Marrus, Michael

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

COMPTES RENDUS - BOOK REVIEWS 413 one combines these changes with. the author's admission (p. 261) that peasant households in the Loire valley were by now taking advantage of the national market network, one has to wonder how helpful the peasant economy paradigm remains. Are these still peasants simply commercializing the surplus that a good year brings? Or are they increasingly like farmers making production decisions in response to market signals? What is involved here is a gradient, not an all-or-nothing choice; however, Dallas's data on crops, which reveal a new emphasis on the potato, strongly suggest the survival of a self-sufficiency mentality. I have to register a complaint of style and one of substance. Sometimes Dallas's writing is self-conscious to the point of distraction. A taste for the grandiose ("the ongoing historical project") rubs elbows with social-science kitsch ("my analysis of the social whole"). There is even drama where one would least expect to encounter it: would you call the opposition between sociology's static models and history's preoccupation with change "a ghastly dilemma"? This is too bad because most of his book is well-written, with no lack of apposite metaphor and helpful analogy. As for substance, I believe economic historians should protest vigorously against the author's conftation of "the classic economic approach" (p. 38) with "contemporary economic theory", which, in Dallas's view, "makes the market its sole frame of reference" (p. 25) and whose practioners "do not study decision-making strategies" (p. 292, n. 11). To say this is to ignore almost two decades of scholarly attention to institutional and non-market factors as determinants of economic behaviour. One has to wonder if there is any real live exemplar of "contemporary economic theory" who would fit Dallas's relative-prices-tell-us-all-we-need-to-know caricature. In actual fact, theories of risk aversion, its relation to forms of tenancy, crop-selection and market-orientation (i.e. "decision-making strategies") have been argued back and forth by economists and economic historians. Moreover these theoretical debates are not tucked away in the specialist economics journals; they are readily accessible in recent historical studies dealing with peasant societies under pressure (e.g. Jan de Vries on Holland, Michelle McAlpin on India, and too many to name on the U.S. South). Dallas could have profited by consulting such studies, for they are concerned with the same issues he addresses and could have provided him with potentially useful insights. As just one example, Dallas's discussion of peasant handicrafts would not have been hurt by a look at the "F/Z goods" trade-off model proposed by Hymer and Resnick and utilized by de Vries. In short, Dallas's fine book could have been even better had his comparative reading in economic history been as wide as it appears to have been in anthropology. * * * E.P. FI1ZGERALD Carleton University CHRISTINE PIETTE- Les Juifs de Paris ( 1808-1840) : Ia marche vers I' assimilation. Quebec: Les Presses de l'universite Laval, 1983. Pp. 211. This short, businesslike monograph offers an excellent social portrait of Parisian Jews in the half-century after Jewish emancipation. Christine Piette of the University of Laval probes the degree of social integration into French society of this small community, which grew from only 800 persons in 1791 to about 9,000 in 1840. To provide answers, she draws upon a wide range of archival sources, reaching far beyond the records of the Jewish community itself. Following the research agenda of some distinguished French scholars, particularly Adeline Daumard, Piette makes good use of notarial archives, declarations de deces et de succession, electoral lists, and census material. Similarly, she rummages con-414 HISTOIRE SOCIALE - SOCIAL HISTORY scientiously in the relevant files of the Ministere des cultes, the Consistoire central and the Consistoire de Paris- the latter two being the state-imposed governing agencies of Jewish life in France. Her discussion also draws upon an extensive pamphlet literature in an effort to get at the mentalites of religious reformers, and provides a good critical appraisal of early historical works, notably those of Leon Kahn. To Piette, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the Jews moving decisively along the path of assimilation, beginning the communal disintegration which the liberal emancipators during the French Revolution had intended, and which increasing numbers of Jews came to fear. The process went furthest at the upper end of the social hierarchy. An examination of the Jewish bourgeoisie reveals a very high degree of social integration by 1840, particularly among the most affluent. Residential patterns, the proportion of the total community in various social groups, occupational distribution, wealth, and styles of life all show an increasingly close approximation with non-Jews and progressive involvement in the general society. Yet, as she notes, integration was by no means complete at the end of the period . The great majority of Parisian Jews were not bourgeois, and did not assimilate quickly. The data indicate a continuing separation from the surrounding society, although the Jewish particularities were slowly disappearing. In explaining this uneven pattern of assimilation, I would certainly emphasize, to a greater degree than in this work, how Parisian Jewry was an immigrant community - growing more than ten-fold in fifty years , and with a continuing influx, mainly from impoverished, traditional Jewish communities of Alsace and Lorraine. Following this montee a Paris Jews retained much of their previous identity, just as did Bretons, Auvergnats, Basques, and many others. On this point I think Piette could have profited from a reference to Louis Chevalier's idiosyncratic but stimulating Les Parisiens (1967). The tendency has been to stress the weakness of Jewish identity in France, and the inexorable movement of Jews away from Jewish identification. A hurried reading of Piette's conclusion might seem to bear this out. But the evidence presented elsewhere in this work, as in that of Patrick Girard several years ago, suggests that all was perhaps not so rigidly programmed. Piette emphasizes the importance of the consistoires, which had a strong centralizing effect, facilitating the social integration of Jews while at the same time preserving Jewish institutions intended precisely to facilitate ethnic survival. Thus Jewish leaders by the end of this period wanted their own hospital, orphanages, schools, and charitable agencies - as with Catholics and Protestants - rather than relying upon those established by the state. Piette does not take up the argument of Simon Schwarzfuchs (whose Napoleon, the Jews and the Sanhedrin , published in 1979, is oddly missing from her bibliography) that the consistorial system prevented the fragmentation of French Jewry in the nineteenth century , ultimately weakening both extreme orthodoxy and extreme reform. She seldom goes far from her sources, and prefers to make judgements that are firmly grounded in archival records. While this sometimes limits her horizons, it has yielded a disciplined, judicious study, on which others, and perhaps the author herself, can eventually build. * * * Michael R. MARRUS University of Toronto TERRY PARSSINEN- Secret Passions, Secret Remedies : Narcotic Drugs in British Society , 1820-1930. Philadelphia : Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983. Pp. xii, 243. When the publication of Terry Parssinen's Secret Passions, Secret Remedies was announced, I awaited it with great expectation. Following on the heels of an excellent article, 

CHRISTINE PIETTE—Les Juifs de Paris (1808-1840): la marche vers l'assimilation.

https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/38473/34889

CHRISTINE PIETTE—Les Juifs de Paris (1808-1840): la marche vers l'assimilation.

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)