France

Bela Menczer describes the various intellectual and artistic personalities who conspired to produce the Exposition Universelle, in Paris, in 1867.

Sometimes admired, even occasionally popular; John Roberts describes how Georges Clemenceau towered over French political life for nearly half a century.

The revolutionary upheaval that brought down Louis-Philippe swept into power a famous French Romantic poet. Gordon Wright describes how Lamartine acquitted himself with courage and energy; but his fall was as swift and sudden as his rise.

J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.

During the years before the French Revolution, writes D.M. Walmsley, Mesmer’s treatment of patients by 'animal magnetism' in some ways foreshadowed the methods of modern pyschiatry.

In 1680, writes Joanna Richardson, the mistress of Louis XIV was concerned in a scandal that involved both poisoning and black magic.

Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.

The exploits of his youngest brother frequently disturbed Napoleon; but, writes Owen Connolly, of all the brother-kings, Jerome was the most useful to him, the most soldierly and the most loyal.

In the autumn of 1792, as Lamartine wrote, the “national heart of France seemed to beat in Danton’s breast.” Eighteen months later, writes Maurice Hutt, Danton went to the scaffold, crying: “Show my head to the people; it is well worth it!”

Joanna Richardson describes how the gifted cousin of the Emperor Napoleon III acted as an all-powerful intermediary between the studio and the palace.