Backstairs Boy
THE career of Ouvrard, the Ivar Kreuger of the Revolution and the Empire, deserves a goodbook. This isn't it. Written by a German business- man, it has the faults of amateur efforts by historically uncritical partisans. The political background is sketchy and inaccurate. The errors may be trivial but they are alarming. Herr Wolff, for example, does not seem to have readnor has his collaborator, Dr. Alfred Schmitz, read the now abundant literature on the Restoration which considerably alters the traditional 'liberal' picture. It is not certain that Charles X and Polignac planned a coup d'Etal in 1830. It is certain that Polignac did not succeed Villele and that the Archbishop's palace was sacked in 1831, not 1830. The vulgar error that Fouche was 'one of the collection of renegade monks and priests who played such an important part in the Revolution' is repeated. Dr. Schmitz finds time to denigrate Madelin's Histoire do Consulat et de !'Empire, not unjustly, but ignores the much better and much more relevant book, Madelin's life of Fouche.
Some of the faults are the work of the trans- lator. We have the perfectly good traditional term for the Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire: the Imperial Diet. Why then Irl ay.e, 'Imperial Assemblies'? Why does the RoYalls` and Catholic army of La Vendee appear as thc 'Counter-Revolutionary army'? Where ,s 'Poitou et Bretagne'? Perhaps the most dranlatle, mistranslation is the constant description °I. Godoy as 'Prince of La Paz.' Does the translator think that this is a territorial title? The book is not totally without merit. Thank: to Mr. T. A. B. Corley's useful notes it is not 3:1 bad as it was when the German collaborators had finished with it. Herr Wolff does make intelligible some of the complicated transactions in which Ouvrard made and lost fortunes. That he speoi so much time in gaol, that he lost several fortunes, casts doubt on Ouvrard's claim to ,0 a 'speculator of genius,' but he was busy one occasionally important in the coulisses of the First Republic and the First Empire. He dal tuA State some service under the Restoration an u was badly let down. But many of his schenIFs
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were visionary, notably his dreams about Ladd America. He was inferior to Rothschild an_ Labouchere in one way, to John Law and to's Pereire brothers in another. But there re f:113.111 the possibility of writing a good book about WI'
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