To kill a cat

Anthony Pagden

• Settecento Riformatore. Vol. IV: La Caduta dell’Antico Regime 1776-1789 Part One: I Grandi Staii dell’Occidente, Part Two: II Patriotismo Repubblicano e gli Imperi dell’Est by Franco Venturi
  Einaudi, 463 pp, July 1984, ISBN 88 06 05695 6
• The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton
  Viking, 284 pp, £14.95, July 1984, ISBN 0 7139 1728 8
• Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy by James Miller
  Yale, 272 pp, £25.00, July 1984, ISBN 0 300 03044 4

It is the fortune, or perhaps the misfortune, of the Enlightenment that its historians frequently write very long books. Franco Venturi’s Settecento Riformatore, which must surely be one of the longest, has now reached its fifth and final volume. As an enterprise it can have few parallels even among dixhuitièmistes. It offers no less than the description of an entire culture seen from a single geographical viewpoint. The culture is the whole of Europe from 1730 until the demise of the ancien régime in the French Revolution. The perspective is Italy, for, as Venturi announced at the start of the project, the Italians were, because of their long tradition of social and political analysis, perhaps the most perceptive observers of the European scene.