Taking an anthropological approach, this article interprets Pagnol's critically acknowledged classic as a reinvention of a carnivalesque ritual practised in France from the late middle ages through the late 1930s, when ethnographers observed its last vestiges. By linking La Femme du boulanger (The baker's wife, 1938) to contemporaneous debates over gender, national decadence, and the definition of French cultural identity, I argue that the film recycles the charivari's long-standing function as a tool of popular protest against social and political practices regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the nation. In the context of the Popular Front, Pagnol's charivari ridiculed divisive partisan politics pitting Left against Right, symbolically purged class conflict from the social body, and created a new form of folklore that served as a focal point for the communitarian ritual of movie-going among the urban working and middle classes. In so doing, the film promoted the ongoing shift in public support away from the Popular Front in favour of a conservative ‘National Union’ government under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who in 1938–9 assumed the role of France's newest political patriarch.

The military triumphs and the political eclipse of Marlborough epitomize much of the history of the Treaty of Utrecht. He was, as even Bolingbroke acknowledged, the great successor to William, keeping the Grand Alliance together and imparting to it a rapid and vigorous motion in sharp contrast to the delays of William's ‘languishing out disastrous campaigns’. As ‘the greatest general, and as the greatest minister, that our country or perhaps any other has produced’ (to quote Bolingbroke again), he was deeply involved in the prolonged negotiations leading to the peace. But Marlborough and the Whigs were discredited and ousted from office in the course of the negotiations, and the peace was the work of a Tory ministry which claimed that the terms showed a reaction from the impracticable proposals of the Whigs to the more sound, statesmanlike and feasible, concepts of William III.

Two thousand people bought tickets for the civic ceremony to welcome Joseph Chamberlain and his young American bride, held in Birmingham Town Hall on 8 January 1889. The Times newspaper was at pains to point out how unstintingly the more warm-hearted of the local Gladstonian Liberals had given of their goodwill, even though the occasion was mainly due to initiatives from the leaders of Radical Unionism. It seemed to bode well for the health of the Unionist alliance that among the worthies listed as present was no less a person than Sir James Sawyer, President of the Conservative Association.

Venice has long evoked contrasting images – on the one hand the republican embodiment of Renaissance principles, a rare example of both stability and freedom; on the other, a city of spying and treachery, a government founded on oppression and driven by corruption. Caught between the Scylla and Carybdis of what amounts to a historiographical paradox, historians have found it difficult to escape its reductiveness, taking sides in describing one view as ‘myth’, the other as historical reality. The five books reviewed in this article suggest different but connected ways of sailing out of these straits by emphasizing the utter diversity of the city, the government, and the images they have evoked through the ages. In this interpretation, more than harmony, what is crucial about Venice is the coexistence of the different ‘worlds’ of this early multicultural metropolis. In line with a recent move away from fixed tags and neat developments to an emphasis on diversity in the historiography of early modern Europe, this is a welcome and interesting evolution in the history of Venice, though it is by no means unproblematic, multiculturalism being no easier issue in the Renaissance than in the twenty-first century.

The Arab question in British diplomacy, it is remarkable to observe, has conjured up, both among those directly involved and among subsequent commentators, an amount of passionate discussion, of anguished retrospection, of accusation and self-denunciation, quite out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. For after all, compared to the great issues of Europe, America, the Commonwealth, and India, the Husain-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, are small and paltry transactions which, as luck would have it, have turned out, it is true, to be inopportune and profitless and the cause of much loss and tribulation. For the historian of the Middle East, of course, the British connexion must loom very large by reason of its immediate impact and of its ultimate consequences, but in British history can the short-lived middle-eastern episode be more than a passing incident in the Indian summer of the Empire? For they are perhaps right, those who assert that had Britain been able to retain India, her middle-eastern position could probably have been maintained, regardless of mistakes and confusions in middle-eastern policy itself, and that, once India gone, neither virtue nor virtuosity would have availed to preserve Suez, Haifa and Habbaniyya. But this cool, sceptical view is rarely met in the writings either of the participants or of the subsequent commentators, whose mode is one of burning regret, and vehement lamentations, and who are for ever weighing good faith against bad faith, promises kept and promises broken, scrutinizing motives and examining scruples, like the diligent followers of some strict pietism, oppressed by sin and dolefully thirsting for justification.

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, the ‘devil of a country’ to which Dr Alexander Johnston referred, seems an unlikely candidate, at the historian's first glance, for consternation. Today's visitor would find that the ‘Garden Parish’, St Ann's, truly exudes everything warm and wonderful associated with tropical stereotypes. Yet two hundred years ago Dr Alexander Johnston, ‘Practitioner of Physick and Chiurgery’ rarely observed this very paradise, the foothills of coastal St Ann's, in a positive light. To this particular Scot, the bright reds and greens clearly took second place to the shabby problems of daily life in the Caribbean.

The conventional picture of early Virginia suggests an almost exclusively male population, intent on personal profit, ruthlessly ignoring social considerations, lacking stability. This article argues that such a picture is an exaggeration, and draws attention to three communities, the inhabitants of which more closely resembled the rural English societies from which they had come. Particular attention is paid to the Neck of Land in Charles City, upriver from Jamestown close to the falls. The survival of administrative records makes possible an account of this small community between 1613 and 1629, revealing a hamlet of healthy married families whose concerns were sex, land, and status, rather than death and disease or the neighbouring Indian menace; and where stability in the 1620s did not, however, mean the absence of social tensions. Thus the Neck of Land, taken together with the communities at Point Comfort and on the Eastern Shore, demonstrates the inadequacy of current perceptions of early Virginian society.

It is surprising that while there is a considerable literature dealing with the reform of the civil service from the time of Burke to the setting up of the Civil Service Commission in 1855, very little attention has been paid to the final stages of reform following the introduction of open competition in 1870. Yet it was in this period that patronage ceased to be of importance and the modern civil service developed. The Order in Council of 4 June 1870 which made open competition the normal method of entry to the civil service enormously reduced the scope of patronage, but it did not kill it immediately. Right up to the First World War remnants of the old system lingered in most departments, although by then a lavish system of honours and subsidies from the party funds had displaced the most objectionable forms of political patronage. The purpose of this article is to give some indication

Zionism and the creation of a new society. By Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. 293. ISBN 0-19-509209-0.

Land and power: the Zionist resort to force, 1881–1948. By Anita Shapira. Translated by William Templer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Reissued Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. x+446. ISBN 0-8047-3776-2.

The founding myths of Israel: nationalism, socialism, and the making of the Jewish state. By Zeev Sternhell. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xv+419. ISBN 0-691-00967-8.

The article analyses the processes that preceded the construction of sanctuaries in the Holy Land through the prism of the Church of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, deconstructing and uncovering layers of political power struggles which led to its formation and present shape. This study, based on extensive archival research and a field survey, demonstrates how the reconstruction of the basilica of Gethsemane, and hence the concretization in stone of some of the most depicted evangelical traditions, was not merely the result of an ecumenical consideration. In fact, it reflects the narrow, and sometimes very down-to-earth, interests of various denominations and political forces. The study also demonstrates how the unique setting of the Holy Land encouraged simultaneous multi-layered political processes, comparing the case-study of the Church of Gethsemane to those of other symbolic and national religious monuments: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.

In 1648, Essex was the scene of a major military campaign of the Second Civil War. This essay seeks to explain why that campaign was fought. There are several reasons why such an investigation is worthwhile. Firstly, it challenges the fashionable historical idea that the Civil Wars were fundamentally a conflict between centre and localities. Secondly, it concentrates upon the Second Civil War as a serious proposition, not as a pathetic appendage of the earlier conflict to be dismissed with contempt but not consideration. Thirdly, it demands a look at Essex as a county caught up in the violence of civil war.

In the great and widespread revival of medieval studies by which the nineteenth century was distinguished, no province was so long neglected as that of academic institutions and scholastic thought. The pioneers of the historical revival were, almost without exception, men deeply influenced by the romantic movement, and many of them were antiquaries rather than historians; their successors, especially in England and Germany, were principally concerned to trace in the Middle Ages the origins of national institutions and racial characteristics; to neither party did the speculations of what seemed an outworn religious organization make any appeal. Even those scholars who, in France and elsewhere, were themselves Catholics and ecclesiastics, were also men who had been brought up in an age of transition and adaptation, when traditional religion was on the defensive, and were often more sympathetic towards the various systems of philosophy—idealist or ontological—that flowered and fell in Germany and north Italy in the period after the French Revolution. Meanwhile, in the century before that great cataclysm, the scholastic thought of the thirteenth century, rejuvenated by the Italian and Spanish theologians of the counter-Reformation, had been all but submerged by successive waves of Jansenism, rationalism and the new philosophy of Kant, and had only survived in a few schools as a dry and formal discipline. To all alike, therefore, whether Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans or free-thinkers, the vast mass of manuscript material which survived from the scholastic period to cumber the libraries appeared destitute of literary or human interest, and daunted the boldest with its bulk and its technical terminology.

On 31 March 1939, Britain, breaking with hitherto steadfastly pursued policy, declared her commitment to the defence of Poland in the event of a German attack. This gesture was a dramatic change in Britain's foreign policy, not merely in relation to one East European state, but more notably in relation to Europe as a whole. Not surprisingly, the declaration has been the focal point of historical attention, although the events following have received less attention. The crisis days of March 1939 saw a chain of events, not necessarily of the same origin or character but which in sum total caused disquiet in European capitals, most clearly in London. Because of this it is easy to over-look the long-term nature of some of the events which culminated in March 1939 and thus, in consequence, to overestimate the effect of the British guarantee upon Polish foreign policy.

Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.