Review Essays
The Postmodern City from an Early Modern Perspective
ROBERT A. SCHNEIDER
A STRIKING FEATURE OF The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the
Twentieth Century, edited by Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, is a lack of
representations or pictorial depictions that might capture the city as a geographical
space. There are, to be sure, iconic images: the dust jacket shows the view of the
freeway as seen from the interior of a police cruiser; one chapter includes
reproductions of L.A.-inspired advertisements evoking not so much the city as a
lifestyle of fun, freedom, and sex; another presents a sampling of postmodern
architecture, which, predictably, crops up in this cityscape more than elsewhere. 1
(The best-known icon, the sign "Hollywood," was undoubtedly too much of a cliche
to be included in the book.) But these images merely evoke the southern California
metropolis through association; they do not depict it. Can anyone conjure up a
single view of Los Angeles as readily as the Manhattan skyline, Chicago's Loop, or
the San Francisco Bay come to the mind's eye? Indeed, the pure phenomenology of
Los Angeles emerges as one of the fundamental assumptions of this collection: the
city is not so much a space as an experience, and the quintessential postmodern one
at that. There is, as was once famously said of Oakland, "no there there." Even the
many maps in the book are alarmingly imprecise. One contributor suggests a
"simmering, spread-out pizza with all the extras" as an appropriate metaphor for
the city (to be placed next to New York as a melting or boiling pot);2 while another
posits the metropolitan territory as engulfing virtually all of southern California,
from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. 3
A rush to proclaim the sheer novelty of Los Angeles marks this book, which might
serve as a point of entry for a historical assessment of its overall approach. "Los
Angeles is the first consequential American city to separate itself decisively from
European models and to reveal the impulse to privatization embedded in the
origins of the American Revolution," asserts Richard S. Weinstein. 4 And much of
The City builds on this assertion. Whether this statement correctly characterizes the
American Revolution I shall leave to others to decide (but surely the very concept
1 Harvey Molotch, "L.A. as Design Product: How Art Works in a Regional Economy," in The City:
Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja,
cds. (Bcrkelcy, Calif., 1996), 225-77; Charles ]cncks, "Hetero-Architecture and the L.A. School," in
Scott and Soja, The City, 47-75.
2 Jencks, "Hetero-Architecture and the L.A. School," 48.
3 Molotch, "L.A. as Design Product," 225.
4 Richard S. Weinstein, "The First American City," in Scott and Soja, The City, 22.
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of "privatization" is anachronistic, implying a preexisting status of government
ownership that itself is modern). What "European models" does he have in mind?
He elaborates: "In the European city, the public realm is usually apprehended as an
open space within a communal solid; our impression of such cities is that they are
mass-positive residuals of the feudal city, out of which were carved the piazzas and
boulevards."5 Impression indeed. "The yearning to reestablish the public realm, as
it was once understood to exist in Europe, is impossible without a return to the
coercive politics and religious privileges we renounced as a nation," he continues.
"The shape of public space in European capitals is the result of policies that suited
the political strategies of an aristocracy or military or religious oligarchy."6
There are several problems with this interpretation. For one, evidence that
undermines it is found elsewhere in the volume. Mike Davis shows that the history
of twentieth-century Los Angeles has been punctuated by attempts to preserve and
create public spaces, most notably the efforts of Frederick Law Olmsted and
Harland Bartholomew in the 1930s, which, if successful, would have established a
"dramatically enlarged Commons, not the private subdivision [as] the commanding
element in the Southern California landseape."7 That these efforts failed was due
to a combination of factors, including the city's vigorous anti-radicalism and the
shortage of public funds during the Depression. But their success would hardly have
presupposed the "return to coercive politics and religious privileges" evoked by
Weinstein, especially given the democratic rhetoric that justified the creation of
public spaces in other American cities. s For another, the "European model" he
seems to have in mind is simply a caricature of urban history that fails to appreciate
the dynamic course of cities' development in the last millennium. European cities
did not suddenly emerge into their Haussmann stage out of an aging medieval
cocoon but, rather, underwent a whole series of spatial transformations, especially
in the early modern period. 9 Does this matter? Historians are often prone to
flourishing the past as a means of deflating claims to novelty: we can always find
precedents and antecedcnts. Sometimes, this is merely a pointless, even meanspirited, exercise. Here, however, it might prove salutary, for the highly adumbrated
historical perspective, largely limited to twentieth-century America, that informs
this book allows the contributors to make excessive claims for the novelty of the
L.A. urban experience, which in turn fuels their somewhat apocalyptic prognosis for
the "postmodern" city as a whole.
To turn from the postmodern to the early modern urban experience is to
appreciate how change, novelty, endless variety, spatial fragmentation, exurb an
Weinstein, "First American City," 33.
Weinstein, "First American City," 40.
7 Mike Davis, "How Eden Lost Its Garden: A Political History of the Los Angeles Landscape," in
Scott and Soja, The City, 164; see also Michael Dear, "In the City, Time Becomes Visible: Intentionality
and Urbanism in Los Angeles, 1781-1991," in Scott and Soja, The City, 91.
x For a view of the complex of factors, combining democratic rhetoric with class interests, which
promoted the creation of one notable public space, see The Park and the People: A History of Central
Park, Roy Rosenzweig and Elizaheth Blackmar, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992).
Y On these transformations, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in
the Provincial Town, 1660-1770 (Oxford, 1989), chaps. 3 and 6; Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l'urbanisme
ii Paris, Vol. 2: Renaissance et temps moderns (Paris, 1953); Rohert A. Schneider, Public Life in
Toulouse, 1463-1789: From Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), 345-52.
5
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expansion, rapid social mobility, economic dislocation, massive in-migration,
demographic fluctuation, widespread homelessness, the trampling of tradition, the
cacophony of tongues, and the collision of cultures could characterize city life then,
too. Early modern cities even had a degree of "virtual reality" as a component of
public display. Witness the Renaissance festivals that could transform the cityscape
into a fantasyland of the exotic, foreign, and bizarre; royal entries that overwhelmed
provincial towns with their mock architectural splendors in homage to a passing
potentate; or the pyrotechnic spectacles of the eighteenth century that combined
propaganda with sheer entertainment. And what could be more weirdly eclectic
than street life in the early modern city, with solemn religious processions
competing for space with such popular sports as bear-baiting, for example, or two
scaffolds side by side in a public square, one for the mounting of fireworks, the
other for the breaking on the wheel of a criminal? The city did not yet have the
equivalent of "theme parks" -which the authors of The City see hegemonically
engulfing Los Angeles-but entertainment ranked just below commerce, legal
services, and religion in drawing people inside its walls.
To be sure, most still had walls, or at least a strong sense of place and boundary,
which, combined with a durable set of municipal traditions, support thc claim that
contemporary urban life represents a significant departure from the more settled
and constrained environment of pre-industrial cities.lO As Christopher Friedrichs
has pointed out, "the truly creative and transforming epochs in the history of the
European city took place not during the early modern era, but before and after
it."!! While change and innovation certainly marked this period, the point is that
cities themselves were not, for the most part, fundamentally altered. Rather, they
were beset by a contradiction between dynamism and constraint that was resolved
in a variety of ways. Sometimes, innovation could find an outlet only outside the
city's traditional structures: in the area of economic production, for example, the
Verlag system provided for an escape from guild restrictions, allowing for merchants
seeking new methods of production to tap peasant labor in the countryside. 12
Sometimes, change provoked an institutional response designed to contain it, as
when new disciplinary and incarceral measures were devised to deal with increased
social pressures from below.13 Sometimes, urban culture demonstrated impressive
absorptive capacities: in the realm of public display, new secular ceremonies were
added to the traditional repertoire of mostly religious rituals with very little sense
of competition or displaccmcnt. 14 And sometimes, the pressure of change prompted
cities to recast the very terms of their self-representation. This last response,
10 On walls as demarcating the boundary between town and country, see Villes et campagnes au Moyen
Age: Melanges Georges Despy, Jean-Marie Duvosquel and Alain Dierkens, eds. (Liege, 1991).
11 Christopher R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City, 1450-1750 (London, 1995), 10.
12 European Proto-Industrialization, Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, eds. (Cambridge,
1996).
13 See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford,
Calif., 1975), chap. 2; Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo
(Cambridge, 1983); Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth
Century (Cambridge, 1987); Brian S. Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge, Mass.,
1971); Jonathan 1. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995),
353-60.
14 Robert A. Schneider, The Ceremonial City: Toulouse Observed, 1738-1780 (Princeton, N.J., 1995).
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indicative of the transformations that began to work on most European cities in the
eighteenth century even before industrialization, has been elucidated by Bernard
Lepetit. A new urban image then emerged that replaced stability, enclosure,
privilege, and tradition as reigning values with one that underscored the city's
economic functions, its dynamic character, and its spatial openness. The transformation was reflected in city maps: those quaint cartographic representations that
highlighted houses, churches, and rivers, usually wildly out of scale, gave way to
more geometrically accurate renderings of the space and configuration of the city
and its environs. IS
The salient point, however, relates to the tension between tradition and change,
which characterized urban life well into the modern era. That this tension is now a
thing of the past in the postmodern city-indeed, that its absence is central to the
very concept of postmodernity-seems to be the overarching assumption of The
City.I6 And the authors do make a good case for concluding that Los Angeles is a
city where the past has been effaced and the center will not hold.
But just as important to their understanding of its postmodernity is its status as
a true world city, whose vistas and diversity are so unprecedented as to require
neologisms. The city is not merely sprawling and formless but an "exopolis," not
merely the playground for foreign capital but "glocalized," not simply remarkably
heterogeneous in its social make-up but a "heteropolis."17 Here again, however, it
might be hclpful to rccall that world cities emerged in the late medieval and early
modern period as well. Bruges, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, and Amsterdam: the great
commercial metropolises of northern Italy and the Low Countries, as well as some
cities of the Hanseatic League, had in their day an economic and cultural profile
that astonished contemporaries, especially since their rise as world cities was just as
rapid as that of Los Angeles in the latter half of the twentieth century. (After the
collapse of Antwerp in 1585, Amsterdam was on its way to becoming the world's
leading trading center within the space of a generation; its population grew
four-fold in a century.I8) Indeed, they helped fashion a "world system," which in
turn brought goods, people, and cultures from throughout the world into their
confines, thus rcndcring city life truly cosmopolitan. These cities were worlds unto
themselves, graced with a degree of autonomy that was both cause and effect of
their emergence in a political environment where the territorial state was very
weak. "The hare beat the tortoise for once," writes Fernand Braudel, referring to
IS Bernard Lepetit, Les villes dans la France moderne (1740-1840) (Paris, 1988), chap. 2; see also Paul
M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985), pt. 2; and Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, chap. 11.
16 Dear cites the following passage from Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991) as a definition of the difference between modernism and
postmodernism: "It is then ... the peculiar overlap of future and past ... the resistance of archaic
feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies ... that is the condition of possibility for high
modernism ... [The) postmodern must be characterized as a situation in which ... the archaic has
finally been swept away without a trace." "In the City, Time Becomes Visible," 95. Dear does not give
the page of the Jameson quote.
17 Edward W. Soja, "Los Angeles, 1965-1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis," in Scott and Soja, The City, 433, 442, 444.
18 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. 3: The Per~pective of the
World, Siiin Reynolds, trans. (New York, 1984), 187.
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the cyclical contest between state and city so familiar to historians of the West. 19
Not unlike contemporary Los Angeles, their eccentric position in relationship to
states and empires ensured their centrality as receptors and conduits for the
diversity of the world, both material and cultural. Fifteenth-century Venice was a
meeting point for the European, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds; seventeenthcentury Amsterdam was an island of de facto toleration in Counter-Reformation
Europe, an unequaled melange of creeds and churches: Dutch, Scottish, and
Walloon Reformed, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Remonstrant, Mennonite, Huguenot, Catholic, and Jewish. Even though these cities owed their status as
the uniquely cosmopolitan urban cultures of their day to multiple contacts with the
wider world, it was only within their rarefied environments that the various parts of
this world could be assembled. Paradoxically, in the early modern period, the site
of cosmopolitanism was primarily local. This might be considered in relation to the
assumption, which seems to run through The City, that Los Angeles embodies the
contemporary world in all its postmodern variety and evanescence. There was really
nothing in seventeenth-century Amsterdam that could not be found elsewhere; it
was, rather, the sheer concentration of these goods and people, the refinement of
materials, the congruence of cultures, that made the city exceptional. Likewise, for
all its typicality, indeed banality, L.A. should probably be seen as more unique-a
hyper-urban experience-than representative.
Except, of course, that it is a First World example of a collection of contemporary
cities-late twentieth-century megalopolises such as Mexico City, Cairo, Calcutta,
and Sao Paulo-which, with their teeming populations, sprawling cityscapes,
environmental degradation, and systemic paralysis, presage a troubling future for
the urban experience if other cities follow in their path. And insofar as the world at
the turn of the millennium is increasingly urban, one can only sympathize with the
desire to focus on a particularly well-documented case of intense urbanization as a
means of plumbing the dcpths of this experience at its most extreme. In this sense,
the contrast with the approach to early modern cities is inevitable, and for once
easily explainable as well. Los Angeles exists in a world after its own image, an
increasingly urban one. Early modern cities, on the other hand, looked out on vast
expanses of a still-rural society. Thus to study Los Angeles is to think about the
world beyond it in terms of similitude-largely as a paler reflection of the urban
realities that will one day overtake it, too. To study early modern cities, however,
is to think about their multiple relationships with the world, both near and far.
Indeed, there were three sorts of relationships that could determine the fortune
and status of cities. One was the relationship to the surrounding countryside, which
took a variety of forms: direct rule, as in the case of the Italian city-states, which
extended their authority over the contadi; urban ownership of the land, as city
dwellers became rural landlords; and economic exploitation, as merchants and
landowners sought to take advantage of the industrial and agricultural possibilities
of the land and its peasantry. Cities relied on the surrounding lands for food and
19 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday
Life (New York, 1981), 511. Sec also Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, A.D. 1000 to 1800, Charles
Tilly and Wim P. Blockmans, eds. (Boulder, Colo., 1994); and Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and
Its Competitors (Princeton, N.J., 1994).
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viewed them as a defensive zone against threatening armies. In times of plague,
those inhabitants who could do so repaired to their rural retreats to escape the
insalubrious urban confines. In short, even as they periodically closed their gates
against it, cities could ignore the countryside that encircled them only at their
peri1. 20
The second crucial relationship was with other cities. Sometimes, this took the
form of associations in leagues, the most famous case being the Hansa; but there
were others, some for economic, some for military purposes. The northern Italian
cities developed well-regulated relationships as a by-product of their proximity and
the mutual fear of warfare; out of these relationships emerged the practice of
modern diplomacy. Often, pairs of cities maintained a rivalry based on economic,
political, or even cultural competition; hence the strained relationships between
such French cities as Toulouse and Montpellier, Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles,
Colmar and Strasbourg, Metz and Nancy. Great commercial cities such as Venice
and Amsterdam maintained trading relationships with a host of cities; usually,
foreign merchants were required to be organized into a guild and recognized by the
city council as legitimate traders. In an era when economic demand was relatively
inelastic and the supply of credit and materials often uncertain, commercial urban
centers were connected in a web of mutual dependency.21
The greatest of these centers, as noted, escapcd thc control of thc tcrritorial
state, at least for a time; most cities, however, had to confront the reality of
intrusive royal authority. And this constitutes the third relationship that characterized the urban experience in the early modern period. Indeed, the relationship
between cities and states is one of the main themes in both urban history and the
history of state-making. Machiavelli offered three ways cities (or principalities)
might be ruled by a conqucring prince: "first, by devastating them; next, by going
and living there in person; thirdly, by letting them keep their own laws, exacting
tribute, and setting up an oligarchy which will keep the state friendly to yoU."22 In
practice, however, the interaction between central authority and cities was less
dramatic. Cities were, of course, increasingly subjected to fiscal demands as the
rising expense of warfare prompted royal authorities to look for new sources of
revenue. Cities that proved hostile or recalcitrant to the crown's demands often saw
their walls torn down and their venerable charters ignored; troops could be billeted
in inhabitants' homes; unwanted offices could be foisted on the urban community
and municipal government. But the balance sheet in the relationship was not
entirely negative. The creation of new courts or offices could stimulate the
economic life of a city and raise its profile in the realm as well. The building of
garrisons for troops was probably more of a boon than a hardship. Royal
governments aided local authorities in launching the public works projects that
20 Giorgio Chittolini, "Cities, 'City-States,' and Region States in North-Central Italy," in Tilly and
Blockmans, Cities and the Rise of States, 28-43; E. Le Roy Ladurie, "Sur Montpellier et sa compagne
aux XVl e et XVU e siecles," Annales: ESC 12 (1957): 223-30; Gaston Roupnel, La ville et la campagne
au XVIr siecle: Etude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (1922; rpt. edn., Paris, 1955); Pierre Goubert,
Beauvais et les Beauvaisis de 1600 a 1730 (Paris, 1960).
21 Spruyt, Sovereign State and Its Competitors, chap. 6; Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy
(1955; rpt. edn., Boston, 1971); Lepetit, Les villes dans la France moderne; Rene Favier, Les villes du
Dauphine awe XVIr et XVIIr siecles (Grcnoble, 1993).
22 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, George Bull, trans. (London, 1981), 47-48.
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would transform many eighteenth-century cities. And some cities, such as Bath,
Versailles, and st. Petersburg, owed their existence, or at least their newly achieved
grandeur, to royal initiative or the presence of the royal eourt. 23
To focus on these sorts of relationships is a large part of the study of early
modern urban history. The City really attends to only one of these, the relationship
between Los Angeles and its region, especially with regard to transportation policy
and the vicissitudes of high-tech industrial development. 24 Its place in the world
economy, especially as the most important Pacific Rim city in the United States, is
acknowledged but does not occupy a significant part of the analysis. 25 Neither
Sacramento nor Washington is listed in the index: state or federal policy does not
figure prominently in the book. Rather, it approaches L.A. as a largely selfcontained urban experience, indeed, an all-consuming one: the postmodern world
in microcosm. In this sense, the book is strangely provincial.
Though not addressed systematically, national politics is, however, certainly
invoked in a way that suggests its importance, but its treatment remains frustratingly vague. 26 Edward W. Soja ends the volume with an attempt to link local events
with national trends; the result is something of a diatribe on the sins of the
Reagan-Bush years and their "neoconservative postmodern politics." "During the
Reagan years," he writes, "a growing tide of factual 'disinformation' reconstructed
the cold war threat into what would eventually be named a new world order, with
the United States as its postmodern Robocop and the mass media as its primary
battlefield." The L.A. region benefited from "military Keynesianism," but what
strikes the author as significant is the "simulacra," not the reality, of policy.
"Continuing to feed off the fears of its majority constituencies, the hypersimulation-addicted neoconservative regime opened an offensive against the inner
cities, which were perceived to hold the most serious domestic threats to the new
world order. The war on poverty became a war against the urban poor, a
promulgation of law and order that militarized the local (and federal) police in a
struggle against drugs, gangs, crime, illegal immigrants, and other inner-city
targets." In case we mistake these for real problems confronting real people,
especially those living in the inner city, we are advised to remain incredulous, lest
we join the ranks of the duped. "As hypersimulations, these powerful images were,
and to many still are, genuinely believed to be real and true."27
>3 On these themes, see Friedrichs, Early Modem City, chap. 2; Tilly and Blockmans, Cities and the
Rise of States; Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648-1871
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1971); Frederick M. Irvine, "From Renaissance City to Ancien Regime Capital:
Montpellier, c. 1500-c. 1600," in Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France, Philip Benedict, ed.
(London, 1989), 195-220; Robert A. Schneider, "Crown and Capitoulat: Municipal Government in
Toulouse 1500-1789," in Cities and Social Change, 195-220; Borsay, English Urban Renaissance;
Bernard Lepetit, "Une creation urbaine: Versailles de 1661 a 1722," Revue d'histoire moderne et
contemporarine 25 (1978): 604-18.
24 Martin Wachs, "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Policies
and Future Prospects," in Scott and Soja, The City, 76-105; Allen J. Scott, "High-Technology Industrial
Development in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County: Observations on Economic Growth and
the Evolution of Urban Form," in Scott and Soja, The City, 276-310.
25 See Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg, "Income and Racial Inequality in Los Angeles," in Scott
and Soja, The City, 315.
26 An exception is Jennifer Wolch, "From Global to Local: The Rise of Homelessness in Los Angeles
during the 1980s," in Scott and Soja, The City, 390-425.
77 Soja, "Los Angeles, 1965-1992," 456.
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One does not have to be a partisan of the Reagan-Bush "regime" to find this a
distressingly imprecise substitute for political analysis (though perhaps living inside
the Beltway has something to do with it). But it might help to have some
appreciation for the historical use of "simulation" as political action and how this
technique has been understood by social historians. To take an example from Soja's
concluding essay (which happens also to be an egregious instance of obfuscating
apologetics): that the people who beat truck driver Reginald Denny during the 1992
Los Angeles riots were not simply acting out of revenge or anger but were really
engaged in presenting a sophisticated response to the assumption of the largely
white jurors in the trial of the L.A. police officers accused of beating Rodney King
in 1991 that the infamous videotape of that incident was "a misleading picture of
reality." Denny's attackers, Soja implies, were really posing a question, indeed,
conducting an experiment: "[W]ould it be possible for the same result to occur with
a videotape of many black men kicking and beating up a lone white man?"2R The
fact is, of course, that every action, even the most brutal and primitive sort, has a
symbolic component, which early modern historians, among others, have gone to
great lengths to decode in order to comprehend the behavior and mindset of people
who otherwise might remain inaccessible to our understanding. 29 The difference,
however, between these historical approaches and Soja's interpretation is that the
former rely on evidence, painstakingly assembled, carefully displayed, and often
ingeniously analyzed, while his is speculation of the airiest kind. And yet he had at
his disposal the historical actors-the very participants in the riots-that early
modern historians can only imagine in action, and only dream about having as live
informants. Soja might have asked himself what it would take to prove his
provocative assertion regarding Denny's attackers. The answer would certainly
entail a more subtle examination of the anthropology and semiology of politics
inside Los Angeles than informs this self-consciously postmodern book.
Soja, "Los Angeles, 1965-1992," 259-60.
For classic examples of this approach, see N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture, chap. 6; E. P.
Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present
50 (February 1971): 76-136. See also the remarks of Keith M. Baker: "The action of a rioter in picking
up a stone can no more be understood apart from the symbolic field that gives it meaning than the
action of a priest in picking up a sacramental vessel." Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge,
1990), 13. Another pioneer in the attempt to understand the symbolic dimension of popular action,
Robcrt Damton, has in fact suggcstcd a comparison between an carly modern riot and those that took
place in Los Angeles in 1992. He notes, however, the difficulty of such sorts of comparisons because of
the vastly different mental worlds of the two periods. See his review of Arlette Farge and Jacques
Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution, Claudia
Mieville, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), in New York Review of Rooks (October 22, 1992): 44-46. I
was alerted to this rcvicw by Cynthia Maria Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage
in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 177.
28
29
Robert A. Schneider is Ordinary Professor of History at the Catholic University
of America in Washington, D.C., and currently a visiting professor at the Irish
National University at Maynooth. He is the author of Public Life in Toulouse,
1463-1789 (1989) and The Ceremonial City (1995, paperback edn. 1997). He is
completing a book on the role of writers and intellectuals in the formation of
a new political order in the period following the Wars of Religion in France.
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