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 474 SHORT NOTICES July of the electoral machinery in 1789. One of the most interesting papers in the volume is that entitled ' La Campagne ^lectorale de 1789 en Bourgogne ', which relates how a comparatively small group of men at Dijon successfully pulled the strings in order to obtain ascendancy in their province for their political views during the six months preceding the meeting of the states-general. Certainly these Burgundian lawyers and doctors had nothing to learn in the art of political wire-pulling, nor can it be said that they showed any lack of practical ability. Their machinations were, in M. Cochin's eyes, only too successful. The essay, to which students of the French Revolution will turn with most interest, is, however, that already referred to, 'La Crise de l'Histoire Revolutionnaire'. In this paper M. Cochin makes a gallant attempt to vindicate Taine's reputation as an historian from the charges brought against it by M. Aulard. That the attempt is not entirely successful is hardly to the discredit of M. Cochin's skill as an advocate. Few Frenchmen can write of the Revolu- tion with complete impartiality, and it is true that M. Aulard is himself more or less a partisan, but the gloom of Taine's picture is too unrelieved to carry conviction. The Revolution was to him a bad dream, and, as in a dream, events appeared to him out of their true proportions. Against the charges brought against Taine of inaccuracy and of lack of judgement in the choice of his authorities, M. Cochin makes an ingenious defence, but in regard to this accusation of unconscious distortion and exaggeration he fails to convince us. X. Robert Owen's name and just fame grow with the years. He has had many biographers from the crude and hostile narrative of W. L. Sargent (1860) to the brilliant and yet scrupulously accurate two- volume study by Frank Podmore. Unfortunately, the latter is out of print, and there- fore the student cannot do better than use the very good account in the Dictionary of Political Economy for his landmarks, and fill in the picture with Owen's autobiography which is now placed before us at a commend- ably moderate price, with an introduction by Mr. Max Beer, The Life of Robert Owen by Himself (London : Bell, 1920). Mr. Beer's introduc- tion is adequate, and he contrives to say much in very little space. He is, perhaps, overkind to Owen when he says of his community experiments in America that their failure was ' due to the incompleteness of his theory of character formation '. However complete his theory had been, these communities must have failed unless his disciples had combined a sustained idealism with some serious knowledge of the processes of agriculture. C. R. F. In a volume entitled Le Transfert de Chambery a Fribourg de VEveche de Geneve: 1815-19 (Recueil de Documents tires des Archives Suisses. Geneva : Eggemann, 1920) M. Otto Karmin has put together from the Swiss Archives all the correspondence from the side of Geneva in the affair of the transfer of the bishopric of Geneva from Savoy to Switzerland. Behind this apparently small readjustment of ecclesiastical machinery lay a great number of varied interests. When the Congress of Vienna increased the territory of the restored republic and new canton of Geneva,