Review

General Books

Having produced a second edition of his undergraduate text on early modern European social history, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe, George Huppert now offers the same readership an accessible introduction to the intellectual history that has occupied much of his professional career. Huppert is known for his contributions on Renaissance historiography and the history of public schools in early modern Europe. Those topics are key elements of his new book, which presents the French Renaissance, and particularly the intellectual life of sixteenth-century Paris and its provinces, as background to what emerged two centuries later as the French Enlightenment. All the classic Enlightenment themes, from religious skepticism and the popularization of science to calls for freethinking, social reform and political liberty, were anticipated, Huppert contends, in the "style of Paris," the approach to learning that became the humanities of early modern college education. The book offers portraits of thinkers who engaged in intellectual sociability and personal friendship as they criticized the Aristotelian ideas of clerics and university professors, explored classical literature and nature for their own sake, challenged social inequality, political tyranny, and superstition, constituted the young men in public schools all over urban France. The book's characters are philosophes who formed a Republic of Letters and spoke of public utility and the public good. One might think one was already in the Enlightenment.	1
Huppert's analyses of sixteenth-century French writings bring to mind many of the classics of the eighteenth century. Botanist and traveler Pierre Belon, accompanying the French ambassador to Constantinople, explored the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. His Observations expressing admiration for egalitarian Turks and pondering the decline of Greek civilization, seems to anticipate the writings of Montesquieu and Gibbon. While Pierre Ronsard and his circle made French a language of poetry, the Dialectique of Petrus Ramus (Pierre La Ramée) did the same for philosophical investigation. Ramus' commentary on Caesar provides a history of the Gauls that anticipates the battles over history and the French constitution that raged in the last generations of the Old Regime, and Huppert explicitly finds in it the French roots of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Louis Le Caron's Dialogues considered the ancient and modern worlds and the natural equality that he thought existed before people claimed things were "Mine and Thine." He, thus, anticipated Rousseau in the long run, and in the short run, the historical work of his friend Estienne Pasquier, whose Recherches used the German philological method of Beatus Rhenanus to show that the Franks were Germanic warriors, not the descendants of the Trojans. Pasquier's history is not antiquarian, but critical of received authorities, whether political or religious. Beside the lesser known figures are the big names like Montaigne and his friend La Boëtie. The curriculum itself is an important theme: the best writers (optimi auctores) continue to be read, both in school and afterwards. Huppert's portraits of young intellectuals using the great works effectively humanize the history of ideas.	2
The book looks not only at ideas but also at institutions, so Ramus appears as principal of the Collège de Presles. Huppert provides delightful scenes of dedicated teachers who tried, often heroically, to educate students in a time of religious warfare. His heroes are Erasmian humanists who were sympathetic to reform, but not necessarily prepared to go Protestant. However, the increasingly tense atmosphere posed a problem. Indeed, when students ask the inevitable question—What stands between the style of Paris and the Enlightenment itself?—he answers: Religious intolerance and conflict. Still, the ideas survived, and they didn't have to go underground. They remained in schools. The seventeenth-century rationalists who came out of the tradition are not the libertines their religious enemies took them to be. Huppert illustrates the intellectual continuity by tracing the transmission of humanist thought through the memoir of the radical priest Jean Meslier to his editor Voltaire. The discussion of Meslier and of the rediscovery of his original text provides rich material for students and instructors who want to explore the methods of intellectual history. The book's examples are quite lively and communicate the key issues from late medieval universities to the Enlightenment. Some might quibble with the focus on public education. Religious institutions were also interested in learning, even scientific learning, and noble academies provided another important form of education, but Huppert is following a main line of historical development. Others may object to making Paris the center of intellectual life, but the continuity within French history is undeniable. Surveys in European history would make good use of the book, and one could assign it to end a course on the Renaissance or begin one on the Enlightenment. It would work for a course on the history of Paris as well.	3
Texas Tech University   David G. Troyansky

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.