Le Siecle Research Articles

Leadership in Modern Times. Reflections on Yves Cohen’s Le siècle des chefs

This review article discusses Yves Cohen’s recent book Le siecle des chefs: Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorite (1890-1940) . Cohen provides an extensive analysis of discourses on leadership in France, the Soviet Union, Germany and the United States. He also studies how leadership was practiced, by French and Soviet factory directors as well as by Stalin himself. While giving due credit to the scope and sophistication of his book, the review article asks whether Cohen’s focus on scientific discourses and highly structured organisations leaves sufficient room for contingency. It argues that interwar political leadership in interwar Europe was not least about seeing and seizing opportunities in unforeseeable circumstances, often thriving on a positive fascination with crises and states of emergency. It also points out that, contrary to what the combined title and subtitle suggest, “le siecle des chefs” hardly ended in 1939, and that the quest for leadership continues to preoccupy present-day societies, cultures and polities.

The Early Sartre and Marxism by Sam Coombes

MLR, 104.4, 2009 ii53 of poor proof-reading. Most regrettably of all, this study of the reading of a great nineteenth-century critic lacks the indispensable critical tool of a bibliography, leav ing readers to scrabble for references between the footnotes and an index of names. University of Leeds Rachel Killick The Early Sartre and Marxism. By Sam Coombes. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2008. 330 pp. ?40. ISBN 978-3-03911-115-2. It is commonly held that Sartre's work falls into two distinct parts, a non-Marxist existentialism' and aMarxist phase. This assumption is shared by thosewho see his development towards Marxism as progress and those who regard it as a betrayal. In this carefully documented and comprehensive study, Sam Coombes launches a devastating attack on such views. He argues that the early Sartre (up to the late 1940s) is closer toMarxism than isusually believed: 'the existentialist and Marxist anthropologies [...] have a great deal more in common than they do not' (p. 167). This leads him to a rereading of the entire body of Sartre's earlier work, on the basis of which he claims 'there are a number of important reasons for believing that Sartre had already conceived some kind of over-arching vision which was both ontological, ethical, and even political as early as 1940-1' (p. 141). That isnot todeny that Sartre's standpoint changed radically His positions were in a constant state of development and self-criticism. But by stressing the continu ities,Coombes is able to clarify the nature of the changes. Thus he is able tomake some illuminating parallels between the early Sartre's notion of inauthenticity and theMarxist theory of ideology. Sartre's concern for the relationship between free thought and action is shown to be similar to theMarxist stress on the unity of theory and practice. Drawing on Thomas Flynn's Sartre andMarxist Existentialism (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1984), he argues that the notion of situation is a 'bridge concept' (p. 60) linking existentialism andMarxism. All toomuch ofwhat has been written about Sartre andMarxism suffersfrom an inadequate knowledge either of Sartre or ofMarxism. Coombes cannot be faulted on either count. He shows an impressive knowledge, not only of Karl Marx, but of a range ofMarxist thinkers, including Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, and Henri Lefebvre, and draws insightful comparisons with various aspects of Sartre's work. The whole of Sartre's work is considered: the explicitly philosophical work, in particular VEtre et leneant (which, Coombes warns, should not be taken 'as awork which encompasses all the key aspects of Sartre's philosophical world-view at the time that it was written' (p. 77)), the fiction, and the early plays, as well as posthu mously published material such as thewar diaries and the correspondence with de Beauvoir. A fascinating section is devoted to the complex relationship between Sartre and Paul Nizan. Coombes shows how several of Sartre's fictional works, in particular some of the stories in Le Mur, can be seen as a conscious, and ironic, response toNizan's malicious portrayal of Sartre as a potential Fascist in the guise of the character of Lange inLe Cheval de Troie (1935). 1154 Reviews Coombes's convincing account of the complex unity of Sartre's work thus un dermines many of themore facile interpretations, notably Bernard-Henri Levy's much overrated Le Siecle de Sartre (Paris: Grasset, 2000), which seeks tomobilize Sartre's early existentialism against hisMarxist self, in a latter-day re-enactment of Cold War cliches. There are several detailed points on which Coombes's judgement could be queried?for example, his claim that the cultural policy of the French Communist Party was not crudely Zhdanovist' (p. 312). But that is simply an indication that his work will provide a stimulus for further research. No serious study of Sartre's philosophical, ethical, and political evolution in the futurewill be able to disregard Coombes's work. London Ian Birchall Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self inPost-War France. By Claire Boyle. London: Legenda. 2007. x+176 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1 905981-10-6. In Claire Boyle's study of the autobiographical writings of Nathalie Sarraute, Georges...

Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self in Post-War France by Claire Boyle

1154 Reviews Coombes's convincing account of the complex unity of Sartre's work thus un dermines many of themore facile interpretations, notably Bernard-Henri Levy's much overrated Le Siecle de Sartre (Paris: Grasset, 2000), which seeks tomobilize Sartre's early existentialism against hisMarxist self, in a latter-day re-enactment of Cold War cliches. There are several detailed points on which Coombes's judgement could be queried?for example, his claim that the cultural policy of the French Communist Party was not crudely Zhdanovist' (p. 312). But that is simply an indication that his work will provide a stimulus for further research. No serious study of Sartre's philosophical, ethical, and political evolution in the futurewill be able to disregard Coombes's work. London Ian Birchall Consuming Autobiographies: Reading and Writing the Self inPost-War France. By Claire Boyle. London: Legenda. 2007. x+176 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1 905981-10-6. In Claire Boyle's study of the autobiographical writings of Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, JeanGenet, and Helene Cixous, theunifying principle ofher analysis is a view of self-writing as an agonistic field inwhich an anxious author is engaged in a struggle to fend offa voracious readership intent on consuming the authorial self in the gesture that gives the book its title. In each case, this struggle concomi tantly involves awriterly suspicion regarding what are taken tobe the norms of the autobiographical genre, but that suspicion and the generically disruptive strategies to which it gives rise take on a variety ofmanifestations. The dialogue form of Sarraute's Enfance attests to a conception of the self as inherently plural and inter subjective. The need to protect this plural self from the reductive commodification threatened by an appropriative reader occasions the challenge already posed to the autobiographical genre inEnfance, a challenge presented more explicitly in Tu ne faimes pas, and then effectivelyexacerbated by the polyphony of voices inher final work Ouvrez. Perec's traumatic experience of a dispossession of the self leads, prin cipally inW ou le souvenir dyenfance and Jeme souviens, to generically destabilizing strategies designed to foster an active reading process less likely to seek amonolithic authorial self that is simply not available. In the course of this analysis, it isdifficult to escape the feeling, a version ofwhich is confronted quite explicitly by Boyle, that the reader is to be treated like Rousseau's recalcitrant citizen: on le forcera d'etre libre'. Perhaps themost effective chapter is on Genet's Miracle de la rose, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, and Journal du voleur,where resistance to a subjectification threatened by both social and literary institutions (the prison and the confessional mode, respectively) is sought by tactics of abjection geared (not entirely success fully, Boyle argues) towards thwarting readerly identification. Finally, Cixous's autobiographical trajectory fromLe Livre de Promethea, through the (significantly) co-authored Helene Cixous: photos de racines, to Les Reveries de lafemme sauvage and Le Jour ou je netais pas la is characterized by a progressive self-estrangement, MLR, 104.4, 2009 ii55 in a process that also serves tomark the ethical danger of the readers quest for knowledge of the autobiographical subject. The principal weakness of this study is the rather banal model of traditional autobiography that is repeatedly invoked to point up the experimental self-writing of the authors addressed, and this despite an opening chapter reviewing recent developments in autobiographical theory. The nuances glimpsed in that review are not always in evidence later in the book. There are also some significant omissions in Boyle's reading of the critical literature on French autobiography: to take just one example, in the light of the importance here of fragmented self-representations thatdraw on impersonal cultural materials, itmight have been illuminating to refer toMichel Beaujour's conception of the autoportrait' elaborated in Miroirs d'encre: rhetorique de Vautoportait (Paris: Seuil, 1980). In terms of autobiographical practice, the twentieth-century literary context for the chosen writers' innovations seems a little sparsely drawn: such figures as Gide and Leiris do not even merit amention. Moreover, when Boyle observes, for instance, that thewriters she has discussed seem touse their autobiographical texts to inquire into,rather than set out, the selfand...

La mujer en las anécdotas de Voltaire sobre Luis XIV

In Le Siecle de Louis XIV and in Anecdotes sur Louis XIV, Voltaire deals with some episodes of the king’s private life. The female figure is a key element in Voltaire’s anecdotes since it is connected not only with the love life and home environment of the monarch, but also with the political scene of the time. In this way, Anne of Austria, Marie-Therese of Austria, Henrietta of England, Adelaide of Savoy, Mademoiselle de La Valliere, Madame de Montespan, and Madame de Maintenon, among others, are close to Louis XIV at different moments of his life. As a historiographer, Voltaire is aware that his writing should be at the sovereign’s service. Thus, in his anecdotal accounts of Louis XIV, Voltaire portrays a king whose most remarkable feature lies in his power as an absolute monarch as much as in his feelings as a man.

The Universal Republic of the Freemasons and the Culture of Mobility in the Enlightenment

In France, Masonic history remains a peripheral field of study, excluded from mainstream social and cultural history.1 For the most part its practitioners are not at universities at all, and refer to themselves as ‘‘Masonologists.’’ They study French Masonry in isolation, avoiding historical context. Paradoxically, despite their use of the term sociability, they continue to give priority to the Masonic order’s own chronicle, which at best amounts to a static and internal sociography. But what about the work of Georg Simmel? Jurgen Habermas? Maurice Agulhon? Daniel Roche? Margaret C. Jacob? How can one forget that these scholars placed the Masonic lodges of the Old Regime at the heart of their studies of eighteenthand nineteenth-century sociability: Simmel’s Secret et societes secretes; Agulhon’s Penitents et francs-macons and Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise; Roche’s Le siecle des Lumieres en province; Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; the Bad Homburg colloquium titled Sociabilite et societe bourgeoise; or Jacob’s Living the Enlightenment, which is finally to appear in French?2 To my

Le Siècle des Lumières: bibliographie chronologique by Pierre M. Conlon

850 Reviews of the funding of our research that causes this volume to present the home coun try as the centre of the world. It is not their lack of vision or want of breadth of awareness. UNIVERSITYOFKENT PHILIP ROBINSON Le Siecle des Lumieres: bibliographiechronologique. By PIERRE M. CONLON. Vol. XXIII: 1788. (Histoire des Idees et Critique Litteraire, 4I9) Geneva: Droz. 2005. xxvii+456 pp. SwF I32. ISBN 2-600-OIO3I-9. Pierre Conlon has almost completed his invaluable bibliography. But before his im mense task culminates with the final account of I789, this volume collates the publi cations at the Ancien Regime's momentous end. The febrile atmosphere of a country on the cusp of revolution prompted a great rise in publications, from a total of I944 in I786, to 2882 in I787, to 4I90 in I788; such is the explosion in the number of publications that this is the first volume in the series to be dedicated to a single year. It is no surprise that political texts dominate, given the convocation of the Etats generaux for the following year, and the intention to create the Cour pleniere. The formal range of the texts iswide, with drama, poetry, letters, and dialogue all serv ing political expression of varying hues. Figures including Mirabeau, Olympe de Gouges, Necker, and Louis XVI himself contributed to the ferment. Yet for all the pamphlets written by a 'patriote' or a 'citoyen', the titles here indicate no outright hostility to the monarchy, and the host of works on Louis XII indeed suggest some confidence in the institution. Although occasionally abrupt, the introduction sensibly avoids considering the works through the prism of imminent events. One wonders, though, how accurate a forecast might be found in the Nouvelles et curieusespropheties composees par Pythagoras, Joseph leYuste, Daniel le prophe'te etMichel Nostradamus pour les annees 1788 et I789 (88: I536). The publications are not exclusively political or serious, as illustrated by the intriguing Histoire tres plaisante arrivee a un bossu amoureux de la ville d'Angouleme (88: 27 I9). Literary works appear byMercier, Reif, Nerciat, and Louvet de Couvray, and Beaumarchais remains in the spotlight given the Kornmann affair, although whether the Lettre d'unefemme en couches aM. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (88: I240) was of much consolation is debatable. Nor do the publications focus solely on the situation in France; from a dissertation on the bread of the Hottentots, to a historical essay on Surinam, and a work on Indian deities, giants, and cosmology, the outside world was not forgotten. Foreign literature, particularly English novels, continued to appear in translation. It is to be hoped that this project will one day be accessible in amore user-friendly form. For as important as this bibliography most certainly is, the commitment and calibre of Conlon's scholarship would be better served in digital rather than paper form. Yet if readers are likely to find a database easier to navigate than a printed volume, perhaps only the latter makes for juxtapositions as serendipitous (and even as significant) as that between theworthy Souscription volontaire enfaveur des pauvres de la ville & des faubourgs de Caen (88: 2 I85) and the more frivolous Souvenir a l'angloise, et recueil de coiffures dediee [sic] auxfemmes de bon gout (88: 2 I86). UNIVERSITYOFEXETER THOMASWYNN ...

Inscribing his Ideal Reader(ship): Victor Hugo and the Shaping of le lecteur pensif

In the fifty years that separated the publication of Han d'Islande (1823) from that of Quatrevingt-treize (1874), Victor Hugo's use of the novelistic form in many ways punctuated rather than propelled his writing career, as his fictional undertakings were far less frequent, in terms of total output, than his poetic or dramatic efforts. (1) In reference to Hugo's early novels, and in spite of his enthusiastic endorsement of the genre in an 1823 review of Walter Scott's Quentin Durward that appeared in the first edition of La Muse francaise, (2) this hesitancy can at least in part be explained by the lingering reluctance of an ambitious young writer to practice his craft in a form that had yet to be fully legitimized. Sparked by personal reasons or motivated by the promise of financial gain, Hugo's first fictional endeavors tested the waters of the novel: Han d'Islande (Hugo's nod to Scott and the gothic novel) was published anonymously and played out his own love story with Adele Foucher; Bug-Jargal had its origins in a school bet; and Notre-Dame de Paris, for which Hugo had received a sizable advance, was only completed under the threat of sanction. (3) The period of silence that followed is, however, more difficult to elucidate, as thirty-one years separate the publication of the wildly-successful Notre-Dame de Paris from that of the much-anticipated Les Miserables in 1862. Indeed, as the novel as a genre gained momentum and legitimacy in France in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, as the roman-feuilleton emerged in newspapers like Le Siecle and La Presse and steadily grew in popularity, bringing a more accessible mass-produced kind of literature to a changed and changing nineteenth-century reading public, Hugo made and sustained his sizable fortune writing plays and poetry, keeping ideas for novels tucked away in his carnets personnels, aware of and concerned perhaps as early as the 1830s about the new kinds of constraints being imposed on novelists dependent on their pens and--more and more--on the reading public. (4) Hugo's veering away from the novel just as it became fashionable speaks in fact to a certain wariness on his part, at once of the vogue of the roman historique that took off on the heels of Notre-Dame de Paris (he later claimed to have never written one), (5) of the advent of the realist novel, and of the production and mass consumption of literature through serial novels, which targeted a different, less sophisticated kind of reader. (6) That Hugo had little interest in pursuing the writing of historical or serial novels, or both, as they in many cases intersected, is not, however, surprising. His commentary in La Muse francaise about the other novel that had yet to be created had already set him apart from the direction or directions that would be pursued by his contemporaries. What also needs to be taken into account is that there was something else that set Hugo apart from his contemporaries by the end of the 1830s: the success he had already attained as a writer and the financial independence that this success allowed him. Indeed, after an unstable childhood in which his family's money concerns were real and constant, and the lean years of the 1820s (which themselves were nonetheless subsidized by one of the last pensions royales awarded), Hugo's desire for financial security and the stability that it ensured was realized in the 1830s through the careful management both of his theatrical productions and the publication and re-publication of earlier works. (7) The effects of Hugo's careful serf-management and of his understanding of the new business of literature--and especially strategies for publication that continued to assure his financial independence throughout his long career--have, in fact, in many ways been under-explored in terms of their relevance to his body of work. For unlike the great majority of his contemporaries whose financial status had shifted and who became dependent on commercial concerns, Hugo's rare success story put him in a position not only to write what he wanted when he wanted, but increasingly to cultivate, inscribe, and write for a desired, ideal and idealized reader(ship). …

Quebec Sociology and Quebec Society: The Construction of a Collective Identity

Abstract: In this paper I will briefly outline how sociology has interpreted French Canadian collectivity from end of last century to present time. I argue that French-speaking collectivity in Canada has been ascribed, both successively and simultaneously, characters of race, ethnic group, society, and nation through prism of sociology. The cultural specificity of this collectivity has been alternately perceived as either a stigma or as an element of pride. My paper has three parts: Leon Gerin and Marius Barbeau, or the as a handicap; External perspectives of Horace Miner, Everett C. Hughes, and Laval School; and what (the cultural specificity of character) means. These three perspectives correspond to three periods in history of sociology: The pioneers (before 1939); institutionalization of (academic) sociology (1940-1969); and nationalization of sociology (1970 until now). The 1960s and 1970s are viewed herein as Golden of sociology in Quebec. Resume: De la fin du siecle dernier a aujourd'hui, la sociologie quebecoise a fourni diverses interpreations de la collectivite francophone au Canada, lui attribuant, successivement et simultanement, differents statuts: ceux de race, de groupe ethnique, de societe et de nation. La specificite culturelle de cette collectivite a ete percue tantot comme un stigmate tantot comme un element de fierte. Mon article se divise en trois parties: 1) Leon Gerin, Marius Barbeauou la difference comme handicap, 2) Un point de vue de l'texterieur: Miner, Hughes et l'Ecole de Laval, 3) qu'et-ce que la [much less than] Quebecitude (ou la specificite culturelle du signifie ? Ces trois perspectives correspondent dans une certaine mesure a trois periodes dans Ia sociologie quebecoise : 1) les pionniers (avant 1939), t'institutionnalisation de la sociologie academique (1940-1969), et la [much less than] nationalisation [much greater than] de la sociologie quebecoise (1970 jusqu'a maintenant), avec les annees 1960 et 1970 co mme I' [much less than] Age d'or [much greater than] de la sociologie. What is specific to a group or a society? The social sciences, and particularly sociology, have a stake in this debate. It is impossible for these disciplines to escape problem, because social scientists cannot define their field without constructing an object; that is, without defining society in which they practice their profession. In Quebec, it certainly was not sociologists who invented Quebec Question. However, sociological studies have made significant contributions to formation of national identity (Fournier and Houle, 1980), providing cognitive categories which have helped French-speaking collectivity in thinking out its identity. As early as beginning of century, Marcel Mauss observed significant contributions that human and social sciences have made to creation of national identities in Europe. Referring to works devoted to study of national character, he stated: Le siecle dernier a vu la naissance d'un nouveau genre litteraire ... Mais ceci n'est que la manifestation litteraire d'un fait: la formation consciente des caracteres nationaux (Mauss, 1967: 603). In other words, recourse to human and social science is indispensable in that it ensures a cognitive basis for establishing clear social boundaries and specific political demands. This representation of identity not only rests on inherent characteristics, but it is also, and more importantly, a function of balance of power within which group or collectivity exists. In effect, this determines ease in which it may transform these traits into a collective identity (Bourdieu, 1980: 63-72). Within framework of this paper, I will briefly review how sociology has interpreted French Canadian collectivity from end of last century until present time. …

Slavery and the Venality of the July Monarchy Press

Though much has been written about press censorship following the Revolution of 1830, little concrete information exists on the financing of the July Monarchy press, and even less on its venality.' What we do know about the funding of French newspapers at this time usually amounts to little more than statistics on the receipts and expenditures of individual dailies in given years, such as for La Presse in 1836, L'A telier in 1840-41, and Le Siecle in 1841.2 From these figures scholars have concluded that during the period 1830-48 press revenue still derived overwhelmingly from subscriptions rather than from the sale of individual issues and that advertising income was on the rise for large circulation newspapers. Although it is generally accepted by historians that these early years of French industrialization were tainted by influence peddling and corruption in many sectors of society and industry, from which the journalistic world was not exempt, no works have been able to show conclusively that gratuities, bribes, or payoffs constituted a significant portion of the operating capital of many journals under the Orleanist regime. It was common knowledge to contemporaries that politicians or

Comment on Récrit L'Histoire : Louis XIV de Lavisse a Gaxotte

L'histoire bégaie souvent, on le sait. Cette constatation désabusée gagnerait cependant à être rapportée en priorité à la manière dont on l'écrit. L'historiographie, genre littéraire, se caractérise jusqu'à nos jours par la fixité de la règle qui la commande : la répétition, le recours aux autorités, la technique du centon et, d'une façon générale, la fidélité à l'égard de la norme en vigueur. L'histoire est la chimie la plus inoffensive qu'ait élaborée l'esprit humain, puisqu'elle se complaît au conservatisme épistémologique.

Voltaire's Use of Larrey and Limiers in Le Siecle de Louis XIV: History as a Science, an Art and a Philosophy

Voltaire's Use of Larrey and Limiers in Le Siecle de Louis XIV: History as a Science, an Art and a Philosophy

The Annales School and the Enlightenment

The Annales School and the Enlightenment ARAM VARTANIAN Daniel Mornet, in his classic Origines intellectuelles de la Revolution frangaise, initiated a half-century ago the historiographic method which has evolved into that of the Annales School. His use of the socio-cultural survey to interpret the French Enlightenment was prompted by a spe­ cific issue: the relationship of the philosophes to the Revolution of 1789. Nineteenth-century historians had generally believed, some approvingly, some disapprovingly, that the Revolution was the outcome of the "philo­ sophic du dix-huitieme siecle." To challenge this facile assumption, Mornet reconstructed in depth the climate of opinion that was the indispensable medium through which the Enlightenment could have had any impact on the Revolution. He found several reasons for rejecting the theory of a causeand -effect connection between the two: first, the philosophes' ideas had been overwhelmingly reformist, not revolutionary; secondly, those same ideas had been parallelled by, or assimilated to, the outlook of a large sector of the public well before 1789 without any revolutionary, or other­ wise destabilizing, effects on the Ancien Regime; finally, Enlightenment thought, having met with both resistance and indifference in the years leading up to the Revolution, had failed to dominate politics at the deci­ sive moment. Because Mornet was intent above all on characterizing the movement of Lumieres as either revolutionary or non-revolutionary, he dealt only tangentially with a problem that was to become more impor­ tant to some of his successors in the Annales School, and which will be of central concern to us: namely, how can we determine, apart from the 233 234 / VARTANIAN intellectual origins of the French Revolution, the degree of kinship there was between the views of the philosophes and the various 'collective men­ talities" prevalent in eighteenth-century France? To be sure, the answer to such a question was, in 1933, beyond the scope of Mornet's inadequately quantitative method, which consisted not in a statistical analysis but in a mere compilation of relevant data, along with random use of represen­ tative instances. Attempts to interpret the Enlightenment, from the early nineteenth century until the present, have suffered for lack of the sort of information provided by the Annales historians, which now makes it possible to fit—even if still only tentatively— the canonical texts of Lu­ mieres into their proper context of a public consciousness. Without that context, the historical, and therefore also the hermeneutic, status of the texts is subject to distortion. Even Mornet's old problem, which is by no means settled today, about the linkage between the Enlightenment and the Revolution will be, as we shall see, nearer to a solution, if the "collec­ tive mentalities" in the midst and often for the sake of which the philo­ sophes composed their works are taken into consideration. In short, the purpose of this paper is to ask what bearing recent investigations in the sociology of eighteenth-century culture have on our understanding of the Enlightenment—of its sources, its nature, and its role in French history. The bibliography of the subject is already too extensive to be used here without restraint. I shall, therefore, concentrate on three major and ex­ emplary studies, each of which is preeminent in delineating a particular aspect of the eighteenth-century mind: Michel Vovelle's Piete baroque et dechristianisation (1973); Daniel Roche's Le siecle des Lumieres en prov­ ince: Academies et academiciens provinciaux (1978); and Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment (1979). Vovelle's book is a statistical measurement of the sharp decline of "ba­ roque piety," that is, of ostentatious and elaborate religiosity, in the whole of Provence during the course of the eighteenth century. This change in public attitudes and behavior is inferred from an exhaustive examination of wills. One may wonder, at first, what there is in common between the great texts of the Enlightenment and a dusty heap of testamentary documents. Let us recall, however, that the drawing up of a will, by its sober confrontation with death and therefore with the meaning of life as well, can be a moment of "philosophical truth," eliciting from the testa­ tor a statement of his deepest convictions. The filiation...

The Expedition of Baron de Pointis against Cartagena

EVEN the patriotic Frenchman does not always realize how long is the list of his naval heroes. He is often content to name Duquesne, Duguay-Trouin, and Jean Bart, and to suppose that the list is complete. There is a host of others who should not be forgotten. Among them is Jean Bernard Louis Desjeans, Baron de Pointis, whose daring exploits have suffered eclipse bn account of the failures of the French navy toward the close of the reign of Louis XIV. Yet one of his expeditions played for a year a determining r6le in the maneuvers of the navies of England, France, and Holland, greatly alarmed both Spanish America and the English West Indies, influenced somewhat the course of peace negotiations at Ryswick, and materially increased English interest in the South Seas at the moment when the future of the Spanish empire became the predominant issue in European diplomacy. Le Siecle de Lottis Quatorze still stands resplendent for its wars and rumors of wars. It has, indeed, been generally assumed that this king was too deeply engrossed in military affairs to be interested in commerce and colonization, and that while he cherished the army he starved the navy. He was, however, deeply concerned about naval affairs, commerce, and colonies, as even a casual reference to the manuscripts and printed sources of the reign will indicate. Some have claimed that the attention paid to them was due to Colbert, but the emphasis on all three increased after his death, and was largely responsible for plunging France into three-quarters of a century of bitter, if intermittent, warfare which began with the accession of William III. to the English throne, and ended in I763 only after it had spread from Havana to Manila. The career of Pointis is a commentary upon this paragraph, and particularly is this true of his capture of Cartagena, the exploit for which he should best be remembered. He was born in I645. By the age of forty he had risen in the navy to be captain of a royal vessel. Soon after, he was made commissary general of marines and a chevalier of the Order of St. Louis. At Beachy Head in I690 he commanded a ship of the line. After the battle of La Hogue two years later, when Louis XIV. began gradually (more gradually, indeed, than has usually 237

THE TEACHING OF FRENCH CIVILIZATION

THE HISTORY of civilization is not a new-fangled or a pseudoscience: no less than 170 years ago, Voltaire practiced it with dazzling success, and neither Le Siecle de Louis XIV nor L'Essai sur les Moeurs have been allowed to run out of print. Yet the subject is coming into its own, in our days, with such dramatic suddenness, that many of us are still wondering-maybe with a sneer: What is Civilization, anyway? And how on earth can it be taught? To answer the first question with any thoroughness would take us into the Philosophy of History: a fascinating realm no doubt, all the more fascinating because it might well be a phantasmal one. The teacher of languages would have a perfect right to consider it as outside his practical sphere. Fortunately there is enough upon which we are all agreed to provide a workable definition of Civilization, and a firm basis for its study. Our task is to teach French, that is to say to train our students in the use of an instrument, the French language. That instrument is composed of words grouped into sentences. But words are only symbols. They stand for a certain reality in the speaker's or writer's mind. Unless they stand for approximately the same reality in the hearer's or reader's mind, they will be meaningless sounds. They exist only in function of the speaker's and of the hearer's experience. They change their colouring, chamaleonlike, according to their background; and if there were no background whatever-if they did not represent something either material or conceptual-they would be sheer nonsense. The