(Jean Dagen). As is appropriate for a work of this type, most of these essays deal with issues thathave periodically attracted critical or scholarly interest.

In contrast, Françoise Rubellin’s book is the work of a single hand. Rubellin has an establishedreputation as a scholar of Marivaux’s work, and in spite of the now substantial weight ofbibliography devoted to Marivaux she finds new and illuminating things to say about the playsunder examination. She concentrates in her opening chapter on the biography of Marivauxhimself, before examining the characters of his plays and the actors who performed the roles atthe Italian Theatre or, in the case of La Seconde Surprise de l’amour, the Théâtre Français. Rubellinthen examines various aspects of Marivaux’s dramaturgy, his remarkable and discreet handling oftime, ‘qui ne commet pas d’infractions à l’unité du temps’ (p.92), his opening scenes, ‘révélateursd’une dramaturgie souple, variable et parfois surprenante’ (p.93) and his handling of thedenouements which, although sometimes criticised for their cruelty, are equally expressive of an‘euphorie passionnée’ (p.149). Chapters are also dedicated to two aspects of Marivaux’s plays thatare frequently ignored: the divertissements, which survive for La Surprise de l’amour and which maybe supposed to have originally existed for Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard, and which are socomplementary to the gaiety of the plays; and the didascalies and jeux de scenes, which meritattention because they demonstrate that ‘Marivaux a accordé une importance extrême auxexpressions non verbales de ses personnages’ (p.199). This is a book that scholars and studentsalike will find both useful and thought-provoking.

D. J. CulpinUniversity of St Andrews

India in the French Imagination: Peripheral Voices, 1754-1815. By Kate Marsh. London:Pickering and Chatto. 2009. 211 p. £60 (hb). ISBN 978-1-85196-994-4.

Kate Marsh’s monograph follows on from her investigation in 2007 of twentieth-century Frenchreactions to India, Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian Decolonisation, 1919-1962 (Oxford: PeterLang). Unsurprisingly, this evaluation of an earlier period is also informed by various strands ofpost-colonial theory, without ever being dominated by them. It is claimed that the influence ofFrance in India was at its height in 1754. Yet Marsh sets out to show that, despite the French defeatat the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, France’s representation of India during the periodassessed evinces a considerable continuity. In some respects French reverses could even havesharpened its own sense of a colonial identity. Like Canada, India was a theatre where Europeanrivalries were played out. The rivalry between Britain and France on the colonial stage underminesthe frequently adopted binary opposition between coloniser and colonised to create a ‘triangulardiscursive relationship’ (p.5) between the European powers and India. In addition to this Europeanrivalry, two other features dominated French engagement with India: the maintenance of itscomptoirs and its trade links. Versailles was consequently more concerned in sustaining its tradingrights and their potential development than in any notions of territorial aggrandisement, despitethe urgings of various schemers for imperial expansion. It is thus totally inappropriate to envisagethe loss of power in India as a loss of empire.

In the late eighteenth century interest in India was not confined to the commercial and politicalspheres. Attention was increasingly focused on its history and culture. In this field, the Hindureligion and its practices received much more coverage than those of Islam. The bayadères, thetemple dancers, fired Western imagination with their erotic performances. From 1760 theAcadémie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres fostered the study of Hindu mythology as apertinent subject of scholarly enquiry. Just like the fictional Persians of Montesquieu, theAmbassadors of Tipu Sultan provoked much curiosity during their visit to France in 1788. Such wastheir vogue, their images even appeared in material culture. Two of the ambassadors were paintedby the court artist Vigée-Lebrun. Further female interest in India is manifest in the genderedresponse of Mme de Genlis and Olympe de Gouges (p.56-67). The most high-profile preoccupationwith things Indian came from the pen of Voltaire, who in diverse philosophical works used the

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antiquity of India as a tool to undermine Judaeo-Christian chronology. (India, of course, alsoloomed large in Voltaire’s campaign for justice in relation to Lally, the royal representative there,who was disgraced and brutally executed.)

Given the immense authority of the British East India Company, the boundary betweencommercial and political power could be blurred. The British could therefore be portrayed infictional representations as despotic compared with the worthy French. If Lemierre’s La Veuve duMalabar (1770) can be deemed a historical play, it is counterfactual insofar as it ‘provides a fictionaldramatization of what French rule in India would have been’ as a contrast to the actual rule of theBritish (p.96).

The appearance of Marsh’s study is to be welcomed at a time when scholarly enquiry has beengradually moving away from a predominant concentration on the Atlantic world to evaluate theimportance of the Indian Ocean. English translations of the abundance of French quotations aresupplied. This work also helpfully contextualises Voltaire’s forays into India and its history andculture in the year (2009) that saw the appearance of the first fully scholarly edition of hisFragments sur l’Inde et le général Lalli (Les Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. LXXVb). All in all, givenits wide remit, this monograph will prove useful in itself as well as being a stimulus to furtherresearch in variety of disciplines.

Simon DaviesQueen’s University Belfast

The Super-Enlightenment: Daring To Know Too Much. Edited by Dan Edelstein. Oxford: VoltaireFoundation. 2010. SVEC 2010:01. x + 300 p. £55/€65/$95 (pb). ISBN 978-0-7294-0990-2.

This fascinating collection of essays unites a wealth of knowledge and opinion in an endeavour topaint a new picture of the intellectual climate of the eighteenth century. Edited by Dan Edelstein,the book is an attempt to challenge commonly held beliefs about the opposition that popularEnlightenment thought faced from mystical thinking and ‘illuminism’. Edelstein’s introductionprovides a background for the world of ideas that the work will consider and hints at the line ofapproach that the argumentative thrust of the collection as a whole will take. Not only, he claims,does much of the problematically termed ‘illuminist’ thought have a grounding in the scientificand enlightened spirit of the age of reason but also some of the work of the Enlightenment properappears, under closer scrutiny, to resort on occasion to mythologising as well. In an attemptto demonstrate a new and more accurate way of considering the breadth of Enlightenmentthought, Edelstein and his collaborators are asking ‘how Enlightenment principles could coexist,seemingly without difficulty, with those lasting currents of mysticism, magic, mythicalspeculation and hermeticism that persisted throughout the eighteenth century’ (p.2). The pictureof the Enlightenment they are trying to compile is ‘less one of a homogeneous movement, definedby certain core beliefs, than a movement continuously oscillating between opposing poles’ (p.31).

Peter Reill kick-starts the volume with an essay that discusses an eighteenth century in whichsecret societies had sprung up that ‘proclaimed that one could learn the secrets of life and thetransformation of matter in their lodges’ (p.38). However, Reill points out, amid such hermetic andalchemical lodges arose thinkers such as Johann Salomo Semler, who applied ‘the modern criticalapparatus of Enlightenment vitalism to revise traditional hermetic assumptions’ (p.45) and thusblurred traditional historical distinctions in the development of what Reill calls a ‘hermeticimagination’.

Natalie Bayer considers the impact of the arrival of western Enlightenment ideas on Russia in theeighteenth-century. She discusses the reaction towards Voltaireanism, the attempts to reconcilenew ideas with orthodox and traditional Russian values and the emergence of Masonic lodges,arguing that, although the Russian intellectuals and Freemasons ‘offered a criticism ofEnlightenment materialism, they did not reject all the components of Enlightenment philosophyand practice’ (p.188).

Kris Pangburn sets forth a magnificent study of Bonnet’s theory of palingenesis, in which heargues convincingly that the resurrection theories proposed by Bonnet and his contemporaries

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© 2012 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies