Études Orléanaises by Georges LefebvreReview by: Jeffry KaplowThe American Historical Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Oct., 1964), pp. 129-132Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1842131 .

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Lef ebvre: iEtudes orleanaises 129

an extended encomium of his Dictionnaire Philosophique or a rationale for his anti- Semitism, Gay finds Voltaire, if not entirely sans peur, then very nearly sans reproche. I think it was Voltaire who said, "No man was ever so wicked as to deserve a hagiographer." In Gay, Voltaire may have found his Parson Weems.

We may attribute the unevenness to a shifting focus. Some of the essays are offered as a new genre, a "social history of ideas," and some are frankly in the polemical tradition. Such a mixture can not only disarm criticism-a polemic is responded to only with silence, or another polemic-but the danger is that the author may be unaware that he is moving from one genre to another in a single essay. When, for instance, he says that Diderot's position on sex in the Supple- ment au Voyage de Bougainville represents a "complete and positive repudiation of Christian morality" and on the same page he tells us that the prevailing emo- tion in the book is "love," we wonder: which genre is in the ascendant?

As a partisan of the philosophes, Gay insists upon the essential novelty of their work and upon the rigor of their secular devotion. That some eighteenth-century members of the party of humanity may have acted as though they espoused a "religion of humanity" is anathema. To suggest that still otners not only failed to be original, but might indeed have owed something to the Christian tradition, is the very abomination of desolation. The two most vehement and humorless essays cover these themes. "Rhetoric and Politics in the French Revolution" purports to show that no part of the Revolution can be seriously compared with a secular religion, and "Carl Becker's Heavenly City" is declared not only to be wrong, but to have "conservative implications." Despite its strong points, the chief im- pression left by Gay's book is that the Heavenly City of some twentieth-century philosophers is to be found in the eighteenth century.

Michigan State University STANLEY J. IDZERDA

1TUDES ORLP-ANAISES. Volume I, CONTRIBUTION A L'ETUDE DES STRUCTURES SOCIALES A LA FIN DU XVIIIe SI-CLE; Volume II, SUBSISTANCES ET MAXIMUM (1789-AN IV). By Georges Lefebvre. [Commission d'Histoire economique et sociale de la Revolution. Memoires et documents, Number I5.] (Paris: the Commission. I962; I963. PP. 276; 476.)

HALF a century ago, when Alphonse Aulard and his disciples dominated the field, studies of the French Revolution were largely confined to the political aspect. Works of social and economic history were rare, and regional investigations were exclusively in the hands of antiquarians more interested in the stones of cathedrals than in the lives of the construction workers who built them and the worshippers who prayed within them. All this has changed, however, largely through the ef- forts of Jaures, Mathiez, and, not least of all, Georges Lefebvre. Today we under- stand the necessity of closely scrutinizing local conditions as a step toward a new synthesis.

These two volumes, the last Lefebvre wrote before his death in 1959, are

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130 Reviews of Books

classics of their type. The fruit of a lifetime of research, they are a model of method and analysis.

What is most important about these books is precisely their method. The focus is primarily on the maximum and the problem of food supply during the Revolu- tion. One might expect, therefore, that the treatment would be narrowly economic. Happily, this is not the case. Nowhere does Lefebvre allow himself to fall into the trap of writing as though he were dealing with a closed model, an ideal type. He is always sensitive to the need for exercising historical imagination in the interpretation of his subject matter. Economic history takes on meaning for him only as it is understood as a function of social structures, collective mentalities, and political behavior. The result is the kind of history that Marc Bloch used to call for-a history of men in all their diversity.

Lefebvre begins his work with a discussion of the countryside surrounding the city of Orleans, the area that was later to constitute the department of the Loiret. With a mastery of agricultural detail that few historians can match, he shows the differences that existed between the rich grain-growing land of the Beauce, the less fertile Gatinais, and the vineyards of the Val. In all areas save the Gatinais, the proportion of bourgeois and noble property was high, and the peasants were consequently less than well provided for. And even among the peasants, inequality of condition served to exaggerate the plight of some, particularly the landless day laborer. Although there may have been great differences between the styles of life of a farmer in the Beauce and a sharecropper in Sologne, they had in common their poverty and their ignorance. Weighed down by high costs of production, by taxes and seigneurial dues, they lacked above all a consciousness of their alterna- tives, and this in turn increased their degradation. Even a normally productive year was difficult; a crop failure brought disaster. The evidence Lefebvre produces would seem to support Professor Labrousse's celebrated thesis.

The peasant, because of a lack of political rights and his own indifference, played only a minor role in the earliest stages of the Revolution. His desires found their way into the cahiers through the grace of the large landowners, if at all. But the same was not true in the cities.

OrIeans was the capital and principal city of the Loiret. It had become im- portant largely because of its excellent road and canal connections with the princi- pal cities of France, but the construction of new transportation and communica- tion networks at the end of the eighteenth century threatened this advantage. Competition in the principal industries was growing more intense. Despite its relative prosperity, the economy of the city remained traditional, highly dispersed, poorly equipped, and almost completely subordinated to the guild system, which was struggling to maintain itself in the face of new developments. The dynamic eement was made up of commercial men-the ne6gociants-who provided the capital for new enterprises and gave work to the artisans.

Politically speaking, the nigociants and the nobility controlled Orheans. These dlverse elements were brought together by similar habits, a common consideration for birth and fortune, an equal dislike of lowering class barriers in their frequenta-

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Lefebvre: itudes orleanaises 131

tions and marriages, a pride in their status, and a scorn for all that smacked of the people. They controlled the municipality, and in the early stages of the Revolu- tion their wishes predominated. Lefebvre goes so far as to call this group the "high society" of Orleans, and he sees this conception as more fundamentally im- portant than the artificial distinction between the nobility and the upper reaches of the Third Estate. The nobility was too diversified to form a meaningful group- ing around a common program or ideology. Nobles had no faith, either political or religious, that was peculiar to them. As a result, they joined with the upper bourgeois to protect their interests, even if this meant giving way to bourgeois conceptions of legal equality and loss of fiscal privilege. The evidence used to back up this argument is impressive. If the same were to prove true of other large cities, our traditional concept of the nobility, already much challenged, would have to be totally revised.

It is principally in his second volume that Lefebvre deals with the sans-culottes. This political class made up of both employing and employed artisans and shop- keepers had failed to participate in the advance of the eighteenth-century econ- omy. They had become increasingly subject to the control of the commercial men who had taken hold of the market for their products. Wages had failed to rise as quickly as prices, especially in the bonneterie, the hose and hat manufac- ture that was the chief industry of Orlans. There were, moreover, conflicts among the sans-culottes. When the employing artisan got less for his produce from the negociant, he of course passed on this disadvantage to his employee. The em- ployee in turn was dissatisfied, but he did not have a clear idea of how to amelio- rate his situation. He most often turned to the authorities (automatically and with some reason identified with the rich) to give him work and a decent salary. If they refused, he blamed them for his resultant inability to procure the bread that was necessary for continued survival. The way was open for political action.

These demands for bread and work formed the basic program of the sans- culottes; the question was how best to realize them. And here the precarious na- ture of the sans-culotte party becomes clear. The creation of a maximum on grains was beneficial to many urbanites, but the same was not true of the general maxi- mum. Too many of the sans-culottes, especially the employing artisans, saw no reason to be forced to sell their goods at fixed prices and to pay their workers a set wage. Only the wage earners could profit fully from this program. This antagonism between the diverse elements of the sans-culotte party in the end de- stroyed it. And the alliance with the Mountain did not help, for the Montagnards were themselves much attached to the principle of private property and were consequently wary of pushing government intervention further than was neces- sary to maintain the war effort. The maximum was never strictly enforced. When it was in part, it prevented the worst from happening: the abject misery that ap- peared after its suppression. But the failure to go far enough and to apply the Terror to its enforcement fully and completely made it only occasionally successful and at the same time exacerbated the conflicts among the sans-culottes.

There is little to be said in criticism of these volumes. It is to be hoped that

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I32 Reviews of Books

other historians will now follow the lead of the late master who continues to serve us.

New York University JEFFRY KAPLOW

LA SECONDE R1;PUBLIQUE DANS LA REGION ALPINE: ETUDE POLI- TIQUE ET SOCIALE. Volume I, LES NOTABLES (VERS i845-FIN i848); Volume II, LES PAYSANS (i849-i852). By Philippe Vigier. [Pub- lications de la Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Paris, Series "Re- cherches," Numbers 3 and 4.1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. I963.

PP- 333; 527. i8 fr.; 25 fr.)

THIS is one of the magistral regional studies that are the admiration and despair of foreign historians of France. Vigier discerns a sufficient geographic, economic, and social unity in the departments of the Isere, Hautes-Alpes, Basses-Alpes, Drome, and Vaucluse for them to comprise a historically meaningful "Alpine region." There is a unity, too, in the almost unique regional response to the con- sequences of I848. In a sense, the author's major object is to explain why "these countryfolk who had by and large greeted the birth of the new regime with indif- ference rose up by the thousands in December, I851, to defend the 'Republique des paysans' against Louis Napoleon's coup d'Wtat."

Having established the historical coherence of his region, Vigier scrupulously elaborates its divisions. He identifies three major zones-the mountains, the plains, and the intermediate plateau country-with distinctive, if overlapping, economic and social configurations. Then each department is treated as a unit of much more than administrative significance, and within and across the departments are situated a great variety of crucial social and political institutions. His attention to minute distinctions, often presented topically, department by department, rather clogs the analysis, but it does not obscure the significant general outlines that emerge from the mosaic of local realities.

At the end of the July Monarchy regional politics were characterized by apathy and the petty factionalism of the Notables who dominated the inert countryside. The lower classes suffered the depression of I846-I848 more placidly than else- where and greeted the news of the February Revolution with less apparent interest. Nevertheless, the republic produced at Paris won immediate and universal accept- ance. By the December elections, however, the moderate republicans had lost their original initiative and support. Louis Napoleon's crushing victory seemed a local triumph of the party of order over the "red republicans," but actually reflected the emergence of the rural masses as an autonomous force. Their stirrings, mistakenly ignored by the republicans, were not to be confined by the prestige of the con- servative Notables, nor directed into Bonapartist channels. It is here that Vigier's region diverges from the national pattern because a considerable segment of the Alpine peasantry would join in an active resistance both to the old social order and the new administrative machine. As general economic conditions slowly

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