This volume of essays is a Festschrift for T. C. W. Blanning, who has recently retired as professor of European history at Cambridge University. The title alludes to his The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (Oxford, 2002), a comparative study of Britain, the Holy Roman Empire, and France in the eighteenth century, in which Blanning drew on Jürgen Habermas's concept of a public sphere to explain the successes and failures of European ancien régime monarchies before the French Revolution.
The introduction by James Sheehan is a summary and discussion of Blanning's main published work. The first chapter, by Chris Clark, is on the Prussian coronation ceremony of 1701. This ceremony was “invented”; there was no precedent for it, and thus various rituals and practices had to be adopted from elsewhere for the occasion. These were not, however, used as a mask for power, nor were the participants in the coronation just actors performing a previously defined cultural script. The elements of the ceremony were selected deliberately, if eclectically, because of the meanings they had for contemporaries. Peter Wilson's chapter on German military culture is largely on the institutional structure of military organization in the Reich , with some discussion of issues such as mutinies, soldiers’ loyalty, and the education of officers. Hamish Scott focuses on the development of diplomatic culture, especially the increasing importance of French as the language of diplomacy, the emergence of permanent diplomatic representations, and the close affinity of diplomatic culture with court culture.
In one of only two chapters focusing on Britain, Andrew Thompson argues that the best evidence for seeing eighteenth-century Britain as a confessional state is to be found in foreign policy in which the belief in a common Protestant interest often played an important role. Brendan Simms examines the “strategic culture” (112) of British foreign policy from 1714 to 1760 and, contrary to tendencies to focus on Britain's overseas empire, usefully emphasizes the other “imperial” dimension, involvement in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire (115–16). James van Horn Melton discusses the Protestant community in the archbishopric of Salzburg, which survived heavy pressure to convert to Catholicism, until the archbishop's Emigrationspatent of 1731. Melton examines reactions by Protestants to the attempted imposition of Catholic orthodoxy. These often entailed the contrafactual subversion of Catholic hymns and prayers, as well as outright resistance, for example, to demands that inhabitants wear the badge of the scapulary. Joachim Whaley questions the idea that the Aufklärung reached a crisis after the mid-eighteenth century and was then followed from the 1770s by increasingly anti-Enlightenment ideas. According to Whaley the concerns of figures in the late eighteenth century were distinct from those of earlier theorists but not because of a general rejection of Enlightenment. Maiken Umbach examines the relationship between princely power in the Holy Roman Empire and the moral culture of Bürgerlichkeit, which was often appropriated by minor territorial princes because it suited their particular position within the legal and political framework of the empire. R. J. W. Evans's illuminating chapter on the politics of language in eighteenth-century Hungary is concerned with the use of Latin as an official language, the responses to attempts by Joseph II to impose German as official language, and the relationship among the various vernaculars. The subject of Julian Swann's chapter is the political culture of supporters and opponents of the 1771 Maupeou coup. Swann argues that this coup tore up the rule book of relations between the monarch and his parlements, while the use of the army in suppressing the parlements conjured up the prospect of “military despotism” (242). Derek Beales draws attention to a rich but neglected source on the public sphere in the Habsburg monarchy under Joseph II: petitions. Beales shows that these ought to form part of any discussion of the public sphere, even though their authors and content separate them from the world of clubs, journals, and coffeehouses usually associated with the public sphere. Munro Price revises Daniel Wick's Namierite explanation of the decision by certain French court nobles to turn against the monarchy in the years before 1789: nobles alienated by court politics did not necessarily become prorevolutionary; many were reactionaries after 1789. Often an important motive for their actions was “nationalism” (275), especially their disappointment at France's dismal performance in foreign policy before 1789. William Doyle discusses the abolition of hereditary nobility in the National Assembly on 19 June 1790. Paradoxically, the abolition of the sale of offices had turned the French nobility into a closed caste, which was then all the more vulnerable to criticisms that it did not deserve its special status. Gary Savage analyzes foreign policy debates in France immediately before and during the early years of the revolution. Savage emphasizes the remarkable continuities between prerevolutionary criticisms of the alliance with Austria and the anti-Austrian rhetoric after 1789. Mark Berry discusses Mozart's operas La Clemenza di Tito and the Zauberflöte, commenting on the themes of power and hierarchy in them. The final chapter by Emma Winter analyzes the motives behind the art patronage of Ludwig of Bavaria between 1825 and 1848, especially its purpose of moral education, arguing that this particular form of culture cannot be easily aligned with either representational or public varieties of art production.
The “cultures” discussed here, therefore, range from, for example, visual art and music to the beliefs of policy makers and the invention or subversion of rituals, thus illustrating the very wide variety of ways in which a focus on “culture” can inform historiography. British domestic affairs may seem a little underrepresented in this volume, given their prominence in Blanning's Culture of Power. There are also, for some reason, slight inconsistencies in the format of the references, and the reference to Alexander von Humboldt on page 173 should probably be to his brother Wilhelm. In sum, however, this is a very strong and interesting collection.
