Le Temps des conspirations: La Répression politique en Maine-et-Loire entre 1814 et 1870, and: Histoire de la répression des opposants politiques (1792-1848) (review)

The recent upsurge in interest in human rights (i.e. political repression) studies, which has typically concentrated on contemporary developments in the "third world," has no doubt spurred growing numbers of scholars to look back into the history of "western civilization" for relevant material, where, to the surprise of no one who has ever examined this subject closely, the fruits for picking are heavy, ripe and seemingly endlessly varied. Of course, given such well-known, centuries-old events as the Inquisition and the medieval religious wars, as well as quite recent European and American developments such as the Holocaust and (on an obviously entirely different plane) McCarthyism, even relatively well-informed laymen can hardly be shocked to discover that the field of human rights studies in Western history is, unfortunately, an extremely rich one. As these two books, one focused on the French department of Maine-et-Loire (between Paris and the Atlantic coast, centered on Angers) and the other on France generally, remind us, nineteenth-century French history was filled with often-bloody conflict and political repression, starting, of course, with the demand for "human rights" which was central to the French Revolution and the brutal "reign of terror" which followed within a few years.

Both of these lengthy volumes contain plenty of information which anyone interested in historical French human rights studies would benefit from reading, but both of them are also deeply flawed and ultimately seriously disappointing, the Aubert volume above all because of its truly chaotic organization (disorganization would be more apt) and the Boscher book primarily because of a surprising lack of depth and superficiality, especially for the post-1800 period. In terms of temporal coverage, the Aubert book feels much more coherent that the Boscher volume, simply because lumping together the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon with the subsequent thirty-three years seems far less seamless than concentrating entirely on the post-Revolutionary period. Both books, bizarrely, lack indexes, generally a serious flaw for a scholarly book but one which is almost fatal for the Aubert book given its general incoherence. Both include bibliographies, which seem far more comprehensive for the Aubert volume (although no one who has not specialized in Maine-et-Loire can truly judge); Boscher's bibliography omits numerous seemingly-relevant French sources (for example, Jeanne Gilmore's 1997 La République clandestine, 1818-48 and Jean-Claude Vimont's 1995 La Prison politique en France) and includes exactly one English source, thus excluding such clearly relevant volumes as Daniel Resnick's 1966 The White Terror and the Political Reaction after Waterloo, David Skuy's 2003 Assassination, Politics, and Miracles: France and the Royalist Reaction of 1820, Sylvia Neely's 1991 Lafayette and the Liberal ideal, 1814-24: Politics and Conspiracy in an Age of Reaction and Robert Bezucha's 1974 The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy.

Aubert, a lawyer and legal historian at the University of Rennes, has produced a book, based on a ten-year old dissertation, that is filled with useful information mined not only from what appears to be a comprehensive selection of secondary sources, but also from intense research in archival material. Its great virtue is that he provides insight into the local ramifications and organizations which often reflect the broader developments treated in Boscher's book, thus providing the sort of local "color" that considerably enhances our understanding of national trends and events (although sometimes this extends to insignificant details and police reports on individual incidents). But all of Aubert's book's virtues are overwhelmed by a totally unsatisfactory and confusing organizational scheme: rather than organizing his material by...