exclusively be put on Henry. University of York. JONAS VAN TOL doi:10.1093/fh/cru124. Vox Populi: Une Histoire du Vote avant le Suffrage Universel. By Olivier.
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University of York
JONAS VAN TOL doi:10.1093/fh/cru124
Vox Populi: Une Histoire du Vote avant le Suffrage Universel. By Olivier Christin. Paris: Seuil. 2014. 277 pp. €20.00. ISBN: 978 2 0206 2948 5. Vox Populi, Olivier Christin’s analysis of the historical origins of the vote before universal suffrage, comes appropriately at a time of widespread disillusionment in Europe with democratic institutions. The sanction of majority rule no longer, it seems, satisfies the aspirations and hopes of an increasingly large proportion of the European electorate who revert to right-wing protest votes or regionalism as a way out of the political impasse. Professor Christin’s latest book offers in this context a valuable lesson: the consensus around the majority rule, one man one vote, and the fairness of
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Religion occupies a relatively large proportion of the biography. Readers familiar with the period might find this bothersome, but for the benefit of other readers these digressions are essential. The chronological structure of this biography is broken up by a pair of thematic chapters, focussing on Henry’s character and court. In these chapters, a large part of the rehabilitation of Henry’s reputation takes place. Knecht addresses a number of peculiar and persistent rumours, such as Henry’s alleged love of cross-dressing, and puts them into context. He also refutes more serious accusations, including the idea that Henry was essentially lazy and more interested in occupying himself with putting on lavish displays of opulence rather than with affairs of state. Instead, Knecht describes Henry as ‘intelligent, witty, hard-working, eloquent, courteous, fastidious and cultured’. To illustrate this Knecht presents a range of examples, including Henry’s political reforms and his strong interest in learning and scholarship. He also at length discusses the changes Henry made to French court culture, arguably his strongest and most lasting legacy. Hero or Tyrant? is in the first place aimed at an academic audience. Knecht’s arguments will sound familiar to those readers aware of the relatively large body on recent French scholarship on Henry III. But for those seeking to acquaint themselves with Henry and his reign, Knecht’s biography provides a detailed, comprehensive and wellbalanced introduction. Non-academic readers will also find much to enjoy. The narrative of Henry’s life and reign is interspersed with anecdotes from court life and detailed descriptions of the many theatrical displays put on in Henry’s honour. This makes it an enjoyable as well as informative read. Nowhere in the book is the question posed in the title (hero or tyrant?) straightforwardly answered. Fortunately Knecht did not feel compelled to position Henry in either of these rigid categories. The analysis of Henry as man and as monarch is more sophisticated than that. Knecht emphasizes Henry’s virtues, as well as the extreme complexity of the political situation he was forced to deal with, but does not shy away from condemning his political ‘blunders’. After all, Henry’s demise was to some extent of his own making. The assassination of the Guise brothers and the courting of the Huguenot party in the face of mounting opposition from the Catholic League provoked his assassination at the hands of a friar in 1589. There is no denying that Henry III’s reign ended in disaster. Yet, as Knecht convincingly argues, the blame should not exclusively be put on Henry.
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political representation in modern democracies should not be taken for granted. It is the product of a long pre-enlightenment history whose origins are to be found, not so much in Antiquity, but in the centuries of voting practises and techniques that began in the thirteenth century. Nor are the voting practises of modern Europe necessarily ones that imposed themselves as being the fairest or the most straightforward. A good example of this is the debate around the secret ballot—now seen counterintuitively as the guarantor of impartiality—that was seen in the early modern period as the form of suffrage most likely to be fraudulent or to be the object of pressure from the outside. The majority rule, and the equal value of each individual vote that can be added and subtracted, is only one of many forms of collective decision-making (not just the election of representatives) that often gave the sanior pars, the ‘healthiest’ portion of the electorate, more weight than the rest. Many assemblies of the ancien régime that resorted to the vote for collective decision-making included individuals whose vote had unequal weight, those who had more than one vote and those who only had a fraction of a vote. Yet voting was recognized throughout the medieval and early modern periods as a legitimate way of resolving differences, political or religious, without resorting to conflict, that often evoked the providential intervention of God in human affairs. Before being a rational and effective way of resolving issues, elections were first a form of trial for candidates who were subjected to the collective will as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. In some cases, an element of chance was introduced where a third of the candidates’ names were removed before voting or ballots randomly discarded to ensure ‘fairness’. In a series of well-chosen case studies, Christin demonstrates that by the mid-eighteenth century, European institutions had accumulated centuries of experimentation in mixed voting practises. Rather than a miraculous re-discovery of classical democracy, the emergence of majority rule imposed itself gradually over time as one of many different solutions that were available to the architects of modernity. Beyond a critique of collective amnesia, Vox Populi tells the story of the invention of important concepts without which modern institutions such as the state would not exist. One such is the persona ficta that was evoked to create unanimity out of dissension in universities or the Roman electoral college of cardinals. The deliberative practises of institutions, such as the Imperial diets and the Reichstag in the Empire or Parlements and assemblies of the clergy in France, are studied closely through visual representations of seating arrangements. Rather than the symbolic unity and equality of representatives that the hemicycle represents in France, the United States (or indeed the United Nations) today, mediaeval assemblies acted out the inequalities of its representatives through seating arrangements. Endless quarrels of precedence, rather than being petty and futile, were on the contrary a necessary step in negotiation, without which the assembly would have been perceived as illegitimate and unworkable. In a different section, Christin demonstrates that the much reviled practises of the Renaissance papacy for influencing the votes of cardinals and ensuring the success of one candidate over another were strategies that were integral to the smooth working of the institution, rather than its high-jacking. The constitution of electoral colleges, who had the ability to vote, how many times, the number of ballots, the election by acclamation (unanimity) or access (the rating of several candidates) were all variables that were experimented with for the election of popes, bishops and abbots for centuries. Other examples of voting practises lower down the social scale include lay confraternities or the resolution of confessional differences in jointly governed Swiss territories (Catholic and Protestant) during the Reformation where individuals were asked in conscience to choose between the priest or the preacher. Rather than evoke the
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miraculous resurgence in the eighteenth century of classical democracy or the search for precedents in semi-republican municipalities Vox Populi retraces the complex and non-linear history of collective decision-making that informed the formation of our modern institutions. It does so concisely and with elegance in a thought-provoking book that will almost certainly become a classic. Newcastle University
LUC RACAUT doi:10.1093/fh/cru139
Crowston’s second book is a strong follow-up to the impressive Fabricating Women (2001), and, like her first, cleverly combines economic, social and gender history to provide innovative new insights into Old Regime France, in particular Paris. The dual aims of this book are both kinds of writing-back-into eighteenth-century historiography: firstly highlighting the ‘open secret’ of credit networks which included many different spheres and commodities and which dominated so much of Parisian life in a way as yet unacknowledged, and secondly demonstrating the key role that women played in such networks, as wielders of credit, patrons, producers and consumers. In both of these aims the book is undoubtedly successful, due in large part to Crowston’s mastery of an impressive range of source material. The opening chapters of the work explore the concept and critique of ‘credit’ in Old Regime France—in reality, Old Regime Paris. There is very little material in this book not devoted to the capital. Crowston argues that credit was a much larger and more ubiquitous phenomenon during this period than has previously been identified. Through analysis of correspondence and a variety of print material, Crowston makes a compelling case for the transitive nature of credit in this period; easily converted between different spheres, and facilitated by the diverse understandings of value that existed in the eighteenth century. Such connections were further encouraged by a growing collaboration between court and commerce in the capital. This widening of the remit of credit networks allows for an analysis of the role of women, in particular elite women, in the world of credit and trade, which Crowston reveals to be far more substantial than previously believed. The lion’s share of the book, however, is given over to the fashion industry. The move from credit to fashion is neatly undertaken in the third chapter through the concept of ‘economies of regard’. Through a plethora of printed and literary sources Crowston reveals the importance of performance in credit networks and the role played by fashion in such performance. As with credit, the fashion industry was constructed around a complex network of information sharing through the developing fashion press and the public performance of fashion. Also in the same vein as credit, the fashion industry was managed through connections built on trust and constructed images, both of which could come crashing down. It is in the following chapters, however, that Crowston’s expertise really shines. Her analysis of the lives of Parisian female fashion merchants, their complicated dealings with a variety of clients and suppliers, and the ways in which they managed the high stakes debt that were so crucial to their industry,
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Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. By Clare Haru Crowston. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 424 pp. £18.99. ISBN 978 0 8223 5528 1.
