Becoming French: Mapping the Geographies of French Identities, 1871–1914 by Dana Kristofor Lindaman (review)

reference to an external narrative. It helped to create a world of fantasy, permitting onlookers to escape for a moment from the concerns of everyday existence. Color was, of course, a significant preoccupation of the Impressionist painters in their effort to capture the fleeting impressions of modern reality on the human eye. Kalba discusses at length the theory and treatment of color in Degas, Renoir, and Monet.While Degas celebrated the invasion of color in the visible universe of contemporary French society, Renoir adopted a more conservative, classicizing approach. Monet remained aloof from the issue, emphasizing instead how changes in atmospheric conditions affect our way of seeing things. The expatriate American painter J.A.M. Whistler expressed his fascination with the modernity of color in his depiction of a fireworks display, Nocturne in Black and Gold. The Neo-Impressionists, like Seurat and Signac, welcomed the influence of scientific theories about color on the elaboration of the pointilliste technique in their works. Kalba discerns a similarity between their paintings and the new autochrome color photography developed at the end of the century by the Lumière brothers and other inventors. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Lindaman, Dana Kristofor. Becoming French: Mapping the Geographies of French Identities, 1871–1914. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8101-32801 . Pp. vii + 180. This work examines the writings of Élisée Reclus and Paul Vidal de la Blache, two important French geographers of the late nineteenth century, and considers three French texts of the period as expressions of a similar geographic sensibility. The two geographers posited the world as a living body, a metaphor which provides a framework for understanding the workings of the natural world and one’s place in it. Their ideas were central to the French school curriculum between 1871 and 1914, in which shared history, language, and morality were the basis of Republican identity, as the State sought to define it. Schoolbooks of the Third Republic invited the student to orient him or herself “according to the bodily coordinates mapped onto the landscape” (136). The study of geography was no longer a matter of dry and boring memorization, but an engaging narrative conveying the ideals of the new Republic. Following their views, Lindaman interprets geography less as a matter of physical space and more as the“psychological coordinates of the individual within society”(136). In three ensuing chapters, Lindaman maps this embodied metaphor in three works of the period, with the aim of identifying the underlying psychological geography of each. First, in Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre, the goal of mapping nature is a figurative mapping of the self; the journey is a voyage of self-discovery. The traveler is an individual confronting contemporary issues of identity, an abstract analysis which anticipates psychoanalytic approaches of the twentieth century. Second, in the widely-used history 194 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 Reviews 195 and geography schoolbook, Le tour de la France par deux enfants, G. Bruno (the pseudonym of Augustine Tuillerie) instills a sense of French identity in generations of French pupils by means of a tale of travel and adventure throughout France. In it, two orphaned boys set out from their village in Lorraine, recently annexed by the victorious Prussians, to rejoin France and to keep their French citizenship. Through numerous encounters, the work imparts lessons of patriotism, practicality and morality. Finally, Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic voice in Une saison en enfer is interpreted as the mapping of an individual psyche as it resists the values of an oppressive school system and the colonizing influence of the new capitalist economy. Fittingly, Rimbaud fled Western society for a life in Abyssinia. In conclusion, Lindaman notes that the expressions of psychic geography studied in this work are specific to the first twothirds of the Third Republic and represent authoritarian attitudes no longer accepted by today’s public.Yet some views of the two geographers, Reclus and Vidal, are relevant even in today’s cynical age. The principles of organic ties endure as a feature of identity, not as a static ideal but in the fluidity of constant movement, amid the influx of immigrants and the growing sense of...