Updated Review at End of Year: Definitely the best textbook for AP European History, if I've got any prospective Euro teachers looking at this review.Updated Review at End of Year: Definitely the best textbook for AP European History, if I've got any prospective Euro teachers looking at this review. It's universally voted as the favorite of most AP Euro teachers due to its readability, primary sources and the AP-aligned questions at the end of each chapter. There are strong advocates for a few other options, but this is the majority choice. And after teaching with it for a year, I do see why. It's not perfect (Spielvogel has himself some questionable OPINIONS), but I found I agreed with all the reasons listed above that people had given me for why to get it. Note: I have the 9th AP edition, and appears not worth it to upgrade to the 10th- not enough changes. Am waiting for 11th edition to see if there are substantial changes based on the College Board's realignment of the units/question types in 2019-2020. *** Original Notification-PS- This thing is the reason why my book count is so much lower this year. I'm teaching an AP class for the first time this year and I'm reading this whole thing along with the kids to make sure my lessons are targeted, in addition to finding/reading many primary source excerpts and scholarly articles to supplement it. Gonna just leave this here until June as my excuse for why there's often not another currently-reading book on here!...more
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the renegade, married Bishop of Autun, Prince of Benevento, Prince of Talleyrand of largely infamous renown. HCharles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the renegade, married Bishop of Autun, Prince of Benevento, Prince of Talleyrand of largely infamous renown. His name, where it is still known, is likely to call up images of what some thought to be his spirit animal, the snake, or perhaps just the snake charmer. He is best known as the remarkable survivor of five straight French regimes, and not the relatively kind ones where you got to rusticate in the country when you fell out of favor. These were the years of Louis XVI, Danton, Marat, Sièyes, Fouché, Napoleon and the Ultras, and aside from the two years of the Terror which he largely spent abroad in England and America, he was rarely out of government service the whole time. By reputation, he was considered a man without honor by many, the untrustworthy minister who was nonetheless recalled and recalled again to serve the French government, whomever might be at its head. His most famous and unambiguously triumphant episode: the astonishingly favorable outcome of the Treaty of Paris, followed by the Congress of Vienna, at which, despite the return of Napoleon and the slight…. interruption of Waterloo, he was able to obtain for France a still almost unbelievably favorable settlement and return her to the status of a Great Power. This allowed the completely exhausted and occupied country to maintain her borders and visited punishment largely only on the conqueror, rather than on the people who had supported him (again, incredibly, even after the Hundred Days!). Later on, through his time at the London Embassy, he was also a large player in ensuring that the question of Belgium, one of the major mistakes of the Congress, was peacefully fixed and resolved, and helped ensure that war did not break out once more.
And yet, despite these amazing feats, his negative reputation remains. The clever Talleyrand, certainly. But more importantly, the man who stood for nothing- who changed his opinions and advice to suit his masters, who was just as happy serving the good king as the ambitious conqueror. The man who who was only out for himself and his own survival- oh, remarkably good at it, one must give him that, but still, not one that anyone, in fact, from any faction would trust farther than they could throw him.
But why? Surely whatever faults he may have had, his accomplishments and many years of government service (and remember this is centralized France we speak of) must outweigh them. You would think this would especially be the case as passions faded and the practical results of his work became more evident, especially as his memoirs were released and the Second Empire came to a close, that it would be time for the revisionist biography. But, as of 1932, that had not occurred.
Cooper’s reasoning for writing this biography lies there. At one point in this biography, Cooper reminds us of the politics of historians in France. At least into the early 20th century, they tended to fall into one of three camps- Republican, Royalist and Bonapartist. Perhaps even more so than most countries, the story of France’s 18th and 19th century history depends on where your sympathies lie- whether we can hear tears over the wheels of the tumbrils or only the iron march of justice or perhaps only a faraway prophecy of the Savior to Come. Talleyrand was the firm disciple of none of these camps and thus, points out Cooper, he has not “yet found his defender in France.” Duff Cooper, a diplomat, politician and historian himself, takes up his sword here to become his defender in their place with what seems to me to be a great deal of sympathy towards one that I believe he considered a colleague of sorts that he had a right to analyze like he would analyze the work of any other counterpart, based on his own experience in the field. (I would like to do him the credit of saying that Cooper states his bias straight out as he remarks that he is “an Englishman who believes that Talleyrand was a true patriot and a wise statesman to whom neither contemporaries nor posterity has done justice”.)
Thus, Cooper dedicates his history of Talleyrand to refuting, or at the least complicating the negative reputation that generally attaches to Talleyrand. His major means of doing this is through defending him from the biggest charge made against him: that he was a man of inconsistent or non-existent principles who cared only for his own survival and acted accordingly. He does this by stating, consistently, that he argued, from 1789 to the 1830s for a policy that was marked by moderation, conciliation and the desire for domestic and foreign peace. He believed in constitutional monarchy and freedom of the press and in reconciling the old guard and the new revolutionary spirit, and said so on many occasions.
Cooper admits that Talleyrand would not die for these principles. He was willing to state them, argue them, make the best case possible for them. But he would not fall on his sword if they were not obeyed. But nonetheless, he maintains that each time he was asked for his advice or given the opportunity to state his views, he held to these same principles, whether in the last days of 1789 or throughout Napoleon’s mad expansionist period.
An example is an episode where he is rather prophetic about the fates of both Prussia and Austria which were to eventually follow later in the century, in part due to their crushing treatment at the hands of Napoleon . As a demonstration of Talleyrand’s policy of conciliation, peace and moderation, he accurately analyzed the weakness of the Austrian empire and wrote Napoleon, after both Ulm and later Austerlitz, that “Such a power is necessarily weak [Austria}, but she is an adequate bulwark against the barbarians and a necessary one. To-day, crushed and humiliated, she [Austria] needs that her conqueror should extend a generous hand to her and should, by making her an ally, restore her to confidence in herself, of which so many defeats and disasters might deprive her forever… To-day more than ever I date to consider it the best and wisest policy.” Napoleon ignored his advice, and ignored similar advice given about the likelihood of the lessons that Prussia was likely to draw from their treatment in defeat and indeed, his blunt statement that so crushed a country could never be an ally. Talleyrand attempted to rein in the worst of Napoleon’s excesses, and various statesmen attest to him being the voice of reason at this time. In addition, within a year he resigned from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, unable to bear supporting Napoleon’s endless ambition and ever-changing policy, especially when he would no longer listen to his advice. Therefore, in actuality, we have a man who consistently spoke his unpopular truth to a man who many considered the modern Caesar and was ready to argue away some of Napoleon’s desire for the spoils of victory.
Beyond his defense of Talleyrand’s consistency in arguing for moderation, conciliation and peace, one interesting feature of the biography is that his defense is remarkably tailored to the audience he seems to have in mind- that is upper class Englishmen with some experience with government. Thus it is no surprise to find that Talleyrand is endowed with all the virtues that that audience could be counted upon to appreciate, and many opinions that were likely to endear him to that particular crowd. For instance, one argument that returns again and again is that Talleyrand was an Anglophile. Indeed, beyond that that he always believed that France and England were natural allies. He points out each time that Talleyrand strove for an Anglo-French alliance (which he maintains was one of those “consistent principles” that was nearly as important to him as general European peace) and spends a great deal of time on Talleyrand’s time as Ambassador in London. He further more reports the favorable impression that he made on various famous English of the time, men and women his audience would have recognized-Aberdeen, Lord Grey, Lord Holland and Wellington himself. It also probably did not hurt that he intimates that the French never recognized Talleyrand’s worth, but Englishmen were smart enough to do so- so hah!- those ungrateful, wrong French need to be tutored by England once more. In addition, he takes every opportunity to position Talleyrand as a graceful, aristocratic survivor of the 18th century, a species which was thought of at the time in England with nostalgia by many in the upper class: the time before the storm and the scare, when conversation was an art and the rabble hadn’t a thought in their heads of such horrid things as revolution and demanding their rights. There are a legion of anecdotes contained here that serve no other purpose but to illustrate Talleyrand’s inborn class and grace and his ability to strike the sort of pose that aristocrats liked to believe that aristocrats have always struck. Finally, he makes frequent off-hand asides that his audience is meant to understand with a small smirk and a knowing nod of the head. You know, the sort of joke that comedians make that starts, “You know how when….” except rather than detailing a character from the metro, the characters he expects us to recognize are types that you are likely to see about an embassy or an upper-class drawing room- or at the very least in a book that anyone sitting in either of those locales would have read. He expects his audience to have the same base that he is working from. Again, it is a defense of a colleague (I don’t care how long in the past it was- this is a man who could blithely write that “Pitt received him and was as stiff as only Pitt could be,” of the English Prime Minister of two centuries previously- as if he had just gone to his house for tea the previous day).
Indeed, to that end, it was interesting to me how much of his defense ultimately rested on the fact that Talleyrand was, after all, incredibly good at his job. Reading this from modern-day, it sounds as if Talleyrand would have made an incredibly successful consultant of the Booz Allen type. Another major way that Cooper defends him is to state over and over again that Talleyrand gave the best advice to whoever asked it of him, whether royalist conspirator or Napoleon himself, whether to members of the Directory or to the restored Bourbons. For example, when he was asked if the Empress should leave Paris when the allies were marching on it before the formal capitulation of the government- he said no, that it would indicate the surrender of Paris and “throw away the game with good cards in hand.” He said this despite the fact that he supported the royalist cause at the time and had done for some time. This advice was ignored and the Empress left Paris, but nonetheless he gave the best advice possible at the time for Napoleon’s position. Cooper writes:
“When he was asked afterwards why he had given advice, which, if it had been followed, would have proved injurious to the cause which he already secretly supported, he replied that his credit at the time stood so low that he knew that he had only to advise one course for the opposite to be adopted. This was an ingenious explanation of his conduct, but it is permissible to believe that in giving it he was doing himself, as not infrequently, less than justice. He may have doubted whether his advice would be followed, he certainly wished no good to the Napoleonic regime, but when required to deliver an opinion on a question of policy, he probably preferred to give the opinion which he really held, and which also was the wisest counsel in the circumstances. All through the previous year whenever Napoleon had asked for his opinion he had given it honestly, advising the Emperor to make the best peace he could, although with little expectation and less desire that such advice would be followed. Although his conscience troubled him little, there exists such a thing as professional pride, and it must have afforded him some consolation to feel that the advice which he had given was always sound and that those who refused to follow it were the architects of their own misfortunes.”
Now tell me: Hand this to a bunch of career diplomats and government servants and politicians. How many of them do you think can maybe recognize some part of that scenario?
In the end, then, it is a fairly able defense. His writing is remarkably authoritative, his narrative runs smoothly for the most part, and his general insights about politics, in-depth analysis of each political situation Talleyrand deals with and finally his determination to point out what seems to be fairly obvious bias on the part of many of Talleyrand’s contemporaries makes the reader apt to want to believe him. However, I should point out a few flaws: For those looking for a particularly scholarly biography, you will not find it here. You will cringe with his frequent, lordly assumption of how people “must��� have felt (with sometimes little textual evidence to support it) or how Talleyrand must “doubtless” have proceeded due to some motive that he never wrote down. Also, while his citations of primary sources are frequent and impressive, they are embedded like anecdotes in the narrative and there are no footnotes or endnotes to be found where we might go look up a quotation for ourselves. In addition, despite his indignation about the biases of Talleyrand’s contemporaries, he does not hesitate to assassinate the character of many of Talleyrand’s accusers himself. There is a general tone of “Well this mean old man said this horrid thing about Talleyrand, but he was a mean old man who was just jealous of him anyway,” about a lot of his refutations of others. And due to his lack of citations or in-depth review of the history of many of these people he mentions, I am unable to judge whether Cooper is making this up as he does how Talleyrand “doubtless” must have felt on several occasions. Finally, during what were actually Talleyrand’s surprising amount of years away from the center of power, Cooper has a tendency to wander about quite a bit with his narrative and go out of his way to point out Talleyrand’s relevance by taking us through a sequence of barely related anecdotes about interesting personages he met along the way. Sometimes amusing, but I think lengthened the book unnecessarily for what seemed to be the purposes of providing character witnesses for Talleyrand.
Ultimately, I think of his biography in the same vein that I do Nancy Mitford’s biographies. The tone is nearly the same. The writing is just as divinely sure of itself, his advice and opinions as magisterial as only an English politician and diplomat who grew up under Victoria’s empire and owned a quarter of the globe could be. There is no suggestion that he might not know something, not a hint of qualification or ambiguity. Where Cooper defends Talleyrand, he has his back 100%. Where he is willing to condemn him, he says so straight out and wastes no more than a few sentences on it.
And his writing- I really cannot emphasize enough how excellent his writing is. Aside from that wonderful tone I mentioned above which just makes me smile every time, he is really a master of character sketches. I met many characters here I had never heard of before, and after usually less than one page of description on Cooper’s part, I never felt the need to read another word about them again. One of my favorite examples:
“A brave and loyal messenger was needed who would carry through the line defended by Napoleon’s army to the allied statesmen and if possible to the Bourbon Princes themselves… Such a man was available in the person of the Baron de Vitrolles, one of those faithful and fearless supporters of the old order, whose belief in the righteousness of their cause was as sincere as their religion, and whose services were as valuable in moments of crisis as they were embarrassing after the victory was won. The Baron had already fought for the cause, but this was his first introduction into the world of high politics and he has left us in his memoirs the impression that it produced on him. He was naturally alarmed at the prospect of negotiating with statesmen whose names were already famous throughout Europe, but the more he saw of them the less he thought of them, and it appeared to him that both Talleyrand and Fouche were rather lacking in intelligence as neither of them seemed to have a clear idea of exactly what he wanted. Politics are indeed a simple science to honest souls like the Baron de Vitrolles, who believe that all solutions of the problem save their own are wrong and who are prepared to die for their cause.”
(Aside: On top of everything else that's great about it, does this remind anyone of a certain bombastic PM-to-be? Come on! Get way harsh about it. Put WWI center brain. People could still be snotty about Churchill in 1932- and were. It probably isn't a comment, but it totally could be, right??)
Cooper also takes periodic time out to express his own views on various subjects, usually, again, in a pleasing and interesting fashion. There is a lovely and somewhat astonishing- when considered in its parts- description of time passing in England that he gives just as Talleyrand arrives in the country to begin his ambassadorship in 1830:
“It was a very different country that this lover of England was revisiting in 1830 from that which he had left in 1794. Never perhaps have thirty-six years effected so complete a change in the outward aspect and inner mind of a whole nation. It is hardly too much to say that the complete process of alteration from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century had taken place in that period. He had known the London of Horace Walpole and he came back to the London of Charles Greville. When he was last there Pitt and Fox had been at the height of their powers; now the young Disraeli was already older than Pitt had been when he became Prime Minister and the young Gladstone was coming of age. He had left the London of knee-breeches and powdered hair and he returned to the London of frock-coats and top-hats. White’s Club, down steps of which he would have been kicked as a rascally Jacobin in 1794, elected him an honorary member. The famous bow window had been built over the steps in the interval and had already seen its greatest days, for the brief reign of Brummel was over and the dandies of the Regency were no more. Boswell had been alive when he was last in London. The whole life-work of Keats, Shelley and Byron had taken place during his absence and this, the year of his return, the first publication of Tennyson saw the light. Those who were alive at his first visit could remember the reign of Queen Anne, those who were alive at his second could live into the reign of George V.”
In the end, whether Cooper offers the best factual account of Talleyrand’s life or not- and really for a biography published in 1932 I don’t know how we can’t expect a certain amount of his facts and interpretations to be quite dated, as indeed they are- he is really just, I must say once more, a pleasure to read. Think of it as a well-written collection of sometimes amusing, sometimes quite serious short stories, a “based on a short story” tale written by someone with a sure hand who has taken up his pen to defend a friend. On this basis, I have no flaws to find or criticism to offer. Eighty years later, still a job very well done indeed....more
I am a bit sad to have finished the last of Nancy Mitford's wonderful portrait biographies, but I can't be sad I read this. Inimitable, as always, NanI am a bit sad to have finished the last of Nancy Mitford's wonderful portrait biographies, but I can't be sad I read this. Inimitable, as always, Nancy. My hat is off to you. Full review in a roundup of awesome books on my blog: https://shouldacouldawouldabooks.com/......more
The central thesis of David Bell's First Total War is that the Napoleonic wars, both in the way they were thought of and in the way they were fought, The central thesis of David Bell's First Total War is that the Napoleonic wars, both in the way they were thought of and in the way they were fought, represented an almost complete break with the style of the 18th century, where wars had become more and more limited, a matter of aristocratic codes and diplomatic maneuvering, and where battle was avoided as much as possible. While Bell is in agreement with the vast majority of Napoleonic scholars that in terms of actual battles and fighting and military technology (ie, the things we would normally think of as constituting warfare) very little had changed from the preceding century- indeed as he and several other scholars note, if a soldier of Louis XIV fell asleep for a hundred years, he would have very little trouble fitting into the regiment he found when he woke up. (Well, except for perhaps being a hundred year old sleeping princess with a weird uniform and craaazy vocabulary, but let that pass!) No, the real revolution took place in the way that war was thought of. He states that "the intellectual transformations of the Enlightenment, followed by the political transformations of 1789-1792 produced new understandings of war that made possible the cataclysmic intensification of fighting over the next twenty-three years.”
Guided by the work of the brilliant (if unrepentant) Nazi legal theorist, Carl Schmitt, he traces how war had gone from being considered a normal and perfectly acceptable part of interstate interactions to being thought of in an increasingly demonized way as the exception to the natural order of things rather than the rule. Therefore, those who engaged in it were increasingly demonized, enemies were increasingly thought of as devils and subhuman, and the result of the conflicts could not longer be simply making a point or exchanging a province or two- instead it had to mean total and complete victory over your evil opponents, because now making war had to be a) justified, at all, which was not the case previously, since again, it was thought to be the norm, and b) had to be justified on moral grounds as an absolute necessity. This lead to black and white thinking, where on the one hand you get some enlightenment thinkers who dream of perpetual peace and utopia, and some others who dream of war as a "cleansing" pursuit that will "purify" a nation and lead it forward (there are many striking quotes he cites from Revolutionary figures- particularly the Girondin wing of the revolutionary parties- who use this sort of language. Pretty scary actually). Ultimately, he concludes, this tradition of thinking about war in in a black and white, good and evil sort of way has carried right down into the present day, where he states, "it has become very difficult to discuss war in non-apocalyptic terms."
Given the history of the past ten years, with its wars and diplomatic rifts and seemingly intractable conflicts and unending disasters, it would be easy to be in at least partial sympathy with Bell's conclusions. Indeed, he uses this history to make his point (and, one suspects, to try to give his area of expertise the kind of immediate relevance it has not seemed to have in a good while). I think that he is right to state, as he does numerous times, that theorizing of war, how it is thought of, how people respond to it and why, has become an under discussed and and even "ghettoized" (as he phrases it) topic. And he convinced me he is absolutely right to bring to the fore again. Furthermore, I think that his understanding of the Napoleonic era as something that served as a model for future generations of statesmen, soldiers and historians, is also right on the money. It doesn't matter how much of it was myth or not when you're looking at it from the perspective of what it influenced in the future. Nationalist mythmakers made great hay out of the Napoleonic era as the "first national war," and they were quite successful at doing it. I also think that Bell's work in pointing out the development of "military culture" in this period was really fascinatingly done. This era was really the first time that the "army" was separated out from the "civilian" population as a whole separate entity with a separate ethos, living space, way of thinking and education. In fact, the word "civilian" did not even exist in many languages- and those languages it did exist in it meant simply a student of civil law, not a "noncombatant" as we would think of it today. It is from this separation that the ideology of "militarism" largely arose in Western Europe, and he is right to point out that Prussia, the country who did the most to promote these ideas, got its reforms and its mindset straight from its perceptions of what had happened to it at the hands of Napoleon.
However, in presenting the Napoleonic era as a time of total rupture and break with the past, I think he somewhat overstates his case. As many other Napoleonic scholars of the revisionist school have found, there are far more continuities to be found with the 18th century than Bell really wants to speak about in this text- not just in terms of military tactics and technology, but also in terms of who controlled the army, how it was organized, how it was used, its means of supporting itself logistically, and even how war was thought of by the majority of countries who were still monarchical and not shaken by the upheavals of revolution. The point has been made time and again that the other countries changed very little about their armies or how they used war during or after the Napoleonic wars. The Congress of Vienna was meant to restore the status quo, and it did so quite effectively for quite some time, formalizing the aristocratic, diplomatic constraints of the 18th century into the Concert of Europe- which ensured that limited war in Europe did not return until 1914. That is the other thing- the continuities that Bell sees between the "total war" of the 19th century and the 20th century have a large gap between them- the 19th century, where wars and diplomacy and the governments who engaged in them looked nothing like the changes he claims for the Napoleonic era. Also, his definition of "total war," which seems to be just huge armies against huge armies trying to crush each other out of existence completely rather than having a negotiated peace, does not mean the sort of "total war" that existed in the 20th century- involving entire societies and economies, which were completely mobilized for war and a part of the effort. Certainly the Napoleonic wars, which lasted a quarter century, affected many millions of people for many long years, but societies were not mobilized for war the way they were in the 20th century. In addition, Bell also discounts that whatever differences the Napoleonic wars might have opened up with its immediate 18th century predecessors, the 18th century was actually rather an aberration in the annals of warfare. "Limited war" did not really exist before that point- and one only has to go back to the wars of religion that rocked the continent just previous to it to see that armies and battles being separated from "civilian" life was not the norm. So to phrase the idea of armies going at each other without the limits of aristocratic codes as a revolutionary new thing doesn't really work.
Despite all these deficiencies, I do think the work is absolutely worth reading for its fascinating take on the way that war was conceptualized and how that changed in this period (which is after all his major point), and also, I really do have to mention it: It is just FUN. For serious, Bell is a fantastic writer and he knows how to set a scene and toss off a dryly humorous line to keep you hooked when the stories of speeches and battles isn't quite doing it for you. He's wonderful at creating a sense of place, even better at putting his finger on the best way to describe someone's characters (oh, the endless wonderful anecdotes!). His opening chapter story of the Duc de Lanzun and his brazen, dashing life as a courtier and a soldier made me smile to no end- there's this part where he and his lover dash across the battlefields of Corsica under enemy fire laughing and singing all the way- oh man, it's just great. You can see it and smell it. His stories might sidetrack a little from his central arguments, but they ultimately add to it and besides the book the enjoyable, wonderful read that it is. That's why it gets the fourth star, despite its faults.
Whether you're a lover of a good swashbuckle, or a man with a twinkle in his eye, or just simply a war historian, this is the book for you. Settle into your big leather armchair in front of the fire and let it snow. You'll be solidly entertained for the weekend....more
I’ve written before about why I love Nancy Mitford’s biographies so much. First off, she writes exactly the sort of narrative history that floats my bI’ve written before about why I love Nancy Mitford’s biographies so much. First off, she writes exactly the sort of narrative history that floats my boat: history that treats the past as, first and foremost, an endless, rich vein of gold to be mined for storytelling yarn, fascinating characters and plots so good that you need the excuse of Hey-It-Actually-Happened to get people to suspend their disbelief.* Secondly, her writing has, for the most part, exactly the right touch for the upper class social histories she chooses to cover: a light, witty tone and a focus on the day-to-day human foibles of the rich and powerful she covers. She’s more than able to achieve this due to my absolute favorite thing about her: She’s an ultimate Insider. A Gossip Girl in a timewarp back to the eighteenth century: at times a welcoming, warm Serena, and sometimes, deliciously, a cutting Blair at her worst.
Mitford is able to offer a unique understanding of her biographies’ subjects precisely because she, unlike so many other historians, refuses to put her subjects on any sort of pedestal. Having been brought up an aristocrat herself, knee-deep in history and family and traditions up to her eyeballs, she treats courts, celebrities, great nobles and great historical personages with absolutely no deference whatsoever- unless, for her own reasons, she feels that they have earned it. (Louis XIV gets a grudging and not-entirely-complete pass, but only because he created her personal dream heaven come to earth- Versailles. Seriously, lady needs the Tardis to land on her doorstep, STAT. I can’t even imagine the unholy sums she would have paid to be a part of that Madame de Pompadour episode.) She has no self-consciousness and no hesitation in pronouncing with authority on the way that X lady of the court handled a rival, or how Y lord of the realm should have responded to the traitorous actions of a friend. (My favorite example comes from this book when she takes the actions of a barely-tolerated visitor of Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet as an excuse to give well-bred parasites who live off a career of constantly visiting their richer, country-house owning friends a piece of her mind.) Their characters are drawn, cut up and pronounced Good For Nothing or quite the best fellow who ever lived without the slightest hint of the temporizing and presentation of both sides that professional historians think appropriate- all without ever descending into any sort of Victorian moralizing. Oh no, her verdicts are of a very practical, no-nonsense, English sort. This person understands how things are done and that one does not. One of her biggest pet peeves with the female consorts of powerful men is when they just do not understand how to properly manage them in order to keep their high-status companions at their side and grateful to be there. (La Pompadour, a personal hero of hers, earns plaudits for her savvy when she personally sets up and manages a whorehouse for the king after the sexual aspect of their relationship grows cold.) The manors, townhouses, courts and palaces of these eighteenth century folk are where she lives, mentally, if not physically. These biographies are written, often, like Richelieu, Madame Pompadour and Louis XIV are her personally known contemporaries whose various episodes she dissects with perfect, witty, dry detachment.
Voltaire in Love is another great example of this trend. Mitford had written biting, ironic asides about Voltaire before (“apt to bite the hand that fed him” is the one I remember being repeated), another example of those side characters you could tell she’d really rather write about that I wrote about in my review of the Sun King . So it wasn’t surprising to find that she’d chosen him as a subject.
What was interesting is that she chose, rather than making herself responsible for doing a biography for his whole life, to focus on only the part of his life that interested her: His nearly twenty year-long love affair with Emilie, the Marquise du Châtelet. I really liked that she did that- it let her talk about all the stuff she loves (illustrious, vaunted men and women creating their great works…. and committing very human acts of folly along the way), without giving herself the obligation to follow through with the conventions of biography if she doesn’t want to. Voltaire’s early life is got through rather quickly, with only the fun highlights to give us the broad brushes of his character and the atmosphere he grew up in. It’s clear that Arouet (his birth name- he gave himself the name Voltaire) was an irresponsible, narcissistic sort, who thought rather a lot of himself. Selfish, disinclined to work, thoughtless- he once tried to elope with a girl after he’d been packed off to The Hague as an unpaid attache so that he wouldn't cause any more scandals. In short, the sort of boy nobody wants their sons to hang out with. In the negative column, he was also the sort who dished it out but had a problem taking it back (something that would make him ridiculous socially and get him in trouble with the law repeatedly. Nancy does not approve of this, which makes sense- it does not fit her code of what the Right Sort Does). But he was, as we know, also smart, talented, perceptive, and determined- a fan of the Enlightenment, logic and scientific advances. He was a great proponent of Newton in France- something quite controversial in those Cartesian times. He repeatedly got into fights with other writers and critics, was easily offended, and went in and out of jail all of his life...
This book was super great, you guys. So here's the question dealt with: when you think of the Enlightenment, what do you think of? Is it "periwigged PThis book was super great, you guys. So here's the question dealt with: when you think of the Enlightenment, what do you think of? Is it "periwigged Parisian poseurs prattling on in their salons"? If so, Roy Porter would LOVE to sit down and have a chat with you about how you are completely wrong. So traditionally, there is a view that the Enlightenment was a unitary movement, one whole phenomenon, centered on one place. As scholars have now shown, there were many different Enlightenments in many different countries- and not all of those countries were in Europe (it apparently seriously took until the late 1960s before somebody decided that maybe the American Revolution dudes should be included). They concentrated on different ideas, expressed themselves differently and took on different social projects at different times- and there was a much wider range of people involved than is typically thought.
Porter contributes to this new conversation on the period by showing thoroughly and once and for all that there was an English Enlightenment. Straight up denying those who find that term "jarring" and out of place, he shows how English thinkers were in fact free to start expressing different and innovative ideas much earlier than French thinkers were, and how French thinkers (in particular Voltaire) took their inspiration from England. He gives a great overview of the English (and Scottish) writers that were publishing theories and essays on a huge array of topics during the 17th and 18th centuries. He does so in bracing, entertaining and challenging fashion, demonstrating a command of the material and a rhetorical style that I think makes it difficult to challenge him on very much at all.
Excellent overview for a general reader, entertaining fun for someone who knows a little bit more. Even if you've got a handle on your Adam Smith, your Newton and your Bacon there are many many other fellows who are worth exploring. I can't believe this book isn't more widely read (though it did win a big prize in the UK)- perhaps because it didn't get great marketing in the US or something? I want a job marketing popular histories because for real it is a shame so many things like this fly under the radar, unnoticed....more
It's a quick overview of all the 19th century Revolutions, valuable mostly for showing the links and patterns rather than as individual studies of eacIt's a quick overview of all the 19th century Revolutions, valuable mostly for showing the links and patterns rather than as individual studies of each event in and of itself. The point is to use it as a building block to show how it determined what came after, and even how much it still affects the structure of the country today. The book obviously takes the position that the Revolution ended with the triumph of the bourgoisie in the creation of the Third Republic (with its title beginning and ending dates), but even if you want to argue with that, I would still recommend it if you're looking to give yourself a basic picture of what the deal with 19th century France was and why it was such an ass-kicking (not in a good way) century for them....more
British academic writing at its best, for me. Doyle takes an obviously enormous subject and sets it out in clear, economical and often wryly funny proBritish academic writing at its best, for me. Doyle takes an obviously enormous subject and sets it out in clear, economical and often wryly funny prose and manages to make it readable, concise and as thorough as an introductory volume is going to get. You do not need any prior knowledge of the French Revolution to tackle this volume. However if you do have a bit I promise you it still offers an excellent refresher: it is not just a long series of names, dates and major events designed to give you a timeline. There's wikipedia for that, y'all. It manages to give its narrative enough depth that you'll still learn something new, or look at events from a new perspective, while also not feeling like you're getting bogged down in minutiae that are completely beside the point except to specialists. I was familiar with the basic shape and structure of part of the Revolution that most people know a bit about- the part from the Tennis Court Oath to the end of the Terror- but I also knew very little about the Directory era that followed or Napoleon's first years. Those four years are really the key to understanding why Napoleon comes to power and why his regime takes the shape that it does. One of the more interesting recurring themes you find when you get deeper into French Revolution literature is the idea that the series of Revolutionary governmental experiments tried in those years were wartime regimes, shaped and radicalized hugely by that experience. The conversation on the subject usually focuses around the regicide and the heads rolling and the bread riots, but there are other dimensions. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite do not bring a Napoleon to the throne and allow the creation of an Empire. But many many other things do.
Anyway, good as an introduction, good to pull out chapters from for your class on the subject, good as a refresher, and good as an example of how to do academic writing on a subject that people have gone over with a thousand combs and still find something to say. The only thing I would say that was slightly disappointing is that the book is light on dealing with the historiography of the Revolution and all the major debates about it that are still being fought over now. I think it would be helpful to have a least a brief overview of the major thinkers on the Right and the Left just to orient people before they plunge into further reading....more
"Nineteenth century historians, shocked by the contemplation of such a merry, pointless life, have been at great pains to emphasize the boredom from w"Nineteenth century historians, shocked by the contemplation of such a merry, pointless life, have been at great pains to emphasize the boredom from which, they say, the whole Court and the King suffered. No doubt a life devoted to pleasure must sometimes show the reverse side of the medal and it is quite true that boredom was the enemy, to be vanquished by fair means or foul. But the memoirs of the day and the accounts of the courtiers who lived through the Revolution .. do not suggest that it often got the upper hand; on the contrary they speak on and all, of a life without worries and without remorse.. of perpetual youth, of happy days out of doors and happy evenings chatting and gambling in the great wonderful palace... If ever a house radiated cheerfulness, that house is Versailles; no other building in the world is such a felicitious combination of palace and country house..."
"..The case of the Duc de Richelieu illustrates the fact that once a man has been convicted of treachery, he is better dead; the traitor will always betray... If, when the Regent had enough proof to cut off four of M. de Richelieu's heads, he had cut off just one, the history of France might have been different indeed."
If you guys read those paragraphs and aren't smiling or shaking your head or clapping your hands or some other expression of delight, then perhaps this book isn't for you, but I'm doing all of those things and LOVING IT. I absolutely adored this book from start to finish, and Nancy Mitford's narrative charm is the reason entire. It is of course helpful that her subject is fascinating in her own right, and her cast of supporting characters were leading men and ladies in many other stories and indeed can't help but steal the spotlight from time to time (if the Duc de Richelieu is playing sidekick #2, you've got a damn good thing going is all I'm saying). But this biography reveals two women, not one, and it is a picture of two times and two mindsets, and the primary one is not the one that takes place in the 18th century.
What is it about these early 20th century women? These British women writers in particular? There's something about their assurance, their ability to opine and pronounce and tell a tale with such utter confidence and pull it off without the slightest self-consciousness. There's a way some of these women have of staring you down with utter unconsciousness that anyone could sensibly feel anything different that makes you blink even when you know there's something wrong with that reasoning.
I think part of it really does have to do with the fact that so many of them descended from the aristocracy. It might have been an aristocracy whose material rights had in many ways long since gone, but please do let's remember that it is just possible for women of that generation to have had grandfathers who fought Napoleon. The values being imbibed, the educational program, and the history being taught was not so different, and the society was still to a great degree closed. It still mattered who you were born... but of course there is a consciousness that that is all fading away, so quickly. And you know that when things are falling away, oftentimes that is the first time you see them, clearly.
Nancy Mitford's book was all about this. It manifested itself in two ways: the first was the way that she approached the world of Versailles, the nobles, the King, and Madame de Pompadour herself. She approached her as an equal, and actually rather as her sympathetic superior. While other historians might have spent a great deal of painstaking time explaining the social codes of Versailles and entangled family trees and have lists of names and navigational charts, Nancy Mitford's book assumes a warm familiarity with her readers and her subjects. She is not intimidated by Versailles, and she expects that you will be equally comfortable walking about the ancient pile while she waves her hand at "oh that old Hall of Mirrors, it really is just too dusty I keep telling Mother the maids really do forget to dust in there, oh mind your dress darling the step is just a bit uneven there, this way loves, we'll have a picnic lunch by the lake today, shall we, it's lovely outside..."... as we pass on easily from room to room, watching the men and ladies come and go, confident that the people we meet will be in perfect accord with us. The dresses might be different, and the wigs, but Mitford makes that all seem a matter of fashion- as if we had been out of the country for a year and just needed to pay a morning call to our good friend the Duchess who would fill us in. We just need to make sure our friends don't see us in this shocking state before we've had time to get rigged up properly.
As the quotes above might show, her aristocratic ease and sense of belonging to this world means that she feels free to make many pronouncements on it. In telling the story of La Pompadour, she lets us know when she feels the lady has gone wrong, when she's been clever, and what she could have done better- the same judgement and really the same understanding is applied to the other characters in the story. For instance, she sets up a careful contrast between the marriage of the King and the Queen and how the Queen was a clearly inferior creature to Madame de Pompadour because she hadn't the least idea of how to manage a man- and nor should she poor lamb, taken out of poor obscurity with her poor Polish king father, with her dowdy religiousity and her frigid refusal to sleep with the King (who otherwise, apparently, might have been faithful)... much better to have stayed at home. When Madame de Pompadour ceased sleeping with the king, by contrast, Mitford applauds how well she manages to keep his love despite it all, though she is realistic about the nearby brothel that develops to replace her. She has a fairly down to earth view of things and when she is sentimental, it is well hidden behind a practical argument.
What I loved about this whole viewpoint was that she successfully individualizes history to the extent that she makes it all seem a matter of "person X was rather cranky that day and lady Y just didn't quite know how to manage him properly, and person Z was a nasty little beast who should have been strangled at birth and made things very much the worse..." It's a personal view of history that makes the work of deciding the fate of millions, declaring war and peace, dealing with complex financial matters as just another damn thing that must be done after inspecting what's on for dinner and sorting out a dispute between the cook and the housekeeper. There's really no reason to make it a bigger drama than that and those who do well... loves, perhaps that is a sign you don't really belong here, isn't it?
So this is the second thing that fascinated me about this one. Similar to the work of Isak Dinesen, to Vita Sackville-West and Evelyn Waugh (in Brideshead at any rate), this is a lament for the decline of the aristocracy. It might seem an odd approach to celebrate the life of one of the world's most successful bourgeoisie social climbers while also making a case for why the aristocracy has been unjustly maligned and why it should still exist, but it's actually a rather clever way of doing it. I don't think it was necessarily a conscious agenda of hers, but her opinions on the subject seemingly couldn't help but come through. Mitford presents Jeanne de Poisson (as yes, the poor lady was born before she became La Pompadour) as a good upper middle class girl who never forgot her roots or pretended to be anything other than she was (both a prime English virtue and something the class conscious aristocrat would have been on the lookout for), and yet as someone who was "naturally" born with an upper class feeling and point of view and taste- she is fiercely loyal to her friends, a lovely, warm person who doesn't gossip behind other people's backs, a lady who throws wonderful parties and makes even shy people feel welcome, a woman who can discuss important issues with men, but knows when to retire, a woman who knew how to keep her looks and her friends as she aged. An unusual case, but much like Cinderella hiding in her dirty clothes, a case where the way we are born nonetheless does tell. She constantly defends Madame as having gotten a bad rap, and completely unfairly too- she rather mindblowingly and continuously argues for why she may have gotten a lot of money from the King but a) it wasn't as much as has been thought (oh, you know fifty million, not a hundred million, so that's totally okay!), and b) that what money she did have was well spent. Nancy Mitford rather crushingly tells us that she was skilled "in the art of living," and people who were starving for their bread just can't properly appreciate that apparently. She goes on rapturously about the beautiful houses she built and decorated with her exquisite taste, and seems to save the greatest of her pity for these troubled times for how her houses didn't last long after her death- after all, beauty and art are what should be appreciated above all. (Once again, the starving and the bread and the oppressed peasants with no rights get no mention- or if they do, it is in mentions of Madame's charity or her helpfulness in certain sticky political situations to save an innocent.) With regards to the King, she takes him to task when she feels he is not fulfilling his proper role in the world, and honestly blames a lot of what comes after on the fact that he does not know how to lead properly.
There are some mentions of the Revolution to come, of course. How she approaches this though is to phrase the problems as a peculiarly French extreme of oppression and particular problems of the personalities at the top. She does once or twice acknowledge that Louis XVI was rather shut off from the world in Versailles, and speaks of the political abuses that went on in France. However, she phrases it as if there really would have been no need for the overthrow of the system, which is perfectly fine in theory, thank you, if France hadn't gone about it all the wrong way.
I don't mean to present this as a political program of a book- that's not the dominant feeling of it, just something that underpins the approach. More of a viewpoint, really- her biography dominating Madame's biography. I wouldn't have it any other way. It's incredibly well written- relatable and warm, sparkling and close. She knows how to tell a story in just the right way to make you laugh, how to deploy an anecdote to tell you all you need to know about a situation. Her knowledge about her subject is clearly deep, but she is able to use it in the way that only the most eminent of scholars do these days- without footnotes, without careful demonstration of knowledge and self-conscious admissions of "I could be wrong"- just one long, continously flowing story that is written not to prove she knows something, but because it's a story worth telling and perhaps it will pass the evening until you go to bed. One could picture her as a good hostess handing these out to her guests to busy them at a house party rather than gossiping to them herself all night long since she has a cold in her throat.
Her ultimate verdict on the story of Madame de Pompadour and its meaning really is that of a hostess, or someone who has been a guest for many years. As her funeral cortege leaves the palace, and the King turns to go inside with tears streaming down his face, she remarks only: "After this a great dullness settled over the Chateau of Versailles."
By that point in the book, you know what that means- and bells ringing out and a Requiem blasting at full strength couldn't have said it better....more
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