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Cultural historian Frederick Brown provides a portrait of fin-de-sic̈le France, whose defeat by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 resulted in a virtual civil war, waged without restraint, which toppled Napoléon III, crushed the Paris Commune, and provoked a dangerous nationalism that gripped the Republic. In the face of humiliation by Prussia, postwar France dissolved into two cultural factions: moderates, proponents of a secular state, and reactionaries--militant, Catholic, royalist--who felt that France had suffered defeat for having betrayed its true faith. A bitter debate took hold of the heart and soul of the country, framed by the vision of "science" and "technological advancement" versus "supernatural intervention." The roiling conflicts that began thirty years before Dreyfus did not end with his exoneration in 1900--instead they became the festering point that led to France's surrender to Hitler's armies in 1940.--From publisher description.… (more)
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The tug-of-war between Catholicism and the allied forces of modernity, science, and secularism sandwiched between the times of Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III dominate the book. Any vignette to begin with would have admittedly been arbitrarily chosen, but Brown’s choice of the 1863 publication of Ernst Renan’s “La Vie de Jesus” (“The Life of Jesus”) serves as a terrific and illustrative point of departure for a book whose major themes include Renan’s strident anti-clericalism.
Brown also includes a couple of stories that are unfortunately little-known in the United States, but that give hints of the growing violence and division that is to come. He tells of the Union Generale, an investment syndicate launched by aristocratic, pro-Catholic associates that went on to build railroads all over Europe. Due to rampant speculation and financial impropriety on the part of the man who ran the operation, it suffered a tremendous failure – also known as the Paris Bourse crash – in January, 1882. Perhaps not surprisingly considering the events to come, the first people to be blamed were the Jews. We get detailed chapters of the building of the Panama Canal and the 1897 fire at the Charity Bazaar as well, but the heart of the book is a 55-page long chapter on perhaps the one event – or rather a long, complex series of events – that is familiar to all Americans: the Dreyfus Affair.
Woven together, these bits of history provide one of a few tapestries that really are essential for understanding the French history of this period. For someone unfamiliar with the major names and events, I recommend Robert Gildea’s “Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914,” which provides much of the political background that Brown can’t cover in a brief 265 pages. Brown has a tremendous grasp of the source material. I highly recommend this to readers looking for a great bridge between popular and more formal academic history regarding this period. Reading this makes me want to pick up the Brown’s Flaubert biography that I have on my shelves – or anything else that I can find by him.