Problèmes paysans de la révolution (1789-1848): Études d'histoire révolutionnaire by AlbertSoboulReview by: John B. Cameron, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 5 (Dec., 1977), pp. 1235-1236Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1856381 .

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Modern Europe I235

J. H. LAMBERT. Cosmological Letters on the Arrangement of the World-Edifice. Translated with an in- troduction and notes by STANLEY L. JAKI. New York: Science History Publications. 1976. Pp. 245. $18.00.

J. H. Lambert was a Swiss-German autodidact who made notable contributions to philosophy, mathematics, and the physical sciences. He wrote this work in 176i, however, "to find in the whole world-edifice the kind of order, harmony, vari- ety, transformation, interconnection, perfection, beauty, means, and purpose" (p. 74) which he felt it must have as the creation of an all-powerful, all- wise, and wholly beneficent God. In the Age of Newton he sided with Leibniz, seeking assurance "that in the work of the All-wise no driving wheel gets stuck as often happens with our own clocks" (p. 193). This most perfect of all possible worlds, moreover, was finite in time and space, hierarch- ically ordered, and everywhere inhabited.

In Lambert's cosmology, the solar system was part of a disc-shaped system of stars rotating about a dark central body, which in turn was part of a larger similar system constituting the Milky Way. There might be, he thought, further levels of hier- archical structure, with the Milky Way system as a component of the next higher order.

Lambert's twenty letters, unfortunately, consti- tute a long-winded, repetitious, and awkwardly written monologue. In this first complete English translation from the German original, the author's haste seems to have been paralleled by his trans- lator's. The book is marred by far too many ty- pographical errors, not a few gross infelicities of translation, and some errors of fact. Tycho Brahe's system, for instance, is described as having only Mercury and Venus rather than all the planets orbiting the sun as the latter revolves about the earth (p. 240).

The forty-two-page introduction and the notes to the text, however, provide a useful background to the man and his ideas, though a fuller treatment of the context of cosmological and theological thought from Newton to Herschel would have added greatly to the value of the book. One wishes that Lambert at least had given us less matter and more art.

WILBUR APPLEBAUM

Illinois Institute of Technology

ALBERT SOBOUL. Problemes paysans de la revolution (1789-1848): Etudes d'histoire re'volutionnaire. (Textes a l'Appui: Serie Histoire Contemporaine.) Paris: Francois Maspero. 1976. Pp. 445.

This book is a collection of nineteen articles which Albert Soboul has published, or read at scholarly

meetings, over the past thirty years. New in- troductions have been written for several of the articles and the bibliographical references up- dated. The book not only covers most of Europe (though the main emphasis is, of course, on French rural life) but also includes one article on the peasantry in nineteenth-century Japan. Though the articles concentrate on the period 1789-1848, Soboul discusses, in the first section of the book, the medieval and early modern origins of Old Regime agriculture; he also pursues limited aspects of the peasant situation up to the early twentieth century. These articles are remarkably unified in theme and approach. There are only two articles whose inclusion I would question: "Un temoignage: Paul-Louis Courier et la Revolution" and the last part of "Une paysannerie asiatique: le cas du 3apon. "

Given that all but three of the articles ("Mouve- ments paysans et troubles agraires (I789-milieu du XIXe siecle)," "Mouvements paysans antifeodaux (fin XVIII-XIXe siecle)," and "De la faction des com- poix"), plus an extended introduction, are reprints, one might wonder if such a book is worth pub- lishing. It seems to me that it is because it provides a convenient presentation of the views of the world's leading historian of the French Revolution on the role and problems of the peasantry in eigh- teenth- and early nineteenth-century European history.

Soboul sees French peasant communities on the eve of the Revolution as having many internal divisions, but maintaining their unity because of bitter opposition to the seigneurial system. It was precisely because of this opposition that the peas- antry played an "axial role" in the French Revolu- tion. The peasants, unwilling to accept purchase of seigneurial rights, ignored the legal distinctions in the statutes of August 5 to I 1, 1 789 which abolished feudalism. For this reason, the compromise be- tween the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie broke down. The freeing of the peasantry was, therefore, forced from below rather than imposed from above as it was, for example, in Prussia. Thus, Soboul says, the peasantry pushed the bourgeoisie further into revolution, e.g., into the complete and unqua- lified destruction of the old order on July 17, 1793, and thereby brought on the temporary and rather uneasy alliance between the Mountain and the peasants. It was this alliance which ensured that national property would be available in small par- cels and permitted the development of that large group of peasants with small- to medium-size land holdings so central to the development of French capitalism in the nineteenth century. Finally, So- boul argues, the Revolution destroyed the peas- antry in the course of freeing it. With the end of feudalism the internal cleavages of the peasantry

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I 236 Reviews of Books

increasingly asserted themselves and the tradi- tional community fell easy prey to the develop- ment of exploitive capitalism.

Soboul's interpretation of the place of the peas- antry in the development of French and European society from the eighteenth to the twentieth cen- turies has remained consistent over the past thirty years. He is not, however, frozen into his inter- pretations. In these articles two points on which he has shifted his views are striking. The first is a major one. In all of the earlier articles Soboul insisted, as had Lefebvre before him, that the land- less and small peasants resisted partition of village commons and thus were responsible for the slow- ness with which capitalism developed in the French countryside. Several years ago Alfred Cob- ban (Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, pp. I o0-1 7) suggested that the opposite was true. As a

result of the work by A. Ado, Soboul now concurs in the view that landless peasants in fact agitated for partition of the commons. It was the wealthier peasants who resisted and thereby, in Soboul's present view, retarded the development of capital- ism. The second shift is minor and indeed involves one phrase in one of the articles. Throughout the 1950S and early 1960s Soboul adamantly asserted the "feudal" nature of eighteenth-century agricul- ture. Since that time, however, although he still insists on the economic reality of the repression of the prerevolutionary peasantry he is perhaps not so wedded to the term "feudalism." The following statement from a paper presented at the Twelfth International Congress of the Historical Sciences at Vienna in 1965 illustrates this semantical shift and provides a fitting conclusion for Soboul's broad interpretation of the peasantry and the Rev- olution: "En faisant table rase de toutes les survivances flodales, en aifranchissant les paysans des droits feodaux et des dimes ecclesiastiques, dans une certaine mesure aussi des contraintes communautaires, en detruisant les monopo- les corporatifs et en unifiant le marche national, la Revolu- tion a marque en France une etape decisive dans la transi- tion de ce qu 'ilfaut bien appeler lefeodalisme, faute d 'un autre mot, au capitalisme" (p. 348, emphasis mine).

JOHN B. CAMERON, JR.

University of Southwestern Louisiana

JOHN R. GILLIS. The Development of European Society, I770-i870. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1977. Pp. xvi, 300. $9.95.

This book shows the hand of a teacher who knows and loves his subject and works to make it mean- ingful to students. Not quite a textbook, it will probably be most useful for classroom purposes, though some insights will stimulate students of the period at any level. The focus is on social-

economic developments and political events/ structures, particularly those involving attacks on the existing states. Comments on cultural trends, though they include careful background on liter- acy or the social position of intellectuals, are pointed toward politics-Romanticism as an artis- tic movement might scarcely have existed-and are brief overall. Diplomatic detail is avoided. Eastern Europe is credited with some activity, though certain generalizations on the impact of international capitalism are questionable, and Italy is allowed to unify; the author is, however, clearly most comfortable with Britain, France, and Germany. In sum, the book shows the strengths and emphases of a social.historian willing to come to terms with some, if not all, political and cultural trends, making a bow to Europe while implicitly recognizing that the interesting developments were at this point confined to the Western fringe and that Europe is a misleading historical entity.

The period is well portrayed as a century of transition. John R. Gillis is at his best in showing that industrialization was a century-long process not initially involving many factories. He gives full play to broader demographic and economic trends. Only by 1850-7o does the author see in- novation become accepted reality, the revolts stilled, urban life a norm, and nation-state govern- ments entrenched. Attention to the stuff of life- birth, death, childrearing-informs the best sec- tions of the book, and terse statements, as on the complex nature of preindustrial longevity, convey important understanding. One pedagogical device is jarring: brief efforts to show that contemporary conditions in the Third World illumine Europe in transition. Occasionally provocative (for example, intellectual ferment is compared to China's Cul- tural Revolution as a standard challenge to the use of culture in the age of transition), the approach is usually simplistic and sometimes misleading, as when comparison of demographic expansion in- volves no assessment of population/resource ra- tios. Moreover, the book is very teleological: the non-West will make it, by Western criteria of mod- ernization though perhaps through different, even better, means. But there is a teacher's fine sense of urging students to juxtapose current reality, on family size for example, to the past. We are even presented with a preindustrial version of the en- ergy crisis, this one in terms of human energy at the end of the eighteenth century.

The book will not satisfy as a final synthesis. The long sections on social history give way to rather conventional political narrative, often not fully comparable even in periodization; the link- ages are not completely made. Social trends 1815-48 are presented too heavily in crisis terms, supplemented by a few outright errors, such as the

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