Consumable Metaphors: Attitudes towards Animals and Vegetarianism in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Recent decades have witnessed a notable increase in the amount of scholarly attention paid to the place of animals in societies and cultures of the past. In part this reflects an increasing academic interest in environmental history, and in histories that recover facets of the past which cast light on synthetic and transnational concerns (see Harriet Ritvo, ‘History and Animal Studies’, Society & Animals 10:4 (2002), 403–406 [p. 404]). Ceri Crossley’s volume represents a detailed intervention into the broad field of historical ‘animal studies’ publications, addressing the place of animals in French thought from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. Crossley’s contention is that French attitudes to animals in the period are embedded in broader political and social concerns. He argues that philosophical writing about the nature of animals can be read as one of the ways in which authors thought through a number of key issues, including the nature of power relations, the position of the proletariat and the position of women in French society. This persuasive hypothesis is argued across 15 chapters organized in chronological order, prefaced by an introduction which contextualizes the volume in the light of recent scholarship in French and English on animals and human society. Some of the chapters focus on general themes (for example, vivisection, women’s responses to the animal debates, writing about animals, vegetarianism after 1870, animal welfare post-1900). Others take a case-study approach, using the writings of both well-known authors (Michelet, Lamartine, Saint-Hilaire, Saint-Simon) and authors who are nowadays less commonly read and studied (Gleizes, Godin, Toussenel), to explore thinking in a given period (such as the July Monarchy (Chapter 4)) or on a particular topic (such as anti-Semitism (Chapter 8), or dietary theory (Chapter 9)). The breadth and depth of familiarity with the subject that Crossley demonstrates is impressive. Overall, the emphasis is on non-literary texts rather than on the metaphorization of animals in fiction of the period, despite the volume’s more general title. This emphasis allows some fascinating general insights into the role of metaphor in the ‘scientific’ writings of central thinkers of the period, such as Michelet. A main strength of the volume is that while a chronological structure is used to organize the material, the developing arguments map the heterogeneity of thought on animals rather than suggesting any unified and linear progression of ideas through the period. The diversity of the currents of thought explored reminds us that developments in the ‘history of ideas’ are most successfully mapped when they are understood, as they are here, as flows, counter-flows and exchanges.