The Rise And Fall Of The Second Empire 1852 1871

The Second Empire lasted longer than any French regime since 1789, yet most historical accounts of the government of Napoleon III have been overshadowed by the knowledge of its disastrous and tragic end. As Professor Plessis shows in this detailed thermatic study, such an approach ignores the major social, economic, and political developments of a period that witnessed the gradual acceptance of univeral suffrage, the establishment of large-scale industrial capitalism, a massive improvement in communications, and the birth of impressionism in art.

A distinguished French historian traces the history of France under the Second Republic. His approach emphasizes the relationship between the political history of the period and the history of popular culture and thought.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The Jacobin Republic was the most difficult and dangerous phase of the Revolution, when events begun in 1789 reached their climax. The Republic was brief, barely two years, but it put up a victorious struggle against the armies of the European Coalition and against the forces of the counter-revolution.

This book provides a detailed account of French history from the oripins of the Thrid Republic, born out of the collapse of Napoleon III's Second Empire, to the coming of the Great WAr in 1914. Part 1 begins with the fall of the "notables" and the victory of the republicans. Then follows a picture of the economy and society of late nineteenth-century France, and an examination of spiritual and cultural development under the increasing threat from nationalist and socialist forces. The moderates' brief ascendancy at the end of the century followed by the extreme sentiments unleashed at the time of the Dreyfus affair, brings the story in Part 2 to a more passionately political period, when the republic finallynbecame established as a bulwark of bourgeois prosperity, witnessing the rise of the banks and big business, and the dangerous revival of colonial expansion.

The Paris Commune of 1871 is one of the great romantic failures in revolutionary history. Yet very little is known about its enemies, and especially the army, which first fraternized with the revolutionaries and then, two months later, crushed them with the utmost violence. This book, based on extensive archival research, is the first serious study of the role of the army in the civil war. It examines its composition and organization, its weaknesses and their effect on government policy, the steps taken to improve morale and discipline, the state of mind of officers and men and, finally, the conduct of the army in battle and the causes of the final bloodshed, in which about 20,000 Parisians were killed in the fighting or executed afterwards. Its purpose is to cast new light on the policy of the government and the problems of using an army in a civil war, and to tell for the first time the full tragedy of the suppression of the Comune, one of the bloodiest and least understood social conflicts in the history of modern Europe.