For the soul of France

by Frederick Brown

Frederick Brown, cultural historian, author of acclaimed biographies of Emile Zola ("Magnificent"--The New Yorker) and Flaubert ("Splendid . . . Intellectually nuanced, exquisitely written"--The New Republic) now gives us an ambitious, far-reaching book--a perfect joining of subject and writer: a portrait of fin-de-siecle France. He writes about the forces that led up to the twilight years of the nineteenth century when France, defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870--71, was forced to cede the border states of Alsace and Lorraine, and of the resulting civil war, waged without restraint, that toppled Napoleon III, crushed the Paris Commune, and provoked a dangerous nationalism that gripped the Republic. The author describes how postwar France, a nation splintered in the face of humiliation by the foreigner--Prussia--dissolved into two cultural factions: moderates, proponents of a secular state ("Clericalism, there is the enemy!"), and reactionaries, who saw their ideal n