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.

Everyone agreed that France faced a demographic crisis.

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

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.

France’s malady is its need to speechify.”

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.

As Tocqueville saw it, demagoguery would be the ultimate political expression of a society bereft—of family pride, manners, grammar, local custom, hierarchical structure, religious principles, and sacred space.

Several months later, in December 1892, the valiant, independent-minded Abbé Frémont noted regretfully in his journal, “Hatred of the Republic and of Jews is today the sustenance of French clergy. Drumont is their preceptor. Above all, don’t tear this choice morsel out of their mouths: if you try, you will immediately be smeared with ink and

The trial served an exorcistic purpose. Having cast out the alien, France celebrated her salvation. Everyone rejoiced, socialists arm in arm with monarchists, and men of the Left proved, if anything, even more bellicose then men of the Right.