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associations, whose ruling ethos was (despite the usual
association of bourgeois society with competition)
"emulation": a spirit of cooperation among equals for
the benefit of society. These bodies served to define
bourgeois men by excluding women and the uneducated, both groups with no place in the public sphere
of early or mid-nineteenth-century France. The associations organized lectures, libraries, museums (especially of natural history), and musical events; they
subscribed to journals, and some provided spaces for
gaming and smoking. Some went in for charitable
activities. But political questions were scrupulously
avoided as divisive and hence counter to the spirit of
emulation, and in any case would have antagonized the
authorities. (The attitudes of successive governments
are the subject of one chapter of the book.) The men
who belonged to these associations were different in
each town but occnpied a similar place in the local
social order, saw themselves as bourgeois, and behaved
and spoke in very similar ways.
Voluntary associations flourished after the revolution and empire and declined with the advent of the
Third Republic. The divisions within postrevolutionary
society, Harrison suggests, made "emulation" an attractive "rhetorical tool for reconfiguring social order"
(p. 3). But after about 1870, bourgeois society began to
fragment. The Franco-Prussian War disrupted bourgeois social practices, and under the new repuhlic the
public sphere was transformed. Rival voluntary associations now became the focus for class and political
conflicts, as a white-collar petite bourgeoisie and a far
wider range of leisure associations began to emerge.
Thus the appearance and disappearance of Harrison's
societies are very closely tied to politics, to economic
change, and to social conflict, even though she allows
these factors little or no role in bourgeois class formation. This is a tension throughout the book, resulting
perhaps from a rather narrow definition of what is
"political."
Another problem concerns geographical coverage.
The book claims to be about the whole of France, and
although many of the arguments are certainly more
widely applicable, it is not clear how typical the
voluntary associations in these three places were. Paris
and other major cities were clearly very different, as
Harrison admits. If male hourgeois identity was primarily a local formation, did politics, social tensions,
understandings of masculinity, and social practices
perhaps interact in different ways in other parts of the
nation? A detailed discussion of these issues would
have improved the book.
Nevertheless, Harrison's emphasis on social practice
and performance as the formative component of individual class identities is very convincing. 1 was also
persuaded by her stress on bourgeois status being
locally defined and her focus on masculinity and its
role in class formation is refreshing (reversing the
all-too-common association of gender with women).
All of these arguments, though, raise further issues. I
remained uncertain, at the end of the book, what
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Harrison sees as the connection between these local
bourgeois identities and any sense of belonging to a
nationwide French bourgeoisie. Was it purely rhetorical? Or were wider identities also formed through
performance (such as voting, a political as well as a
social act)? I also wondered what common elements
might exist in the identity of bourgeois men and
bourgeois women. Here the shift from "the bourgeois
citizen" of the title to "the French bourgeoisie" is
problematical.
Some of Harrison's writing is excellent (I particularly enjoyed the story of the phosphoric chicken of
Lons), and the research is also very sound. She might
nevertheless have extended her analysis by examining
buildings, artefacts, iconography, and maps: there is no
sense of her bourgeois in the space of their towns.
Although in some respects incomplete, this book is
nevertheless a valuable contrihution hoth to our understanding of nineteenth-century provincial France
and to current debates on class formation.
DAVID GARRIOCH
Monash University
DOUGLAS PETER MACKAMAN. Leisure Settings: Bourgeois
Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 2J 9.
Cloth $46.00, paper $18.00.
The construction of bourgeois and middle-class identities has figured prominently within cultural history.
Recent studies include how the bourgeoisie and the
middle class used pets (Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the
Boudoir:
Petkeeping
in
Nineteenth-Century
Paris
[J994]), fashion (Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeuisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century
[1994]), cholera (Catherine J. Kudlick, Cholera in
Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History [1996]),
and parlor making (Katherine C. Grier, Culture and
Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity,
1850-1930 [1997]) to construct their identities.
In a similar vein, Douglas Peter Mackaman argues
that the spa formed an important part of the construction of bourgeois identity. He has written a fascinating
book that describes and analyzes French spa culture
from the ancien regime to the end of the nineteenth
century. Using archival sources and contemporary
accounts, such as guidebooks written by both physicians and spa-goers, Mackaman explores why the
bourgeoisie went to spas and what they did there. He
provides a detailed description of the daily spa routine
including mineral water treatments, rules and regulations, and social events. Mackaman shows how medicalization and regimentation applied to virtually every
area of spa life from eating and drinking to exercise,
sleep, and amusements. The book is copiously illustrated with drawings, photographs, and architectural
plans of spas.
Mackaman argues that the bourgeoisie found neither aristocratic nor popular forms of leisure appropriate to their values of productivity and respectability,
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Reviews of Books
but that the spa became the perfect bourgeois vacation. Spas created for the first time a productive and
therefore bourgeois model of vacationing. The spa, as
a therapeutic site, promoted both better health and
appropriate consumption. Spas became increasingly
respectable as entrepreneurs (often physicians) redesigned them to satisfy bourgeois needs for modesty and
to reinforce class distinctions.
After an introductory discussion of ancien regime
spas, the author moves to a description and analysis of
the medicalized spa (1815-1850). Physicians prescribed hydrotherapy for a variety of internal and
external afflictions. Indeed, one had to have a doctor's
prescription in order to take the waters. Physicians
served as both gatekeepers and promoters of mineral
water establishments. Each spa had its own physician,
and physician-entrepreneurs ran some of the spas. In
the early part of the century, there were three main
types of mineral water establishment: those managed
by the French government, such as Vichy and Plombieres; those run by another government, such as
Aix-les-Bains, under the control of the PiedmontSardinian crown, 1815-1860; and private establishments, such as Evian-les-Bains.
After 1860, the medical component receded in importance as pleasure and leisure became more central
to spa vacationing. In 1860, the law requiring a physician's prescription was abrogated, thus opening the
way for non-curists as well as curists to vacation at
spas. Railroads made it easier and faster for visitors to
travel to spas. With its park, promenade, casino,
ballroom, and other amenities, the spa offered respectable and appropriate ways for the middle class seeking
bourgeois status to socialize. Spas became sites where
bourgeois identity could be confirmed and reproduced
by a vacationing and consuming middle class. The spa
vacation itself became a socially acceptable form of
bourgeois consumption, and the spa and its surrounding ville d'eaux became locales where spa-goers could
participate in and display further consumption. To see
and be seen was one of the principal functions of the
spa. By the late nineteenth century, the management
of spas had changed, as government-run establishments were privatized. By 1900, spa vacationers numbered 800,000, a vast increase from 31,000 in 1820.
The French were not unique in their emphasis on
hydrotherapy and the spa vacation. Taking the waters
was a European-wide phenomenon and a central feature of the nineteenth-century middle and upper-class
American experience as well. The French case illustrates the therapeutic uses of hydrotherapy and is
important for understanding the role of thermalism in
the history of medicine. The French spa experience
also exemplifies the construction and evolution of the
bourgeois vacation. This work raises larger questions
about the history of vacations: who took them, what
did they do, where, and for how long?
This is a book that all historians will enjoy, and I
enthusiastically recommend it. Mackaman's account is
not only historically important but is of current cul-
AMERICAN HISTORIrAL REVIEW
tural and medical interest. Spas continue to flourish in
France as medical institutions paid for by national
health insurance. They have become ever more democratized, offering rest cures and hydrotherapy to large
numbers of spa-goers.
ANN F. LA BERGE
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
ISABELLE OUVERO. L'invention de la collection: De la
diffusion de la litterature et des savoirs a la formation du
citoyen au XIX e siecle. (Collection "In Octavo.") Paris:
Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I'Homme. 1999.
Pp. 334. 220fr.
To walk into a French bookstore is immediately to be
made aware of the seemingly peculiar French mania
for "series," especially of the pocket variety. From the
"Livre de Poche" to the "Collection Folio" to every
historian's dream-the five-dollar-a-volume "Points
Histoire" series by Seuil-the triumph of the French
pocket edition is perhaps best epitomized of late by the
international success of the heavily illustrated and
creatively formatted "Decouvertes Gallimard" series.
Is it Cartesianism or simple fetishism that drives the
French passion for the pocket series? Isabelle Olivero's book offers a history of the origins of "the series"
that situates the phenomenon in its most conventional
context: the history of book publishing in the nineteenth century.
The history of the book and of commercial publishing represents an important and lively field in modern
French history. The multi-volume Histoire de l'edition
[rancaise (1990), under the direction of Roger Chartier
and Hcnri-Jcan Martin, has established the general
outline of the history of book publishing in France,
ranging from the evolution of technologies of production, to new consuming practices, to the development
of specialized niche audiences of readers such as
children and women. The third Chartier-Martin volume, dedicated to the "short nineteenth century" from
Romanticism to the Belle Epoquc, is subtitled "the
publishers' era." The general narrative includes increasing readership as part of the republican democratizing agenda, offering cheaper editions made possible by industrializing technologies, and publishing in a
variety of new formats such as the illustrated and
railroad editions. It is within this project and as part of
the research concerning the history of publishing in
nineteenth-century France that Olivero makes her
contribution.
Olivero's study begins with an interesting empirical
observation: 1830-1914 witnessed the publication of
seventy-one "collections," as compared with eight for
the period from 1660-1830. Part of what she calls "the
second reading revolution" (p. 10) Olivero contextualizes the popularity of collections in the context of the
spread of learning and popular education. To her
credit, she also offers the French case in relation to
changes and developments in other European countries as well as in the United States. The book aspires
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