scholarly journals THE MEXICAN EXPEDITION OF 1862–1867 AND THE END OF THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 660-685
Author(s):  
JEROME GREENFIELD
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
French Politics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Constitutional Reforms ◽  
French People ◽  
Legitimacy Crisis

AbstractThe French expedition to Mexico from 1862 to 1867 rarely features in accounts of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War or of the liberalization of the French Second Empire in its final years. By contrast, this article uses a range of archival and published sources to argue that the failure of the Mexican expedition was an important factor in the crisis that convulsed French politics in the late 1860s. The legitimacy of the fiscal-military system was undermined, partly because of the burdens that the expedition imposed on the French people. There resulted difficulties over finance and the army, which hindered the Second Empire's ability to confront the Prussian threat and accelerated the emergence of the ‘Liberal Empire’ with the constitutional reforms of 1867–70. Liberalization, though, could not rescue the imperial regime, and the legitimacy crisis of the Second Empire was only resolved by a transition to a parliamentary democracy under the Third Republic.

The Return of N’Guyen Van Binh

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Geoff Read
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
The Third ◽  
Original Sentence ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
One Year

This article explores the case of N’Guyen Van Binh, a South Vietnamese political prisoner exiled for his alleged role in “Poukhombo’s Rebellion” in Cambodia in 1866. Although Van Binh’s original sentence of exile was reduced to one year in prison he was nonetheless deported and disappeared into the maw of the colonial systems of indentured servitude and forced labor; he likely did not survive the experience. He was thus the victim of injustice and his case reveals the at best haphazard workings of the French colonial bureaucracy during the period of transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. While the documentary record is entirely from the perspective of the colonizers, reading between the lines we can also learn something about Van Binh himself including his fierce will to resist his colonial oppressors.

The old regime of hygiene: Life in the nineteenth-century French countryside

Rural History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Zdatny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Lesson ◽  
Material Conditions

AbstractThis article provides an object lesson in the history of thelongue durée, reflected in the comprehensive filthiness of rural life in the nineteenth century. Political upheaval had not changed the material conditions of peasant existence or sensibilities relating to hygiene. Economic revolution had as yet made no practical difference to the dirtiness of daily life. Peasants under the Second Empire lived much as they had under the Old Regime – in dark, damp houses with no conveniences, cheek by jowl with the livestock. Their largely unwashed bodies were wrapped in largely unchanged clothes. Babies were delivered with germ-covered hands, drank spoilt milk from dirty bottles, and spent their young days swaddled like mummies and marinating like teriyaki. The Third Republic set out to ‘civilize’ the rural masses, but this snapshot of material life in the nineteenth-century French countryside illustrates just how much work lay in front of it.

Piety and Politics in Nineteenth Century Poitiers: The Cult of St Radegund

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-81
Author(s):  
Brian Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
French Society ◽  
The Third ◽  
Pius Ix ◽  
The Middle Ages

St Radegund, a sixth-century royal ascetic who relinquished her position as the wife of a Frankish king and established a convent in Poitiers, is today a rather obscure French local saint. Yet in the nineteenth century, as a result of the tireless promotion of her cult by Édouard Pie, bishop of Poitiers from 1849 to 1880, St Radegund was widely invoked in France as ‘la sainte reine de la France’ and ‘la mère de la patrie’. Her wonder-working tomb, a popular devotional site in the Middle Ages, offered cures and Pie saw to it that the pilgrim trains to Lourdes made an obligatory prayer-stop at Poitiers. This article analyses devotion to St Radegund during the Second Empire and the Third Republic and explores some of the religious and political connotations of the cult of this royal saint. The development of the cult is particularly significant for it allows us to see, reflected on the local level, something of the larger struggle for national self-definition that was taking place in nineteenth-century French society as royalists contended with Bonapartists and republicans, clericals waged war against secularists and the ultramontanes sought to rouse their fellow countrymen in support of Pius IX.

Clericals, Anticlericals and the Women's Movement in France under the Third Republic

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. McMillan
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
French Politics ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern France ◽  
The Family ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Church

Most historians of modern France would agree that the quarrel between clericals and anticlericals was one of the most significant political issues in French politics between 1870 and 1914, especially in the period before the passing of the law which separated Church and State in 1905. The charges brought against the Catholic Church by the anticlericals were many, but until recently few students of nineteenth-century France have commented on the fact that one of their most serious allegations was that the Church oppressed women. Perhaps the most celebrated formulation of this theory came from the pen of the historian Michelet who, in a virulent polemic entitled Priests, women and the family, bitterly attacked the powers which priests were reputed to exercise over the female mind through the institution of the confessional, to the great detriment of marital life and family unity.

Renouvier: the Man and His Work (i)

Philosophy ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 7 (25) ◽  
pp. 42-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Alexander Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
The Third ◽  
Active Life ◽  
Commune Of 1871 ◽  
The Revolution

In Charles Renouvier we have one of the lone, stern, and indefatigable workers in philosophy in the nineteenth century. His powerful mind, moral earnestness, and intellectual vigour command respect and attention and place him high in the ranks of the philosophical thinkers of his century. He differed profoundly from his English contemporary Spencer and his German contemporary Lotze, both of whom have received more attention than Renouvier. His long and immensely active life fell into periods which coincide with, and partly reflect, the political and intellectual fortunes of his country from the Battle of Waterloo, through the Revolution of 1830, the Second Republic of 1848, the Second Empire, the War and the Commune of 1871, into the Third Republic, with its Dreyfus struggles and its Educational and Disestablishment problems in the early years of the present century.

A Note on the Revision of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 1011-1022
Author(s):  
Roy Macridis
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
The Third ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
The People ◽  
Fourth Republic ◽  
French People ◽  
Registered Voters

Recent political developments in France, particularly the dissolution of the National Assembly and the subsequent elections of January 2, 1956, overshadowed one of the most interesting and long-awaited enactments of the second legislature of the Fourth Republic. A law of November 30, 1954, passed by the National Assembly by the required two-thirds majority, realized the revision of the constitution of the Fourth Republic. The law was the culmination of debates that had begun when the new constitution was framed. One might indeed say that constitutional reform was advocated throughout the whole period of the Third Republic, and in 1945 the French people overwhelmingly expressed themselves in favor of a constituent assembly to frame a new republican constitution. Yet when the document was drafted and submitted to the people it was received with great apathy and endorsed on October 13, 1946, by a minority of the registered voters. No sooner had it been put into force than the movement for reform recommenced, and various leaders like DeGaulle, Reynaud, Mendès-France, Laniel and Bidault joined the eminent statesmen of the Third Republic in proclaiming the need for further revision. Perhaps no better evidence testifies to the inherent instability of the French body politic than this perennial dissatisfaction with the basic instrument of government.

The Parliamentary Opposition to the Front Populaire and the Elections of 1936

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-695
Author(s):  
A. W. H. Shennan
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
French Politics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
Scholarly Attention

At the beginning of his venomous critique of conservative parliamentarians, Abel Bonnard commented:Le parti modéré, négligeable en apparence et si l'on s'en tient au peu qu'il a fait, ressemble à une carafe d'eau claire où le vulgaire ne voit que le plus nul des objets, mais dans laquelle un devin penché aperçoit mille scènes du passé et de l'avenir.To judge by the continuing dearth of works on the French parliamentary right in the inter-war years, the properties of this subject have remained hidden. Scholarly attention has been directed almost exclusively towards the ideological extremes of both left and right. Those nearer the centre of French politics, possessing a less identifiable ideology but a far greater numerical strength inside the Palais Bourbon, have been largely ignored. There is still no detailed or comprehensive account of the parliamentary right's evolution in the final decades of the Third Republic.

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