As the historical-scholarship industry expands, certain subjects, and not only the most interesting ones, have become so weighed down with bibliography that the historian wishing to create a coherent picture of a famous epoch, episode, or personage will soon be as overwhelmed as a man trying to hack his way through the Amazon with a pair of nail scissors. To remind us just what attracted so many writers to these subjects in the first place—to reanimate corpses that seem thoroughly vulturized—thus becomes a difficult challenge, one rarely met as well as in Frederick Brown’s sweeping reevaluation of late-nineteenth-century France,…