Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830-1940 by Lewis Pyenson (review)

90BOOK REVIEWS In an introduction, ten chapters, and a conclusion this book provides a vivid, thoroughly documented case study, replete with example, of "the propensity to formulate and to accept conspiracy theories" in nineteenth-century France. The first of two such leading theories came from the Right which "provided a tradition of counter-revolutionary conspiracy theory, focusing on Freemasonry and revolutionary secret societies." Plenty ofserious studies exist on this end of the spectrum. The liberal and republican Left had its own tradition of such theory, "as highly developed, as tenacious and as influential . . . . The enemies denounced in this tradition were the Jesuits." About this end of the spectrum, there have been few such serious studies. Cubitt's book treats the phenomenon in all its complexity. The first chapter explores in general anti-Jesuitism and the Jesuits in France from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, and then after die Society's restoration in 1814. Then three chapters deal with the opposition to theJesuits as portrayed in myth during the Restoration and the July Monarchy and, in its third great manifestation, in the debate that culminated in the Ferry Decrees of 1880 to its final spasm in the anti-Jesuit portion of the Dreyfus Affair. Then in six more chapters the author turns to an analysis of the structures, imagery, and argument of anti-Jesuitism, to "murder, money and spies" as Jesuit tools, to Jesuits in plain clothes, to the confessor and the schools, to history and morality , and to the supposed Jesuitism which produced Jesuits. The concluding tenth chapter is an excellent recapitulation and analysis of how "the Left's appetite for the myth of a Jesuit conspiracy like the Right's fascination widi Masonic plotting . . . did much to encourage the habits of rhetorical intransigence and moral ostracism that bedeviled French public debate on numerous occasions in the century and a half after the Revolution." This is an excellent book. As usual, the price of Í59.00, set by the Oxford University Press, is so outrageously high as to be a positive disservice to the author. But it is still eminently worth reading, first and foremost, in and for itself. It also has the additional advantage, at least implicit, of making us in the United States, serenely free of thefesuit myth, ask what myths we have fed on in trying to simplify reality. John W. Padberg, SJ. The Institute offesuit Sources Saint Louis, Missouri Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830— 1940. By Lewis Pyenson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1993. Pp. xxi, 378. »45.00. ) Pyenson's fine book, following others on German colonies and Indonesia, is for historians of science, imperialism, religion, and the dozen lands where BOOK REVIEWS9 1 French savants conducted research. Although there are a few misreadings of secondary sources (The Tunisia-Morocco chapter mentions Khéreddine/Khayr ad-Din as two persons), Pyenson has carefully mined government and private papers. For scores ofscientists his wit enlivens narratives ofcareer vicissitudes and bureaucratic-military-academic politics. The style is erudite yet brisk. In Algeria Albert Camus passed through 1937-38 as a research assistant in meteorology (p. 124). "The physical climate is omnipresent in his novels and essays." Meticulous scholarship fills the notes, and the publisher is lavish with photographs. Both appear in the pages where they matter. The handsome edition has a Glossary of French Terms, Note on Sources, and Index (but no bibliography). Pyenson catalogues French endeavors in the carte du ciel and other astronomical measurement, meteorology, seismology, vulcanology, and mapping the earth, its geology, and its magnetic variations. In the twentieth century wireless time signals from the Eiffel Tower, and data cabled or radioed from weather stations, unified the program. French cultural imperialism spanned more than a century in some lands. In the Americas it included Québec, Martinique, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Equador, and Mexico. The Society of Jesus made particular contributions to science and to the mission civilisatrice. Jesuits carried on despite Third Republic anticlericalism; they resumed after the Great War in which some of them fought. Pyenson describes a Jesuit's fifteen-year formation. Superiors identified adolescent talent and planned the seminarians' doctoral research in philosophy and theology . They...