Provincial Patriot of the French Revolution: François Buzot, 1760–1794 by Bette W. Oliver

Abstract

Reviews 247 also a new disease, syphilis. Losse underscores in the introduction to her fascinating work that while syphilis spread throughout the Old World affecting the physical body of those who contracted it, as well as the institution of marriage, the family, and even “the survival of humanity”(2), the French Wars of Religion threatened French society on broad political, legal, social, and religious levels. As Losse notes, the confluence of these two phenomena informs the writings of a number of French sixteenth-century writers and spans literary genres. In this study, Losse examines satirical verse and prose narratives, colloquies, travel literature, siege literature, and memoirs to analyze the metaphorical linking of physical patients and the ills of the French body politic. From Rabelais’s frequent mention of venereal disease, his detailed record of its symptoms and impact in Gargantua and Pantagruel, to Erasmus’s observations of the spread of the disease through his European travels in his Colloquies, and the association by both the cosmographer and former Franciscan André Thevet and the chronicler and Calvinist pastor Jean de Léry (among others) of cannibalism and syphilis as metaphors for the spiritual ills and “sins” of French society, Losse traces the multiple and varied uses of discussions of syphilis.Whether to record or bear witness to great physical and social suffering, or to analyze, criticize or attack controversial contemporary thinking and behavior through the protective metaphorical sign of this new illness, Losse emphasizes the centrality of syphilis to sixteenth-century discussions of physical and social disease. Whereas in Montaigne’s Essais, for example, the discourse of illness reflects differences between the Old and New Worlds, Losse demonstrates that in d’Aubigné’s Les tragiques the physical and moral suffering of Mother France and the conflicts between her children mirror the destruction and violence between French Catholics and Protestants. In addition to her synthetic analysis of literary works within the medical, scientific, and religious context of the period, Losse pays special attention to literary form and rhetorical devices. Her work includes six chapters, each devoted primarily to one sixteenth-century author or concept, as well as an introduction and a conclusion. Throughout her study, Losse integrates past work on each of these authors, often reframing earlier literary analyses within the context of the syphilis pandemic.Her work will be extremely valuable to a wide range of scholars and students of French Early Modern literature and civilization.Although detailed and well-researched, including extensive footnotes, it reads easily and could certainly be included in undergraduate courses on French literature or history, as well as graduate seminars. Northern Arizona University Erika E. Hess Oliver, Bette W. Provincial Patriot of the French Revolution: François Buzot, 1760– 1794. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. ISBN 978-0-7391-969-0. Pp. 167. $80. Oliver chronicles the major events of the French Revolution, into which she inserts the life and political career of Normand lawyer Buzot.As her narrative progresses, the emphasis is placed increasingly on Buzot himself. She provides an excellent perspective to show that what occurred in France between 1789 and 1794 took many unexpected and dramatic turns and that the lives of “ordinary” people like Buzot were violently impacted in unforeseeable ways. Buzot was an attorney in Évreux who, out of a sense of patriotism and civic duty, accepted election to the Estates-General (which became the Constituent Assembly) in the spring of 1789 and then to the National Convention in September 1792. He was a moderate and a defender of the rights of the individual citizen, but he was from the beginning skeptical about the possibility of reconciling the new political regime with the existing monarchy. He thus leaned toward the establishment of a republic.In the National Convention,he became associated with the Girondin group of delegates.He had already become acquainted with the Interior Minister Roland. Buzot and Roland’s wife Manon fell passionately in love. Their relationship remained platonic,however,because of circumstances and their sense of virtue.They did exchange several intense love letters, but only those written by Madame Roland survived. What survived from Buzot’s writings is a memoir or apologia which he penned during the last months...