New Books In European Studies

It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on–with the executioner’s aid–the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless. Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a ne

One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just the military that suffered: refugees poured west to escape the brutality of the Red Army’s advance through the historic German lands of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia; and civilians in the cities bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s failure to stem the allied bombing campaign of the RAF at night time and the USAAF during the day. The staggering scale of losses during those last months of war also hints at why 1945 is such a grimly fascinating one from a historical perspective: Nazi Germany faced an inevitable end, yet continued to fight grimly until the bitter end, achieving a total defeat that was unprecedented in modern history. In doing so it created a ‘zero hour’ for the German people, who then set about rebuilding their lives, economic activity and ultimately Germany itself, with the Nazi era firmly in the past. The legacy of the

As Elizabeth Goldsmith writes in The King’s Mistresses: The Liberated Lives of Marie Mancini, Princess Colonna, and Her Sister Hortense, Duchess Mazarin (PublicAffairs, 2012), the Mazarin sisters were “arguably the first media celebrities.” Upon their arrival at Louis XIV’s Court of Versailles, the sisters made a splash when Marie and the young King promptly fell in love. Ultimately, the couple’s relationship– which climaxed with a forced separation and Marie’s confinement in a convent– reads like something out of Shakespeare. Forced into advantageous mismatches that were, at turns, oppressive and abusive, the sisters jumped back into public view when Hortense, donning men’s clothing and making use of the new post coach service, left her husband and took to the road. Marie promptly joined her. At a time when it was borderline scandalous for women to travel unaccompanied by men, much less divorce them, the sisters darted about Europe, seeking refuge from th

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now. In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences. While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of

The second-longest reigning British Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II has always remained an elusive figure, a monumental accomplishment given the media attention focused upon her family. In her new book, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House, 2012), Sally Bedell Smith peels back the layers of mystique to reveal the very shy woman who is the current Queen. It isn’t so much a dismantling as a reevaluation, an effort to appreciate a figure who– though part of an institution that is seen by some as vestigial– is nonetheless deeply impressive and truly beloved. Smith interviewed over 200 people, 160 of whom are on the record as the queen’s relatives and friends–a fact that suggests that the 40 individuals who opted for anonymity are even grander higher ups. Though the book is not “authorized,” it carries significant clout. Buckingham Palace also offered Smith limited access to the Queen, so the author could see her subject in action and play witness to

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker’s lifetime. This will be required reading for

It’s springtime in the American Midwest. The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new baseball season has already produced history-making performances and rising stars. But the students in my sports history class don’t want to talk about any of that. Instead, the subject of sports talk among these red-blooded Americans is . . . the Champions League! European football, unlike the American variety, is a sport of global reach and increasing popularity. In the weeks ahead, hundreds of millions of fans around the world will watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League and the group stages and knockout rounds of 2012 UEFA European Championship. To mark the occasion, we take a break from our normal slate of interviews to bring together a team of scholars and experts who look at European football in its various dimensions. In this special double episode, we talk about the economic and business side of soccer with Simon Chadwick and Brad

Today we are talking with Philip Gounev (co-edited with Vincenzo Ruggiero) about his new book Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe (Taylor and Francis, 2012). He is the co-author of this book with Vincenzo Ruggiero, and they have a number of people who have made contributions to individual chapters. This is a great combination of two researcher’s skills. Prof Ruggiero is a major theorist on the topic of organized crime and Philip is a leading researcher into corruption in Europe. The issue of corruption is always ‘timely’. It may be that in a global financial crisis the consequences of corrupt practices have even greater impact. The authors focus on the connection between corruption and organized crime, especially how these two concepts interact in a market place. Organized criminals need security to ensure stable operations, and the public officials can provide that security through corrupt practices. I do a great deal of research into corruption and organized crime but I still learnt a

Over 2.5 million Germans died as a result of World War I, or about 4% of the German population at the time. Somewhere between 7 and 9 million Germans died as a result of World War II, or between 8% to 11% of the German population at the time.* It’s hardly any wonder, then, that in the first half of the twentieth century the Germans were preoccupied with death and how to deal with it–it was all around them. Monica Black‘s impressive Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2011) explains how they did it. She focuses on remembrances of various sorts (funerals, monuments, eulogies, etc.) and the ways in which they were shaped by German tradition, transient ideology, and exigency. As Monica demonstrates, Germans themselves changed “German Way of Death” radically over this short period as they attempted to deal with a whole variety of competing pressures, values and interests. This is a fascinating book as it shows how the dead, though gone, are rea

Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players. For the league’s teams, the draft is the chance to re-stock their rosters with fresh young talent, basing their choices on reams of analytical reports and hours of dissected game films. The players, on the other hand, see the draft as the fulfillment of their lifelong dreams, the chance to slip the penury of amateur collegiate status and earn millions as a professional athlete. Like everything the NFL does, the draft is an epic, made-for-television spectacle, with fans cheering and jeering from the balcony of New York’s Radio City Music Hall, team executives arrayed on the floor like UN diplomats in crisis deliberations, the wise chorus of ESPN experts predicting each team’s selection and then decrying those teams that didn’t do as they had predicted, and the players themselves, dressed in tailor-made suits purchased with their expected millions, waiting for their names to be called.

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned, the “bad guys” of Western history, for they (apparently) didn’t like reason, truth, progress and all that. First among the black-hats was Joseph de Maistre. He believed the French Revolution was “satanic,” as were the ideas behind it. Or so I thought until I read Carolina Armenteros‘ excellent book The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Turns out de Maistre was a good deal more subtle and thoughtful than the “received view” of him suggests, and Carolina does

Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a German journalist who came to England while a teenager, and who has lived here and worked here ever since (even managing to marry an English girl). As you would expect from such a background, Philip’s Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (Faber and Faber, 2012) is full of closely observed insights about the linkages (and differences) between these two great European rivals. He takes us through familiar territory and introduces us to new ways of seeing, for instance, the way the two square up on the football pitch (with an examination of two of the great players for each country, Bertie Vogts and Kevin Keegan). He brings fresh material to old subjects, such as the apparent gulf between the two when it comes to comedy (the Germans indeed do, he argues, have a sense of humour – but he glories in how the English build humour into

Alabama-Auburn. Maple Leafs-Canadiens. Boca Juniors-River Plate. Carlton-Collingwood.Fenerbahce-Galatasaray. Great rivalries are the catalysts of national sporting cultures. They are the high point of a season, fueling emotions as well as ticket sales and media hype. The most famous rivalries typically have bearing for league standings and championships. But many are also grounded in long-standing divisions between social classes or religious and ethnic communities. The case can be made that the most intense rivalry in all of sports is between Glasgow’s two football clubs: Celtic and Rangers. Known collectively as the “Old Firm,” the two clubs have dominated Scottish football for more than a century. The last time a team other than Celtic or Rangers won the Scottish league was 1985. But the rivalry is built on more than the competition for titles and trophies. Rangers were long associated with Scottish Protestantism, and the club refused for decades to sign a Catholic player. Celtic,

My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory in Newcastle. He ended up making the parts of the spot lights that were used to guide anti-aircraft batteries (and my grandmother made parachutes, just over the River Tyne in Gateshead). Although this was not half as exciting to find out about as a young boy as discovering that he was in fact a Commando or part of the Long Range Desert Group, what my grandfather was part of was vital to the defeat of Nazism. In his excellent book, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2011), David Edgerton is all about this crucial non-military part of Britain’s war with Germany, and it sets about challenges perceptions almost from the front page. His argument is that Britain was actually far more able and well resourced than commonly thought. It en

This week we’re continuing our focus on the Second World War, as our guest author, Jorg Muth, chats about his recent book Command Culture: Officer Education in the U.S. Army and the German Armed Forces, 1901-1940, and the Consequences for World War II (University of North Texas Press, 2011). Muth’s book, which has recently been selected for the U.S. Army Chief of Staff’s Professional Reading List, is a provocative analytical comparison of the respective cultures of officership in the US Army and the German armed forces in the first half of the twentieth century. In setting up his comparison, Muth pulls few punches in his critique of the flaws resident in both institutions. Yet while the American army managed to overcome these flaws, Muth notes that the Wehrmacht ultimately fell victim to its own hubris and ossified culture inherent in its origins. He continues to offer valuable insights as to how these institutional problems and successes continue to shape the culture of officership in the U

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death. In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II. And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one c

I have always found something distinctly ‘un-British’ about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire – and British spirit – as being founded upon the open ocean: unconfined, stormy and there to be mastered. A route to the rest of the world and limitless opportunity. The Mediterranean, by contrast, always seemed a bit limp. It had no tides; its main purpose was as a tourist destination; it was (at least on its northern shore) very European in a way that Britain was not. It seemed as cramped as an Italian tourist beach in autumn. But I was very, very wrong. That is why reading Robert Holland‘s excellent book Blue Water Empire: the British in the Mediterranean since 1800 (Penguin, 2012) was such an eye opener to me. British history has been intimately bound up with the Med, and not just through the odd colonial oddity like Gibraltar or Malta, or through the search for a viable theatre in the Second World War. As Holland argues, it is the British that made the Med

This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of our previous guests, Matthias Strohn, recommended the book, and I am glad he did. Stahel’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of German planning for and execution of Operation Barbarossa. Stahel highlights the many flaws and paradoxes intrinsic to German thinking about war in the East, not least of which was the deception perpetrated by Halder, who masked the centrality of the drive on Moscow to his own plans in order to avoid confrontation with Hitler. By late August 1941, Stahel argues, the German failure decisively to defeat the Soviet regime (even while winning significant victories at places like Minsk and Smolensk) spelled doom for the Wehrmacht. Nor is Stahel resting on his laurels. By the time I conducted the interview, his second work had just hit the shelves. In Kiev

In Had Me a Real Good Time: Faces Before, During, and After (Omnibus 2011) Andy Neill provides a detailed account of Faces, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed groups of the early seventies. Neill begins his story with biographies of those who would become Faces including, of course, sections about each of their early bands: Ronnie Lane, Kenney Jones, and Ian “Mac” McLagan with Small Faces; Rod Stewart and Ron Wood with the Jeff Beck Group. The book’s mid-section details Face’s career through four albums and countless tours of England and, essential for their commercial success, the United States. Also included is an analysis of the balance that was sometime kept and sometimes not, between Face’s career and the career of their superstar sfront man, Rod Stewart. Neill devotes the final part of his story to the band’s break-up and the individual members’ post-Faces careers. All-in-all, Neill provides a richly researched history of a band and all the people

As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, class conflict, imperialism, political repression, globalization. The history of bicycle racing brings in another key ingredient of the modern age: technology. The sport began only with the invention of a machine, and its history, from the mid-1800s to today, has been linked to the constant adaptation of that machine. Andrew Ritchie documents the first decades of this history in his book Quest for Speed: A History of Early Bicycle Racing 1868-1903 (Cycle Publishing, 2011). As he explains in our interview, an important part of the story is the evolution of the bicycle, from early wood-and-steel models that rattled their riders, through the high-wheel bikes that we typically associate with 19th-century cycling, to the more familiar bicycles of the 1890s, with chain-driven rear wheels and pneumatic tires. An important point Andrew makes is that technological develo