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Reviews of Books
Revolution and their fate in revolutionary and
Bonapartist France.
The climax of French action in America was at the
Battle of Yorktown (October 1781). The Battle of
Valmy (September 1792) was the last battle in which
the "American" regiments were recognizable. They
had begun losing identity after the "Amalgam" (February 1792), which mixed regulars and volunteers, and
to which, after September 1793, the levee en masse
added conscripts. Many officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) resigned or emigrated, Scott
emphasizes, not for political reasons but because the
army had become so unprofessional.
This book is remarkable in that it is history from
below, insofar as Scott's exhaustive research in the
available sources could make it, and could have been
prosopographic had not the personnel of the "American" regiments been so scattered during the revolution
and their records grossly neglected. The enlisted men
"disappeared" via the "Amalgam," the promotion of
NCOs into the officer corps, deaths (battle and nonbattle), retirements, or informal transfer (via desertion) to National Guard units or regiments offering
greater opportunity for advancement. For the officers,
there were emigration, promotion, and transfer. The
officers faded from the picture earlier than enlisted
men because most officers who served in America
(1780-17R3) were lieutenants and captains of ten to
twenty years service, and by 1792 (when the Wars of
the Revolution began) they were becoming middleaged.
Many stayed in the army, nonetheless. Alexandre
Berthier, a captain on Rochambeau's staff, served in
the Versailles National Guard as well as the Army. A
general in 1792, he was dismissed after the king was
overthrown, but he enlisted, rose through the ranks,
and was a major general in 1796 when Napoleon made
him his chief of staff, a position he held until 1814 (pp.
139, 170). Mathieu Dumas, an aide-de-camp to Rochambeau in America, was elected to the Legislative
Assembly (1791), proscribed in 1792, fled to Switzerland, returned in 1795, fled again in 1797 after trouble
with the Directory, returned to the French Army in
1800, became a general, and served Napoleon in
administrative roles all over Europe (pp. 170, lR9).
The flight of noble officers after the overthrow of the
king (August 1792) created opportunities for competent corporals and sergeants. From the "American"
regiments, some ninety-three men who had served in
America and forty-odd others became officers in 1792
alone (p. 171). One Nicolas Lenoir, born in Lorraine,
had enlisted in 1759 and was a sergeant major when he
came to America in 17RO. He made lieutenant in 1792,
was in sixteen campaigns during the revolution and the
Napoleonic era, and retired as a colonel in lRI4 with
fifty-five years of service (p. 191).
The detail on individual soldiers and officers is the
most fascinating part of this fine book. Scott draws
broad conclusions from his "prosopographic" work,
however: the "American" regiments did little or noth-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ing to inspire revolution in France. Most men and
officers were career soldiers. Their story, during the
revolution, is typical of the Royal Army in general. As
the revolution became more violent (after August 10,
1792), the men (and many of the officers, such as
Berthier and Dumas) were less zealous for the revolution than eager to take advantage of the opportunities it opened to them. Some officers emigrated early
in the revolution. The "Americans," such as the Lameth brothers, had hope for the revolution until the
king was made captive (August 1792)-then they
emigrated. Their associate in the National Assembly,
the Marquis de Lafayette, behaved similarly. (He had
served with the Americans, not Rochambeau.)
The book also illustrates not only the close connection between revolution and war but also that many
military professionals can generate no zeal for politics
or revolution at all. A good example is Lazare Carnot,
one of the rare commoner-officers in the French Army
in 1789, a captain of engineers who became the
republic's "Organizer of Victory." He stood for "careers open to talent" and induced the Convention to
reinstate many noble officers who had been dismissed
but were needed in 1793-94 (p. 187).
One of the author's more solid points is that the
"most pervasive characteristic of the French officer
corps" between 1794 and 1799 was "growing professionalism." This goes far toward explaining the success
of Napoleon between 1799 and 1812.
Overall, Scott has produced a fine, informative, and
most readable book. The best parts are the minibiographies that dot the text and add a human element, as well as color to this basically military history.
OWEN CONNELLY
University of South Carolina
CAROL E. HARRISON. The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses
of Emulation. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New
York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 268.
Voluntary associations in nineteenth-century France
have generally been studied for their political significance, especially their links with republicanism. Indeed, the creation of a French bourgeoisie has generally been seen as a political as well as a social process.
But Carol E. Harrison explicitly rejects this: "politics
did not make the French bourgeoisie" (p. 7). She also
rejects attempts to define the bourgeoisie in socioeconomic terms, instead arguing that bourgeois class
formation was the product of a particular type of
sociability that defined a man's identity both as male
and as bourgeois within a particular locality. It was a
combination of social practices and rhetoric that produced class.
Harrison's focus is on three towns in eastern France:
Besancon, Lons le Saunier, and Mulhousc. They were
very different in size, political affiliation, ethnic and
religious composition, and in their hierarchies of
wealth and status. Yet each town had its voluntary
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
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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