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  • Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture
  • Stephen Stigler
Kavanagh, Thomas M.Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp 251. ISBN 0-8122-3860-5.

Gambling is not now, nor has it ever been, entirely respectable. It has existed for as long as humans have gathered into societies, as is suggested by nearly perfect dice found in sites in Egypt dating back at least 4000 years. Like alcohol and prostitution, gambling has survived incessant attempts at prohibition and eluded efforts at control or taxation. But despite all this evidence of a strong hold upon us, gambling has never been respectable. One consequence of this has been that gambling has been pushed to the margins of social and cultural history. Thomas Kavanagh describes it as falling "on the wrong side of scholarship's well policed dividing line between the serious and the frivolous," and states that it tends to be treated as an "embarrassing digression" by those few scholars who attempt a serious study of gambling. This book is his attempt to move this social phenomenon to a more central position, by exploring its role in French literature over the past four hundred years.

The core of the book is a series of studies, each (with one exception) presenting one or two literary works and (usually) focusing upon one gambling game. The author begins with Bodel's 1202 play Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, involving the dice game "hasard," a game whose complex rules are only partially known today; he then advances to the 1640s and Pascal's well-known wager, presented in the Pensées as a game-theoretic argument why even atheists should live as if they believe in God. Next, Crébillon's 1763 novel Le Hasard du coin du feu and the game of "Brelan" take center stage. Brelan (or Breland; the name like the rules varied over time) was a card game with rapidly escalating bets, and it serves as a setting for an illuminating discussion of the role of the libertine and bluffing in mid-eighteenth century France. Another chapter on roughly the same period discusses Casanova in the 1750s and his involvement with the casino card game of pharaon (better known in America as "faro"). Next, the change in the way gamblers were portrayed on stage between Dancourt's 1687 play La Desolation des joueuses and Saurin's Beverlei in 1768 highlights changing attitudes toward wealth and towards the aristocracy.

The nineteenth century is represented by Balzac's 1831 La Peau de chagrin, a novel [End Page 456] whose untranslatable title is sometimes rendered The Wild Ass's Skin, as well as Barbey d'Aurevilly's 1849 Le Dessous des cartes d'une partie de whist and Paul Bourget's 1889 short piece "Un Joueur" (included in translation as "A Gambler" in an appendix to this volume). Balzac's novel opens with a young man risking and losing all he has on one bet on one spin of a roulette wheel, Barbey uses the game of whist (then spreading from England to France) as an excuse for discussing the esthetic of mystery, and Bourget illustrates how gambling was redefining self-image at the end of that century. A final study surveys the changing role of the casino in French life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing particularly upon two movies, Demy's 1962 Baie des anges, and Melville's 1955 Bob le flambeur, as vehicles for exploring the relationship of chance and individuals in the mid-twentieth century.

Kavanagh's studies are invariably interesting, and some (particularly the discussion of dice in the thirteenth century and libertine culture in the eighteenth century) are convincing in their broader cultural implications. The games are for the most part clearly explained and their relevance nicely brought out – they are not merely adornments to the discussion. He does miss a chance to draw a further useful message in the chapter on Balzac. After Raphaël has lost his only gold Napoleon on a single bet on black at roulette, Kavanagh quotes with approval the croupier's comment after the youth departed, that a real...

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