Journal of Social History

Park,, Sun-Young

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz089pmid: N/A

A 1790s proposal for a Death Tribunal, in which the life and character of the deceased would be judged and their remains accordingly deposited in either a municipal or reprobates' cemetery; two men inscribing poems on a girl's tombstone at Champ de repos cemetery to help solace an unknown, grieving mother; three young friends visiting the Catacombs to reflect on their own mortality and inevitable end—such are the anecdotes enlivening Erin-Marie Legacey's evocative book on changing burial practices and cemeteries in Paris between the revolutionary and postrevolutionary eras. Charting intimate, personal stories alongside government initiatives and sweeping reform projects, Making Space for the Dead: Catacombs, Cemeteries, and the Reimagining of Paris, 1780-1830 argues that evolving models for treating the dead were tied to the larger project of social reconstruction in these turbulent decades. The notion that attitudes toward death serve as reflections on contemporary life and society is certainly not new. But by analyzing ideas alongside material culture and space, and bridging radically distinct political regimes that more often function as chronological dividers, Legacey generates insights that deepen, and at times challenge, existing scholarship by Philippe Ariès, Michel Vovelle, Richard Etlin, and Thomas Laqueur. The book proceeds chronologically, beginning with the 1780 closure of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents at the heart of Paris due to its threats to public health. Urban burials had been an Old Regime concern, but the outbreak of the 1789 Revolution irrevocably altered the terms of the debate. Alongside the discourse of hygiene that remained a constant in cemetery reform proposals, revolutionaries envisioned a new pedagogical function for this space: the instruction and diffusion of modern civics and morality. Given the vicissitudes of the early revolution, however, few concrete changes came to pass. Projects to refashion burial practices on principles of uncompromising secularism and equality were too controversial, while the desecration of royal and religious graves during the Terror, not to mention the spectacle of decapitated bodies in ad hoc mass graves, added chaos and horror to the culture of death. The perceived crisis of public morality after the Terror led to a concerted effort to reform the care of the dead. Responses to an 1800 French National Institute essay competition on regulations for burials and funerals suggested evaluating and categorizing the dead according to virtue; creating individual graves to foster communion between the deceased and their survivors; allowing religious sentiment while rejecting the monopolizing power of the church. In a moment of political and social détente, this range of inventive proposals expressed the desire for order, in death as in life. As Legacey argues, they also charted a middle ground between Old Regime and revolutionary culture by reinserting hierarchy and spirituality into the proceedings. The latter three chapters explore discrete postrevolutionary realms for the dead as social spaces of reconciliation, challenging previous studies that have emphasized their furtherance of ideological divisions. Opened in 1804 beyond the city walls, Père Lachaise Cemetery established the model for a modern cemetery with its orderly individual plots and lush landscaping. Legacey compellingly describes the conflation of the public and private spheres in this Elysian field, as new forms of sociability developed among mourners and through epitaphs that instructed receptive passersby on a virtuous life. Meanwhile, the Paris Catacombs, initially created in a former quarry to receive the skeletal remains of the Holy Innocents, opened to visitors in 1809, envisioned in part as a somber memorial to revolutionary violence. In sifting through written accounts and guestbook commentary, which could range from reflective to morbid or merely curious, Legacey analyzes the Catacombs as a space where Parisians could come to terms with the ruptures of their recent past by confronting the physical remnants of their deep and enduring history. The book concludes with the Museum of French Monuments (1793-1816), the brainchild of art collector Alexandre Lenoir, which displayed a notable (yet hitherto overlooked) assemblage of funerary monuments and fragments, along with an Elysian Garden containing the entombed remains of Molière and Descartes, among others. Recreating the nation’s rich history through its material culture, century by century, the Museum was yet another space for contemplating on, and reconciliation with, the past. This theme of social rapprochement through the culture of death unites the book’s episodes, but two considerations could have enriched these analyses further. First, Making Space for the Dead is surprisingly reticent on Romanticism, especially given its subject matter and chronology. The political and cultural dimensions of this movement threaded through the various developments under investigation—the sentimentalized accounts of graveside reunions; the naturalistic landscaping of Père Lachaise; the macabre fascination of the Catacombs; even the early interest in historic preservation informing Lenoir’s Museum. Engaging the hybrid and contradictory nature of Romanticism might have complicated some of the conclusions drawn here, which are compelling but at times too neat. Second, the book focuses on Paris, as the center of politics and where the problem of urban burials was heightened, but the knowledge we have gained on provincial pushback against the Revolution through the work of Suzanne Desan and others raises the question of how far reform proposals and measures spread beyond the capital, and their reception. In addition to deepening our understanding of Parisian politics and society, contested notions of care for the dead could serve as fruitful grounds for developing the history of center-periphery relations during the revolutionary and postrevolutionary eras. A number of venues examined in this book, such as Père Lachaise Cemetery and the Catacombs, entered mass culture over 200 years ago and remain popular tourist attractions. Our fascination with the afterlife, commemoration, even the macabre appears to endure timelessly. Yet as Legacey demonstrates in this elegantly written and argued book, the ways in which we address these issues through practices, spaces, and material culture are deeply contextual. Situated at the liminal zone where the intimately personal collides with public display, they ultimately provide a unique window into a society’s fears and anxieties, its hopes and desires. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Doyle, Dennis, A

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz095pmid: N/A

Within the historiography on nineteenth century US psychiatry, Southern asylums have long been neglected by scholars focused on the Northeast. Yet as Gonaver’s new book astutely points out, the lack of attention paid to Southern psychiatrists and their institutions has left us with an insufficient understanding of racial slavery’s role in the development of mental health care—not only below the Mason-Dixon Line but nationwide. For decades, Gerald Grob and other stalwarts in the history of psychiatry claimed that race had been peripheral to the profession’s early theory and practice. That’s not the story Gonaver tells. Given that racial slavery was the era’s most significant and polarizing institution, it served as a primary context framing how asylum superintendents debated the design and staffing of their hospitals, their use of restraints, and the relationship between insanity, racial segregation, religious fervor, and gender conventions. In recovering how racial slavery influenced asylum medicine, Gonaver documents the rise and fall of the regime of Dr. John M. Gall, superintendent of the first US asylum: Virginia’s Eastern Lunatic Asylum. Relying on a treasure trove of previously unseen archives, she not only reveals Gall’s perspective but also the perspectives of his patients and his staff. What is so remarkable is that Eastern was the only antebellum institution in which slaves served on the staff and both blacks and whites were accepted as patients. Gonaver’s Chapter Two finds evidence that the enslaved staff sometimes empathized with the patients’ confinement and may have helped some escape. In Chapters Three and Four in particular, the archival record was substantial enough that Gonaver could reconstruct some patients’ lives. But as any scholar of antebellum medical files knows, they are often incomplete or hard to read. To her credit, Gonaver admits when this occurs, telling the reader when gaps in the record compelled her to make an inference or speculate. For readers who expect historians to only make pronouncements backed up by incontrovertible evidence, they will be disappointed and might find some of her recovery work invalid. But beyond this rare and fragmentary glimpse into the lives of enslaved patients and staff, Gonaver argues that racial slavery had a hand in shaping the history of asylums. Historians of psychiatry are probably aware that the American Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane treated Galt as an outlier. Most scholars have attributed his marginalization to a fundamental disagreement between Galt and other AMSAII alienists as to what constituted moral treatment. Galt defined it as patient mobility, the cottage system, and absence of restraints, whereas Thomas Kirkbride and others believed that a well-designed asylum was essential to curing patients. Gonaver adds to our understanding of this schism by recovering the part that slavery played in Galt’s marginalization. Chapters One and Two demonstrate that Galt’s belief that patients should be relatively free of restraints and afforded the freedom to work and even live outside the asylum was inspired by his experience hiring-out slaves from local plantations to work, live, and even earn money at the asylum. Those same chapters also argue compellingly that the AMSAII’s opposition to Galt’s version of moral treatment was more than simply clinical skepticism. It also was rooted in Northern asylum-keepers’ opposition both to Galt’s reliance upon slave labor and to his institution’s racial integration. At a time when Northern whites relied on racial segregation to bring “order” to a rising free black population, Northern antebellum asylums were all-white spaces by design. So while Galt perceived the mobility of hired-out slaves as modern labor management and the racial intermingling on his wards as being no different than on a successful plantation, his AMSAII colleagues saw only Southern backwardness and disorder. While Galt did experiment with relative autonomy for enslaved staff and patients, Chapters Three and Four examine the ways in which Eastern Lunatic Asylum’s helped maintain racial slavery as a system. Chapter Three offers that antebellum psychiatrists’ policing of religious expression among their patients was not just a reaction to the Second Great Awakening’s “irrational” revivalism. Instead, Galt and other asylum administrators in slave states discouraged Quakerism and other egalitarian forms of Christianity which challenged racial slavery and promoted abolition. In Gonaver’s Chapter Four, her most ambitious, she adds further context to Carroll-Smith and Charles Rosenberg’s classic “Female Animal” essay from 1973, arguing that asylum doctors helped sustain a culture of sexual exploitation and violence against women within both marriage and racial slavery, blaming women’s bodies rather than systematic abuse for any emotional damage sustained by female victims. In Chapters Five and Six, she addresses Reconstruction’s ironic impact on Virginia’s black mentally ill. Galt’s untimely suicide and the eventual end of racial slavery spelled the end of racial integration, patient mobility, and moral treatment at Eastern Lunatic Asylum, with the black mentally ill remanded to the segregated Central Lunatic Asylum. Supported by scientific racism, the mentally ill black freedmen and women became regarded as constitutionally unfit for freedom, mere savages who required fettering and forced labor to keep them under control. Gonaver’s argument that slavery served as a vital context for asylum history will generate lively debate in a graduate course on slavery, medicine, or the antebellum South. Filled with evocative stories patients and their families, it is eminently readable and should also be considered for undergraduate history courses. As a forewarning however, a college instructor should be aware that the author does not always define some of the antebellum pharmaceuticals and diagnoses she name-drops. And although the term “moral treatment” is central to the thesis it is not defined early enough in the book’s introduction, requiring quite a bit of reading before a reader can begin to really unpack it. Notwithstanding, this is a great addition to the literature on asylums. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Vause,, Erika

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz076pmid: N/A

Not long ago, the French Revolution held a position in the European historiographical imagination comparable only to that of the Holocaust. Moreover, given its seminal positioning as the harbinger of global modernity, tracing the Revolution’s causes and course became the testing ground for various new methodological approaches from “history from below” to the “cultural turn.” During the last few decades, however, the deplacement of a Eurocentric vision of modernity coupled with the ascendence of global and transnational histories has undermined the Revolution’s former centrality to our narrative of global and even European history. Although historians have continued to produce new and insightful work on the period, they do so outside its previous pivotal position as the foundation of the modern Western nation-state. It seems possible to admit that François Furet’s 1978 declaration that “the Revolution is over” has finally become reality. This historiographical context makes Katie Jarvis’s finely wrought and persuasively argued Politics in the Marketplace all the more refreshing and important. Jarvis returns to sources bases, topics, and questions that might have appeared exhausted by generations of scholarly literature, and, with an exceptional archival eye and delicate analytic brushstrokes, reveals them to be still alive with insights and possibilities. Jarvis does so by entering into one of the most fundamental debates in the Revolution’s literature: the role of economic factors in explaining the Revolution’s momentum. For the historians of the mid twentieth-century, influenced by Marxism, the French Revolution was fundamentally a question of class, spurred by a rising bourgeoisie who chafed under the strictures set by an obscolescent aristocracy. This interpretation was challenged first by the careful work of social historians who demonstrated the heterogeneity of these supposedly united classes and then by historians of the “cultural turn,” who tended to ignore the economic altogether in favor of focusing on the Revolution’s discursive and symbolic dimensions. Subsequent scholars have returned to the role of the economic factors, but from a cultural standpoint, stressing the importance of new economic philosophies rather than materical factors themselves in explaining the Revolution’s course, or from the standpoint of imperial and transnational commercial networks. In contrast, Jarvis joins historians such as Amalia Kessler and Rebecca Spang in showcasing how cultural and intellectual change impacted everyday life and in turn how the contestations of material existence forged and remade abstract relations between market, state, and individuals. Whereas Kessler and Spang do so through the vehicles of the commercial law and money, respectively, Jarvis returns to the roots of “history from below” and focuses on a crucial but overlooked group of historical actors: the Dames des Halles. From the standpoint of social history, the Dames represent a particularly interesting group: small traders who were neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat; women, but often, as Jarvis argues, articulating their identities in non-gendered terms. Conceived as the Parisian embodiment of the Third Estate in its interaction with the king during the old regime, the Dames would also become vital actors in the Revolution. By studying these women’s participation in revolutionary events from 1789 through 1798, Jarvis provides a compelling, nuanced, and surprising exploration of the contigent and negotiated nature of gender, citizenship, and the economy that challenges generalizations about the nature of political engagement and gendered relations. Jarvis’s findings reach beyond the Revolution to show how careful social and cultural history can challenge the boundaries of what we mean by the political and economic. Jarvis’s account of the Dames is divided into seven chapters. The first two chapters present a kind of overview of the Dames’ individual and collective identities in terms of first social history and then cultural history. In the first, Jarvis makes skillfull use of records from courts, justices of the peace, and the police to capture these often elusive women who, in her words, have “scattered across the archives like runaway onions careening off a cart” (13). The second chapter, deeply indebted to cultural history, examines the place of the “poissarde” (fish wife) as a symbolic representative of the people in both ritual and pamphlets of the old regime and Revolution. The third chapter presents us with a spatial history of the Halles, which at the same time doubles as a exploration of how visions of the “private” and “public” were negotiated by the Dames and by the various government agencies with which they interacted during the Revolution. This chapter also provides a gateway between the less dense first two chapters and the last four chapters, which center around particular economic/political contests. The fourth chapter is a particularly brilliant account of how the crisis of the paper-money assignat, and in particular the absence of reliable small change, forged new economic identities after the collapse of the guild system. The fifth chapter examines two ostensibly separate regulatory efforts of 1793 – the closure of the revolutionary women’s clubs and the Maximum that imposed price controls – and argues that they are in fact directly related to each other the battle between the Dames, representing retail interests, and pro-consumer radical clubs. Jarvis’s masterful account of their skirmishes throws the often-discussed misogyny of Jacobin legislators into an entirely different light. The sixth chapter follows the politics of the subsistence economy under the strangely understudied Maximum, showing how, for the Dames, police, and legislators alike, the economy was imagined as a system of symbiotic relations but not always in the same way. The last chapter, which takes us into the nineteenth century, examines the graduated business tax called the patente, whose uneven development, Jarvis argues, reveals a far more complicated relationship between gender, citizenship and economy than scholars have previously recognized. Politics in the Marketplace is an innovative contribution to the history of the French Revolution as well as to social history more generally. Jarvis shows that to understand the larger importance of the French Revolution, we need not only look at the giant contours of global history, but also back to the everyday lives of those who lived through it. The Revolution, it appears, is still far from over. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)