Alon Confino's brief new essay on Holocaust historiography is primarily a prolegomenon to and justification for his forthcoming study of Nazi fantasy and temporality. At this level, the book works exceptionally well. But it strives to establish the need for a future book through offering a broad historiographical reflection whose importance is supposed to transcend the goal of motivating one man's research agenda. Confino wants this meditation to intercede in Holocaust historiography and reorient it, in part by bringing the tools of historical theory to bear on its issues. And promisingly, Confino chooses the historiography of the French Revolution as a counterpoint to help think through the intellectual situation of Holocaust studies today. In this broader purpose, Confino's success is definite but mixed.

As the book goes on, Confino's comparison of the two sets of events turns out to be historiographic and essentially strategic. It is not—to choose one example—like Arno Mayer's brilliant comparative essay on the how the French and Bolshevik Revolutions saw violence and terror follow in their wake. Instead, after clearing his throat, Confino examines how origins, context, contingency, and ideology in Holocaust studies need to be rethought. His main conclusion is that students of the Holocaust must pay more attention to pre-Holocaust fantasies, instead of reducing the death of the Jews to the truncated origins, restricted context, and local contingency of wartime atrocity. In a deft chapter, Confino indicts the turn to ideology in Holocaust studies as essential but insufficient. All things considered, Confino has certainly won the right to pursue his neo-intentionalist agenda—for that is essentially what it is, broadening “intention” to incorporate popular fantasy and not just policy choice—in his eagerly awaited future scholarship on how the Holocaust took place.

All the same, the invocation of the historiography of the French Revolution is helpful only sometimes in the larger critique Confino offers, and in any case it is highly intermittent and sometimes vague. And occasionally the call to the French Revolution for help in justifying Confino's research is less than entirely persuasive. In one chapter, Confino appeals to François Furet's famous though debatable contention that 1789 made the Terror a foregone conclusion to suggest that historians need to think more about how 1933 set off the Holocaust, in part by enabling the fantasy of a world without Jews long before the reality became possible. Regardless of whether that parallel is useful, Confino also sees his demand for an ideological prehistory to the Holocaust as analogous to Alexis de Tocqueville's argument that the French Revolution merely consolidated the absolutist project of centralizing state authority. “All that the French Revolution did would have been done without it,” Tocqueville claimed. Confino wants this slogan to imply that the prehistory of the Holocaust in the first years of Nazi rule needs to be studied, yet that important but simple suggestion is available without agreeing with Confino that “Auschwitz accelerated the creation of a world without Jews that would have been created without it” (p. 76). For one thing, Tocqueville's claim was about prerevolutionary history rather than about the unfolding of the revolutionary dynamic that Furet in fact faulted Tocqueville for omitting. Tocqueville's thesis of continuity would make more sense applied to long-term and indeed pre-Nazi history. Confino, by contrast, seems much more interested in what one might call “the Nazi dynamic” set off by 1933. Further, Tocqueville's case for continuity—like Raul Hilberg's later one with its stages from exclusion to genocide—rested on an actual institutional history. Confino's desired connection, in contrast, is between the fantasies of 1933–41 and the grim realities that followed. Even granting Confino's premise that historians have ignored Nazi fantasy in particular or the years between 1933 and 1941 in general, which I'm not sure is true, it doesn't follow that restoring the balance requires “decentering” Auschwitz or reduces the institutional move to murder to a banal development that would have occurred some other way even without the decisions and processes after the annexation of Poland and the invasion of the Soviet Union that historians have spent a generation reconstructing.

As these comments suggest, thinking along with Confino is a joy, even if, as in natural science, not all of his provocative thought experiments have to pan out for others to work. I found myself equally taken by the historical premise with which Confino starts his book: these two events deserve to be connected precisely because they are special. In the end, however, Confino's interest in deprovincializing the Holocaust—thinking about how it was like all other events in some of the basic conceptual issues it poses—ousts another book he could have composed. In this unwritten book, Confino would have pursued a more serious confrontation of the two “foundational pasts” that the revolution and genocide have provided to world consciousness. After all, to argue, as Confino does repeatedly, that the conceptual problems of historicizing the Holocaust are universal is to scant the specific and restricted comparison that juxtaposition with another singular event raises. If the Holocaust is like all other historical events in some respects (e.g., it involved contingency), these then are precisely not the respects in which the Holocaust is—like the French Revolution—a foundational past for modern humanity.

And yet there are tantalizing moments in this book when the extremely interesting comparison announced in the title shines through enticingly. Of these, much the most important comes in Confino's passing reminder that where once the French Revolution with its promises of universal emancipation and solidarity lit the world on fire, now the Holocaust with its emphasis on particular injury and trauma has taken its place in moral consciousness (p. 9). Though marginal to the rest of his text, Confino has hit upon a crucial event to decipher: how it happened that the Holocaust came to occupy the space of the French Revolution in the political imaginary. This discovery, however, points not so much to a more subtle account of the Nazi era, but to a history of what was at stake in the extraordinary age not long ago when its nightmares suddenly became so vivid, precisely as prior dreams collapsed.