Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture (review)

'To be alive,' according to Bataille, 'is, madly but inevitably, to roll the dice' (p. 30). Is gambling not just a mere metaphor for decisions made in life, but much more centrally a direct reflection of what Borges described as 'nothing but an infinite game of chance'? In a study that ranges over eight centuries and explores depictions of gambling in the theatre, novels, short stories, autobiography, philosophy and film, Thomas M. Kavanagh provides not just a fascinating and diverse exploration of changing attitudes to gambling but an analysis of the close ties linking games of chance, works of literature, and the historical moment. If Huizinga depicted gambling as a degeneration of play, which he defined as essentially disinterested, and Caillois's systematized analysis of play left no space in which gambling could make itself at home, Kavanagh allows gambling to reveal itself as 'a subjective wildness cosubstantial with who I am' (p. 11). Affirming what Baudelaire knew perfectly well, that to bet is to 'be alive in a special way, to escape the mortal boredom of waiting' (p. 24), he moves easily through a rapid historical survey of chance from Greek and Latin concepts of tyche and fortuna to contemporary game and probability theory, before turning to a historical survey that runs from Jehan Bodel's Jeu de Saint Nicolas to the rise of casinos. Bodel's ironic staging of a victory for faith secured 'only by the bettor's tawdry dream of doubling his initial stake' (p. 48) is set against Pascal's correspondence with Fermat at a time when the choice of religion was in itself an often dangerous gamble. With the Enlightenment came an age addicted more than any before or since to gambling, in a gesture that Kavanagh presents as paralleled by social changes in which the aristocracy saw more and more clearly how much their own place depended on an increasingly futile bet. Sexual seduction also finds a direct equivalent in gambling at this period, with the rules of brelan and its function as a socialized game holding a mirror to the libertine's erotic strategies. Casanova's autobiography is convincingly portrayed as emblematic of what was really at stake in contemporary wagers, while whist, whose very name suggests the silence in which it was played, forces the player to enter an isolated, unstable world, very much analogous to the rapidly changing society of the nineteenth century. Paul Bourget's story, 'Un joueur', which is provided in Kavanagh's translation as an appendix to the volume, links the anti-gambler protagonist with second-rate art and with the late nineteenth-century's turn away from the kind of adventurous embrace of the aleatory that had marked earlier decades and that we see in Balzac's Peau de chagrin, also illuminatingly analysed here. A crisp and illuminating study of Demy's Baie des anges and Melville's Bob le flambeur leads to a survey of the radically changed culture of contemporary casinos: clearly, Kavanagh wryly asserts, 'God has left the casino.' With all this you also get the rules of brelan, pharaon, whist and lansquenet.