For the Soul of France

History had taught republicans to distrust luminaries.

Wilhelm refused, and the matter might have rested there had Bismarck not made the refusal sound contemptuous by mischievously editing a telegram from Wilhelm to Louis-Napoléon.

pride. Your science is beautiful, and necessary, and invincible; but you accomplish little by enlightening the mind if you do not cure the eternal wound of the heart.

One consoles oneself for not knowing foreign lands by supposing that one knows one’s own country at least, and one is wrong; for there are always areas of one’s own land that one has not visited, and races of men who are new to one. I experienced this fully then. I felt that I was seeing these Montagnards for the first time, so greatly did their mo

Everyone agreed that France faced a demographic crisis.

De Lesseps’s grandiosity, or capacity for self-delusion, made him, like Eugène Bontoux, an exceptionally effective promoter.

One witness thought that the scene might have been not much different at the Colosseum in Rome when frenzied spectators climbed the Vestals’ tribune to demand the execution of a gladiator, little realizing that France herself was the doomed combatant.

“Time in his forward flood shall grow ever more dignified,”

It was France’s misfortune and originality, a journalist observed in 1861, that since the Revolution every form of government had been regarded as a usurpatory improvisation by one camp or another. Twenty years later, the remark still held true.