Venice: A Maritime Republic by Frederic C. LaneReview by: Lauro MartinesThe American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Dec., 1974), pp. 1582-1583Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1851851 .

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1582 Reviews of Books

offing, however, and it will be the subject of an- other volume.

EARL ZIEMKE

University of Georgia

FRANqOIS JEQUIER. Une entreprise horlogere du Val-de-Travers: Fleurier Watch Co SA. De l'ate- lier familial du XIXe aux concentrations du XXO siecle. (Le pass6 present: Iktudes et docu- ments d'histoire.) NeuchAtel: La Baconni&re. 1972. Pp 406. 30 fr. S.

The Jequiers, like many other inhabitants of the valleys of the Jura mountains in western Switzerland, began to supplement their meager farming income by "handicrafting" watches back in the early nineteenth century. Like many other families they soon earned their livelihood from this trade, but unlike most they succeeded in growing with the industry and maintaining their family enterprise through good and bad times.

FranSois Jequier belongs himself to the sixth generation of Jequiers who were engaged in the making of watches. He had access to com- pany and family papers ordinarily closed to the researcher and used this opportunity on the whole to good advantage, covering his story in six long chapters with a prodigious scholarly ap- paratus of footnotes, appendixes, a detailed bib- liography, and indexes.

Watch making was well suited for small scale work, individual initiative, and the family en- terprise. Several members of the Jequier family had their own ateliers, which they directed with Protestant frugalit), hard work, and con- siderable business acumen. "Every man his own master" was the motto through most of the nineteenth century, and competition even among brothers and in-laws was the order rather than the exception. "These men carried the conviction that their duty consisted in in- creasing their capital, their desire to make money was equaled only by their reluctance to spend it." Realizing that ferocious competition was hurtful to all, they began to make accords among themselves that culminated in the fusion of the two principal family groups into the Fleurier Watch Co. in 1915. The fusion made the Jequier enterprise the most important watch manufacturer in the Val-de-Travers, even though on a Swiss scale it never grew beyond a small to middling outfit.

Due to the character of the company and the sources used by the author most of the book is taken up by detailed accounts of the financial ups and downs of the family and their business. Annual reports are quoted at length and too often the story is little more than a running commentary on factual data supplied. Very little is said, for example, about the employees, pre- sumably because they are only rarely mentioned in the annual reports. Working hours were long, salaries low, organization slow to come. The first response to every crisis was to lay off workers, apparently without ever creating any adverse repercussions. Post-World War II pros- perity, however, led to a rapid change in the paternalistic relationship between workers and employers, as the growing shortage of labor forced the family to make more and more con- cessions in order to attract young people into their enterprise.

Jequier's book is a pioneering study into a hitherto well protected, secretive corner of Swiss business life. What emerges is a picture of frugal, dedicated people who through genera- tions built up a business that weathered bad times and grew increasingly prosperous. Basi- cally conservative, these people nevertheless were able to adjust to the changing times and managed to maintain themselves in enviable positions.

HEINZ K. MEIER

Old Dominion University

FREDERIC C. LANE. Venice: A Maritime Repub- lic. Baltimore: Tohns Hopkins University Press. 1973. Pp. xi, 505. Cloth $17.50, paper $6.95.

We are offered the best one-volume history of Venice in any language. Representing in some respects a lifetime of work this book carries the marks of a personal statement, above all, in its new and thoroughly pondered appreciation of the sea in the fortunes of Venetian history. But it is presented in a cool, plain-speaking man- ner and has none of the impressionism or self- indulgence of the volume by P. Braunstein and R. Delort, Venise: portrait historique d'un cite'

(1971). Professor Lane outlines the history of Venice

from its origins among simple fishing folk to its current industrial problems and rate of sink- age. The overriding interest and glory go to the

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Modern Europe 1583

medieval and Renaissance periods. The Middle Ages, to the end of the fourteenth century, get about 200 pages; the next two centuries get an- other 200; and most of the remaining text (some 70 pages) is devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians of the early modern period may regret the brevity of the third part, but in the treasure hoard of Venetian history the lion's share belongs to the period from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. The city made and spent itself then. Music aside, eighteenth-century Venice was a theatrical and painterly lark: not the most challenging game for our heavy methodological artillery.

The author is selective in the best sense: "I have put nautical affairs in the center of my story . . . because I believe they were important in determining Venetian social structure and the city's fortunes" (p. v). He details the effects of ships, rivers, and trade in the long arc of the Venetian economy. So doing, he is also able to trace the history of a ruling class, as its mem- bers grappled their way out of the lagoons to become pirates, long-distance merchants, ship- ping magnates, and empire builders. Their energies and organizing abilities, like those of the Genoese, were astounding. At first supple and open to the entry of rich new men, the ruling class grew increasingly exclusive after 1300 and became a caste well before the end of the century. The fifteenth century brought an apparent balance between the city's over- seas interests and its aggressive expansion into the Italian mainland. In the course of the sixteenth century the old ruling caste aban- doned the sea, retreated from maritime trade, and became a landowning, stay-at-home patri- ciate. Henceforth noblemen lived off rents, agricultural produce, money-lending, the spoils of office, and investments in the public debt. It is an old story but it has yet to be retailed as a transformation in sensibility: a transfor- mation in social and economic attitudes first, then also in moral, artistic, literary, and in- tellectual values. Between about 1470 and 1515 the upper-class mind of Venice suffered the im- pact of momentous political and economic trials, the consequences of which were incalcul- able for Venetial culture. In striving to under- stand the realignments of the early sixteenth century certain Venetians adduced the putative

effects of sinful luxury, but most noblemen, if they could afford it at all, gave themselves to opulence-the high, frenzied mark of caste. Although Professor Lane does not study the intersections between cultural and social trains in Venetian experience his particular emphases served to help us understand the new currents surging through Venetian manners and pur- views around 1500.

As a field for historical study Venice has always recruited detractors or partisans of the mito di Venezia-the myth of Venice's stability, concord, and political sagacity. Venetian his- tory brings ideologies out into the open. Profes- sor Lane does not stand with the detractors. This would require a New or Old Left his- torian with a more polemical view of oligarchy. Paradoxically, however, contributions to the myth of Venice can be more on target than historical debunking of the sort that takes one improbability for granted: namely, that ruling classes can at any time be more enlightened or more generous than they are in fact.

LAURO MARTINES

University of California, Los Angeles

ERIC COCHRANE. Florence in the Forgotten Cen- turies, I527-I800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1973. Pp. XiV, 593. $12-50.

Eric Cochrane has organized his history of Florence around portraits of six men who represent successive generations of Florentines from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century-Cosimo I, Scipione Ammirato, Galileo Galilei, Lorenzo Magalotti, Giovanni Lami, Francesco Maria Gianni. He tries to place each in his full historical context, and in that process of rounding his portraits out he touches on social and economic condi- tions, politics, art, music, and other aspects of their respective ages, and at the same time establishes the linkages between the portraits that give the book its continuity and the justi- fication for its title as a history of Florence. The book is addressed to the "educated layman," and the author assumes that scholars will want only to consult, not to read it. That condition precludes a fair treatment in the hands of a re-

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