Le Silence des moines: Les Trappistes au XIXe siècle, France-Algérie-Syrie by Bernard Delpal (review)

310book reviews kingdom. Indeed, the very nostalgia was recognition that the cause was lost. Occasionally when in their cups, High Churchmen longed for the king across the water, but in their hearts they knew he was not going to come. Besides, another reason for Toryism—the need to fight Dissenters—diminished as dissent itself diminished. In fact a greater threat was heterodoxy, and in that struggle High and Low Churchmen could make common cause. Moreover, the Whigs turned out not to be so bad after all. The Pelham family (of whom the scion was the Duke of Newcastle, the greatest political broker of his day) proved to be perfectly pious in their own way. Patronage from such a source was no shame. This is not to say, of course, that High Church Toryism disappeared. Nor is it to argue that Whigs unilaterally co-opted the High Church to suit their own purposes . Some such co-option indeed took place, but as Dr. Chamberlain argues, "it would be just as true to say that High Churchmen succeeded in modifying Whiggery" (p. 93). There was a great deal more to the relationship between High Churchmanship and Whiggery than piety in search of patronage. In Bray the vicar may have been brazen; in Sussex he was subtle. Dr. Chamberlain's book, pleasingly written and persuasively argued, may be commended with entire confidence. It is sober and serious: more sober, at any rate, than anything Parson Woodforde might have produced. Dermot Quinn Seton Hall University Late Modern European Le Silence des moines: Les Trappistes au XIXe siècle, France-Algérie-Syrie. By Bernard Delpal. (Paris: Beauchesne. 1998. Pp. viii,6l2. 381FF.) Bernard Delpal has assembled a vast amount of archival material about individual Trappist foundations, principally in France but with attention to North Africa and the Near East. The study began as a thesis of 1 ,035 pages directed by Claude Langlois andJ.-M. Mayeur. It is now a source book of steps and statistics for the foundation and development of the monasteries, and an explanation of the spiritual and material accomplishments of the monks. Steps and statistics predominate—largely: Delpal had the doctoral candidate's obligation to amass all the data he could find. "It is, then, legitimate,in light of statistics and the great quantity of data furnished by them, to work up a type of 'monastic demography '" (p. 144); hence, a study of stages in monastic life (postulancy profession, death), structural elements (social condition, age, type of monk), and broad historical background. The monastery of Aiguebelle was arguably the center of Trappist survival and revival in the nineteenth century. Delpal leads up to the Aiguebelle phenomenon with pages on the complications of the Cistercian reform known specifically as Trappist, the name taken from the monastery of La Trappe as BOOK reviews311 transformed byJean-Armand Le Bouthillier de Raneé (1626-1700). The historical problem of survival and revival never admits of an easy solution; so the relation of La Trappe to the medieval monasteries of Cîteaux and Clairvaux and to the new nineteenth-century foundations is not always clear. Furthermore, the de Raneé reform was itself redone at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Dom Augustin Lestrange, who added a powerful note of expiation—in view of the atrocities of the Revolution—to the already heavy asceticism of de Raneé. From the beginning of the revival of Aiguebelle—and the Trappistine monastery of Maubec—Trappists were to be a nucleus of dynamic Christianity, inaccessible to compromise,in the face of institutionalization and routine. Leaders dreamed of reconstituting the coenobitic communities of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the western Mediterranean. The French monasteries themselves could be compared to the experiments of Egypt. The Algerian foundation of Staouëli receives most attention as Africa's "window on the West." There is full documentation of an established foundation with charts of ages at profession and at death of choir monks and lay brothers, admissions, professions, five-year changes in monastic population. The motto of the French governor General Bougeaud, ense et aratro (by axe and plow), was extended in the monastic motto ense, cruce et aratro (by axe, cross, and plow). Celebrities, functionaries...