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  • The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought
  • Nicholas Cronk
The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought. By Daniel Brewer. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. viii + 260 pp., 4 b&w ills. Hb £50.00; $95.00.

Daniel Brewer sets out in this important book to explore the implications of Foucault's remark that we must think of ourselves as 'beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment'. We are familiar with the postmodern indictment of Enlightenment reason, which goes back at least to the Dialectic of Enlightenment of Adorno and Horkheimer (1944). We are familiar too with the importance of cultural commemoration in French republican history, a theme treated by many historians in the wake of Pierre Nora. What Brewer does here is to combine these historical and theoretical issues into a broader study of how the Enlightenment Past remains a project under continual construction. 'We can understand the Enlightenment thus more as a palimpsest than an event', writes Brewer, 'or an event that becomes such by being continually rewritten' (p. 27). His method is to take a series of case studies as exemplars of the various and conflicting narratives constructed in different periods to make modern sense of the philosophes and the Revolution, like the literary critics Villemain and Sainte-Beuve who sought a 'third way' between the religious right and atheist materialism. Apart from the reference to Hubert Robert in a discussion of ruins, the narratives chosen are all verbal, and visual narratives might have been examined in parallel (for example, the competition announced in 1830 by Interior Minister Guizot to decorate the Chambre des députés with programmatic paintings of the Revolution). Brewer crucially shows how this attempt to accommodate the Enlightenment narrative is as old as the Enlightenment itself: reaction to the death of Montesquieu in 1755 provides a striking example of the Enlightenment's early agility at self-definition and self-promotion. Voltaire and Rousseau are characterized as the two writers 'most intensely involved in constructing and managing their public image' (p. 103), in stark contrast with 'the belated construction of the author "Diderot"' (p. 153). Another insight which deserves further exploration is Brewer's passing remark about the opposing way American and European scholars currently envisage the Enlightenment: Europeans are concerned with theorizing non-conflictual social relations, he claims, whereas Americans are at present more drawn to the study of 'an autonomous individualism that allows for the challenging of commonly accepted ways of knowing' (p. 144) —the Enlightenment as inventor of identity politics? Brewer reminds us repeatedly that there is no neutral vantage point from which to write the history of the Enlightenment, not least because the identity of the eighteenth century is too closely bound up with our own: 'The Enlightenment crisis of reason . . . is bound up with a deep-seated crisis of cultural memory, a crisis that may well be one of the defining characteristics of modernity' (p. 203). Lanson believed that the study of the [End Page 472] eighteenth century could serve 'as a way of understanding cultural change and modernization . . . in the French university of the early twentieth century' (p. 161). A century later, The Enlightenment Past inspires us to think not only about our continuing reinvention of the Enlightenment project but also about the evolving role of the eighteenth century in our own university curricula.

Nicholas Cronk
St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
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