POLITICAL STYLES AND SITES OF POWER IN ANCIEN RÉGIME FRANCE

Abstract

Power and politics in old régime France, 1720–1745. By Peter R. Campbell. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xii+420. ISBN 0-415-06333-7. £50.Antoine Lavoisier: science, administration, revolution. By A. Donovan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+351. ISBN 0-521-56218-x. £40. 0-521-56672-x. £14.95 (pb).Officers, nobles and revolutionaries: essays on eighteenth-century France. By W. Doyle. London: Hambledon Press, 1995. Pp. xii+238. ISBN 1-85285-121-x. £35.Venality: the sale of offices in eighteenth-century France. By W. Doyle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+343. ISBN 0-19-820536-8. £45.The bakers of Paris and the bread question, 1700–1775. By S. L. Kaplan. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+261. ISBN 08223-1706-0. £47.50.Montesquieu and the Parlement of Bordeaux. By R. Kingston. Geneva: Droz, 1996. Pp. 329. ISBN 2-600-00161-1. £30.Class and state in ancien régime France: the road to modernity? By David Parker. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xvii+349. ISBN 0-415-13647-4. £40.The books analysed in this review bear witness in different ways to a revival of historians' interest in the political history of ancien régime France which was highlighted by Peter Campbell in a recent review article in this journal. Campbell speculated that what Fernand Braudel all-so-dismissively called ‘event history’ (l'histoire événementielle) was making a comeback at the expense of Annaliste geo-historical analysis in the longue durée mode or mid-term conjunctural history rooted in social and economic change. A complementary way of looking at the phenomenon, which strikes the reader on engaging with the present crop of works, is to see current historiographical interests in political history as the revenge of Alfred Cobban, progenitor in the 1950s and 1960s of famous revisionist attacks on the socio-economic analyses of the Jacobino–Marxist school of French Revolutionary historiography adorned by Mathiez, Lefebvre, and Soboul. Cobban's broadsides were aimed not simply at some of the conceptual apparatus of the ‘Marxists’, but also sought to highlight empirical research as a corrosive solvent of what he viewed as the deterministic hyperbole of politically-influenced left-wing history.