The Right in France, 1789-1997 by Nicholas Atkin; Frank TallettReview by: William D. IrvineThe American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 2 (Apr., 1999), pp. 658-659Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2650523 .

Accessed: 24/06/2014 23:28

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 support@jstor.org.

.

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 62.122.73.34 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:28:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

658 Reviews of Books

different catastrophe through the disappointment and shame felt by a wide range of the king's subjects at their ruler's failure to live up to the martial traditions of his ancestors. Embracing the fashionable idea that the French monarchy became "desacralised" over the course of the eighteenth century, Murphy argues that the same can be said of its diplomacy. The king and his ministers forfeited the confidence of his subjects by failing to recognize that their policies needed the backing of public opinion and that affairs of state could no longer be decided in secrecy, however well- informed.

Not all of this is convincing. Murphy's own evidence, much of which surveys long series of planted reports about the Dutch crisis in the Gazette de Leyde, suggests that the ministry was well aware of how important it was to cultivate public opinion. It was merely that on this occasion, the ploy backfired. The introduction of the deeply unpersuasive notion of desacralization merely blurs an already confused argument. Public interest in diplomatic questions had been intense in France at least since the great reversal of alliances of 1756. And was the public as wrong, as Murphy main- tains, to blame the industrial crisis of the late 1780s on the commercial treaty of 1786 with Great Britain? Economic historians are now coming to believe that the impact of unrestricted British competition was indeed substantial. This book, then, offers a handy, brief, and straightforward guide to French diplomatic preoccupations during the old regime's closing years. It is much less successful in integrating them into new interpretations of the origins of the subsequent revo- lution.

WILLIAM DOYLE

University of Br-istol

NICHOLAS ATKIN and FRANK TALLETT, editors. The Right in France, 1789-1997. (International Library of Historical Studies.) London: I. B. Tauris; distributed by St. Martin's Press, New York. 1998. Pp. xiv, 306. $59.50.

The essays in this volume, edited by Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, were originally presented at a conference at the University of Reading in 1996. Inevitably, the essays are uneven in quality, but most make important, at times even provocative, contribu- tions to the subject. One theme central to many of the essays is the question of just who belongs on the right and which "right" they should be identified with. More than forty years ago, Ren6 R6mond (La droite en France [1954]) identified the three classic families of the French right: Orleanism, Bonapartism and Legiti- mism. In their respective essays, Pamela Pilbeam and Michael Broers challenge R6mond's taxonomy. The First Empire and the July Monarchy were inspired as much by the left as the right. Napoleon I's thoroughly "Voltairian" regime, argues Broers, anticipated Jules Ferry's Third Republic rather than the regime of Napoleon III. A monarchy headed by an ex-Jacobin

and son of a regicide, insists Pilbeam, had an impec- cably revolutionary pedigree, a point obscured only because many Orleanists were reluctant to claim it and fewer republicans were prepared to grant it. Of course, amalgams of left and right are common enough in French history: Boulangism was notoriously "both right and left," and Colonel de la Rocque's Croix de Feu and, more recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National (FN) proudly boast being "neither right nor left." Hippolyte Taine's Les origines de la France contenmporainze (1876-1899) provided the inspiration for a generation of ultra-royalist historians. Yet, as Michael Biddiss notes, Taine was temperamentally something of a Whig, and the only nineteenth-century ideology for which he had the slightest sympathy was Orleanism. R6mond generally takes a beating in many of these essays. He famously declared Gaullism to be in the Bonapartist tradition. As Jonathan Watson observes, however, this is true only if one takes Gaullism to be le grand Charles writ large. Watson prefers to focus on the role of the post-1958 Gaullist Party in the forging of a distinctive ideology, one closer, again, to Orleanism than to Bonapartism. In this volume, only Legitimism emerges in a recogniz- ably R6mondian form with Geoffrey Cubitt's discus- sion of the religious mysticism that infused so many of its ideologues. Even this portrait might have been nuanced, had Cubitt paid less attention to the writings of Franqois-Ren6 de Chateaubriand and reflected on the recent work of Steven Kale (Legitimism anzd the Reconstruction of Frenzch Society, 1852-1883 [1992]), which argues that the later Legitimism resembled republicanism more than Bonapartism or Orleanism.

This kind of revisionism can be taken only so far. Broers, for example, bluntly asserts that "if the First Empire is of the right, then so must be Jules Ferry, [Georges] Clemenceau and [Ren6] Waldeck-Rous- seau" (p. 25). Perhaps not. All three men, after all, were principled defenders of a parliamentary and democratic regime, not an enlightened absolutism.

Fascism is a perennially thorny problem for French historians, since many are unconvinced that fascism really belongs on the right. But few have any problems assigning the fascist label to Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Fran?ais (PPF) because the founder, and presumably many of his followers, were former Com- munists. Kevin Passmore's detailed study of the PPF in the Rh6ne, however, establishes that most of its ad- herents came from the right; only a handful had previously been Communists. Workers were well rep- resented in the party-although only slightly more so than in the conventionally conservative Republican Federation-but most of them had traditionally voted for parties of the right. In a vigorous essay, Jim Wolfreys argues, contra much received wisdom, that the FN is as fascist as the PPF ever was and far more successful and durable in the bargain. Charles Hauss counters that if the FN now seems to be a permanent force in French politics, it is also permanently mar- ginal. This is devoutly to be hoped for, although, in

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1999

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:28:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Europe: Early Modern aGnd Modern 659

light of the history of earlier fascisms, one is tempted to take less comfort than does Hauss in the fact that the FN seems to be playing the electoral game.

Martin Alexander brings a fresh approach to the story of the dissident officers of the OAS (Organisa- tion Arm6e Secrete) years. The roots of the postwar indiscipline go back to the early days of the Third Republic. The army may have avoided direct political action, but its leaders early developed the habit of blaming all problems, even those demonstrably of their own making, on the civilian leadership. Even a general as impeccably republican as Maurice Gamelin failed to instill the habit of unquestioning obedience to civilian authority into his subordinates. The point is amply illustrated by David Parry's essay on the Cagoule, by far the clearest summary so far of this murky episode. Kay Chadwick's study of conservative Catholics in the 1930s and 1940s traces the course they steered be- tween the "sans-dieux du communisme" and the "faux- dieux du national-socialisme." For most of them, the latter were only slightly less menacing than the former, but for a vocal minority, Nazism amounted to "un recommencement de l'oeuvre de Dieu." Michael Hef- fernan contends that, the pied noir collective memory notwithstanding, the link between the French right and imperialism is a myth. He is quite right, of course, although this is not likely to be news to anyone familiar with the history of Ferry. Miranda Pollard insists that a fundamental antifeminism was central to the dis- course of the French right. Unfortunately, it is not obvious, either from her evidence or from her argu- ment, that this antifeminism is significantly less deeply rooted in the rest of the political spectrum. Richard Griffiths asserts that French royalism became more pragmatic in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair; as evidence he points to royalism's more serious efforts to recruit supporters among the working class. Evidence of this pragmatism, to say nothing of significant royal- ist inroads among workers, is exceedingly thin.

As conference proceedings go, this one is better than most and ought to stimulate some debate among the many scholars of the French right.

WILLIAM D. IRVINE

York Unliversity

MONA OZOUF. Women's Words: Essay on French Singtu- larity. Translated by JANE MARIE TODD. Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. xxii, 300. $29.95.

This is a noteworthy, controversial book. Mona Ozouf is a director of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, a critic for Le noluvel observa- tetit, and the author of an impressive list of histories. Most of her work has treated education (L'ecole, V'eglise, et la republiqtte, 1871-1914 [1982]) and the French Revolution (La fete r&volutionnaire [1976]). Her essayist's style is most accessible in L'ecole de la France: Essais sur la Revolution, I'uttopie et 1'enseignement (1984).

Although Ozouf .has examined issues of gender in

her earlier work, this book marks her first major effort in women's history. Three themes dominate her book. The first is the direct theme of the title: Ozouf presents ten biographical sketches of French women who lived between the end of the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. She states that "The woman's portrait is a male genre. It rarely boasts a female signature" (p. ix). She seeks to rectify this by looking at literate women whose own words will produce a truer portrait than did the Goncourts, Jules Michelet, or Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (or this reviewer). Separate chapters are given to a variety of women writers: Madame du Deffand, Madame de Charriere, Madame Roland, Madame de Stael, Madame de R6musat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir. Each woman is presented on a first-name basis with a summary trait, in the style of didactic moralism. Thus, we meet "Manon, or Valor" (Roland) and "Simone, or Greed" (de Beauvoir). The portraits are interesting and informative, and they are often vivid-from Isabelle de Charriere in "the torpor of a stupid marriage" to Madame de R6musat "who of all led the most conformist life but did not need any advice on how to be happy" and Simone de Beauvoir who was "not exactly lovable" (pp. 205 and 227). Although Ozouf may overestimate the difference be- tween men and women as biographers, it is true that her brush has added new lines to my portrait of Auclert. We have both painted "Hubertine, or Stub- bornness," but she has added some shading to traits such as Auclert's timidity.

The second theme of the book is a leitmotif within those essays, emphasized in the introduction and a concluding essay. This side of the book is more controversial than brushing aside male biographers. Ozouf uses the term "French singularity" (and Mich- elle Perrot's "the French path") to distinguish French feminism (both historic and contemporary) from "An- glo-Saxon" feminism. French feminism has "a tran- quility, a moderation, even a timidity about it" which American feminists "loudly deplore" (p. xii). Ozouf responds with her own sharp words. The French, she says, "lack the militant thrust that transforms female unhappiness into a badge of honor. They do not oppose men, collectively guilty, to women, their col- lective victims" (p. xiii). She is particularly aghast at the women's words employed by some American fem- inists, such as those who speak of "a global war against women" (p. xii), and finds that she "cannot bring myself to use the ugly expression 'white males,' the term employed by American women" (p. 251, n. 39).

The third theme of the book is directly linked to the first two, and her passion suggests that it may have been the origin of them both. Ozouf defends the French Revolution against one of the prevalent inter- pretations in American scholarship today. She insists that during the Revolution (always capitalized), "free- dom was theoretically secured for men and women" and she disputes "the studies that proliferated during the bicentennial [which] developed the idea that the

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1999

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 23:28:57 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions