Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

REVIEWS 301 The final section of the book, "Confronting the Other," looks first at French translations of British writers, particularly Pope, and finds that "the hegemony of polite culture was still too powerful to be much upset by these foreign bodies" (p. 172). The final trio of chapters, "Jacques or His Master?: Diderot and the Peasants," "Enlightened Primitivism," and "Frontiers of Civilization," show through such writers as Diderot, SaintLambert , Rousseau, and Adam Ferguson the way in which elite culture attempts to deal with what is alien to it: peasants, less enlightened European states (Scotland, Geneva) or the remote and seemingly barbarous (Corsica, Russia, North America). France argues that Enlightenment leads both towards and away from primitivism; that primitivism, while it seems on the one hand a conservative device for maintaining distinctions between elite and non-elite cultures, can also be seen as the beginning of "a new anthropological thinking " and therefore truly "enlightened" in the progressive sense—not simply "escapism," but also "renewal" (p. 6). These well-crafted essays are particularly valuable for their breadth of scholarship and for the attention paid to minor writers or less well-known works of major figures— Marmontel, the abbé Trublet, Desfontaines, or the Marivaux of the Spectateurfrançais, the Adam Smith of the Theory ofMoral Sentiments—alongside Diderot, Rousseau, Addison , and so on. Given the author's disclaimer that the pieces, written separately, do not constitute "a unified book" (p. 6), one should not be surprised at the lack of a single argument providing for both the analysis of ogres in Perrault's fairy-tales and that of debates in the Convention. Nevertheless, the essays do on occasion seem pulled in different directions, and one wishes that there were a more sustained consideration of their implications. On the one hand, several of the essays (and the book's title) suggest that "politeness" is a system being undermined from within. For example, when he speaks of translation falling prey to "the hegemony of polite culture," France emphasizes an agonistic quality in the oppositions that are the object of his study. Yet elsewhere, when he uses Daniel Gordon and Habermas to argue against Norbert Elias's view of politeness as "an instrument of non-violent social control," he presents politeness as "enlightened sociability," an opening up of a space for egalitarian thought and progressive self-expression. In these instances, "politeness" is not ranged against its opposite , but is instead being redefined and extended, shown in all its mutable complexity rather than as a restrictive hegemonic phenomenon. Through its subject and the questions it raises, Politeness and Its Discontents is a valuable—if ambivalent—contribution to the debate over the meaning and legacy of the Enlightenment. Julie C. Hayes University of Richmond Thomas M. Kavanagh. Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. xiii + 271pp. US$36.50. ISBN 0-8018-4549-1. For his study of the French eighteenth-century novel, Thomas Kavanagh has chosen a most unusual and fascinating perspective: gambling. First he analyses the social history of gambling, the evolving comprehension of odds and statistics, and the philosophical positions that mathematical probability subtends. Then he discusses ten novels by six authors that use gambling in the largest sense (from actual card games to the theory of probability) as an integral part of their narrative fabric. 302 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:3 Kavanagh begins by declaring that "the triumph of probability theory and the rise of the novel were part of a single shift in our understanding of the world and of how we represent our place within it" (p. ix). He explores the notion of chance as the cultural marker distinguishing bourgeois and aristocratic morality and as the force motivating the plot line of novels. The first chapter deals with the beginnings of game theory and philosophers such as Descartes and Pascal. Originally, gambling stood in opposition to reason, predictability, order, and science. In 1708, however, Montmort demonstrated that card games had a logic of their own; chance then became our own ignorance while knowing the laws of statistics could lead to certainty. The second chapter explores some...