FRANCE

BY

GABRIEL HANOTAUX

TRANSLATED BY

JOHN CHARLES TARVER

With Portraits

VOL. I

(1870-1873)

NEW YORK: G P PUTNAM'S SONS

WESTMINSTER: ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD

1903

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

O introduce M. Gabriel Hanotaux to Frenchmen would be superfluous; his name is already well known in his own country as that of a leading statesman and an author of high reputation. In England he is chiefly known as a Minister of Foreign Affairs who smoothed the path of diplomacy during the troubled period of the wars between Turkey and Greece, Spain and the United States of America. He also took an active part in settling questions as to delimitation of frontier in North Africa which had arisen between France and England; during his period of office the Madagascar expedition was decided upon.

Born in 1854, M. Hanotaux is still a comparatively young man, but he has behind him a political and literary career upon which older men would be entitled to look back with complacency. He is still engaged upon a monumental life of Cardinal Richelieu which has already won for him the Gobert prize, the highest honour which can be bestowed by the French Academy; since 1897 he has been an Academician. His more popular works, L'Energie Française, and Le Choix d'une Carrière, are marked by an ardent

vi

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

patriotism, and strong common sense; they have been exceptionally well received in France.

In fact M. Hanotaux, alike by his administrative career and his proved literary competence, is singularly well qualified to overcome the difficulties of the great work of which the present volume is the first instalment. He is a keen patriot, but he is a wise patriot; he is a convinced Republican, but though he announces his Republican sympathies in his preface, his literary conscience has proved sufficiently robust to eliminate any excess of political partizanship from his narrative.

J. C. T.

I

HAVE

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

undertaken to narrate the

History of Contemporary France from the month of February 1871 to the end of the year 1900.

The present volume comprises, along with the Government of M. Thiers, the end of the FrancoGerman War, the Peace Negotiations, the Commune, the Constitutional Crisis, the Debates in the National Assembly, the Liberation of the Territory. It concludes with the 24th of May, 1873.

The second volume will be devoted to the Presidency of Marshal MacMahon, and the Foundation of the Republic.

The third and fourth volumes will deal with the History of the Parliamentary Republic.

I have made arrangements so that the four volumes may follow one another in rapid succession.

The subject is vast and difficult. But I have seen the facts which I set forth. This work, moreover, is connected with the works which I have begun or published, and which all have, like the present book, but one object: France.

If I tried to go back to the real origin of this book, I should find it in the events with which the story begins the war of 1870 and its immediate consequences.