French Nobility Research Articles

'Celebrities of the Future': Fame and Notability in Henry James's Roderick Hudson and The American

Focusing on two of Henry James’s earliest novels, Roderick Hudson (1875) and The American (1877), this essay explores the ways in which James’s initial formulation of his signature ‘international theme’ intersects with nineteenth-century discourses on fame. Roderick Hudson positions the eponymous American sculptor as a lion and notable in Europe, and then shows his fatal attempts to transcend the objectification and commodification that accompany fame. In The American the protagonist, Christopher Newman, is briefly lionized by French aristocrats, the Bellegardes; to make him socially acceptable to them, he is displayed as a notable within their exclusive, privileged circle, but is afterwards publicly spurned. Both novels provocatively contrast the fate of these American men with the successful use of the mechanisms of fame by two women. In Roderick Hudson, the Europeanized American Christina Light successfully brands and markets her beauty, and becomes, through marriage, a figure of aristocratic renown, the Princess Casamassima. In The American, the French copyist Noemie Nioche effectively negotiates her rise in the world through self-display and self-promotion and finally passes as a noblewoman. Drawing on imagery of statuary, performance, and display, these novels foreground links and conflicts between newer forms of recognition associated with notability and celebrity and older ideas of aristocratic renown. Moreover, using the figure of the American in Europe, James draws attention to the complex ways nationality and gender interconnect in constructions of public recognition.

English

Charles Dickens (1812 to 1870) is a foremost representative novelist of the Victorian era, a great story-teller and social reformer. A Tale of Two Cities has always been one of his most popular and best-loved novels. It is the second attempt on historical fiction by Dickens and French Revolution is his subject. Always interested in the interaction between individuals and society, Dickens was particularly inspired by Thomas Carlyle's history, The French Revolution. He saw similarities between the forces that led to the Revolution and the oppression and unrest occurring in England in his own time. Although he supported the idea of people rising up against tyranny, the violence that characterized the French Revolution troubled him. In the preface to his novel he says “to add something to the popular and picturesque means understanding that terrible time”. The story is set in London, Paris and the French countryside at the time of French Revolution. The book is sympathetic to the overthrow of the French aristocracy but highly critical of the reign of terror that followed. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine-tumbrels thundering to and fro and the bloody knives. Actually, these scenes occupy only a few chapters, but they are written with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. That is why everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A Tale of Two Cities. Again and again, he insists upon the meaningless horrors of revolution, the injustice, the ever-present terror of spies, and the frightful blood lust of the mob. The descriptions of the Paris mob, for instance, the crowd of murderers struggling round the grindstone to sharpen their weapons before butchering the prisoners in the September massacres outdo anything. These are the events in the history of France which form the flaming background of A Tale of Two Cities. Its interpretation of the French Revolution has strongly shaped the British views of national identity and political legitimacy. At the same time, it offers a powerful melodramatic plot pitting private individuals against political systems.  Key words: Charles Dickens english novel, french revolution and Shakespeare.

‘Un paria par en haut’: noblesse et grâce dans L’émigré de Paul Bourget

As he writes L’emigre (translated as The Weight of the Name) in 1906, Paul Bourget is an author who matters in the French literary landscape. His right wing politics, newfound Catholicism and attachment to the Parisian social elite put him in an ideal position to chronicle the consequences of the separation of Church and State on the French nobility. While L’emigre at first appears to be grounded in current events, it quickly ends up being the portrait of a whole class. In the eyes of Bourget, it seems as if the nobility is about to disappear, and overtaken by a sense of urgency, he makes it his purpose to carefully represent the conservative French nobility of the Belle Epoque. In so doing, he offered his readers one of the most complete and didactic accounts of what constituted the noble habitus.

Jean Dunbabin. The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 1266–1305.

Toward the beginning of this learned and stimulating book, Jean Dunbabin attempts to disarm the reader with a modest disclaimer, apologizing that her “subject is so diffuse, a gathering together of bits and pieces from a variety of fields” (p. 9). In fact, this is a thoughtful and sophisticated comparative study of the links between the kingdoms of Sicily and France in the forty years after Charles of Anjou conquered the regno in 1266. For a generation or more after the Battle of Benevento, Dunbabin argues, these contacts remained significant—French nobles and knights rallied to defend the Angevin monarchy, not least after the revolt on Sicily in 1282; the French monarchy assisted their relatives in the south, both politically and financially; and members of important noble families from France continued to make their careers in the south, even if many of them later returned home. A key figure in these relations was King Charles II's nephew Count Robert II of Artois, the de facto ruler of the kingdom from 1285 until 1291, while Charles was first a prisoner and then an absentee. After his return to northern France, the count employed south Italian officials, notably Rinaldo Cognetti of Barletta, who overhauled the administration of Artois. He also built himself a country residence and park at Hesdin, which is usually considered to have been influenced by the royal residences of Palermo.

Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History

John Locke considered the nature of time “very abstruse,” so Hannah Spahn accomplishes no small feat in lucidly tracing Thomas Jefferson's evolving views on time and history (p. 23). She offers many subtle readings of Jefferson texts as well as thoughtful reflections on such issues as the pace of historical change and the timeless appeal of the founders. The book's first part situates Jefferson within “the intellectual history of temporality” (p. 17), between what Isaac Newton called “absolute time”—the objectively measurable eons and epochs of natural laws—and a growing appreciation of “relative” time, experienced subjectively in hours, days, and years. Spahn terms the former rational time and the latter sentimental time. Jefferson's devotion to rational time was manifest in his collection and design of clocks and watches, in his meticulous record keeping, and in his rigorous organization of his daily schedule as well as those of his family and slaves. He believed that only by spending time conscientiously in the present could individuals and nations improve their future. French aristocrats, particularly women, and black slaves, he thought, were incapable of self-improvement because of their present-centeredness and lack of restraint, punctuality, and foresight.

Pioneers in Optics: Louis de Broglie and Edwin Herbert Land

In the early twentieth century, the long standing argument about whether the character of light was particle-based or wavelike was finally coming to an end as the scientists of the day began to accept that light could assume a dual nature. The possibility that such a duality might apply to matter as well as light was first proposed by physicist Louis de Broglie. Born in Dieppe, France, de Broglie studied in Paris and was descended from members of the French nobility. In his youth, he considered a career as a diplomat but later turned to science and pursued the study of theoretical physics. His brother, Maurice, who had also decided to become a physicist and made many advances in the study of X rays, reportedly had a considerable influence on de Broglie and was the first to introduce him to the work of Albert Einstein and Max Planck.

Creating an Online Exhibit: "Luxury Objects in the Age of Marie Antoinette"

How can students arrive at a closer understanding of the material culture that shaped the lives of the French aristocracy and nascent bourgeoisie of late eighteenth-century France? This is one of the challenges that students face in the first-year seminar, Re-Membering Marie Antoinette, as they study the multiple and conflicting ways that Marie Antoinette was and has been represented in biographies, portraits, memoirs, fiction, film, fashion, plays and pornographic pamphlets, records of her trial in 1793, and the spaces and activies that shaped her daily life. This article focuses on a series of scaffolded assignments that lead students to imagine what Marie Antoinette’s daily life might have been like by exploring the material culture of the period through the objects, decor, and activities depicted in Moreau le Jeune’s series of engravings, Le Monument du Costume, and the craftsmanship, labor, and social practices they entail as described in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.

Educating Tocqueville: Jared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America

Educating TocquevilleJared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America Guy Aiken (bio) Without Jared Sparks and the Boston Whigs, we might not have Democracy in America (DIA). In Boston in late September and early October 1831, Tocqueville’s interviews with New World elites––former Federalists and National Republicans who would soon establish the Whig Party in America––put the Old World aristocrat in mind of Rousseau’s “habits of the heart.”1 And New England native Jared Sparks (1789–1866) suggested to Tocqueville two of DIA’s “driving ideas”: the tyranny of the majority and the seminal importance of the New England town for American democracy.2 At the time, Sparks was pioneering documentary history in America by editing and publishing the papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris, and other leaders of the American Revolution. Yet Sparks was also a clergyman whose ordination in 1819 was memorable as the occasion on which William Ellery Channing preached his foundational sermon Unitarian Christianity. Sparks had been chaplain to the U.S. House of Representatives in the early 1820s and then editor of America’s most renowned journal of letters, the North American Review, from 1823 to 1830. Sparks would go on to become America’s first professional academic historian when his alma mater Harvard appointed him McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History in 1839. A decade later he would follow Edward Everett as Harvard’s president, an office he held until early 1853.3 [End Page 169] When Tocqueville was in America there was hardly a more reliable source on all things American than Jared Sparks.4 He was Tocqueville’s most valuable informant, and he epitomized the impact of the Boston Whigs on Tocqueville’s thought.5 In early 1832 he mailed Tocqueville and Beaumont a detailed memoir on the New England town just before the two Frenchmen embarked for their trip back to Europe. Tocqueville’s debt to Sparks in Volume I, Part I, Chapter 5 (I.1.5) of DIA is well known, but not in any detail. The first part of this essay will flesh out just what Tocqueville owed Sparks for this part of DIA. Yet Sparks’s influence reaches further into Tocqueville’s work than just this single chapter. First of all, the “tyranny of the majority” has a chapter in DIA all its own. And in his memoir and in his interviews with the two French aristocrats, Sparks also emphasized the need to begin at the beginning when studying American democracy; the impact of inheritance law on western migration; democracy’s reliance on education; and the uniformity of the laws. All of these ideas either originated with, or were affirmed by, Sparks. Part two of this essay will assess the full extent of Sparks’s impact on DIA. After a brief interlude on religion, the third part of this essay will examine Sparks’s political thought and his disagreement with Tocqueville over the “tyranny of the majority.” Sparks likely learned his contractualism, and his defense of majority rule, from Locke. Looking at Locke reveals the probable source of Sparks’s political philosophy and of his argument against Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority”––an idea that irritated many American readers and that, of course, originated with Sparks himself.6 First Things First: Starting with the Town (DIA I.I.5) Before hearing from Sparks on the matter, Tocqueville had heard two of his other informants stress the importance of the New England town for American democracy. Harvard president Josiah Quincy III spoke of Massachusetts as “a collection of small republics,” and Massachusetts State Senator Francis C. Gray said that town democracy was what distinguished New England not only from Europe, but also from the rest of the United States. Yet Sparks brought the point home. “Nearly all societies, even in America, begin with government concentrated in a particular place and subsequently expand around that central point. But our ancestors founded towns [End Page 170] before there was a state.”7 Tocqueville must then have thought to himself, if I want to see American democracy in its simplest and purest form, I should look at the New England town. As he...

“In the Absence of Males”

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, aristocratic daughters inherited fiefs in the absence of a male heir. Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, royal decisions and jurisprudence increasingly limited this possibility, imposing masculinity as the primary—though not exclusive—criteria for inheritance. This article explores the legal debates that accompanied this evolution, highlighting a number of changes within the French nobility of this period that reveal a new conception of gender relations. The growing importance of the notion of service, changes to the procedure for proving one’s nobility, and the desire for greater exclusivity within the nobility all reveal how gender was no longer defined in relation to the place and role each individual occupied within the ancestral line or family. Instead, gender assumed an unchanging identity, which, much like nobility itself, was considered inherent to the individual.

Images de la France sous la dynastie des Qing (review)

Reviewed by: Images de la France sous la dynastie des Qing Jennifer Tsien (bio) Images de la France sous la dynastie des Qing, ed. Jin Lu Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2010. 174pp. CAN$30. ISBN 978-2-7637-9003-9. In a seminar I taught on eighteenth-century French Orientalism several years ago, a student asked, "But what did the Chinese think about the French?" In this instance, we were discussing the Jesuit missionaries' letters from China, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses. The class had already read some Oriental tales by Enlightenment philosophers and a few excerpts from their "philosophical histories"; the students had seen portraits of French aristocrats in Turkish dress and photos of various kinds of chinoiserie. From these examples, we could only know about one perspective, directed from France towards the East. As much as I would have liked to provide examples of views that went in the opposite direction, I could think of none. At least, our ignorance of Chinese made it impossible for us to access any academic sources written in that language. While Western scholars such as Jonathan Spence, Susan Naquin, or David Porter have given us wonderfully erudite works about Chinese history or about the influence of Chinese products in Europe, to my knowledge, they have not addressed my student's not unreasonable question about the Chinese perspective on France. The present volume edited by Jin Lu addresses the very question of the Chinese point of view from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries through the eyes of present-day Chinese scholars. For this reason, it is an invaluable resource for students of French literature and comparative literature—or for those who happen to be interested in both French and Chinese cultures. Most articles in this collection are translated by Jin Lu from Chinese to French, with the exception of her own pieces, which are written directly in French, and Gang Song's article, which remains in the original English. We are extremely fortunate that Jin Lu is fluent in all of these languages and is familiar with the different academic systems, because she was able to produce a collection of articles that few others are equipped to do. [End Page 263] What we know of Sino-French relations in the early modern era begins with the Jesuit mission to convert the Chinese to Roman Catholicism. The mostly Italian, Portuguese, and French members of the Jesuit order arrived in China in the late 1500s, three centuries after Marco Polo's famed voyage. Matteo Ricci (aka "Li Madou") was the pioneering Jesuit who carried out the policy of assimilating into the Chinese court in order to secure the emperor's favour. Accordingly, the first section of Images de la France sous la dynastie des Qing consists of two articles devoted to the period of the Jesuit missions. The other two sections of the volume deal with the reception of specific works of French literature in China and the descriptions of France by Chinese travellers of the nineteenth century. Some oddly curious facts and several important themes emerge from this collection of articles. To start with the curious facts, it must be said that the interaction between two very different cultures, Chinese and European, sometimes produced hilarious results. For instance, Gang Song tells us in his article "The Other under a Chinese Heaven" of Matteo Ricci's great efforts to explain his homeland to the Chinese elite in terms that would impress them. He created a world map to assist in visualizing the geographical position of his home continent of Oulouba, or Europa. The map included commentary such as, "The wine is made of grape juice. All craftsmen are skilful. People understand everything regarding astronomy and physics. The customs are simple and the wu lun (five human relations) are stressed" (28). Even the main tenets of Christianity had to be adapted to Chinese tastes, to the extent that Ricci convinced scholars that this religion was just like Confucianism because it mostly consisted of "practical advice for daily life" (27). The work of Ricci and his fellows, however, did not prevent many Chinese people from believing that Jesus was a sort of witch...

Revolutionizing the Study of Female Artists

Laura Auricchio's Adelaide Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution (Oxford, 2009) draws on archival research, cultural history, and French Revolutionary history to position Labille-Guiard (1749-1803) as a product of both the art world and the volatile political climate of Revolutionary-era France. Art Historian Auricchio's monograph draws from Anne-Marie Passez's Adelaide Labille-Guiard, 1749-1803, Biographie et catalogue raisonne de son oeuvre (1973), but instead of focusing on attributing paintings to the artist, Auricchio's project centers more on the ways in which Labille-Guiard's evolving career correlated with the political events of the French Revolution and their effects on the art world. Auricchio offers a comprehensive and compelling description of Labille-Guiard's artistic career, beginning with her early years as the daughter of a fashionable haberdasher, and continuing to the relative stability of her court position during the reign of Louis XVI, to her political involvement with the Feuillants during the Revolution, and finally to her posthumous influence over female pupils. Auricchio's general argument is that Labille-Guiard's career reveals important aspects of the era's artistic production and, given this, Auricchio offers an analysis of the political and social conditions of women artists during the French Revolution. Her beautifully illustrated book is biographically and contextually comprehensive. She chooses not to analyze each of Labille-Guiard's images in detail, using art objects primarily as evidence of how the artist successfully negotiated her various positions in Revolutionary France.Auricchio's book, arranged chronologically, is divided into five chapters that situate Labille-Guiard's life within the political events before, during, and after the French Revolution. She also includes an appendix, which both adds and subtracts attributions of works to Labille-Guiard that were originally made by Passez. In the introduction, Auricchio discusses the predicament of women artists, who had to transgress laws governing proper female deportment by working in the male-dominated art world while still maintaining their feminine virtue. Labille-Guiard, Auricchio explains, was different from many other female artists, as she had no artist father to show her the way. Consequently, she was forced to negotiate the virtually irreconcilable positions of artist and woman on her own through the personal and professional relationships she fostered with the French aristocracy and, later, with politicians, actors, and the Parisian urban elite (2). Discussions of women artists' delicate negotiation between the public world of art commerce and their proper place in the domestic realm as women has been previously examined by art historians Mary Sheriff, Melissa Hyde, and Angela Rosenthal.1 Auricchio adds to this scholarship, positioning Labille-Guiard as both subject to the same gendered limitations as the other female artists and as a product of the shifting political, economic, and social worlds of Revolutionary France.Auricchio's discussion of Labille-Guiard and other female artists' negotiation of their gendered position in the male-dominated art world sets the stage for what she sees as Labille-Guiard's many breaches with contemporary mores governing proper female deportment. Auricchio stresses Labille-Guiard's unconventional female behavior in chapter 1, Painting in the Margins, 17741783, when describing Labille-Guiard's early artistic training, submissions to the Academy of St. Luke, and her father's influence on his daughter's ability to depict fabrics and costuming. Labille-Guiard's career, Auricchio posits, offers a model of how a woman draws attention to her work without jeopardizing her moral stature and, as a result, her career. Labille-Guiard's early success painting miniature portraits, a genre considered more suitable for women artists due to its imitation of the human figure and its small, portable size, diffused accusations of impropriety and ultimately paved the way for her success during the twilight of the French monarchy. …

Coquettes and Gallants: (Re‐)Assessing Eighteenth‐Century English Translations of French Memoirs

AbstractThis article explores eighteenth‐century English translations of French memoirs and reconsiders the cultural impact of this controversial literary genre. The works discussed were all originally written by (or attributed to) female members of the French nobility, and the translators reveal the extent to which the shifting social and political conventions in France and Britain created conceptual instabilities concerning gender and sexual politics. Although French memoirs have been neglected by recent literary critics and social historians, this article demonstrates that the perspectives offered by these texts provide uniquely revealing insights into British attitudes towards many important aspects of French culture.

French Film Guide: La Règle du jeu (review)

Keith Reader French Film Guide: La Regle du I.B. Tauris, 2010; 124 pages; paperback; $24.50 In its brief 124 pages, Keith Reader's French Film Guide: La Regle du includes a significant amount of important information. It functions as both a history of the film's (re)construction and critical reception and a scene-by-scene analysis of the film, including commentary on much of the important critical work already written about it. Reader, a professor of Modern French Studies at Glasgow University, calls La Regle du an Everest of French Cinema, as revealing today as it was when released in the spring of 1939 (11). Causing a near riot when first shown, it maintained its reputation as a film maudit until it was painstakingly restored in 1959 and then rehabilitated by film critic Andre Bazin; he proclaimed it a masterpiece of filmmaking and its director a true cinematic auteur. Reader argues that the film served as a model not only for New Wave filmmakers (i.e., Truffaut, Godard, Renais, Chabrol), but that its influence can be seen in films as recent as Robert Altman's 2001 Gosford Park. Reader structures his guide more or less chronologically: from the film's prehistory, filming, and early reception, to a concise summary of criticism since the film's re-release, thereby demonstrating the author's impressive knowledge of the film and its numerous critics. I found the midsection of the guide most enlightening as Reader's detailed interpretation brings out the many ways in which the film mirrors (consciously or perhaps unconsciously) the desperation and palpable anxiety that gripped France between the Munich Accord of 1938 and France's Declaration of War on September 2, 1939. When interviewed later in life, Renoir described his characters and their world in La Regle du as dancing on a volcano (11). The breakdown of the French aristocracy's and haute bourgeoisie's social mores continues throughout the film, gaining momentum in the famous hunt scene at the country chateau, La Coliniere, and culminating there in one chaotic evening. The disastrous soiree comes to a close when the property's just-fired groundskeeper, Schumacher, fatally shoots Andre Jurieux, a heroic pilot in love with Christine, wife of the chateau's owner, the Marquis Robert La Chesnaye, in a case of mistaken identity. Reader points out how Renoir drew upon classic themes in French comedies by eighteenth and nineteenth century authors such as Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and Musset to produce a film steeped in intertextuality that disturbingly mixes genres and social classes (12). Hence, the game of the title represents the social roles we adopt, the between so-called reality and appearances. (In French, un jeu means both a theatrical play and a game.) The show within a show put on at the soiree creates, like the many mirrors that have pride of place in the film, a mise en abyme of theater and acting, foregrounding the way we all perform for one another. Reader invokes Gilles Deleuze's filmic metaphor of a many-faceted crystal, which helps us perceive how characters upstairs and down pair up in Renoir's film as various relationships develop and shift. For Deleuze, Schumacher, the repressed Alsatian guardian assigned to keep order, is key: uncannily like the Germans who will occupy France the following year and contribute to the breakdown of civilized behavior, Schumacher is the one who liberates the Freudian id when his wife, Lisette, Christine's personal maid, is pursued by rabbit poacher turned house servant, Marceau. Layers of irony and hypocrisy continue to accumulate. When Schumacher shoots Jurieux, the games of love-and, we might say, the hunt-precipitously shuts down. Robert, who hitherto had fired Schumacher for shooting his gun among the guests as he wildly chased Lisette and Marceau, here defends Schumacher as performing his duty. …

Not Just in the Great House, but in the Quarters

Most scholars would have been daunted to the point of capitulation in the face of the archive Professor Gordon-Reed has mastered so magnificently for The Hemingses of Monticello. With the meticulousness of a crack detective, Professor Gordon-Reed has made the Hemings documents sing. One of my favorite examples is her brilliant reading of a Monticello kitchen inventory that James Hemings bequeaths to his younger brother Peter, who is about to assume James's (former, pre-presidency) role as Jefferson's chef after his retirement to Monticello in 1809. Gordon-Reed understands Hemings' list of tools and equipment as a kind of professional autobiography, testifying to James's remarkable training in the art of haute cuisine during his time in Paris with Jefferson. Jefferson will fulfill his promise to manumit James in the following months but, tragically, not long after that, James will be dead by his own hand. As an avid, nearly breathless reader of Gordon-Reed's account, I only wanted more, more, more. Eight years earlier, why did James Hemings refuse to ask Jefferson in a timely fashion to take him on as chef at the White House? Gordon-Reed speculates that James wanted Jefferson to offer an official invitation; meanwhile, the frustrated president-elect, waiting for James to approach him, grew weary of this unspoken power struggle in which the desired supplication was not forthcoming and the wish to offer the position according to official conventions became impossible to express; out of patience, Jefferson ultimately decided to hire a native Frenchman instead. This episode strikes me as particularly bizarre and heartbreaking, given that Jefferson took James Hemings to France precisely to afford him the culinary training that would enable him to cook haute cuisine for his master. And why, so soon after at last having been released from the burdens of laboring unremunerated for this complex, difficult man for nearly three decades, did the finally emancipated James find his life unsustainable in freedom? Did he have no attachments, no loves, no prospect of either? Professor Gordon-Reed supplies us with a sorrowful if oblique letter from Jefferson to one of his daughters in which he acknowledges James's death, but we have nothing from the Hemings side of the equation to fill in the blanks, and particularly, nothing from James's hand to help contextualize the tragedy to come. Gordon-Reed's ability to turn archival straw into intellectual gold, so prolific across her marvelous book, here runs into the brick wall of the archive's limitations, leaving this reader saddened and baffled by the story's greatest mystery. That even she has not unraveled the enigma of James Hemings (who would be my protagonist if I were concocting a sequel) is my only, and unfair, cavil with the book. Meanwhile, I am made breathless by the way in which Professor Gordon-Reed's achievement relies as much on her magnificent imagination as it does on her enormous archive. Like a great novelist, she breathes life and power into characters who in earlier accounts had been rendered with one part filial piety, one part nationalist zeal, one part Masterpiece Theater, and one part waxworks. (There may be too many parts in this recipe, but I am a literary scholar, not a French chef.) With brilliance, she details historical context in all its thick description, particularly James and Sally Hemings's life in Paris, with the foment of the revolution percolating; she vividly paints their social milieu among servants of other ambassadors and the very French aristocrats about to lose everything; and she is particularly sparkling in her discussion of black servant peers of the Hemingses who may have discussed with them the French Admiralty Court's hearing of petitions from enslaved noirs, for whom it nearly always ruled favorably. These chapters afford a rich understanding for the background to Gordon-Reed's speculation that Hemings was able to argue for the eventual manumission of herself and any future children in Virginia if she promised to return there with Jefferson when he left Paris. …

Innocent III and the Case for War in Southern France in 1207

In 1208, Pope Innocent III's public declaration of a crusade in the lands of the count of Toulouse (Reg. Inn. III XI.26) appeared to indicate a change in policy regarding the heretics of that region. A closer examination of the letter's contents, however, suggests that a policy of war had been formulated by 1207 at the latest. This predates the death of the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, whose murder was the alleged pretext for the Albigensian Crusade. By considering the letter's notions of crusading and its preference for rhetoric over policy discussion, it can be demonstrated that the document testifies to an advanced stage of negotiations between Innocent and the French nobility, who the pope had hoped would lead the venture. As it was proposed, the crusade was novel in several respects; notably, its use of Holy Land indulgences and the seizure of property belonging to heretics. The cursory treatment these topics receive in the letter illuminates the process of negotiation that preceded the crusade. In the light of his pressing need to allay the concerns of Philip Augustus, Innocent could not have declared the crusade as he did without having first conducted considerable diplomacy. The careful policy refinement of 1207, therefore, assumes new significance for the events of 1208.

Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution , and: Lessons from America: Liberal French Nobles in Exile, 1793-1798 (review)

Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution. By Philipp Ziesche. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. 239. Cloth, $39.50.)Lessons from America: Liberal French Nobles in Exile, 1793-1798. By Doina Pasca Harsanyi. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Pp. 204. Cloth, $80.00.)Reviewed by Ashli WhiteWhen the Bastille fell in 1789, many observers concluded that France had joined the United States in the attempt to become an enlightened republic. Ever since, eyewitnesses - and then historians - have sought to explain the complex connections between these revolutions. Scholarship fells into two general camps: authors who compare the revolutions' trajectories and achievements; and those who are interested in impact, how each country influenced the other. Both approaches are central to narratives of the early United States, affecting interpretations of nationalism, political life, and the economy, among other issues.For all that we know about these sister republics, Philipp Ziesche's Cosmopolitan Patriots and Doina Pasca Harsanyi's Lessons from America remind us how much remains underexplored. These works shed new light on the relationship between France and the United States in the 1790s, and they do so through the purview of migrants. Ziesche focuses on elite Americans who were drawn to Paris for ideological and economic reasons, while Harsanyi considers French nobles who found themselves on the wrong side of revolution and ended up in temporary exile in Philadelphia. For both historians, these emigrants offer an advantageous perspective because of their dislocation. Although the motivation for each group's move differed (one was voluntary, the other not), marginality in their host nations led them to reflect, with keen insight, on what the United States could learn from France and vice versa. Their experiences, the authors argue, show us how some influential men made sense of the reverberations of revolutions.Philipp Ziesche's Americans in Paris are familiar faces, including Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, and James Monroe. For Ziesche's purposes, what's most important about these is their cosmopolitanism - their belief that all men were fellow citizens of the world, united by a common set of values that elided national, religious, linguistic, and other differences (6). This notion encouraged them to travel to Paris in the 1790s, thinking that they, armed with republican know-how, could be useful to their French counterparts in the translation of universal ideals into practice. But the project of creating republican nations was, to a certain extent, at odds with cosmopolitanism, since nations, it was believed, reflected the mores and manners unique to a population and place. Ziesche points out, however, that individual national projects always looked elsewhere for instruction, and they derived legitimacy, in part, from official recognition by other nations. Universalism was an inescapable component of nationalism.The cosmopolitan patriots were well aware of the tension between the particular and the universal in the making of republican nations, and their wrestling with this dynamic in the French context influenced their vision for the United States. Each chapter explores an aspect of this problem through one or more individuals, all the while progressing chronologically through the decade. Ziesche begins with Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris and their impressions of the new French constitution of 1789, and he then considers the divergent stances of William Short and Jefferson on the Jacobins and revolutionary violence. The third chapter centers on Joel Barlow, his hopes for regenerating the French populace through sensibility, and his subsequent inability to understand the Terror, while in the fourth chapter, Ziesche uses James Monroe to evaluate changing ideas of popular sovereignty in Thermidorian Paris and Federalist America. …

The kingdom of France and its overseas nobilities

On 24 August 1782, Louis XVI issued an edict regarding the French nobles living in his colonies. Noblemen were surprisingly numerous in the French colonies, especially in the Caribbean world. Some were cadets of ancient families, gone to make a fortune overseas, and some had been ennobled for their services to the crown. All were keen to assert their nobility despite the remoteness of these places, the harshness of the life there and racial issues that tended to favour that all whites, of whatever status, were treated equally. This law, and its ambiguities, reveals some of the social specificities shared by members of the second estate of the realm in the colonial context, specificities that were relevant in America as well as in the Indian Ocean or even in Corsica. The law also reveals the significant transformations experienced by the metropolitan noblesse during the 1770s and the 1780s, especially in its social representation. It appears that the origins and the specific values of the colonial nobles had in some respects anticipated these transformations.

Motor Sport in France: Testing-ground for the World

The birth of the automobile in the late nineteenth century was greeted with a mixture of awe, scepticism and sometimes even disdain from sections of the European public. In this article, the steps taken in France to pioneer and promote this new invention are examined. Unreliable and noisy, the early automobile owes a debt of gratitude to the French aristocracy who organised and codified motor racing in an effort to test these new inventions while at the same time introduce them to a wider public. City-to-city races demonstrated the potential of the automobile before the initiative of Gordon Bennett proved to be the catalyst for the birth of international motor sport as we recognise it today. Finally this article looks at the special connection between Le Mans and the automobile. Le Mans has, through its 24-hour race, maintained a strong link with the development of everyday automobile tourism and offers the enthusiast an alternative to the machines that reach incredible speeds on modern-day closed circuits. This article examines how French roads were veritable testing grounds for the earliest cars and how the public roads of Le Mans maintain the tradition to this day.

Environmental Change and Globalization in Seventeenth-Century France: Dutch Traders and the Draining of French Wetlands (Arles, Petit Poitou)

SummaryBetween 1599 and the end of the 1650s, the French Crown sustained a policy of land reclamation at a large scale. It was led by the French aristocracy who were helped by representatives of the merchant elites of Amsterdam, such as Hieronimus van Uffelen and Jean Hoeufft. The works in both Arles (Provence) and Petit Poitou (Poitou) show that land reclamation involved a radical change in society, reinforced the authority of the Crown in the areas concerned, and disrupted the former social balances built around the marshes. Thus, land reclamation aroused several conflicts which revealed its deep impact on the environment. So, this article demonstrates how the making of the modern state, backed by the development of European trade and banking, caused ecological and social changes by connecting the political and financial powers on a European scale.

The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss (review)

Reviewed by: The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss Morten Kristiansen The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss. By Wayne Heisler. (Eastman Studies in Music, v. 64.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. (xi, 345 p. ISBN 9781580463218. $85.) Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Perhaps because Richard Strauss's ballet output includes just two original scores (Josephslegende and Schlagobers) and arrangements of harpsichord works by French baroque composer François Couperin— music unfamiliar to most audiences and typically dismissed by Strauss scholars—this book is the first detailed account of Strauss's lifelong engagement with ballet. Neither a rescue mission nor a product of the current project to redefine Strauss as a modernist, Heisler's excellent and original study contributes significantly to Strauss scholarship by meticulously fleshing out the sketchy accounts of his unfinished ballets and those using Couperin arrangements, placing all the projects within the context of dance history, and—perhaps most importantly—deepening our understanding of the aesthetics and ideology behind Strauss's interest in ballet and appropriation of eighteenth-century music. The book is divided into an introduction and two parts: part 1 features chapters on Die Insel Kythere (The Isle of Cythera, 1900) and Josephslegende (The Legend of Joseph, 1914), part 2 on the Ballettsoirée (1923), Schlagobers (Whipped Cream, 1924), and Verklungene Feste: Tanzvisionen aus zwei Jahrhunderten (Bygone Celebrations: Dance Visions from Two Centuries, 1941). According to Heisler, these chapters "chronicle a gradual transformation from his modern-leaning, parodic conception of classical dance in the years leading up to World War I to a belated obsession with romantic-era ballet during World War II" (p. 6). To put Heisler's coverage in perspective, the most thorough account of Strauss's life and works, Norman Del Mar's Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (3 vols. [London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1962-72]), spends a page and a half on Kythere, twenty-six on Josephslegende, thirteen on Schlagobers, and ten combined on the Couperin arrangements for the Ballettsoirée and Verklungene Feste (discussed as instrumental suites, not ballets). Heisler does not discuss the music comprehensively, but rather offers focused analyses to make specific points. The introduction notes the marginal status of dance in musicology, emphasizes the novelty of Heisler's multidisciplinary approach, and locates the study outside the main current of Strauss scholarship. Stating that his research centered on the genesis, premiere, and early reception of each work, he identifies his method as the book's chief asset: Perhaps the principle [sic] value of this book is the way in which Strauss's ballet collaborations . . . demand an inherently pan-disciplinary approach: the synthesis of published Strauss literature and materials . . . with unpublished and/or largely unexplored sources (scores and sketches, scenarios, production materials . . . , choreography . . . , scene and costume designs, reviews, and, if available, dance notation) in the wider context of music history and dance studies. (p. 5) The author labels his study "comfortably postrevisionist" (p. 5) and locates it outside the "revisionist" mainstream of Strauss studies seeking to elevate the composer's status from late romantic to modernist in the context of atonality and neoclassicism. This characterization of revisionism is incomplete, however. Rather than force Strauss into traditional modernist paradigms that [End Page 796] foreground musical style, "revisionism" has sought to broaden the definition of modernism to include aesthetics and other parameters. Although the opening chapter discusses ballets no one will ever experience— scenarios Strauss considered and his own unfinished Die Insel Kythere—its wide-ranging foray into virtually unexplored territory in order to explicate the meaning of ballet and the eighteenth century for Strauss in the 1890s make it the book's most original and valuable chapter. After summarizing Strauss's unrealistically complicated Kythere scenario involving eighteenth-century French aristocracy and peasants along with ancient Greece, Heisler examines scenarios by and correspondence between Strauss's would-be collaborators and the composer. Appealing to the term "classicist modernism," he concludes that they sought to rejuvenate the genre by replacing the superficial virtuosity and stories of late nineteenth-century ballet with pre-romantic dance and musical narrative dominated by set pieces. Heisler views their interest in self-conscious dance episodes and stylized classical ballet as directly influenced...