Hayhoe, Jeremy

English

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

803by his private records. So too with King. ‘King’s diary conspicuously lacks any observation related to the fighting overseas,’ Cook writes. ‘Given the detail and complexity of King’s diary, it is fair to say that not only were the soldiers not on his mind but he completely ignored them.’ (p. 329)  Such are the judgments of hindsight that matter to us now. Previous decades have had their own Bordens and their own Kings. We are not so much worried about Americanization in Canadian culture. Is it any wonder that our historians are likely now to go easy on King on this front. The same goes for King-Byng and conscription. Cook’s account is of our era. But it is more than that. Warlords is the kind of book more academic historians should write: engaging, synthetic, emotive and inspiring. Like Cook’s other books, it traverses the line between academic and popular history. Grounded in a solid sense of the academic historiography, it nonetheless tells a fascinating story that many non-academics will want to read. It will also be incredibly useful in undergraduate teaching. Buy it, and use it—to enrich your lectures or to inspire discussion in seminars. Your students will thank you.Christopher DummittTrent UniversityDolan, Claire – Délibérer à Toulouse au XVIIIe siècle. Les procureurs au parlement. Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2013. Pp 340.In this fascinating book Claire Dolan analyses the documents left by the community of procureurs in the Parlement of Toulouse. Procureurs were legal officers who represented clients through their mastery of procedural form but who were forbidden from presenting legal arguments to the court, a function that was reserved for avocats (lawyers). In 2012 Dolan published an important study of procureurs in southern France during the Ancien Régime (Les Procureurs du Midi sous l’Ancien Régime) and readers will benefit from reading the two books together, but Délibérer à Toulouse works well on its own, being focused on the functioning of the community and its writing practices. The book seeks to understand how the rhetoric of unity that pervades the community’s self-image intersected with the interests, business practices and mentalities of the individual members that comprised it. Délibérer à Toulouse demonstrates how much caution is required when historians analyze and attempt to understand the registers of early modern communities of all kinds. The registers were clearly prepared after the fact, and while the rules of transcription could vary as the elected officers changed, the registers never present a complete picture of what happened in meetings. There was a gradual process whereby the registers became increasingly complete and detailed, notably after a 1749 Parlement arrêt required them to record all deliberations. Even then, however, they are much more (and less) than an objective account Comptes rendus / Book Reviews804 Histoire sociale / Social Historyof what happened during their meetings. The registers, for example, present the community as united, and when conflict is mentioned, it is always “personified” so that, rather than the community being divided by faction, it is challenged by the behavior of one or two bad apples. The community was a complex body. It was governed by two elected syndics and a doyen, the oldest member of the community. Relations among the various officers and with the general assembly were sometimes quite contentious. And if the community generally took sides with the syndics in their disputes with the doyen, the Parlement of Toulouse more often supported the doyen, confirming, for example his authority over the community’s finances and defending the requirement that the syndics provide advance notice to the doyen of any propositions they intended to bring before the community. In addition to the syndics and doyen there was a group of 24 commissaires, older procureurs named both by the elected officers and the Parlement, who were responsible to investigate questions of discipline. Dolan argues that over the course of the eighteenth century there was an ongoing process whereby the community ceded its power to the elite of the community in the person of these different officers. This can be seen in the decline in the number of procureurs who attended the assemblies, notably during the 1770s after the return of the pre-Maupeou Parlement. Still, Dolan notes that procureurs continued to turn out in large numbers when the community was threatened, whether by rival judicial officers or the fiscal demands of the absolutist state. The community fought very hard to maintain the right to determine who could become a member and exercise the function of procureur. Individual members were to be subservient to the community, and too much tension between a member and the company could lead to his exclusion. There is a fascinating discussion of the ways that the community controlled members’ patronyms. Members apparently only used each other’s last names, and when two procureurs shared the same name, the community imposed a slight name change. In 1766 Antoine-Pierre Lapeirie was received as a member, but to avoid confusion he was told to sign DLapeirie, or Louis Casseirol was told to sign JCasseirol, with no indication given of why their first initial was not used. Membership in the community involved the symbolic disappearance of the individual to such an extent that procureurs frequently signed for each other, in a procedure known as the “prêt de nom,” and placed a significant part of their revenue in common.  What did the community provide to individual procureurs that made membership worthwhile? One of the main services provided by the community was the maintenance of professional standards through discipline. The community also very actively policed the links and boundaries between procureurs and other types of judicial officers and practitioners (lawyers, notaries and even procureurs from lower royal courts such as the sénéchal). More generally, the community worked hard to protect the “honour” of the profession and the community. Discipline contributed to this, but the community also actively engaged in propaganda efforts through print, lobbied hard to get the support of the magistrates in the Parlement of Toulouse in their conflicts with other legal practitioners and ensured a public presence at local festivities, commemorations and ceremonial entries. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the community lost 805some of its importance in the lives and work of procureurs, in large part because of a lack of willingness to come to terms with new ways of working, including close cooperation with clerks and solicitors. The unity of the community had always been a fiction that took a backseat to the defense of the common interest of individual procureurs and this remained true late in the eighteenth century “even if it became increasingly difficult... to say just what these common interests were.” (p. 290) Much of the contribution of Délibérer à Toulouse is methodological, and Dolan provides us with an exemplary model of how to approach the deliberations of eighteenth-century guilds, communities and corps. A healthy dose of scepticism and humility is required, and the author demonstrates these qualities in her refusal to push the analysis further than the evidence allows. One surprise is how little space is devoted to the fiscal demands of the Crown, which was a main raison d’être for corps in the Ancien Régime. But this is not a complete history of the procureurs, and Dolan discussed the theme in detail in her previous book. The cultural, social and political challenges posed by the Enlightenment are present in the background, and by the late eighteenth century much had changed in the relationship between procureurs and their community. But rather than emphasizing a story of the gradual weakening of communal bonds, Délibérer à Toulouse tells the story of men who “attempted to solve, as best they could, the problems and the conflicts that everyday life presented them with, while leaving to others the luxury of reflecting on the system that controlled their actions.” (p. 298)Jeremy Hayhoe, Université de MonctonDyCk, Erika – Facing Eugenics: Reproduction. Sterilization and the Politics of Choice. Toronto, Buffalo and London: Toronto University Press, 2013. Pp. 304.Although state-authorized eugenic practices took many forms over the years, none have attracted more attention overall than the sterilization of men and women designed to prevent for good the inheritance of allegedly undesirable characteristics. Touted as an efficient and cost-saving measure allowing those who would otherwise need institutionalizing to live independently, sterilization was the preferred policy in a number of countries, perhaps most notably in the U.S. and Germany as well as in the Scandinavian world. In Facing Eugenics: Reproduction. Sterilization and the Politics of Choice, Erika Dyck tells the story of the lesser-known but energetic and far-reaching sterilization programme employed in the westerly province of Alberta, the first of the Canadian provinces to experiment with this option, beginning in 1928 with the passage of the Sexual Sterilization Act. Dyck’s moving work reveals the long reach of the law even after repeal in 1972, the shifting grounds that assured the persistence of sterilization after the Nuremberg trials of the late 1940s, and the particular local contexts which shaped Comptes rendus / Book Reviews

Dolan , Claire – Délibérer à Toulouse au XVIII e siècle. Les procureurs au parlement. Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2013. Pp 340.

https://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/40371/36554

Dolan , Claire – Délibérer à Toulouse au XVIII e siècle. Les procureurs au parlement. Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2013. Pp 340.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

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