Publisher's Comments (cont.) Frederick Brown, cultural
historian, author of acclaimed biographies of Émile 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-siècle 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 Napoléon 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 na