(6.) Romans Nationaux. Par Erckmann-Châtrian. Paris: Hetzel. 1868-70.
Histoire d'un Paysan, ou la Révolution Française racontée par un paysan.
Le Conscrit.
Le Blocus.
La Guerre.
L'Invasion.
Waterloo, etc.
(7.) Louis's own Account of the Fight at Dame Europa's School. Literally translated from the French. London: J. Camden Hotten. 1871.
Imperialism has fallen; and with it France has for the present disappeared from among the great Powers. With Metz in foreign hands, she is much in the same position as that of Paris when the Prussians had turned upon her the guns of Mont Valérien. Her eastern frontier is wholly exposed; she must feel as Lombardy did while Austria held the Quadrilateral.
As far as material influence is concerned, France is become a second-rate state. She must confine her aim to doing what she has so often done before—influencing the world of ideas. She did this in the Middle Ages in a way which we seldom sufficiently appreciate; she did it in a less degree during the post-Reformation period, for then her own religious wars and the preponderance of Germany had thrown her somewhat into the shade; she did it most of all when the Encyclopédistes began to claim for her a definite position as the world's teacher. This position she had not formally claimed before. Under the old régime she had been slowly getting welded together; feudalism, carried out more 'logically' in France than elsewhere, had kept her provinces almost as distinct as so many little German kingdoms. Louis XI.'s policy, indeed, did for the French noblesse much what the Wars of the Roses did for ours; and Louis XIV., by giving the higher classes a taste for Court life, drew them together and trained them to a community of habits and aims; but the mass of provincials were scarcely affected by this centralization of a single class. Louis XIV., however, did one thing more: he secured to Paris that fatal predominance which has ever since made her the arbitress of the national destinies. While saying 'l'état c'est moi,' he so arranged that very soon the Parisians could say, Paris c'est la France. The great writers, too, lent their influence to glorify the capital: the town-loving spirit was strong in them all. Paris got more and more supreme, while at the same time the efforts of Government were divided between crushing out provincial independence and meeting the ruinous expenditure of a Court always luxurious and very often warlike. Hence a tendency in the old régime to a more and more strictly personal government. Feudal liberties were crushed; feudal tyranny was aggravated. The provincial parliaments, and that of Paris into the bargain, gradually lost even the semblance of power; and the old system degenerated into despotism.