The past in French history. By Robert Gildea. New Haven and London: Yale
University
Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+418. £30.00. ISBN 0-300-05799-7Napoleon and his artists. By Timothy Wilson-Smith. London: Constable,
1996. Pp.
xxx+306. £23.00. ISBN 0-094-76110-8Revolution and the meanings of freedom in the nineteenth century. Edited
by Isser Woloch.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+447. £40.00. ISBN 0-804-72748-1Over the past twenty years, Keith Baker, François Furet, Lynn
Hunt, Mona Ozouf et
al. have argued that the French Revolution gave birth to a new political
culture, and
by implication that one should study politics through this culture rather
than through
l'histoire événementielle of ministries and
elections.
The three books reviewed here all
relate to political culture in the wake of the French Revolution, explicitly
in The past in
French history and implicitly in the other two volumes: under Napoleon,
artistic culture
was politicized and regimented, and after his fall nineteenth-century Europe
was left to
nurse the awkward offspring of 1789, the ideologies of revolution and freedom.
Yet
whilst these books provide fine studies of political culture, they make
only passing
references to two less clearly defined concepts which may be necessary
adjuncts to such
an approach. The first is that of a ‘political class’, meaning
those who occupy office, usually by election and regardless of party, which
enables one to put
l'histoire événementielle
aside, since elections or changes of cabinet are merely reshuffles within
the political class.
The second concept concerns the communities that create political cultures.
What,
though, creates these communities?
