| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Dominique Poulot. "Surveiller et s'instruire": La Révolution française et l'intelligence de l'héritage historique. (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, number 344.) Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 1997. Pp. xi, 591.

The aim of this study is to offer a "history of the form and structure of the patrimony [la morphologie patrimoniale], understood as discipline and representation" (p. 1). As a description, "genealogy" might be a better term than "history," since Dominique Poulot focuses on the period of the French Revolution, broadly construed, as the moment at which material expressions of the French past—heterogeneous artifacts inherited from the ancien régime, as varied in their origins as in their cultural meanings—were reconceived ("represented") and administratively integrated ("disciplined") as a national patrimony subject to the "preoccupations of the state and the tastes of civil society" (p. 1) Poulot sees three processes as crucial: "revolutionary vandalism, événement-monstre, and traumatism of the collective memory; the mythic construction, in the museums, of a reasonable and moral history that also recalls the principles of nature; the place finally made for the remains of the past as indices or signals officially 'lodged' in the present by the administration" (p. 1). . . .

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