Death and the Afterlife in Modern France.

Thomas Kselman has defined his subject broadly. His book treats not only a changing complex of beliefs and practices relating to dying, but also competing ideas about life beyond death. Focusing on a series of simultaneous developments, he has put together a body of material that clearly was difficult to organize. He has not arranged his chapters in chronological order: each one begins at a different point--somewhere from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. Nor is the whole organized around a bold new argument or sweeping characterizations in the manner of Philippe Aries. Rather Kselman takes an analytical approach, showmng several varied frameworks or "models" through which death and the afterlife were understood. In giving us as complete a history as possible, he includes stock summaries of familiar systems of thought--positivist and "utopian socialist," for example. His secondary sources are ample and more than amply set forth--in 72 pages of notes and 23 pages of bibliography. He also includes plenty of fresh detail from his archival research in the Department of Maine-et-Loire, Angers, and Paris.

Kselman's account centers on the nineteenth century, which again and again is noted as the time of greatest change. The first half of the century is often contrasted with the second. Passing comments often bring the history up to the present. The changes in "the cult of the dead" are explained by a combination of underlying social, economic, and political shifts: increasing numbers of people experienced life and death in an urban, more commercial setting governed by more democratic, secular political regimes.

The book might well have begun with the oldest sets of ideas about death: those in folkloric and Catholic traditions. But instead, the first approach to death discussed is the demographic one, which permits the author to set out long-term population changes as a backdrop to attitudes and reactions. Demographers and doctors worked to implant a secular and rationalist way of understanding death, Kselman stresses, but they were hardly detached and dispassionate. Those best informed about demography found reason for optimism in the falling mortality rates overall, while taking alarm at the high incidence of death in cities, suicides, and the falling birthrate.

The second part of the book is about folk culture, Catholic ways, and new nineteenth-century ideologies. The discussion of proverbs, omens, and tales makes clear the great diversity of attitudes in folklore. Some tales depict death as a friend to be welcomed or accepted; others describe it as an enemy to be feared and sometimes outwitted. A similar divergence of attitudes is evident with regard to the clergy. The author does not attempt to relate these differences to varying social and economic conditions in different locales. His account proceeds generally in the psychological and anthropological domain, emphasizing the consoling and ordering functions of traditions. He often takes a view similar to that of the early urban ethnographers he describes, men who thought of folklore as the comforting resource of communities knowing how to deal with death without terror.

In presenting the Catholic approach to death and the afterlife, the author notes that French priests played heavily on fears--of death and hell--in the first half of the century and then less and less. In the later period the clergy seems to have accommodated itself to popular insistence on the importance of this world and growing skepticism about damnation. Still, demand for last sacraments remained high, even among those who ignored other Catholic practices.

A theme running through most of the chapters is the important one of conflicts--between Church and folk, the clergy and families and their doctors, Church and state, mayors and priests and commercial interests in the funeral business. Fundamental economic and ideological interests were at stake. The most vivid evidence comes in accounts of conflicts over last rites and their costs, the location and control of cemeteries, and the management and costs of funerals. Often the reader is left wondering how common some cases described were. What proportion of the clergy cooperated with the relocation of cemeteries and what proportion fought it, say, in the mid-nineteenth century? Were suicides given Christian burials despite the Church's position excluding them? "In many cases" they were, the author tells us. Overall it is clear that on front after front the clergy lost power from the late eighteenth century onward.

Rival groups with secular outlooks challenged the church and won followers to their ideas, which the author discusses under the rubrics of spiritualism, positivism, and spiritism (the latter comprising socialists, Swedenborgians, mesmerists, and such other-world theorists as Allan Kardec). Kselman emphasizes the ambivalence of most people--toward the traditional views as well as toward new ones such as spiritism. He repeatedly observes that uncertainties and tensions were shared by diverse social groups. For his part the author is not ready to make sharp judgments about any of the beliefs and believers. Sympathizing with all those who were touched by the dying, he is sympathetic to any act or belief that helped reduce the pain of loss.

The last section of the book is on "the material culture of death," which is the history of cemeteries and funerals. The core of the history is major legal changes since the late eighteenth century and power struggles of public officials, clergy, and the burgeoning funeral industry (from candle makers, porters, grave diggers to funeral directors). Despite legal measures invoking the revolutionary ideal of equality, it was in funerals and cemeteries that class differences showed up most strikingly. Yet behind the differences and struggles, Kselman shows, the French did find some common ground: a consensus on the importance of respect for the dead. On all sides a "cult of the dead" was deemed necessary to the well-being of society. Step by step, first in Paris and then in the provinces, a system was worked out that accommodated demands for an aura of religious reverence and for professional funeral management.

As a whole, the work is a useful up-to-date overview of a large and complex subject. In the end the reader is left with the task of weaving together the strands presented in separate chapters. There is no conclusion. There is, however, an epilogue that recapitulates some of the central themes. The epilogue is a fascinating commentary on Courbet's painting, the Burial at Ornans. Kselman proposes an interpretation that differs from T.J. Clark's (which emphasizes the painter's ambivalence about his family's social identity, the ambiguous status of the bourgeois in general, and class conflict in a rural community). In Kselman's view the painting is primarily a "response to the problematic nature of death" in the nineteenth century. It reflects a decline in religious belief, disappointment in Catholic ritual, desire for reverence toward the dead, and an uneasiness with the struggles going on as new ways were worked out. This interpretation does not supplant Clark's; it supplements it, bringing out additional understanding. The same may be said of Kselman's book in relation to Aries'.

Charles Rearick University of Massachusetts at Amherst