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R. H. GAPPER BOOK PRIZE 2008

The Society for French Studies is delighted to announce the award of the ninth annual R. H. Gapper Book Prize jointly to Mark Greengrass for Governing Passions. Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576-1585 (Oxford University Press) and Christopher Prendergast for The Classic. Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (Oxford University Press).

The award, which is for the best book published in 2007 by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies, is made by the Society for French Studies together with Mr Richard Gapper, representing the R. H. Gapper Charitable Trust, on the recommendation of a Prize Jury appointed by the SFS. The Prize Jury for 2008 was composed as follows:

Chair: Diana Holmes (University of Leeds)
Simon Gaunt (King’s College London)
Alex Hughes (University of Kent)
Neil Kenny (University of Cambridge)
Roger Pearson (University of Oxford).

The R. H. Gapper Book Prize will be presented to Professors Greengrass and Prendergast at the Society for French Studies annual conference, which takes place in the University of Oxford, 29 June - 1 July 2009.

The winning books:

Mark Greengrass’s Governing Passions is an interdisciplinary historical study that spectacularly revises and deepens existing understandings of a crucial decade, in the middle of the Wars of Religion, when French society was crumbling. The author shows that Henri III and much of the ruling class sought (and failed) to restore society to an imagined pristine state by devising and trying to implement reform on numerous levels (social, political, economic, military, cultural, literary). This convincingly revises prevailing images of this reign as characterized by decadence, passivity, weakness, drift. Based on vast research, including previously unstudied manuscript sources, the book’s originality and distinction lie in its analysis of how the reform project was driven (yet in some senses also undermined) by ideas (in particular ancient ones promulgated by humanism, especially moral philosophy) and by discursive practices (especially that of humanistic rhetoric). This breadth enables the author to bring out the strangeness of this notion of a general moral reformation when viewed through the lens of modern concepts of government or through that of the absolutism and raison d’état which soon followed in the early seventeenth century. The book looks certain to become a reference point for historical studies not only of the Wars of Religion but also of early modern government in general. It also provides a model for how to integrate political with cultural history.

Christopher Prendergast’s The Classic. Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars is an impressively comprehensive and original study of a major figure in French literature and criticism and of the intellectual, socio-political and cultural contexts in which he wrote. Using the topic of the ‘Classic’ as a reference point in mapping Sainte-Beuve’s constructions of the literary, the author investigates how Sainte-Beuve constructs the notion of a ‘classic’ on the battlefield of contemporary ‘culture wars’ relating to a series of issues: how a ‘classic’, and a French ‘classic’ in particular, relates to the practices and values of the ‘classical’ literature of antiquity; how Virgil, not Homer, represents the desired neo-classical and imperial model; how recent findings within the new discipline of comparative philology were challenging conventional constructions of the ‘classic’; the role of the Middle Ages and the earlier role of the Franks and Gauls in historiographical narratives relating modern ‘classics’ to the ‘classics’ of imperial Rome; the position of the ‘classic’ in an emerging mass culture and in relation to democracy. The book ends with brief discussion of how the Beuvian method managed to marginalise the contemporary ‘classics’ of Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Baudelaire, and of how Sainte-Beuve and his views were appropriated by the far-right from the late-nineteenth-century onwards. Though clearly - and sometimes vociferously - out of sympathy with his subject’s politics, Prendergast brilliantly avoids any homogenization of Sainte-Beuve’s views, laying bare the anxieties and ‘edginess’ in his shifting and sometimes conflicting opinions. The conclusion suggests the need to abandon definitively the traditional implications of the concept of the ‘Classic’ and instead to espouse Coetzee’s more compelling analysis (in ‘What is a Classic?’) of the synergy between the ‘Classic’ and the ‘function of criticism’.

Mark Greengrass is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Sheffield, specializing in the history of Renaissance France.

Christopher Prendergast is Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

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