Geography Unbound: French Geographical Science from Cassini to Humboldt by Anne Marie Claire Godlewska (review)

humanities 377 laws enacted for the protection of property prompted one contemporary observer to remark that the chief object of England's legislation appeared to be `the extirpation of mankind,' yet one will look in vain here for the shift from custom to legislation with its attendant moral, legal, and cultural effects on the definition of property. The financial and political revolutions of the eighteenth century played their part in the social revolution that would see the beginnings of legal and social equality in the nineteenth. Scholars have argued that the novel was uniquely fitted to employ gender and genre in the renegotiating of the public and private spheres occasioned by England's move from an agrarian to a capitalist state. London has demonstrated this superbly. (SUSAN GLOVER) Anne Marie Claire Godlewska. Geography Unbound: French Geographical Science from Cassini to Humboldt University of Chicago Press. xii, 444. US $65.00, US $27.50 Mention French geography to geographers and they will think immediately of Paul Vidal de la Blache and the regional school of geography he and his followers fostered from the late nineteenth century until the mid-years of the twentieth. Anne Godlewska deals with a much earlier and, from the point of view of the history of geography, littleknown period, the 1760s to the 1830s. Indeed, of all the many geographers Godlewska names, only one, Alexander von Humboldt, will carry any resonance with current generations of English-language geographers. Why choose to study this period? The recapture of a past period of scholarship is a sufficient reason. An examination of Napoleon's exploitation of geography and geographers is another. For readers interested in Foucault's ideas, there is a third. Godlewska's time span for this work is exactly the one Foucault identified as marking the transition from his Classical episteme to his Modern. Foucault's thinking provides an intellectual context for the book and adds relevance to a study that has a discouraging thesis. The discipline of geography in late eighteenth-century France was, according to Godlewska, `almost entirely occupied with describing and representing,' but nevertheless it was well-established with a network of publishing scholars, some of whom taught in colleges while others held appointments in the bureaucracy. However, during subsequent decades, failure to adopt emerging scientific methods led to geography's `loss of direction and status' to the extent that by the 1830s it was of marginal academic significance. Godlewska identifies attempts to breathe new life into the traditional approaches alongside efforts to be innovative as contrasting reactions to this decline. Godlewska's method of presenting 378 letters in canada 1999 her thesis is to discuss a particular trend and then to examine one or two geographers whose work in her opinion best illustrates that trend. For instance, Godlewska takes the career of the last of the Cassini dynasty of map-makers as symptomatic of the conservatism of geographers in the late eighteenth century. His failure to move from his traditional methods cost him salaried appointments and membership in professional societies. Of those who tried to revive descriptive geography, Malte-Brun emerges as the most effective. Among the innovators Godlewska singles out for analysis are Chabrol de Volvic, who was a long-term prefect of Paris, Adrien Balbi, the prolific Jean-Antoine Letronne, and von Humboldt, who rates an entire chapter. Yet, Godlewska finds the work of the innovators wanting, arguing that they had influence only on the margins of the discipline and failed to restore it to academic prominence. This approach to the topic does raise some questions. Why this apparent need to come to a negative conclusion? Cannot the contributions of some of the geographers she has studied be interpreted in a more positive way? Von Humboldt certainly deserves his chapter. He was one of the founders of physical geography as we now understand it and he did inject interest even into descriptive geography. In their use of social statistics, Chabrol de Volvic and Balbi forged an alliance between statistics and geography that has proved enduring. The fault in Letronne's historical geography seems to lie in his choice of topic B the classical world B and not in his method. Historical geography...