1402
Reviews of Books
Spang can do now that she has pricked our appetites is
to prepare a second course as savory as the first.
EUGEN WEBER
University of California,
Los Angeles
WARREN ROBERTS. Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis
Prieur, Revolutionary Artists: The Public, the Populace,
and Images of the French Revolution. Albany: State
University of New York Press. 2000. Pp. xx, 370.
$24.95.
Although they were contemporaries, Jacques-Louis
David (1748-1825) and Jean-Louis Prieur (1759-1795)
had little in common. One was a major history painter,
the other a little-known illustrator, which is to say that
their training, ambition, talent, rank, and achievements as artists were, in the context of eighteenthcentury culture, incommensurable. What links them,
however, is that both artists participated culturally and
politically in the French Revolution.
Warren Roberts proposes to compare Prieur's and
David's artistic contributions to the revolution, different as they were in scope and nature. Prieur is known
principally for his drawings for the Tableaux historiques
de la Revolution francaise, a publication commemorating the most important events of revolutionary history
as it was unfolding. Engraved by Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, Prieur's illustrations, covering the period between 1789 and 1792, catered to an educated, wellto-do audience. Accompanied by commentaries
written by Sebastien Roche Nicolas de Chamfort and
Abbe Claude Fauchet, they were initially sold in sets of
two for a comparatively steep price of six livres each. A
three-volume deluxe edition covering the whole revolutionary decade was published in 1802.
Almost the entire corpus of Prieur's drawings has
been preserved at the Musee Carnavalet in Paris. It is
a fascinating body of work and Roberts's discussion of
it is most useful, given that, aside from a few drawings,
the corpus as such has not until now received sufficient
scholarly attention. The same cannot be said about
David. His complex and multifarious aesthetic productions from the revolutionary period-from paintings,
to caricatures, to festivals-have been examined and
interpreted at length. Roberts has chosen, rather
arbitrarily, to concentrate only on two aspects of
David's revolutionary oeuvre-his unfinished project
of the Tennis Court Oath, and his revolutionary festivals-justifying his decision by the fact that he has
already considered the whole output in his previous
book. But both his choice of David's works in the
present publication and what he has to say about them
remain unconvincing. The connection that Roberts
seeks to establish between the Tennis Court Oath and
the festivals-namely, Maximilien Robespierre as a
person of paramount influence on David-is at once
too obvious and, for the purposes of his argument,
insufficiently explained by art, thus appearing reductive. This is also due to the fact that Roberts ignores a
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
vast amount of recent literature on David's art in
general and on his revolutionary works in particular.
Consequently, his analyses come across as uninformed
and far too general(izing) to contribute much to the
present state of research on David.
The main problem of the book, though, has to do
with its over-arching comparative argument. Roberts
invites us to consider the revolutionary output of
Prieur and David through the prism of two oppositional categories, the populace versus the public, which
he sees as key notions of the new scholarship on the
French Revolution. Whether these are indeed crucial
new concepts is debatable-what about gender as a
new category of historical analysis?-but what matters
is the use to which they are put here. In a nutshell,
Roberts's argument is that Prieur's illustrations for the
Tableaux offered a visual language of the populace and
as such constituted a truly revolutionary artistic
achievement. David's project, by contrast, spoke the
language of the public. There is, of course, nothing
new about the association of David's art with the idea
of the public: Thomas Crow was first to introduce it in
Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris
(1985). Although Roberts acknowledges Crow's book,
he never produces Crow's argument, nor does he
situate his own in relation to it. Notwithstanding his
references to Jiirgen Habermas's notion of the public
sphere, crucial for Crow, Roberts understands the
public differently, not as the new institutions of collective debate, or as a discourse, but essentially as a
class of people: the educated leaders of the revolution,
such as Robespierre, as opposed to the sans-culottes,
whom Roberts identifies as the subject and audience of
Prieur (never mind the elite clients Prieur's Tableaux
actually targeted).
Quite aside from who did their art address-both
artists may be seen, in fact, to have addressed the same
audience, i.e. the educated public who thought it
worthwhile to look at, if not to pay for, images-this
seems to me a comparison between apples and oranges. The two artists used different languages to
visualize the revolution because of the entirely different purpose of their respective projects (not to mention their talents). Equally problematic is Roberts's
suggestion that Prieur's art, insofar as it speaks of and
for the populace, is more "authentic" than that of
David, whom the author half reproaches for never
having "view[ed] the Revolution from the perspective
of the street" (p. 317). What haunts such diagnosies
are, I am afraid, the ghosts of the cherished Marxist
antinomies (the "good" people vs. the "bad" bourgeoisie), notwithstanding the author's dismissal of Marxist
exegesis of the French Revolution as outmoded. Roberts also deems Prieur's manner more personal in
relation to David's "official" propagandist touch, an
odd claim, given the rather schematic and repetitive
character of Prieur's compositions-a work clearly
made to be engraved. Not enough formal analysis has
been presented to back this suggestion, and, more
generally, to support this book's larger claims. This is
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2000
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
a methodological problem: Roberts insists on the
status of art as a historical document, but he eschews
a thorough examination of its form. Yet, it is precisely
the form of images and cultural practices that produces
historical meaning. Roberts privileges historical events
and the artists's biographies as the source of meaning.
That he reproduces a copy of David's painting from
the North Carolina Museum in Raleigh as the artist's
Self-portrait from the Uffizi Galleries, despite obvious
differences in the format and style of these works,
cannot but appear as a symptom of the regrettable
disregard for the formal specificity of the image in this
book on art.
EWA LAJER-BuRCHARTH
Harvard University
VICKI CARON. Uneasy Asylum: France and the Jewish
Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942. (Stanford Studies in Jewish
History and Culture.) Stanford: Stanford University
Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 605. $65.00.
On the eve of World War II, France was the principal
refuge for asylum-seekers fleeing anti-Semitic or fascist regimes in Germany, Central Europe, Eastern
Europe, and Spain. French refugee policy from 1933 to
1942 charted, nonetheless, a spotty course, oscillating
between welcoming and barring immigrants, allowing
refugees to work and interning them. Vicki Caron
recounts the history of the three forces that shaped
Jewish refugee policy during this period: government,
public opinion, and native Jewry. Although not entirely felicitous in its prose, and despite the fact that it
could have benefited from elimination of redundancies, the volume rewards the reader with an exhaustive
account of a topic that has not previously been examined systematically.
Until recently, the study of French immigration
policy was made difficult by the inaccessibility of
relevant archives (some of which continue to require
special authorization for use). An ideologically driven
perception of French society as possessing a monolithic identity likewise discouraged research that would
demonstrate France's multi-ethnic, multicultural character. Even the emerging French literature of immigration of the last two decades has not paid sufficient
attention to the specific case of Central European
Jewish refugees.
Caron situates French refugee policy against the
background of competing views within both the general and the Jewish populations of France. The proimmigration lobby was driven by a French tradition of
granting asylum (which dates back to the ancien regime), labor shortages deriving from both the introduction of the forty-hour week and the lack of certain
skilled laborers, and a growing military need that could
best be met by pressing refugees into service. Caron
shows that although governments with positive attitudes toward immigration did not necessarily accomplish their goals, neither were governments with negative attitudes unremittingly hostile. Even during the
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1403
worst of the anti-immigration periods, voices favoring
an open door and the refugees' right to work were
never silenced.
Anti-refugee sentiment is sometimes attributed to
latent anti-Semitism, but Caron dismisses metaphysicalor ideological explanations of anti-Semitism. She
favors an interpretation that emphasizes misguided
self-interest. The physicians, lawyers, artisans, and
merchants who sought protectionist legislation certainly fueled anti-immigration and anti-Semitic attitudes, which helped pave the way for Vichy legislation;
but Caron claims they succeeded because the government wished to be seen as fighting the Depression and
because it needed middle-class support.
In addition to a pro-immigration left and an antiimmigration right, there was a body of centrist opinion
that tolerated asylum. After 1936, however, this centrist position eroded. By 1938, afraid that refugees
would drag France into war (and maybe even civil
war), political moderates joined with the radical right
in an anti-immigration stance that addressed economic
and political concerns simultaneously.
Much of the previous literature on French Jewish
leaders in the interwar years has deplored their reluctance to rescue escapees from Nazism. Offering a
more nuanced view, Caron agrees that hard-line antiimmigration Jewish leadership dominated prior to
1936. She commends, however, the motives of subsequent, more liberal, Jewish leaders. A major contribution of this book is the full-scale rehabilitation of the
memory of these leaders who went beyond conventional philanthropy and attempted to organize and
support projects to resettle Jews in provincial centers
and in colonial territories. Eventually they campaigned, albeit unsuccessfully, for the repeal of all
restrictions. Their fault was one of political or tactical
error in the execution of "their fervent desire to
sustain the relief effort" (p. 320). The fact that immigrant Jews blamed the native Jewish leadership for the
disasters that befell their families is attributed to the
success of the Nazis in creating Jewish councils precisely for the purpose of deflecting blame from themselves onto visible but powerless Jewish leadership.
French immigration policy traversed various phases,
beginning with active recruitment in the 1920s, when
the labor shortage provoked by the Great War made
the valuable technical and commercial skills of some
prospective immigrants attractive. Crackdowns during
1934-1935 were occasioned by economic factors
linked to the Depression. The government of the
Popular Front developed schemes in 1936 and 1937 to
alleviate refugees' problems, but little was actually
achieved as a result. In 1938 and 1939, the pendulum
of governmental policy swung again as the Daladier
government, reacting to the arrival of refugees fleeing
the Anschluss, the Munich crisis, and Kristallnacht,
implemented a second crackdown that reflected popular fears of warmongering among Jews. Yet, even
during this period, there was some interest in luring
immigrant business, in settling refugees in underpop-
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