The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Having already dealt a first blow against the Annales tradition in French historiography by proclaiming, in 1974, "the return of the event," the historian-editor Pierre Nora ("Le retour de l'événement," in Faire de l'histoire, vol. I [Gallimard, 1974], Nouveaux problèmes) committed a second seeming heresy in 1987 by heralding the revival of another bête noire of the Annales school, biography. Rebaptized as égo-histoire (Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d'égo-histoire [Gallimard, 1987]), this "new biography," suggested Nora, would no longer attempt to showcase the lives of kings and diplomats, nor would it become a variant of the histoire événementielle that in part had led Annales school historians to reject political for social and economic history, and to shift their focus from individuals to collectivities. (On égo-histoire, see also Jeremy D. Popkin, "Ego-histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers," French Historical Studies 19, no. 4 [1996]:1139-67.) Rather than representing a neo-positivist turn in history writing, égo-histoire, contended Nora, would actually prolong the Annales historians' concern for "problematizing" history by considering the multiple contexts of any historical object, as well as the filter created by the historian's own subjectivity.Biographical and autobiographical approaches to history could thus become object lessons in the construction of identities, both by the subjects of biographies themselves, and by the historians who write about them.

While the practitioners of the "new biography" that forms the subject of the excellent volume of essays edited by Jo Burr Margadant are of course attuned to these recent developments in French historiography, they clearly wish to bring to the lives of nineteenth-century French women an innovative approach. For the renewed interest in biography, as Margadant points out, owes as much to the heritage of the Annales school as it does both to cultural studies (in its attention to questions of identity politics), and to feminist and gender studies. Where considerations of gender are nearly absent from égo-histoire as practiced in France, Margadant and her collaborators have brought it "center stage," indeed insisting on the performative nature of constructing a successful feminine self, often against great opposition, in nineteenth-century France. The subject of biography, in Margadant's words, is thus

no longer the coherent self but rather a self that is performed to create an impression of coherence or an individual with multiple selves whose different manifestations reflect the passage of time, the demands and options of different settings, or the varieties of ways that others seek to represent that person.

(7)

Moreover, by examining how women "stage[d] their personae" (2), sometimes borrowing from, sometimes rejecting dominant masculine models, the studies in this volume challenge master narratives of French history, from which women have often been excluded.

Enclosed between Margadant's enlightening theoretical introduction and an extensive bibliography, six chronologically-organized essays form a coherent project while at the same time offering richly-textured case studies of the lives of individual women. Margadant's own contribution to the volume, "The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France," charts the difficulty experienced by the Bourbons in projecting images of family and motherhood that would resonate with the new elites of postrevolutionary France. Margadant presents the duchess as the "creator of her public self" (37), whose well-publicized pining for her children while imprisoned in 1832, for example, may have been in part a posture destined to win her (and thereby the dethroned Bourbons) legitimacy at a time when motherhood was gaining new respectability under the July monarchy. At the same time, however, the duchess was a "mutable symbol of royal motherhood" (37), exploited by both Legitimists and Orleanists alike for their own political ends. As in all the essays, Margadant skillfully reads the story of the duchess's particular "performance of femininity" against the broader sociopolitical history of the period, concluding here...