Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder ed. by Marc Lacheny et al (review)

The open-access volume Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder, which features contributions in both German and French, is an excellent example of how francophone Austrian Studies enriches the field with theoretically sophisticated projects that transcend traditional limitations of the Austrian cultural studies. It originated in a conference held in late 2019 held at the Brenner-Archiv (Innsbruck) and organized by a team from Innsbruck (Sigurd Paul Scheichl, Ulrike Tanzer, and Maria Piok) and France (Marc Lacheny, University of Lorraine in Metz, and Karl Zieger, University of Lille). Four of these organizers edited this collection, which includes two contributions beyond the original presentations.

The volume and conference were designed to counter the prevailing German point of view in considering germanophone images of France, to highlight the often very different relationship that France has with Austria, and to chart France’s understanding of Austrian culture as different from Germany’s.

The volume’s “Vorwort” (in both French and German versions) outlines the theoretical premises of imageology that guided this event, “die Analyse des Bilds, das von der Kultur eines Landes, des eigenen oder eines fremden, durch die Literatur vermittelt” (6). Such images are centers for investigations of shifting power relations across time and across political realignments. They also provide evidence that (in Paris, at least) Austrian cultures were understood as different from German ones and that Austrians saw French culture as significant for their own country. These editors acknowledge a need to move beyond the limitations of research into germanophone Austrian texts and hope that the volume spurs further studies of French-Central European cultural relations—scholars of “Austrian” culture cannot only use German, and scholars of Slavic and Balkan cultures need to track influences from western Europe.

The first contributions set the tone for this impeccably researched and argued and well-written volume. Veronika Studer-Kovács’s essay on “Nationale Typologien in Le Plaisir von Abbé Marchadier (1747) und Matthias Geiger (1765)” presents an early French-Austrian engagement with national stereotypes. A French play (a political allegory) originally performed at the Comédie française was adapted in French by a Hungarian Jesuit to celebrate Joseph II’s second marriage and performed in Catholic Hungary. Studer-Kovács carefully compares the original and the adaptation to uncover its complicated engagement with cultural power (especially class and language). This spectacular case study models how texts respond to cultural-political networks—imageology at its best as cultural-political-aesthetic studies.

The next essays address “official” representations: Norbert Bachleitner and Juliane Werner discuss “‘La grande nation’ als Exportgut: Das Frankreichbild in österreichischen Schulbüchern des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts,” surveying primary school texts produced after the 1869 school reforms, some with French authors as collaborators. These readers inculcated very specific images of a democratic France (and, unfortunately, of the glories and profitability of its colonial missions). We learn how school curricula and school systems were (re)organized, how schoolbooks created images of ethnic groups within the nation (Stämme), according to the principles of Völkerpsychologie, and how and when German and Austrian views of France diverged significantly. This essay is a model for critical text-based cultural studies.

Mayer tracks Austria’s representation in the Diderot/d’Almenbert Encyclopédie. After carefully explaining all aspects of the project’s planning and execution, she uses statistical analyses of the Austria-related entries. How Mayer contextualizes entries helps to establish how and why the encyclopedia evaluated nations vis-à-vis France—a sophisticated example of what big data can show about culture.

Norbert Bachleitner thoroughly outlines the activities of “Gérard van Swieten, censeur de la littérature française sous l’impératrice Marie-Thérèse.” The essay serves as a history of the censor’s office, the important players and their roles, explaining how censorship norms were established and enforced, what happened in censorship meetings, and how records were kept (including developments like the censorship...