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Frederick Brown, cultural historian, author of acclaimed biographies of mile Zola MagnificentThe New Yorker and Flaubert Splendid . . . Intellectually nuanced, exquisitely writtenThe New Republic now gives us an ambitious, far-reaching booka perfect joining of subject and writer a portrait of fin-de-sicle 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 187071, was forced to cede the border states of Alsace and Lorraine, and of the resulting civil war, waged without restraint, that toppled Napolon 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 foreignerPrussiadissolved into two cultural factions moderates, proponents of a secular state Clericalism, there is the enemy!, and reactionaries, who saw their ideal nationmilitant, Catholic, royalistembodied by Joan of Arc, with their message, that France had suffered its defeat in 1871 for having betrayed its true faith.



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