The sources from which I have drawn the materials for this book are various; they come largely from private papers, and from articles contributed to magazines and newspapers by contemporary writers, French, English, and American. I had not at first intended the work for publication, and I omitted to make notes which would have enabled me to restore to others the "unconsidered trifles" that I may have taken from them. As far as possible, I have endeavored to remedy this; but should any other writ

CHARLES X. AND THE DAYS OF JULY. 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 her pass under the saws and harrows of humiliation. Paris was gay, for money was spent freely by the invading strangers. Sacrifices on the altar of the Emperor were over; enthusiasm for the extension of the great ideas of the Revolution had passed away; a new generation had been born which

LOUIS PHILIPPE AND HIS FAMILY. 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 rather, as some said, by the will of the bourgeoisie —to the French throne. He reigned, not by "right divine," but as the chosen ruler of his countrymen,—to mark which distinction he took the title of King of the French, instead of King of France, which had been borne by his predecessors. It is

LOUIS NAPOLEON'S EARLY CAREER.—STRASBURG, BOULOGNE, HAM. 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 the most striking illustration of this theory may be found in the career of the Emperor Napoleon. Nothing went well with him after his divorce from Josephine. His only son died. The children of his brothers, with the exception of Louis Napoleon, and the Prince de Cani

TEN YEARS OF THE REIGN OF THE CITIZEN KING. 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 first ten years of Louis Philippe's reign were full of vicissitudes. France after a revolution is always an "unquiet sea that cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt." Frenchmen do not accept the inevitable as Americans have learned to do, through the working of their instit

SOME CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION OF 1848. 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 were probably in the plenitude of their prosperity. The Duke of Orleans had been happily married; and although his wife was a Protestant,—which was not wholly satisfactory to Queen Marie Amélie,—the character of the Duchesse Hélène was so lovely that she won all hearts, both in her hu

THE DOWNFALL OF LOUIS PHILIPPE. 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 have mentioned, there was a scarcity of grain, there were drains on the finances, there was disaffection among the National Guard, and hostility among the peers to the measures of the Ministry. Then came the conviction of M. Teste, a member of the Cabinet, for misappropriating public funds. Ev

LAMARTINE AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC.[1] [Footnote 1: For the subject-matter of this chapter I am largely indebted to Mrs. Oliphant's article on Lamartine in "Blackwood's Magazine."] 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 President of the Chamber of Deputies, was made President of the Council (or prime minister); but the real head of the Government and Minister for Fore

THE COUP D'ÉTAT. "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 Frenchmen in the country that they had only a choice between Jacobin rule by the clubs, or Napoleonic rule by an emperor." So, though Louis Napoleon, when he presented himself as a presidential candidate, assured the electors, "I am not so ambitious as to dream of empire, of war, nor of subversive theori

THE EMPEROR'S MARRIAGE. 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 usurpation of the prince president. The national approval as expressed in this plébiscite was overwhelming. Each peasant and artisan seemed to fancy he was voting to revive the past glories of France, when expressing his approval of a Prince Napoleon. The more thoughtful voters, like M. de Montalembert, con

MAXIMILIAN AND MEXICO.[1] [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 advance-sheets, and it was published in the "Living Age" under the title "From Miramar to Queretaro." -E. W. L.] Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, was born the same week that his cousin, the unfortunate son of Napoleon and Marie Louise, had died. He grew to manhood handsome, well educated, accompli

THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS AT THE SUMMIT OF PROSPERITY. The visit paid by the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie to Queen Victoria at Windsor in 1856 was returned in 1857. 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 sight since daybreak, the emperor anxiously watching it from the shore; but it was two P. M. before it was moored to the quai . There can be no better

PARIS IN 1870: JULY, AUGUST, AND SEPTEMBER. 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 employment in France, especially those in Alsace and Lorraine.[1] Long before this, those provinces had been overrun with photographers, pedlers, and travelling workmen, commissioned to make themselves fully acquainted with the roads, the by-paths, the resources of the villages, and

THE SIEGE OF PARIS. 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, when a reporter arrived at the office of the "Gaulois" with a Belgian newspaper in his pocket. The "Gaulois" dared not be the first sheet to publish the news of such a disaster; but despatches had already reached the Government, and by degrees rumors of what had happened crept through the streets of the

THE PRUSSIANS IN FRANCE. 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 Prussia made his headquarters in the beautiful city which seems to enshrine the memory of Louis XIV. On Sunday, September 18, a scouting party of three Uhlans made their appearance at the gates of Versailles. They had in fact lost their way, and stumbled unawares upon the city; however, they rode boldl

THE COMMUNE. 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 Revolution," "had thrown off all formulas, and come out human! " It is the story of those whom the French call "the people,"—we "the mob," or "the populace,"—let loose upon society, and society in its turn mercilessly avenging itself for its wrongs. By March 12,1871, the Prussian soldiers had quitted the environs

THE HOSTAGES. 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 hostages in Paris, May 24 and 26, 1871. At one o'clock on the morning of April 6, three weeks after the proclamation of the Commune, a body of the National Guard was drawn up on the sidewalk in the neighborhood of the Madeleine. A door suddenly opened and a man came hastily out, followed by two National Guards s

THE GREAT REVENGE. 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 and a quarter of inhabitants: she had not half that number during the Commune, notwithstanding the multitude of small proprietors and peasants who had flocked thither from devastated homes. Monday, May 29, found the city in the hands of the Versaillais. The Provisional Government and its Parliament were v

THE FORMATION OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC. 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 history of France from the election of the National Assembly called together at Bordeaux to conclude terms of peace with the Prussians, to the election of the first president of the Third Republic, during which time France was under the dictatorship of M. Thiers. Adolphe Thiers was born in M

THREE FRENCH PRESIDENT'S. 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 descendant, Patrice (or Patrick), the subject of this sketch, was the sixteenth of seventeen children. He was born when French glory was at its height, under the First Empire, in the summer of 1806. When he was seventeen he was sent to the military school at Saint-Cyr. There his Irish dash and tal

GENERAL BOULANGER. 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 civilized world as that of Bismarck. A new word was coined in 1886 to meet a want which the general's importance had created. That word was boulangisme , though it would be hard to give it a definition in the dictionary. We can only say that it meant whatever General Boulanger might be pleased to attempt. Geor