histoire de l'exploitation d'un grand réseau: la compagnie du chemin de fer du nord,...

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Histoire de l'exploitation d'un grand réseau: La Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord, 1846- 1937 by François Caron Review by: Shepard B. Clough The American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Jun., 1975), pp. 653-654 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1854319 . Accessed: 25/06/2014 09:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:27:31 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Histoire de l'exploitation d'un grand réseau: La Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord, 1846-1937 by François CaronReview by: Shepard B. CloughThe American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Jun., 1975), pp. 653-654Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1854319 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 09:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:27:31 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Modern Europe 653

their friends. Jansen shows that Mazarin cleverly exploited Arnauld d'Andilly's concern for his fellow solitaires, for his brother Antoine, and for the future career of his son Simon (later to become marquis de Pomponne) to gather ma- terials with which to inflame the religious dis- pute-all to serve his political purposes. Even Antoine Arnauld's provocative Lettre . .. .a une personne de condition . . . and Seconde let- tre . . . a un duc et pair de France . . . were indirectly provoked by Mazarin. Throughout his correspondence with the court, Arnauld d'Andilly never seemed to lose his confidence in Mazarin because in his earnest, Christian pa- tience he never could suspect the Machiavellian intentions of the cardinal-minister.

Jansen thus supplements her earlier book, but she does not add a great deal of historical value. What she adds may upset her critics, for she amply provides more ammunition for an emotional defense of the purity of the friends of Port-Royal and a bitter condemnation of Mazarin and other practitioners of raison d'e'tat. Still, there is no little poignancy in an intimate viewing of the uneven match between the old-fashioned Arnauld d'Andilly and the worldly Mazarin. Perhaps what is deficient here in historical interest is compensated for by the material's human interest.

NORMAN RAVITCH

University of California, Riverside

AGNES ETHEL MACKAY. La Fontaine and His Friends: A Biography. New York: George Braziller. 1973. Pp. vii, 9-227. $8.95.

Biography as a genre has been for some time out of favor within the community of profes- sional historians, however great its enduring popularity among the general reading public. Significant studies such as Wilson's Diderot remind us how much can be accomplished within the form by a scholar of intellectual rigor and historical sensitivity, but, on the whole, the trend toward prosopography reflects the deeper theoretical and substantive interests of current historians. Agnes Ethel Mackay's latest biography will do nothing to lessen such tendencies.

La Fontaine and His Friends neither uses its main figure as a foil to the intellectual and cultural life of seventeenth-century France nor (its stated goal) makes us "alive to the climate and tendencies of the time," so that we might disengage what is unique and personal to the life, thought, and accomplishments of the poet.

Impressionistic, anecdotal, and ever credulous, the book is gossip at third hand. All the faults of the genre at its weakest are manifest. Events, feelings, and motives impossible to know or verify are presented as gospel. Character traits are seen as essential, constant, and forever reflected in extant paintings. Anachronism is unavoidable because mental states are assumed to be precursory in men of genius. Social anal- ysis is superficial and fifty years out of date.

Almost all of the historically interesting prob- lems upon which a rigorous life of La Fontaine might shed some light are ignored or treated cursorily and out of proper context: the nature of patronage and protection; the process of change in literary taste; the coexistence of piety and libertinage; the role of the Academie Fransaise; the quandary of the Protestant no- bility under Louis XIV; the perception of old age and illness in the early modern era. The book's most ambitious exercise, a chapter on the aged La Fontaine's conversion, is commonplace, a paraphrase of La Fontaine's hagiographers, effectively unrelated to the patterns of belief of the broader milieu. A brief but painful exercise in pure intellectual history, an attempt to demonstrate how the Fables support Gas- sendist versus Cartesian views of animal life, serves ultimately to launch a plea against cruelty to animals and, a fantastical under- taking, to link La Fontaine's views to those of the twentieth-century scientists Jean Rostand and Charles Noel-Martin.

In short, La Fontaine and His Friends will be of almost no utility to the historian or stu- dent of seventeenth-century culture. It pro- vides neither analysis nor insight, and we truly do deserve at least one or the other from the writers of biography.

ALAN CHARLES KORS

University of Pennsylvania

FRANCOIS CARON. Histoire de l'exploitation d'un grand re'seau: La Comnpagnie du Chemin de Fer du Nord, I846-I937. (]Ecole Pratique des Hautes E-tudes-Sorbonne. VI' Section: Sci- ences economiques et sociales, Centre de Re- cherches historiques. Industrie et artisanat, 7.) Paris: Mouton. 1973. Pp. 619. 78 fr.

Business history has not been highly developed in France, largely because of the extreme secrecy with which the French guard their business activities. In recent years this secrecy has abated somewhat, in part, because more and more businessmen have come to believe that the attitude of the public toward them would be more favorable if based on hard

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654 Reviews of Books

evidence rather than upon imaginary data and, in part, because with the nationalization of the railways, the large commercial banks, and at least one large manufacturing establishment (Renault), scholars can claim access to, records that are, in essence, public property. Economic historians like FranSois Crouzet, Maurice Levy- Leboyer, and Bertrand Gille have moved into this interesting field and have also steered many students to it. The work before us is a product of their endeavor.

The dissertation on the history of the Nord Railway by FranSois Caron is no-t easy read- ing, but it is a mine of information and a rich collection of insights. Fortunately the author provides a "general conclusion" of sixteen pages, which is a thumbnail sketch of his en- tire story. At the outset of this synthesis Caron states his central theme: "To write the history of a business is to write the history of costs. There is no true entrepreneur except the one who is able to modify them. The entire history of the Nord Railway is a progressive loss of control by the management of its costs." Some of this loss is attributed to. the necessity of borrowing large amounts of capital for con- struction or for the introduction of technical improvements; some arises from the fact that railways provide a service that, within broad limits, has to be maintained in good times and bad (it cannot be stored); some from arrangements with the state that infringed upon the company's freedom of action; some from the policies of trade unions that kept labor co-sts high and inflexible (they were some sixty-five per cent of the costs of running the road); and some from the development of a rigid bureaucracy within management. When French railways became nothing more than a public utility, nationalization was a logical outcome.

This story makes the book worthy of study, but one will find tucked in here and there a wealth of reflections about the role of railways in determining the location of industry; how small lines were a drag on the main lines; and how technical innovations created problems of financing and profit making. In brief, this book is an absolute must for the student of railway history and a quasi-must for students of French economic hiistory.

SI-IEPARD B. CLOUGH

Columbia University

MARCEL GILLET. Les charbonnages du nord de la France au XIX6 siecle. (ifcole Pratique des Hautes Etudes-Sorbonne. VI" Section: Sci-

ences economiques et sociales. Centre de Re- cherches Historiques. Industrie et artisanat, 8.) Paris: Mouton. 1973. Pp. 5o8. 84 fr.

The cover photograph on Marcel Gillet's book depicts a bronze sculpture of coal miners. It is a misleading choice of artwork, however, for the text within scarcely discusses the people who worked the mines. Although Gillet inter- viewed (in the late 1950s) some 117 men who had worked in the mines of Nord and Pas-de- Calais before 1914, his principal source has been the records of private companies. No less than eighteen mining firms gave him access to their papers, and consequently his study deals largely with questions of production, invest- ment and reinvestment, business structure, and the organization of the patronat. Gillet's story is one of increasing concentration and-toward the end-integration with the larger metallur- gical companies. In general, traditionalistic business practices predominated, and the prin- cipal mine owners were more concerned with growth than with development-with maximiz- ing profit by tried-and-true methods rather than experimenting with organizational innovations. They came to the idea of regional cartelization rather late-igoi-and while they recognized that cooperation might serve them well in the growing conflict with organized labor, indi- vidual firms still remained jealous of their independence. Throughout, they were com- mitted first of all to maintaining high prices rather than to increasing production, though by the early twentieth century the area's mines were also producing two-thirds of all France's coal.

It is perhaps appropriate to the subject that such generalizations must be extracted from the book by some strenuous digging. This study's primary value, and apparently Gillet's primary interest, resides in the mountains of data he has provided: there are twenty-five pages of excellent maps, forty-five pages of graphs, and forty-five different tables. It is very much history without any of the human juices in it and written largely-though not uncritically-from the company point of view. But for all of that, it is still an extremely useful source for specialists.

GEORGE FASEL

University of Misso-uri- Columbia

GUY LAPERRIERE. La "Separation" a Lyon (1904- I908): Ltude d'opinion publique. Preface by ANDRE LATREILLE. (Collection du Centre d'His- toire du Catholicisme, number 9.) Sherbrooke:

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