Welsh Journals

offered 'the ever-present threat of sudden violence beneath the agreeable veneer of sociability and good manners', a statement which might apply equally well to ancien regime France as a whole. Throughout these sections of the book the note of authenticity in matters of detail, description and definition is striking. It could be argued that Professor Cobb exaggerates the importance of Lyons as the capital of counter-revolution in the south-east. It was unquestionably a magnet for all sorts of intriguers, spies, assassins and criminals, but one doubts whether the counter-revolution ever had a capital. It is evident that plans were hatched and orders dispatched from time to time, but, given the extremely ill-assorted, irregular bands at the disposal of the counter-revolution and the importance attached to local antagonisms, the chances of their being implemented were minimal. We should not be surprised, for the counter-revolution was never as bureau- cratised or as centralised as the Jacobin Terror. How could it have been? As secret orders were hurried from town to town, village to village, chateau to inn, they inevitably assumed 'a local habitation and a name'. One only has to read the correspondence of leading ultras in the south- east from 1814 to 1820 to realise that the comte d'Antraigues, the greatest exponent of entrepreneurial espionage produced by the Revolution, had a host of disciples. The counter-revolution fed upon particular grievances, personal hatreds and village feuds. In this respect Lyons was certainly less significant in dictating the character of provincial counter-terrorism than Paris was in determining that of provincial terrorism (and this latter point can often be exaggerated). The book is really a collection of essays, rather tenuously related by Professor Cobb's unique 'angle of vision' and philosophy of history and life. It is not that the author finds it impossible to sympathise with those who exercise power. The representant en mission, Javoques, exercised the powers of life, death and pregnancy over those who crossed him politically or in bed, and there is a malign approval of this 'wild, raving eccentric, an individualist in a collective clutch of terrorists'. Nicolas Guénot, the wood-floater from the Yonne, whom Professor Cobb uses as an illustra- tion of the biographical approach to history, had a particularly unsavoury curriculum vitae, but also used his brief spell of power as a police official with the tacit approval of the author. What Professor Cobb really dislikes is depersonalised authority, the boring bureaucrat, the soulless private prosecutor. Tyhus, the Minister of Police, Cochon de Lapperant, is condemned not because he exercised considerable power (he consigned Babeuf and his fellow-plotters to the guillotine) but because he was 'dull', 'an utterly typical member of the professional legal class'. In his private comedie humaine the author is more attracted by the brutal than the boring, more likely to applaud vengeance than vertu. In a revealing phrase, he writes: 'Gu6not was an unusual, even interesting monster. Cochon is a boring very ordinary administrator.' The choice of individuals and groups to be studied is, therefore, a subjective and often a random one. The consequences for the reader are vignettes and interpretations which stimulate the imagination, which settle the historical digestion