Abstract
This is a book of stories—ninety-eight stories, to be precise—as Emma Rothschild is careful to tell us on the first page. Enlarging the scope of what will follow, she adds that they are stories about the “three or four thousand people who lived in agitated times” in the provincial city of Angoulême in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But even this more expansive description is misleading. An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries contains multitudes. It is both many stories and many kinds of histories. It is a history of an extended family and those associated with it across time; or rather, as Rothschild insists, “a history with a family at its center, and not a family history” (197). It is a history, again she insists, “not of the economy but of economic lives”—lovingly and meticulously recovered lives forged in the face of hardship,...
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