The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment ed. by Daniel Brewer (review)

This stimulating collection of essays examines the French Enlightenment from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. While some chapters are devoted to subjects such as ‘Science’ or ‘Religion’, others focus on topics that have recently risen to prominence, such as ‘Medicine and the Body in the French Enlightenment’, or ‘Space, Geography and the Global French Enlightenment’. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and the fifteen essays, by some of the leading scholars in Enlightenment studies, together create a dialogue in the best traditions of the Enlightenment. Thus the excellent chapter ‘Private Lives, Public Space’ provides in brief compass a remarkable synthesis of recent work, which is then reinforced by a network of other allusions: the chapter ‘Philosophe/Philosopher’ makes passing reference to the idea of the public sphere, while ‘café sociability’ (p. 49) is alluded to in ‘Commerce’; ‘the collective critical experience of the theatre’ (p. 144) is discussed in ‘Enlightenment Literature’; and the chapter on ‘Art and Aesthetic Theory’ speaks of the ‘levelling public space’ (p. 123) of the Salon exhibitions. Surprisingly, it is literature that emerges as the poor relation here, as the subject of only one chapter: the discussion of the novel omits even to mention a masterpiece such as Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste. And some judgements are hasty — to describe Marivaux’s plays as ‘light comedies’ (p. 142) seems curiously old-fashioned, and runs in the face of a powerful modern tradition of theatrical production. Faced by such richness overall, it is unfair to want more, but inevitably there are gaps: nothing, for example, on the role of the press in the French Enlightenment, a surprising omission given that extensive digitization is transforming research in this area. The book sadly has no illustrations and, while it is good to learn about a satirical print depicting the art critic Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne peering through a magnifying glass while a dog pees on his leg (p. 129), it is a shame we can’t see it. Bibliographical references are not standardized between chapters, so that Voltaire’s major late work, the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, is referred to first in the modern edition (p. 89) and then in the nineteenth-century Louis Moland edition (p. 119) — a pedantic quibble, perhaps, except that the old edition perpetuates a longstanding confusion about the work’s title. Completed by a detailed Guide to Further Reading, this volume will prove a rich resource for students and scholars. Beginners in search of basic information about individual writers or major works will need to look elsewhere; but for more advanced students this Companion will be an invaluable and irreplaceable guide to the most prominent re-evaluations of the French Enlightenment over the last two decades.