Before the late 1880s, service was compulsory in name only, the grounds for exemption being so numerous as to make a mockery of the term. Exempted were family breadwinners, the elder sons of widows, the brothers of serving soldiers, educational administrators, and priests, among others. Men who didn’t qualify could, for fifteen hundred francs (a su

Several months later, in December 1892, the valiant, independent-minded Abbé Frémont noted regretfully in his journal, “Hatred of the Republic and of Jews is today the sustenance of French clergy. Drumont is their preceptor. Above all, don’t tear this choice morsel out of their mouths: if you try, you will immediately be smeared with ink and blacke

“So there exist fresh young brains and souls that this idiotic poison has already deranged? How very sad, and how ominous for the coming twentieth century!”

De Lesseps’s grandiosity, or capacity for self-delusion, made him, like Eugène Bontoux, an exceptionally effective promoter.

Everyone agreed that France faced a demographic crisis.

The trial served an exorcistic purpose. Having cast out the alien, France celebrated her salvation. Everyone rejoiced, socialists arm in arm with monarchists, and men of the Left proved, if anything, even more bellicose then men of the Right.

The past was, above all, a refuge from the dangerous mobility of people and things. It was stillness, order, containment. “The qualities I love in the past are its sadness, its silence, and most especially its fixity. Everything that moves disconcerts me,” wrote Barrès (who must have reconciled his aversion to movement with his cult of “national en

France’s malady is its need to speechify.”

Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented. Bear this truth well in mind: Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as