630 Book Reviews

Pascal, Alban Krailsheimer (in Past Masters series, general editor Keith Thomas; Oxford University Press, 1986), 84 pp., 52.95.

The Past Masters series, on individual thinkers, is invariably by a present master of its subject, and this little work on Blaise Pascal by the distinguished Pascal scholar Alban Krailsheimer is no exception in distilling the essence of the great seventeenth-century French scientist and theologian into a mere eighty pages. The work opens with a chapter of biography, and then proceeds from an analysis of Pascal’s early scientific work on probability theory and atmospheric pressure to the later religious writings, paying particular attention to Pascal’s use and refutation of Stoic ethics, the scepticism of Montaigne and the rationalism of Descartes. The work is a triumph of exposition in demonstrating the essential unity between Pascal’s life and thought, and in establishing ‘that habits of mind originally acquired in a scientific context persisted after his conversion, when he turned his attention to religion’; thus his fundamental interest in the practical as a scientist informed his charitable activity as a Christian, while the logical structures of his proof of the existence of a vacuum against a Jesuit opponent recur to devastating effect in his onslaught on Jesuit casuistical ethics, the ‘inexorable march’ of his argument having the ‘clarity of a mathematical demonstration’. Equally mathematical in character is the famous proof in the Pen&es that man cannot lose his wager that God exists: though in this, Pascal’s greatest work, as in his others, the Cartesian effort to discover rationally certain first principles is abandoned for a threefold appeal to sense experience, reason, and the intuitions of authority and the heart. Mr Krailsheimer is perhaps a little too indulgent to the severer aspects of Pascal’s Augustinian Jansenism-as, for example, on a point like the fewness of the elect-and a little too hard on the much-maligned Jesuits, who had the bad luck to provoke a tartar of literary genius. But the author is surely right to locate Pascal’s greatness in his fidelity to the two central lessons of his experience of the human condition, man’s sin and misery without God and his ultimate hope of happiness in Him, in the only sure refuge of the restless heart.

University of Durham Sheridan Gilley

Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Old Regime France: Le Journal Des Dames, Nina Rattner Gelbart (University of Calfornia Press 1987), xviii+354pp., $38.00 H.C.

Nina Gelbart’s history of the Journal des Dames is lively, well-written and displays admirable scholarship. She breathes such life into her tale of the checkered career of an eighteenth-century magazine that a world emerges full of improbable but unquestionably real people: from the teenage provincial novelist who decides to make it big in the big city by starting a harmless ladies’ magazine; to the editrice who appears betrousered in the offices of her censor, threatening him by her very appearence; through a panoply of what Robert Darnton has called ‘grub-street hacks’ and Gelbart christens ‘frondeur journalists’. By weaving the history of one magazine, which existed from 1759 through 1778 under several different editors, into the broad canvas of politics, privilege and personal lives, Gelbart has been able to recreate Darnton’s underground world of the press.

While the story and its characters are nothing if not engaging, there is much more to this book than a well-told tale. Gelbart is making very significant arguments about women and feminism in the Old Regime, and about the relationship between journalism, the Enlightenment, and the Revolution.

The Journaldes Dames, we learn, was intended to be a ‘rien dklicieux’. Its first editor,