Journal (review)

From 1780 until his death in 1822, with minor interruptions, the French nobleman and sometime diplomat, Marc-Marie marquis de Bombelles (1744-1822), kept a daily journal that takes up ninety-seven closely written manuscript-volumes. As Munro Price has recently shown in his The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil (London, Macmillan, 2002), the Bombelles papers, including the diaries, remain one of the most important, though scarcely exploited and mostly unpublished sources for high politics and the Counter-Revolution. Bombelles fled the upheaval in France and his descendents became Hapsburg aristocrats, thus the location of his papers today in an Upper Austrian castle. This volume continues a version of the diary edited by a series of French scholars since 1977 and covers the bleakest years of the French emigration, to which Bombelles belonged: the apogee of Napoleon's power and the establishment of the Empire. It is not really an edition of the diary, but rather, like the preceding volumes, a series of excerpts that only hint at the expansive scope of the original text. Bombelles's difficult material existence as an émigré and the French emigrant community in Central Europe serve as the chief criteria for the inclusion of these bits, which are meant as a contribution to traditional French national historiography. This truly European source has here been gallicized, though the importance of the Church, rather than the French nation, for Bombelles's understanding of himself is well documented by the passages included here about his taking holy orders after the death of his wife. Of the central European environment in which he lived and of his excellent connections to the cosmopolitan Court at Vienna and its nobility, all also described in fascinating detail in the original, we learn little. Those of French origin mentioned by Bombelles are often accorded an explanatory footnote; the few from central Europe that could not be excluded from the published text usually are not. If Bombelles's family had returned to France with him at the Restoration and the Austrian connection had been merely an interlude, albeit a long one, the editor's approach might have been more convincing. However, precisely in the years covered by this volume, Bombelles was securing the long-term future of his descendents in Vienna. Though three of Bombelles's sons became Austrian officers and a fourth a diplomat under Metternich, we find the myth of Viennese hostility to the émigrés — '[s]ans doute les émigrés français étaient-ils mal vus à Vienne' (p. 14) — repeated in the volume's introduction. The Bombelles indeed became quintessential courtiers of the House of Austria. At the end of the volume, the editor includes an extensive section called 'Analyses' meant, as she writes, to give us 'une vue d'ensemble du texte integral' (p. 409). Unfortunately, these summaries are arbitrarily selective, with even extensive passages, such as the one from 4 October 1805 about the Belgian émigré, Charles Beydaels de Zittaert (1747-1811), a key figure in emigrant circles in Vienna, left unmentioned.