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Reviews of Books
nary, sometimes eclectic approach," which uses cholera "as an opportunity for exploring larger issues" (pp.
6, 8). The result is a number of thematic digressions
that at times threaten the book's clarity and coherence.
Compounding the difficulty are organizational flaws
that generate repetitiveness, as well as the frequent
use of indirect or overworked forms of expression,
such as "in the context of."
Finally, although Kudlick is correct in noting the
scientific ignorance of cholera that still prevailed at
mid-century, the national and international activities
of Louis-Rene Villerme and other hygienists, whose
work is examined in Ann F. La Berge's Mission and
Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public
Health Movement (1992), surely played a part in combating public ignorance and hysteria in 1849, if only by
demonstrating cholera's relationship to economic misery. La Berge shows, too, that bourgeois attitudes
toward epidemics and other public health issues exhibited a variety of political ideologies, a reminder of the
need to be cautious in generalizing about the behavior
and motivations of so varied and complex a group as
the Parisian middle classes.
lACK D. ELLIs
University of Alabama,
Huntsville
W. Scon HAINE. The World of the Paris Cafe: Sociability among the French Working Class, 1789-1914.
(The lohns Hopkins University Studies in Historical
and Political Science, number 2.) Baltimore: lohns
Hopkins University Press. 1996. Pp. xiii, 325. $39.95.
There are three reasons why readers interested in the
history of French popular culture will want to turn to
this book. First, W. Scott Haine has carved out a broad
period of time, the era between the French Revolution
and the Great War, for examination. This allows him
to look at the lives of workers and the world of the
Paris cafe and tell us what changed over time as well as
what stayed the same. For example, "Paris workers
between 1789 and 1914 constantly spent the same
percentage of their budgets on alcoholic drinks, primarily wine" (p. 91). Second, Haine addresses a range
of diverse subjects. There are separate, chapter-length
studies of "Regulation and Constraint," "Privacy in
Public," "Work and the Cafe," "The Social Construction of the Drinking Experience," "Publicans," "The
Etiquette of Cafe Sociability," "Women and Gender
Politics," and "Behavioral Politics." Each yields its
particular gems of information and analysis, such as
the fact that the development of a national railroad
system by 1860 increased the supply of cheap wine
from southern vineyards and "ensured that for the first
time, the average Parisian could consume wine on a
regular basis throughout the day, week, month, and
year" (p. 92). Third, and most important, is the
impressive way that Haine has not only mastered the
relevant French archival materials but also compiled a
strong bibliography on the history of drinking estab-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
lishments. The latter is not surprising, however, for the
editor of the Social History of Alcohol Review.
Unfortunately, there are two negative aspects of the
book that may prevent readers from fully appreciating
its positive qualities. First, its organizational structure
makes it difficult to find much continuity among the
separate chapters; this may be due to the fact that
large portions of the text were previously published in
journals. A second obstacle is that the text struck me as
burdened with problematic examples of academic
prose. On some occasions I thought Haine might have
sought more clarity when making his point. Am I alone
in finding the meaning of these two statements from
successive pages potientially confusing? "By 1900,
workers had won the right to organize but had largely
lost the opportunity to integrate work and leisure" (p.
63) and "before 1914, bosses had great difficulty in
breaking the work/sociability link and instilling more
formal discipline" (p. 64). Haine also displays an acute
need to cite "outside experts" at every possible turn,
such as when a remark by Raymond Williams about
houses in the novels of lane Austen is quoted to
indicate what Paris cafes were not like (p. 234).
This book originated as a doctoral dissertation and
is dedicated to the memory of Haine's thesis director,
Edward T. Gargan, a man whose generosity of spirit
touched the lives of many in the profession-including
my own.
ROBERT 1. BEZUCHA
Amherst College
lUDITH G. COFFIN. The Politics of Women's Work: The
Paris Garment Trade, 1750-1915. Princeton: Prince ton
University Press. 1996. Pp. xiii, 289. $35.00.
ludith G. Coffin's first book is a major achievement.
She transcends the increasingly futile debate between
an "old guard" of social historians and an often
polemical group of new cultural historians. By interlacing analysis of economic, technological, and social
processes with sensitive representations of women's
work she combines the best of both approaches. Her
study both challenges simplistic interpretations of industrialization and carefully situates garment workers
in a complex debate about work, women, and family in
industrial France.
Coffin debunks the common nineteenth-century
view that sewing was always a feminine occupation,
learned at home and "unnaturally" transferred to the
factory. She finds that much sewing was done by men
and that most garments came from the market in
eighteenth-century France. Although male tailors were
hostile to cheap sweated female seamstresses, no one
saw women's wage work as problematic. The elimination of guild restrictions in the French Revolution and
mechanization after 1830 may have made possible
cheap, ready-to-wear clothing and wider webs of distribution. But it did not destroy domestic garment
making. The sewing machine encouraged home work,
as did improved communications and laws designed to
DECEMBER
1997
Modem Europe
reduce women's working hours in factories. The machine's spread came not from the logic of industrial
production but from new forms of advertising and
consumer credit directed toward women. Coffin concludes that the domestic sewing machine did much to
feminize the garment industry and to create the myth
of sewing as women's work. Because this happened at
the same time that the domestic family economy was
disappearing, home work became identified with women's work. The domestic garment industry was not a
holdover but a component in an uneven path to mass
production. Domestic wage work was part of a complex strategy of working-class French families to meet
expanding needs in an emerging consumer economy.
The two-sphere gender order so often stressed in
Anglo-American studies was far less relevant in
France, where low productivity did not allow married
women to "withdraw" from the labor market.
Women wage-earners were, however, problematic in
nineteenth-century France. Indeed, they became the
social problem, especially in the generation after 1890.
While Jules Simon and social Catholics insisted that
the family's survival depended on women's work being
confined to the domestic setting, the factory in the
home produced tragic dilemmas. Low wages meant
long hours and poor conditions, not work according to
the special rhythms of family life. French investigators
found seamstresses neglected family and house care
duties when pressed with wage work. While Simon's
romantic vision of domestic mothers' work was found
illusory, the French were deeply divided about what to
do.
An earlier social history of the garment worker
might have culminated in an analysis of a strike. But
Coffin ends her study with a skillful de construction of
the language of labor reform between 1890 and 1915.
Significantly, the complex struggles over working hours
and minimum wages centered on women's domestic
work. This issue hopelessly divided French labor and
feminists. Fears of undercutting French markets and
destroying the economic viability of domestic wage
work led to a very narrow law. It guaranteed home
workers not a living wage but an income sufficient to
protect women from misery and sexual degradation.
The French, Coffin concludes, were stalemated between protecting the family from industrialism and
preserving it as an economic unit.
This is a very sensible book. Coffin skillfully adopts
new approaches to cultural texts while preserving a
major role for technological and economic processes.
She understands the complex meanings of political
language while recognizing the power behind legislation. By bringing together some of the most promising
trends in contemporary modern French historiography, Coffin offers a model of culturally informed social
history for which we have long been waiting.
GARY CROSS
Pennsylvania State University
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1499
DAVID BARRY. Women and Political Insurgency: France
in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York: St. Martin's;
in association with the University of Durham. 1996.
Pp. xii, 213. $49.95.
David Barry has made an important contribution to
the literature about women and revolution. Noting
that female insurgency has been documented and
explained for both the French revolutions of 1789 (by
Harriet Bronson Applewhite and Darline G. Levy as
well as Dominique Godineau) and of 1871 (by Edith
Thomas and Eugene Schulkind), he sets out to describe and to understand the activities of women
during the mid-century revolutions in Paris. Barry's
research was facilitated by the trail blazed two decades
ago by Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees ("The People of
June 1848," in Roger Price, ed., Revolution and Reaction [1975]), whose work at the Archives de la Guerre
at Vincennes opened the territory for others to follow.
By retrieving the records of women arrested and tried
during the years 1848-1851, Barry fills in many gaps in
prior accounts of the period. Studying this material
also allows him to speculate on the motives for female
involvement in revolution. "Jobs, rents and the struggle for existence may have provided much of the
motivation for action," says Barry, "but possibly not all
of it" (p. 21).
Barry weaves together newspaper and archival
sources, memoirs, and government reports to create a
picture of the lives of the women of Paris during
insurrectionary periods. He points out the connection
between unemployment and prostitution by noting
that of the 3,120 Paris prostitutes mentioned in an
1857 report, only thirty-six had not been previously
employed in manufacturing. He shows the poor record
of achieving literacy by 1867, more than three decades
since the passage of primary school legislation, by the
fact that only twenty-five percent of the brides that
year signed their marriage registers. He notes the
competition for jobs because of ongoing employment
of prisoners and work done in convent workshops. This
is the context for the arrest and trial information he
uncovered.
Barry found information about 292 women, about
two and a half percent of those arrested. Of these, 160
were judged innocent and freed after investigation;
fourteen were found to have no case to answer or died
in hospital; and 118 were eventually found guilty and
sentenced to deportation. In practice, they remained in
the principal women's prison of Paris, St. Lazare. Forty
women of the group convicted are known to have built
barricades, appeared armed on them, fired on troops,
sounded the alarm by ringing the local steeple bell, and
organized the defense of their own quarter. Barry
provides many telling anecdotes from the trial records.
For example, a seventy-six-year-old veteran of previous revolutions, Veuve Anne-Marie Henry, a retired
dressmaker, led women in the fighting on the barricade
of the Rue des Trois-Couronnes in Belleville. She
demanded arms at the Mairie de Belleville with the cry
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1997