Book Reviews

‘notoriously’ great influx of immigrants?). He begins but never finishes an arresting discussion about literature and ethics. He mentions but hardly elaborates the importance of the protestant dissenting tradition for British ethicists. The wider context and fit between the ethical societies and British culture are missing, and we have no comparative basis for judging how other British institutions, especially the traditional religious bodies, coped with the challenges of modernity. Since the ethical societies appear to have attracted relatively few numbers, one wonders where their significance truly lay. Therefore the strangest omission is a clear statement of the historical importance of the movement. One is consequently led to speculate that the ethical societies can be studied as part of the history of ideas in order to apprecia.e the dilemmas and confusions of liberal freethinking as ethical values. Following the argument withersoever it goes is doubtless a splendid ideal, but only for the ninete n&h century. In the twentieth there is the horror that may lie at the end of it; or, as two thoughtful members of Conway Hall said in 1975, the freedom of discourse is not the freedom ‘to proclaim the unthinkable’.

University of California Sheldon Rothblatt

France Fin de Siikle, Eugen Weber, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Beiknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), x + 295, n.p.

After Theodore Zeldin, Eugen Weber. Having first made his mark on French history

with a penetrating study of Action Francaise, and having then stirred up a great discussion with his Peasants into Frenchmen-a book with a thesis, if ever there was one -Weber now jettisons systematic arguments, eschews theory, and avoids public politics in order to recapture the spirit of an age. His Fin de Siecle, roughly the first thirty years of the Third Republic, joined material improvement for the French masses with a sense of decadence among an influential elite. Weber converses wisely and wittily on that apparent contradiction. No dogma here: ‘In history, as in Proust,’ he declares, ‘observation depends on the observer’s point of view, claims to objectivity can be misleading, all we can do is to suggest connections’ (244). Piling anecdote on apercu on apt quotation, Weber undertakes social history in the old style, and brings it off with panache.

The old style, since France Fin de Sikcle says little or nothing about demographic change, the reorganization of production, income distribution, employment patterns, worker organization, and many other staples of recent work in social history. ‘I restrict myself,’ says Weber frankly, ‘to surface phenomena, accessible to the inquisitive tourist: us’ (6). All the disruptions, novelties and amusements take theirplace: telephones, indoor plumbing, bicycles, electric lights, widespread schoolings, brassieres, decadent poets, the caf&conc’, the Tour de France. The one chapter on politics, titled ‘the endless crisis’, deals with Boulangism, anarchism, and the Dreyfus affair, but ignores the routine const~ction of the Third Republic, the struggle over Church and State, and the massive growth of organized labor; the surface is film-thin. Yet the repeated cross-references to Marcel Proust’s life and work, the insights into the popularization of spas, summer camps, and recreational travel, and similar richesses compensate for the superficiality of the analysis, With abundant, delightful illustrations, elegant writing, and impeccable production Weber’s book is a pleasure for dilettantes and serious readers alike. (Superb Harvard editor Ann Louise McLaughlin, to whom many of us owe the sort of debt Weber acknowledges at book’s end, let pass only one noticeable slip: the Comtesse de Pange is quoted on page 60 as saying ‘The very word shampoo was ignored’, when the countess almost certainly said the word was unknown.)

A reader’s pleasure is the greater because France Fin de Sikcle consists of a series of

Book Reviews 509

thinly-connected essays rather than a sustained, step-by-step argument. One can open the book to almost any chapter and start reading, without fear of having missed an essential preliminary. A chapter on fads and fashions nestles between chapters on changes in material life and on political crises, a discussion of public health and diet gives way suddenly to a treatment of the money supply. The book scintillates.

The Century’s End, in Weber’s portrait, was a time of play, although rarely of joy. His substantive chapters begin with decadence and end with rugby, soccer, dueling and other fin de siecle sports. Play, some of it deadly, occupies much of the book, since Weber attends to the masses chiefly when they pursue new forms of leisure and to the elite mainly, when they divert themselves and others. ‘Perversion was a la mode,’ he tells us, ‘because the fashionable of the fin de sitcle were a weary lot: stomachs flagging, livers worn, palates jaded, their dissipations were limper than their language, relying on the mind for refinement and spice, seeking out the rare morbid sensation but seldom able to taste it to the full’ (39). But even Weber’s poor appear to live lurid lives, because his information about them comes largely from the Gazette des Tribunaux, the Gazette du Palais, and from cautionary treatises on their ills. Perversion, diversion and reversion -reversion to nostalgia for older customs and simpler times-mark the book’s main themes. Weber never lets these lugubrious subjects, however, slow his book’s pace.

Energy, wit and catholic knowledge do not insure Weber against all errors. He suggests, for instance, that ‘delinquency and criminality rates’ reached their nineteenth-century peak in 1891-1895 (41), when the best evidence available shows an unsteady decline in the rate of crime throughout the century. He quotes with approval an 1877 lecture declaring that ‘Until recently no one left his native town.. . Today no one stays put’ (176) thus ignoring the swarming labor mobility of the early nineteenth century.

When it comes to analysing large-scale social change, indeed, Weber accepts the sentimental theory concocted by nineteenth-century critics of their age: ‘Social barriers were breaking down, altered patterns of life were showing the first signs of standardization, human relations became more complicated as they broadened, accelerated change picked away at stabilities, the progress of the press reduced the gap between the tastes of fashionable elites and those of the masses, placing a premium on being with it, ahead of the crowd’ (151). If you believe that dubious theory, you will find France Fin de S&Ye coherent and illuminating. If not, you can still take pleasure in its verve.

Charles Tilly New School for Social Research

Alfred Rosenberg. Nazi Theoriest of the Holocaust, Fritz Nova (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1986), xxi + 264 pp., $20.00 cloth.

The author of this book has performed an important service for students of Nazism. He has gone through the corpus of Alfred Rosenberg’s writings (including The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which few Nazis apparently ever finished) and has provided thoughtful summaries of Rosenberg’s main arguments. Professor Nova discusses Rosenberg’s concept of racial and national honour, his idea of race and its relationship to culture, and his views on politics, history, art and religion. Substantial attention is also given to Rosenberg’s extreme antisemitism, although not, perhaps, as much as the book’s title might suggest. This is not the only such summary available.’ It is, however, an accurate and readable one and should suffice for most people interested in Nazi thought who have no need to confront Rosenberg’s difficult prose directly.

Despite its considerable value in making Rosenberg’s ideas accessible, Professor Nova’s