Book Review - French History

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change or abolish the city: the Musée social, the Wandervögel, the scouting movement, the Camping club français, the International Garden Cities and Town Planning Federation… The same actors pop up in different guises: Georges Benoit-Lévy appears first in Olivier Sirost’s chapter on camping and later in Mayalène Guelton’s chapter as the unsuccessful proponent of a Spanish alternative to the garden city, the ‘ciudad lineal’ (cited as ‘ciudal lineal’ in the text). The period covered by the book ends with evolution of this activism into capitalism (for example, naturism less as crusade more as a holiday, in Arnaud Baubérot’s chapter) and the professionalization of town-planning. Although the terminology used to describe the city’s ills remained fairly standard across the decades, the proposed solutions differed. In the 1820s and 30s, neither Owen in Britain nor Fourier in France could see much hope for the city, and planned to start afresh with more rational (and smaller) settlements. The failure of Icarian colonies led their successors to consider reforming the city rather than abandoning it. There are chapters here about the attempted creation of green lungs by replacing Paris’s fortifications with parks, green belt policy in the Swiss cantons, and providing French workers with gardens. Not just health but also revivified communal feeling came with greenery and open spaces. The stresses of city-life were not utterly rejected, but rather the countryside was seen as an inoculation against them (in the case of educational establishments, orphanages and juvenile prisons), or as an occasional antidote for the urban dweller. The sense of a respite, rather than permanent withdrawal, is present in Thoreau’s Walden. In nature urbanites could reconnect with their own nature, even if just for the duration of a Popular Front holiday. However, rather than escaping into the pre-modern these developments led to the importation of urban technologies and lifestyles into the countryside. Urbanophobia was an urban phenomenon, and the critics of some aspects of modernity were also the promoters of others. The pursuit of a discourse across time is a worthwhile activity, but it has the tendency to underplay the real problems facing urban dwellers in the period, such as the disproportionate mortality rate. Philanthropists’ hopes that rural colonies would solve issues of juvenile delinquency now seem quaint, but as a response to the disastrous incarceration of children in adult, urban prisons, they really did do some good. Another criticism one might make is that the majority of chapters are centred on France, but as the English and German terminology used above indicates, France was not necessarily at the centre of the developments discussed: one has to know a bit already about garden cities, youth movements and Agrarromantik to get the most out of this ‘histoire croisée’. Nonetheless the editors have worked hard to daw links between reform and leisure, utopianism and capitalism, anarchists on the run and Catholic apologists, and the overall effect is convincing. Hertford College, Oxford

DAV I D HOPK I N doi:10.1093/fh/crt049 Advance Access publication 13 May 2013

Dreaming in French. The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. By Alice Kaplan. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 2012. xx + 289 pp. £17.00. ISBN: 978 0 226 42438 5. Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French is a very engaging and enjoyable book, with significant appeal for a range of different readerships. It is difficult, however, to get a sense

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of it as a whole. This may not matter that much, and Kaplan does explicitly embrace the composite nature of the work, which is made up of three portraits of three very different women, whose relations even to what they ostensibly share—a fascination with France and the French language—are marked more by their differences than by any substantial commonality. In fact, it is not fully clear that ‘fascination’ would even be the right word for at least one of the three women. In a recent interview published in Le Matricule des anges (2012), Kaplan underscored the way her chosen combination of subjects fulfils a sort of identity quota, ‘un triptyque identitaire’, while giving it small twists: the Caucasian woman of high society origins is a Catholic, the Jewish woman a Californian, at least until her adult years, and the African–American Southerner the product of a very selective high school. She also claimed in the same interview that ‘micro-history’ focussing not just on individual lives, but on relatively discrete moments in those lives, reveals ‘symbolic importance’ or new ways into understanding larger social processes. This may well be the case, but the fact of bringing three such microhistories marked by considerable difference into direct relation within one volume is liable to over-determine the lines that give shape to those larger narratives. To a degree this is the case for Dreaming in French. For the most part, Kaplan handles the weaving together of her stories with real elegance, allowing for a loose weft. But she does also seem to want to pull them all together at the end and indeed draws particular attention to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s editorial advice to Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper when they were finishing their Paris After the Liberation, which was ‘to bring the three themes together in a crescendo’. Kaplan’s own strong crescendo may well be what also makes this volume more than a series of ‘finely drawn portrait[s]’ and turns it into ‘a statement’ over which ‘readers could argue’. But the question remains whether the book supplies the terms we would need to engage in that argument. Summing it all up in one bold sentence, she writes ‘France secured them’. The italics in themselves are indication enough of how much is at stake for Kaplan in this sentence, and its flourish is impressive in its own way, indicative of the direct, unflustered style that characterises this book. Inevitably, perhaps, such a bold claim immediately invites the reader to question it. And this is where the book slips away from us a little, for it leaves us wanting to know more about the lives into which these relatively short French episodes (with perhaps the exception of Sontag for whom France became a more lasting fixture) fitted. To know whether they were ultimately ‘secured’ lives. And at the same time, it points us on towards what I think is partly an objective in bringing these three stories into a whole. That is, to suggest rather that there is something securing this configuration of three women, something about France, or a particular moment in French life and literature and the way it answered a particular moment in American modernity, that gives this study as a whole its rationale. It would, however, require a quite different sort of book to substantiate that claim, one that did more of the weaving and knotting to fill in the bigger pattern, as for example Whitney Walton’s 2009 study Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad does. Kaplan references this study, but also distinguishes her aims from it and prefers to conclude finally by linking these three women in terms of the commitment they made to a foreign language and culture, holding their examples up as salutary in the face of globalisation and the increasing dominance of English. This makes for a resounding conclusion, as well as retrospectively undergirding the attention the book pays to the minutiae of estrangement for study-abroad students in the era before internet and Starbucks. The book’s conviction in the importance of another language, and the ‘other’ world it opens up, is what makes these portraits so winning,


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with their emphasis on their subjects’ determination to carve out a personal mental space. The bid to inspire emulation is evident, and understandable. It would be churlish to knock it, especially since emulation is a necessary first step to spinning some of the fascinating detail Kaplan raises into other histories. For example, this particular reader was struck by the archival fragments that testify to Angela Davis’s impact as ‘the bestknown communist intellectual in the world’, ranging from comments made by Gilles Deleuze to a recent pop song by Yannick Noah, and including the decision made by the municipality of Aubervilliers to name an école maternelle after Angela Davis in 2007. Intrigued as to whether Davis’s communist affiliations were significant in that decision, I looked up the names of other recently constructed schools in Aubervilliers: Angela Davis comes after Anne Sylvestre in 2006 and before Françoise Dolto and Wangari Maathi in 2010. Writing Davis into a triumvirate such as that would certainly tell us a whole other history. University of London Institute in Paris

A N N A - L OU I SE M I L N E doi:10.1093/fh/crt041 Advance Access publication 15 April 2013

Robert Boulin: Itinéraires d’un Gaulliste (Libourne, Paris). By Hubert Bonin, Bernard Lachaise, and Christophe-Luc Robin. Brussels: Peter Lang. 2011. 421 pp. €44.00. ISBN: 9789052017365. Robert Boulin’s name is really only known to aficionados of the ins and outs of French politics during the 1960s and 1970s and, sadly, rather for the tragic and murky manner in which he left this life, in the autumn of 1979. And yet, at the time of his death, he was considered a premier ministrable. Briefly, Boulin served as minister for a total of fourteen years between 1961 and 1979, in a variety of what one might call ‘technical’ ministries, ranging from ‘rapatriés’ in 1961, to agriculture, budget, and parliamentary relations. In 1979, he was attending top-level world economic summits with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Raymond Barre, in his capacity as minister for labour. Born in Villandraut in the Gironde in 1920, he joined the Resistance, though not the Free French, early on in the Second World War. At the Liberation he rallied to de Gaulle and became involved in local politics, which meant that he came also within the orbit of Jacques Chaban-Delmas. A member of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) from its inception, Boulin made Libourne his base and became its mayor, but when the General dissolved the RPF in 1953, Boulin instead followed Chaban into the Centre des Républicains Sociaux. This act of mild disobedience did him no harm and in 1958 he was elected deputy. Three years later, his intelligence, attention to detail and capacity for hard work as a member of various commissions in the National Assembly saw him take on the first of a slew of ministerial posts and in the next 18 years he was only not a member of government in Pierre Messmer’s last administration and Jacques Chirac’s first. And thereby hangs our tale. Boulin was a ‘social’ Gaullist, though not quite so ‘social’ as to be in the UDT. His loyalty to de Gaulle was not the blind loyalty of the godillots, but he was neither a pompidolien nor a baron either. The latter saved him politically when, despite the overwhelming support of the majority in the National Assembly, Chaban was replaced with Messmer’s ‘baron-free’ administration to prepare the 1973 législatives. Re-elected then, as he had been at every election since 1962, this time Boulin opted to stay in
