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however imperfectly, with such subjects across the centuries. These are
precisely the two assumptions that the critical mentors of the "new cul–
tural history" - Foucault, Derrida, and the rest - so strenuously deny.
Baker, at least, tries on this score to establish some distance from the lit–
erary critics. He defends the "possibility of human agency" - within the
prevailing "language games" - and denies that he treats individuals as
"mere discursive functions." Yet much of the book undermines the same
assertions. Within the web of discourse, are his subjects the spiders or the
tli
?
es.
On these philosophical issues, the battle has been joined for some
time, and historians remain largely on the sidelines. There are advantages
to staying out of the melee: historians, unlike literary critics, still form a
community of sorts and can profit from each others' work regardless of
philosophical differences. Thus Baker's and Chartier's work becomes
common property. Their important insights into the cultural and lin–
guistic transformation of prerevolutionary France carry them far beyond
the limits of a particular academic tribe. Yet one listens, beneath the
page, for the clamor of voices, the cries of triumph and despair that
served as chorus to the events taking place in France two hundred years,
ago and hears only eerie silence.
DAVID A. BELL
Italian Fascists and Their Jews
BENEVOLENCE AND BETRAYAL: FIVE ITALIAN JEWISH
FAMILIES UNDER FASCISM.
By
Alexander Stille.
Summit Books.
$21.50.
Although I lived in Milan during the 1960s and spent 1971 in Turin re–
searching Italian entrepreneurs, it never occurred to me that when meet–
ing someone named Segre, Foa or Ovazza I was talking to a Jew. I as–
sumed that all the people named Levi, or having names of cities such as
Mosca, Venezian or Milano had been converted to Catholicism many
generations ago, and I never suspected that Ugo Stille, whose column I
faithfully had followed in the Corriere della Sera, had come to America
via Lisbon with his family in September 1941 - probably on the last trip
of the boat I had taken exactly one year before. Thus I picked up
