Abstract
Emma Rothschild appositely compares her book to the vast historical panoramas of Balzac’s Comédie humaine and Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. But its own making, of course and by contrast, is grounded in painstaking archival research rather than imaginative elaboration. For she has exploited the ‘idiosyncratically French’ (p. 9) bureaucracy of the état civil and its associated formalities, overlaying it with the modern technologies of ancestry, to produce a multi-generational set of ‘stories’ interlinked by networks of family and friendships. The hereditary catalyst of Zola’s series is identified by the novelist as being the monstrous and half-insane Tante Dide. The matriarchal origin of Rothschild’s family saga is far too ordinary to have tempted a writer of fiction, although the lives of the descendants of Marie Aymard (1713–90), through her six surviving children and 22 grandchildren, offer us both drama and tragedy alongside the prosaic and insignificant. In respect of the latter, only one of her grandsons, Claude Martial Allemand Lavigerie (1825–92), the future cardinal-bishop of Carthage, is a notable exception. Even from the apparently mundane biographies of the rest, however, Rothschild has teased out a compellingly new version of the economic transformation of France in the aftermath of the Revolution. It is a measure of her extraordinary labours that she has been able to track the destinies of all but one of the 83 signatories of the 1764 prenuptial contract occasioned by the marriage of Marie Aymard’s daughter to the son of a tailor. Such a document is emblematic of the equally illuminating registration of births, deaths, baptisms, dowries, property transactions, loans and debts, powers of attorney and other such ‘events’ subject to legal imperatives. Squabbles and suits, even those not ending up in the courts but faithfully noted in judicial terms nevertheless, are as eloquent about the relationships between neighbours or siblings. Wills obviously assume an exceptional importance in threading together connections, as well as amplifying them in depth and range through the bequests, for example, of unmarried sisters to nephews and nieces. From this posthumous continuity can be reconstructed elective affinities as well as inventories of material things, from furniture to spoons. Testimony of the voluminous and scrupulous research all such documentation has generated is to be found in endnotes which occupy no less than a quarter of the book (pp. 329–435), as well as in two helpful appendices listing all those whose overlapping lives are charted between its starting-point and 1906, the date of the death of Marie’s great-great-granddaughter. Their stories are often all the more intriguing by virtue of the incompleteness of what can be discovered. The majority of the 98 such granular ‘plots’ retold here are devoid of character development, let alone the architecture building towards the ‘sense of an ending’. That the details of many of these lives are only intermittently recuperable is inseparable from what is declared to be ‘a circumstantial history within an infinity of possible evidence’ (p. 304). Thus is the title of this book elucidated, gesturing towards a compendium of facts of which only the most visible, by virtue of being recorded, are locatable.
Clearly indebted to, or at least inspired by, Marc Bloch’s innovatory historiography, the ‘microhistories’ of the individual members of this family serve a larger purpose. That they originally came from Angoulême, a place ‘from which young men set off to make their fortune far from home’ (p. 249), has a wonderful resonance for readers of Illusions perdues. Rothschild follows these emigrants both to adjacent regions, north and south, and way beyond the Parisian destination of Balzac’s protagonist, underlining the extent to which a sleepy provincial backwater was itself transformed in the 1860s by the colonial and military ventures of Napoléon III, scattering a diaspora of the extended Aymard family across the globe, from Mexico to islands of the expanding French empire. There is a sense in which this is only one dimension of a narrative which often comes full circle: it was almost a century earlier that Marie Aymard set in motion legal efforts by proxy to retrieve the fortune, so rumour had it, acquired by her late husband in Grenada. But those who never left Angoulême, like Marie herself, also bear witness to the no less informative culture and constraints of immobility. The central concern of this book is indeed the conjunction, and often the jumble, of the private and the public: the determining contexts of war and economic downturns beyond the vicissitudes of the annual harvest; the institutional pressures of church and state; the social as well as geographical mobility engendered by the belated industrialization of nineteenth-century France; the changing patterns of occupation, from agricultural or domestic servitude to entrepreneurial initiatives and careers, however humble, in public administration. The distance travelled is underlined by repeated reminders of how many of the earlier generations, starting with Marie herself, could not even sign their name. Crucially, however, and unlike the broad overview adopted in studies exemplified long ago by Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) or Martine Segalen’s Mari et femme dans la société paysanne (1980), these changes are seen ‘from below’, ‘from the perspective of an obscure place and an unknown family’ (p. 11). The result is, as Rothschild’s introduction neatly puts it, ‘a history by contiguity of modern times’ (p. 2). This is a tremendously engaging book which reads, paradoxically, like a capacious nineteenth-century novel. And not least because of its elusive dénouements and the absence of an authorial omniscience straining our suspension of disbelief, it is enriched by the certainty, validated by scholarship of the highest quality, that none of it is invented.