of medicine in the nineteenth century associated withJoseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch would have led to the passage of such laws. But Ramsey shows with abundant evi- dence that this was simply not the case. Rather, the state and the political culture of a given country were decisive in this development. France's absolute state monopoly preceded Pasteur and Koch by two generations, while in Germany and Great Britain a "free-field" medical system remained long after those advances in medical practice. On reflection, this seems eminently reasonable since the matter of a legal monopoly is as much the history of law as the history of the medical profession.

This well-edited volume has a uniformity of or- ganization and style, as well as a good introduction by Gerald L. Geison. It is to be hoped that a similar volume might explore the professions excluded from this one, such as the legal and judicial occupa- tions and teaching, all of which are obviously and intimately linked to the state.

THOMAS R. OSBORNE

University of North Alabama

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