Volume 47, Number 3 · February 24, 2000
Brave New World
By P.N. Furbank
France in the Enlightenment
by Daniel Roche, Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer
Harvard University Press, 723 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Daniel Roche is an eminent French scholar who has previously written on French provincial academies and the 'people' of Paris. One must presumably call him a 'social historian,' but in his long and wide-ranging book[1] he aims, he says, to 'move from social history to history on a broader scale.' It is important that the kind of history he is undertaking is made quite clear. It is not narrative history, though it has an overall chronological drift; nor is it concerned, except incidentally, with wars or with politicians, or (much) with intellectual history. One could say that its central topic is structures—social structures, institutional structures, and mental structures—and the interaction between them, with the 'possibilities of transformation' that this brings. Or, more simply, one could say that Roche's subject is change: the change that came over France during the eighteenth century, when the ground shifted under the ancien régime. He warns us, however, of the danger of teleology or hindsight—of writing the history of 'Enlightenment' France in the light of the French Revolution. (In practice he does not always succeed in avoiding this. But then who, apart perhaps from Michel Foucault, has ever managed to?)
Review, 3704 words
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