Rousseau et l’idée d’éducation: essai suivi de “Pestalozzi juge de Jean-Jacques” by Michel Soëtard (review)

spaces such as the château or the abyss,as well as spaces in which the Gothic is deployed. Maurice Lévy’s piece examines the ways in which the English Gothic was transposed into the French literary field, as well as its manifestations in French illustration and stage productions. While Michel Delon focuses on the Gothic castle as inscription of the past within the present and as representing a slippage of boundaries, Seth analyzes the figure of the abyss in its literal and figurative meanings,particularly as it is expressed in Madame Mérard de Saint-Just’s Le château noir, ou les souffrances de la jeune Ophelle (1798).Moving away from traditional Gothic spaces,Joël Castonguay-Bélanger explores the manner in which Jean-Louis Lacrois de Niré represents the Wielicka Salt Mines— a curiosity among the French in the period—in Gothic terms in Ladousi et Floriska (1801). The second section focusing on the political aspects of the Gothic opens with an essay by Roland Virolle, who complicates the sources for the French Gothic through his study of Madame de Genlis and Mercier de Compiègne. The next three essays deal explicitly with the political. Katherine Astbury argues that French Revolutionary theater preceded the roman noir and shaped its evolution. She then goes on to trace the changing uses of the Gothic, which become increasingly counter-Revolutionary, over the course of the 1790s. For her part, Stéphanie Genand demonstrates the ways in which Madame de Staël draws from Gothic plot lines and imagery to defend MarieAntoinette in her Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine (1793). Jérémie Grangé’s piece is a comparative study of Ann Radcliffe and Genlis. While both writers provide rational explanations for what initially appear to be fantastic phenomena, they differ in their focus: Radcliffe privileges the liberation of the heroine and the reestablishment of the family cell, whereas Genlis privileges the liberation of a people and the establishment of a just government. The final section considers the legacy of the Gothic in France. Maud Dubois and Jacques-David Ebguy follow the embourgeoisement of the Gothic in the works of Swiss writer Jeanne-Françoise Polier and Balzac, respectively. Ebguy further demonstrates the disenchantment of the Gothic in Balzac, where it is no longer alterity that terrifies, but the overwhelming reign of the same. The final essay by Ernst Gilles examines Gothic topoi in the works of Georges Bataille. Overall the anthology paints a complex and fascinating picture of the historical, political, and literary contexts of the French Gothic. Wayne State University (MI) Anne E. Duggan Soëtard, Michel. Rousseau et l’idée d’éducation: essai suivi de “Pestalozzi juge de Jean-Jacques”. Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7453-2234-0. Pp. 263. 25 a. An extended philosophical essay in six chapters, this book represents Soëtard’s efforts to rehabilitate Rousseau’s (by his own admission,‘forgotten’) Émile by placing it in context with his other major writings, especially the Discours, the Contrat social, 242 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 243 and La nouvelle Héloïse. Ably elucidating in detail Rousseau’s account of man’s fundamental break with la nature upon entering society (Discours), Soëtard focuses throughout the essay on the centrality of autonomy to Rousseau’s educational project. Although paradoxically haunted by his original state, man’s desire for freedom and his quest for meaning inspire him to forge his own instruments of liberation through education, hence Soëtard’s focus on Émile as keystone to Rousseau’s oeuvre. Embracing the natural contradictions and ambivalences inherent in the educational process as Rousseau describes it, Soëtard valorizes Rousseau’s penchant for subjective rêverie in the midst of a project where raison must not be lost; his study demonstrates that it is precisely in Rousseau’s refusal to seek a compromise between his ideal and the real world that the strength of the Idea lies. Soëtard suggests that the pedagogy presented in Émile in fact surpasses the breadth of Rousseau’s political project in the Contrat, giving it meaning as Émile engages extensively with the concept of...