France in the Nineteenth Century

The fall of the Commune took place in the last week of May, 1871. We must go back to the surrender of Paris, in the last week of January of the same year, and take up the histor...

The Commune cost Paris fourteen thousand lives. Eight thousand persons were executed; six thousand were killed in open fight. Before the siege Paris had contained two million an...

Marshal MacMahon, the Duke of Magenta, was of Irish descent, his ancestors having followed James II. into exile, and distinguished themselves at the Battle of the Boyne. Their d...

A plébiscite--Louis Napoleon's political panacea--was ordered Dec. 20, 1851, two weeks after the _coup d'état_, to say if the people of France approved or disapproved the usurpa...

About once in every seventy or eighty years some exceptionally moving tragedy stirs the heart of the civilized world. The tragedy of our own century is the execution of the host...

Though the surrender of the emperor and his army at Sedan took place on September 2, nothing whatever was known of it by the Parisian public until the evening of September 4, wh...

The Provisional Government hastily set up in France on Feb. 24, 1848, consisted at first of five members; but that number was afterwards enlarged. M. Dupin, who had been Preside...

Louis XVIII. in 1815 returned to his throne, borne on the shoulders of foreign soldiers, after the fight at Waterloo. The allied armies had a second time entered France to make...

Up to 1886 the name of General Boulanger commands no place upon the page of history. After that year it was scattered broadcast. For four years it was as familiar in the civiliz...

[Footnote 1: Much of the material of this chapter is taken from Victor Tissot's book of travels in Austria; the chapter on Maximilian as archduke and emperor I translated from a...

Louis Philippe, after accepting the lieutenant-generalship of the kingdom, which would have made him regent under Henri V., found himself raised by the will of the people--or ra...

There is a theory held by some observers that the man who fails in his duty to a woman who has claims upon his love and his protection, never afterwards prospers; and perhaps th...

The story of the Commune is piteous, disheartening, shameful, and terrible. It seems as if during three months of 1871 "human nature," as Carlyle says of it in his "French Revol...

It was on the 18th of August that the queen, her husband, the Prince of Wales, then a boy of fourteen, and the Princess Royal landed at Boulogne. The royal yacht had been in sig...

The Prussian army was more than two weeks on the road from Sedan to Paris and Versailles, and it was just one month after the French emperor surrendered before the king of Pruss...

As soon as relations became "strained" between France and Germany, according to the term used in diplomacy, the king of Prussia ordered home all his subjects who had found emplo...

As I said in the last chapter, everything in the year 1847 and during the opening weeks of 1848 seemed unfavorable to Louis Philippe. Besides the causes of dissatisfaction I hav...

After the signing of the treaty of 1841, which restored the _entente cordiale_ between France and England, and satisfied the other European Powers, Louis Philippe and his family...

"In voting for Louis Napoleon," says Alison, "the French rural population understood that it was voting for an emperor and for the repression of the clubs in Paris. It seemed to...

Besides the affairs of the Duchesse de Berri, of Louis Napoleon, of Fieschi and his infernal machine, and difficulties attending on the marriage of the Duke of Orleans, the firs...

the crowd; but soon sentinels were removed from the corners of the streets, and as many spectators as thought proper pressed on to the sidewalks of the Boulevard.... Opposite to...