| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris. By Louise Robbins. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 352 pp. 29 halftones and 3 line drawings. $48.00 hard-cover.

It would be an understatement to say that there are many books that deal with the French Revolution and its social and cultural context. However, books that link these events with the tradition of keeping exotic pets like parrots and monkeys are probably not as abundant. One that does is Louise Robbins's Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, where she shows that exotic animals had a clearly stated, if not very large, place in the discussions on slavery (both physical and mental) and freedom. 1

But Robbins aims higher than this. Through eight chapters she describes the Parisian habit of keeping exotic pets—how these animals were transported to France in the first place, where they came from, who traded in them, who mainly bought them, and what their place was in contemporary writings. Chapters also deal with the Versailles Menagerie of the Louises and its successor Jardin des Plantes. They are summed up in an epilogue where she points to the symbolical value of caged animals as "metaphorical representations as slaves, prisoners, native people, or the oppressed masses" (p. 233). . . .

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