Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented. Bear this truth well in mind: Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as

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

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.

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.

The past was, above all, a refuge from the dangerous mobility of people and things. It was stillness, order, containment. “The qualities I love in the past are its sadness, its silence, and most especially its fixity. Everything that moves disconcerts me,” wrote Barrès (who must have reconciled his aversion to movement with his cult of “national

France’s malady is its need to speechify.”

Before the late 1880s, service was compulsory in name only, the grounds for exemption being so numerous as to make a mockery of the term. Exempted were family breadwinners, the elder sons of widows, the brothers of serving soldiers, educational administrators, and priests, among others. Men who didn’t qualify could, for fifteen hundred francs (a

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.

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