PIERRE-SIMON BALLANCHE:

by Albert J.George, '35. Syracuse University Press, 194$,207 pp., $2.50.

Pierre-Simon Ballanche is not, I am sure, a familiar name to the American public. As a matter of fact, he was never a famous man and today has been practically forgotten. But nevertheless he has his importance. He belongs to that large group of educated writers who bridged the gap between the French neo-classicists and the romantics. His works never gained universal recognition but they contained almost all of the ideas that were to be found later on in the writings of such romantics as Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Lamartine.

His whole life was influenced by the French Revolution which took place when he was a very small boy..All of his life he strove to try to understand and explain the causes and effects of the French Revolution. In such of his works as: L'Essai sur les institutionssociales (1816), Le Vieillard at le jeune homme (1819) and his most important work, the Essai de Palingenesie sociale (1829), Ballanche tried to conciliate Catholicism with the modern idea of progress.

Mr. George's biography could have been a very dull one if he had not wisely laid stress on the environment and contemporaries of Ballanche, thus explaining his works in relation to the times in which he lived. An understanding of the literary life of Lyon, in the early nineteenth century, helps one to understand Ballanche's contribution to his century.

This is the first biography on Ballanche in English. Mr. George is to be congratulated on writing about a man who contributed to the ideas of the nineteenth century. Many a great man, famous today, owes a great many of his thoughts to men like Ballanche who first conceived them.

It is unfortunate that the publishers buried the footnotes at the back of the book.