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Reviews of Books
sacrifices are inevitable. Still, the telescopic, macrominded focus of these chapters, framed as they are
within a general theory of change, leaves an impression
of inevitability, as though history marches along independently of people's efforts. Statesmen, reformers,
and thinkers are mentioned here and there, but to
their present-day successors the lesson of the long view
is that it does not matter what they do. To appreciate
the parts played in history by, for instance, the Fugger
family and the founders of such institutions as the
Royal Exchange, the Bank of England, and the modern French treasury, students will have to dip into the
appended bibliographies. This volume is only a beginning, but it leads into a field of study more important
than its title suggests, because government collecting,
borrowing, and spending touched upon the life of
every citizen.
J. F.
BOSHER
York University
Aristocratic Encounters: European
Travelers and North American Indians. New York:
Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 179. $49.95.
HARRY LIEBERSOHN.
Harry Liebersohn has provided a compact, concise
addition to the burgeoning literature on European
contact with non-Europeans and European constructions of the "other." He analyzes the creation of an
image of the North American Indian by a particular set
of observers: French and German aristocratic or elite
"notable" travelers in the Romantic era. The author's
own previous review of travel writing suggests situating
his account somewhere between the careful reading of
texts on European encounters by Anthony Pagden and
the theory of projection of Western power by the
school of Edward Said. Here, however, the Europeans
refashioned aristocratic culture not out of triumphalism but to neutralize challenges to nobility in
postrevolutionary societies. In this condition, they felt
kinship to fellow victims of an inevitable historical
process, the defeated Native Americans. To the extent
that aristocrats aspired to find their masculinity in the
Wild West, this is also a work of gender history.
Liebersohn displays his mastery of both French and
German travel literature, a thorough appreciation of
the history of the American West and the Canadian
frontier, and an immersion in the ethnography of
distinct Indian cultures. He is equally comfortable in
the genre of Bernard Smith, discussing art as shaping
the European vision.
Liebersohn adds complexity to the French Enlightenment image of the Indian by differentiating the
"noble savage" cliche into the cherished convert of the
Jesuits and the intrepid hunter of the soldier LouisArmand de Lahontan. But the distinctive discourse of
eighteenth-century authors envisaged the North
American native as a serene egalitarian, often drawn in
the garb of the classical Roman republican. From
Voltaire to Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, the Indians
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
appeared as frank, generous, and relatively peaceable,
while some authors idealized Iroquois meritocracy.
The contrary Enlightenment view of the "ignoble
savage" appears here only as a minority countercurrent. The author does not mention French officers
such as Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who idealized
the Tahitians but expressed negative views of the
Iroquois. Liebersohn discusses the extreme views of
Cornelius de Pauw, who, though anticolonialist, portrayed Indians as enervated representatives of North
American degeneration. Constantin-Francois Volney,
in America, if not in Syria and Egypt, implicitly
subscribed to the cultural superiority of settled over
hunting peoples. Liebersohn interprets Volney almost
as an anti-philosophe, while it might be more accurate
to depict him only as an anti-Rousseauist. Volney's
successors in the construction of early anthropology
shared his disdain for nomadic hunters.
The origins of the view of the Indian as aristocratic
victim appear to a limited extent in the works of the
liberal noble Francois La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
and the "American farmer," Michel-Guillaume-St.
Jean de Crevecoeur, The true pioneer of the Romantic
traveler's view was Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand.
The tragic fate of the Natchez, idealized in a long
manuscript and in the highly successful novellas Atala
(1801) and Rene (1802), was a metaphor for his own
exile during the French Revolution and for the destruction of the French nobility. Liebersohn has unearthed one of Chateaubriand's sources on the actual
destruction of the Natchez in 1729 in an account of the
soldier Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz. For Chateaubriand, the Natchez were not classical egalitarians
but a hunting, warrior aristocracy defending ancient
freedoms against a modern commercial society. Nature, as well as the human characters, was seething
with passion and excess. As Liebersohn points out,
however, Chateaubriand did not give up nostalgia for
the French empire and the hope that France would
some day recover Canada.
The theme of ambivalence is indeed striking among
the travelers. The vogue of James Fenimore Cooper
increased their enchantment with the image of chivalric Indians. Contact with the Indian aristocracy reinforced their own sense of nobility and martial virtues.
Many accepted the necessity of Anglo-American expropriation and domination but reacted with repugnance to the uncouth manners and mercantile greed of
the pioneers. The forced migration policies of Andrew
Jackson also repelled European observers.
The journals of Alexis de Tocqueville and his Democracy in America (1835) gave full expression to
these conflicting sentiments. Despite lack of sympathy
for other colonized non-Europeans such as Algerians,
Tocqueville, at the price of personal hardship, sought
out the Ojibwa. He found liberty and nobility in a
warlike hunting culture, yet he, too, saw the extinction
of Indians as inevitable. The warning for European
aristocracy was thus to adapt to the world of bourgeois
commerce if they wished to avoid a similar fate.
OCTOBER
2000
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
Travelers from German states were not soldiers,
administrators, or representatives of a lost empire. For
middle-class German authors, America was a subject
of curiosity about the relative success of German
immigrants. The Prussian civil servant Gottfried Duden became a Missouri farmer indifferent to Indian
land rights. For German aristocrats, America provided
a hardier version of the Grand Tour. They could test
their own savage instincts against nature and express
esteem for the hard-pressed Indians. The colorful rival
of Otto von Bismarck, Prussian diplomat Albert Pourtales, found the Osage horsemen of Oklahoma hospitable and generous, although he also wanted to civilize
them and introduce them to agriculture.
The Rhineland prince Maximilian of Wied, already
an ethnographer of the Botocudos in Brazil, felt
particular empathy for the imprisoned chief Black
Hawk at the time of the American militia campaign
against the Sauk and Fox along the Mississippi. Maximilian then relished the display, elegance, and male
warrior clubs among the Mandan, Hidatsa, and
Arikara peoples of the upper Missouri in present-day
Montana. Liebersohn compares the even more valuable, realistic sketches of the artist of this expedition,
Karl Bodmer, to a Nietzschean celebration of the
pre-Socratic Dionysian ecstatic rituals of dance and
initiation. With creative interpretation, the author
finds in these works the aristocratic search for ritual
giving cohesion to a society.
Few of these aristocrats lacked a sense of racial
superiority. But Liebersohn underplays the growth of
early nineteenth-century racial theory and the persistence of the stage theory of development, either of
which could justify expansion and colonization. A
sampling of different explorers, geographers, and early
ethnologists might yield a less romanticized view of
native peoples. The concluding brief paragraphs open
up far too complex subjects for the available space.
The author suggests that the legacy of Romantic travel
included artistic primitivism. For Charles Baudelaire,
portraits of Indians showed a savage alternative to
bourgeois Europe. The symbolist artist Rodolphe
Bresdin drew himself as an Indian. The German
nationalist writer of Westerns, Karl May, found in the
Indians an aristocratic people kindred to the Germans.
This admirable book thus deliberately leaves open
questions about the nature of aristocratic culture in
the late nineteenth century and the practical effect on
imperialism of the Romantic fascination for the Indian.
MARTIN S. STAUM
University of Calgary
FRANZ X. EDER, LESLEY A. HALL, and GERT HEKMA,
editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe. Volume 1, National
Histories. New York: Manchester University Press;
distributed by St. Martin's, New York. 1999. Pp. x, 270.
Cloth $79.95, paper $29.95.
FRANZ X. EDER, LESLEY A. HALL, and GERT HEKMA,
editors. Sexual Cultures in Europe. Volume 2, Themes
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1375
in Sexuality. New York: Manchester University Press;
distributed by St. Martin's, New York. 1999. Pp. x, 261.
Cloth $79.95, paper $29.95.
These two volumes of essays grew out of papers given
at a workshop conference on "Sexual Cultures of
Europe 1700-1985," held in June 1996 in the Netherlands. The unifying theme is a historical one: namely,
that society has strong influence on the shapes and
definitions of sexuality and that the social forms vary
from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Only one
of the contributors, Robert A. Nye, is an American.
The rest are all Europeans, most of them historians.
Most of the essays in the first volume are overviews
on such topics as "sexual cultures" in Britain, Ireland,
the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and Austria,
Spain, and Russia, each more or less covering the
period from the 1700s to the 1980s. The two remaining
essays are on medicine and the modernization of
sexuality and on the World League for Sexual Reform.
They are interesting, occasionally give new insights,
have helpful bibliographies, and will serve as useful
guides to others. Collectively, the essays emphasize the
differences and similarities between countries but are
very skimpy on details. Most also assume a level of
historical sophistication that few undergraduates
would possess.
The second volume has a different orientation. Part
of it offers the same kind of compact summaries as the
first, but on such topics as venereal disease, European
fertility rates, pornography in Western Europe, transvestism, and same-sex relations in Europe between
1700-1990. These essays are compact overviews, short
on details, and will make good guides for new researchers in the field. Still another group of essays is
devoted to specialized topics, and these are more
narrowly focused on studies of a small group of
"lesbian physicians" in Britain in the nineteenth century, sex education in Germany, abortion in the Hague
at the beginning of the twentieth century, and French
Catholic attitudes about abstinence and "appeasement
of lust" from 1930 to 1950, as reflected in the letters
column of a newspaper published by a Catholic organization. There is even an oral historical study of the
recollections of senior citizens in South Wales about
how abortion was dealt with in their younger years. All
of these essays break new ground and are based on
primary sources.
As in all essay collections, some are better than
others, but the overall quality is high, and the editors
are to be congratulated on completing what must have
been a time-consuming process involving conference
papers, comments, revisions, and finally publication.
With the exception of the specialized and narrowly
focused essays, however, there is little that is new, but
it is nice to have the information summarized as it is
here. Editors Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall, and Gert
Hekma justify their rather miscellaneous collection as
demonstrating that historians of sexuality have moved
from nature to culture, with the result that sex, sexu-
OCTOBER 2000