Enfilade

Excerpts of recent reviews featured at the H-France website:

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H-France Review Vol. 10 (March 2010), No. 49

Raymonde Monnier, ed., À Paris sous la Révolution. Nouvelles approches de la ville. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2008. 221 pp. Notes. €25.00 (pb) ISBN 978-2-85944-596-6.

Review by Sydney Watts, University of Richmond.

Quoi de neuf sur la Révolution? Raymonde Monnier’s latest publication on Paris during the French Revolution stands out as a valuable collection of fresh ideas and illuminating scholarship, the ongoing work of a number of both young and well established historians from France and abroad. This plentiful compilation of groundbreaking research, taken from conference proceedings held at the Hôtel de Ville in October 2005, reveals the vitality of historical scholarship on this topic over the past two decades. Certainly, one would think after the flurry of publications following the bicentennial of 1789 that the subject of revolutionary Paris has been exhausted. Not so. In fact, the seventeen contributors to this collection open more historical terrain to the interested scholar than they close off.  While each essay is kept brief, close to its conference paper format, many of them point to burgeoning fields of study. These historians have left behind ideological debates to focus on new topics, original historical problems, and open-ended discussion.

The questions around which the conference focused point to the place of Paris under the Revolution, its role as a site of acculturation that transformed its citizens as much as the city was transformed by its citizens. These scholars look to Paris as the center of revolutionary activity, keeping in mind the historical change in material conditions, social life and economic activity. Many of them contend with the fact that Paris was a growing metropolis with its own urban problems that were further challenged under the revolution.  Other participants focus on the political culture that permeated urban life in ways that to a greater or lesser degree demonstrate what Parisians made of this revolutionary world. In turning to clearly delineated objects of study located in Paris (i.e., urban politics related to financing urban projects and policing the city, cultural venues such as the theatre and museums, city businesses such as construction, public transportation the meat trade, and examples of political culture as seen in sermons, engravings and Parisian academies) these scholars aim to untangle Paris from the Revolution writ large. As a result, instead of using Paris as a backdrop to this revolutionary period, Paris–its urban administration, economic life and political culture–is both the subject and object of this historical period. . . .

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H-France Review Vol. 10 (March 2010), No. 57

Stéphanie Loubère, L’Art d’aimer au siècle des Lumières. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2007: 11. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2007. 343 pp. Illustrations, footnotes, bibliography and index. $111 U.S./£65 U.K./€78 (pb). ISBN 978-0-7294-0917-9.

Review by Elena Russo, The Johns Hopkins University.

In this erudite, careful and thorough study, Stéphanie Loubère surveys and analyzes the surprisingly rich story of the translations and adaptations of Ovid’s “Art of Love” in eighteenth-century France. This is a story that is likely to interest the reader more for what it reveals about the vicissitudes of translating and adapting the classics, and for the role they continued to play in French letters throughout the Enlightenment, than for its potential to seduce the senses and captivate the amorous imagination. Indeed, the expectant reader is bound to be disappointed, for never has eroticism felt so dull, dogmatic and pedantic. Certainly, had Ovid written according to the spirit of his French translators, it is safe to assume that he would never have incurred disgrace, exile, or been accused of immorality. Like them, he would have lived and died in dignified obscurity.

Still, it was worth resurrecting those authors, if only for a moment, and we may agree with Loubère’s claim that a study of the minores is likely to yield some interest for those who wish to explore the intellectual context, or better yet, the rhetorical and argumentative underbelly, of libertine literature, from Crébillon to Laclos. As Loubère points out, both in the Augustan empire and in the ancien regime, writing careers were shaped on the benches of law schools; all of the arts of love, to a greater or lesser extent, deliberately parodied treatises on rhetorics, at a time when rhetorics could no longer find an outlet in the practice of politics. The boudoir, rather than the tribune, became the space in which the arts of persuasion were honed and refined. The same may be argued of the Middle Ages, of such works as André Le Chapelain’s “De Amore” in the twelfth century and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung’s “Romance of the Rose” in the thirteenth century. . . .

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H-France Review Vol. 10 (March 2010), No. 58

Michel Baridon. A History of the Gardens of Versailles. Translated by Adrienne Mason. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.  vii + 296 pp.  48 illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 978-0-8122-4078-8.

Alain Renaux. Louis XIV’s Botanical Engravings. Hampshire, England and Burlington, Vt: Lund Humphries, 2008. 144 pp.  70 illustrations, bibliography.  £30 UK. (cl).  ISBN 978-1-84822-000-3.

Review by Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University.

The last week of January 2009 saw the toppling of one of the last surviving trees planted for Marie Antoinette.  Since 1786 the beech tree had grown in the gardens of the Hameau, the queen’s pastoral retreat (just recently renovated) at Versailles. The tree had born witness to the collapse of the French monarchy and had survived the ambivalence felt towards Versailles and the royal gardens, symbols as they were of Bourbon rule, as France lurched right and left in search of political stability in the century afterwards. The beech had been weakened in the 1999 storms that devastated the gardens of Versailles (and forced a replanting on a scale not undertaken since the 1770s); January’s storm finished it off. Associated Press photos showed gardeners unceremoniously sawing up the arboreal remains of the ancien regime. (more…)

Recently posted at H-Albion:

Robin Simon, Hogarth, France and British Art (London: Greenhill Books/Lionel Leventhal, 2007), 313 pages, ISBN 978-0-9554063-0-0, $90.

Reviewed by Douglas Fordham, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Virginia; published on H-Albion, January 2010.

Since his death in 1764, William Hogarth has become a protean figurehead for a great many impulses in British culture. John Trusler’s “Hogarth Moralized” (1768) was an early and overt instance of the ends to which Hogarth’s life and oeuvre could be put, and Hogarth continues to be, if not moralized, then at least channeled into a disparate series of voices and roles. While the “New Art History” of the past two decades has turned its pragmatic sights on Hogarth the calculating businessman, it has also tended to reduce the artist to a somewhat bland spokesman for a polite and commercial age.[1] In the writings of David Solkin and David Bindman, in particular, Hogarth has been cast as a cultural latitudinarian, mainstream in his preoccupations and eager to please. To the extent that Hogarth’s works reveal contradictions, unpleasant truths, or impolite expressions they tend to be viewed as apt reflections of an anxious age. This view of the artist offered a calculated response to Ronald Paulson’s towering contribution to Hogarth scholarship, beginning in the 1970s, which emphasized the artist’s antinomian impulses and his empathetic eye for the sub-cultural. If Hogarth merges seamlessly into hegemonic discourses in the former, he activates a dizzying array of allusions and a daunting density of meaning in the voluminous writings of Paulson.[2] While each of these accounts, and a great many others, have transformed our understanding of the artist and his age, readers are ultimately tasked with choosing which Hogarth they prefer. For it hardly seems possible for one individual to embody so many contrary impulses.

Robin Simon makes a welcome contribution to this debate in “Hogarth, France and British Art,” where he offers a surprisingly fresh iteration of the artist and his milieu. Simon’s Hogarth is cosmopolitan in his understanding of European Old Masters and contemporary French art, sophisticated in his handling of oil paints, and a friend to “Tory wits” and Whig politicians alike. Hogarth emerges in Simon’s account as an intellectually serious artist and a deeply gifted painter who almost single-handedly elevated British art to a Continental level of refinement. In his desire to translate French theories and standards into a uniquely English vernacular, “Hogarth demands to be ranked with the literary giants of the ‘Augustan’ age in England” (p. 8). Simon shares with Paulson a propensity for making analogies between English literature and art, and some of Simon’s most compelling observations entail comparisons between Hogarth’s paintings and the English stage. . . .

The paradox latent in Simon’s approach is that Hogarth already had an English visual vernacular at his disposal in London printshops, on painted street signs, and in countless urban spectacles. While Simon deliberately challenges the “determinedly insular” (p. 3) quality of recent Hogarth scholarship, at what cost does Hogarth the cosmopolitan painter become divested from Hogarth the graphic satirist as Diana Donald and Mark Hallett, for example, have presented him?[3] This is a question of synthesis, however, rather than a legitimate critique of Simon’s stated aims. On its own terms, Simon’s book deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in British culture in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it dramatically improves our understanding of Anglo-French relations. It also manages to present us with yet another incarnation of the artist from which to choose. This is a significant accomplishment in itself, and if this new Hogarth sits uncomfortably alongside his forebearers, then it can only encourage us to look anew at Hogarth’s astonishingly diverse and provocative career.

For the full review, click here»

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