JACQUES DE SAINT-VICTOR’S CHRONICLE – The historian specializing in the IIIe République brings together in one volume his studies on this unloved regime.
Since the Second World Warthe “longest republicnamely the Third Republicdoes not have a good reputation. It collapsed in July 1940 and, apart from a few radicals, by 1945 no one had sought to restore it. More recently, its great founding figures, from Thiers to Clemenceau, via Jules Ferry, have fallen out of fashion, even accused of all manner of evils.
Thiers is the “massacreur de la CommuneJules Ferry, who dared to speak of “superior raceis condemned as colonialist and Clemenceau passes for one “strike breaker and an apprentice dictator. In short, in today’s advanced (i.e. left-wing) public opinion, the Republic may have as much prestige and support as the monarchy did at the time of Charles X’s coronation.
The historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney, who was president of the bicentenary of the French Revolution and a minister under François Mitterrand, is familiar, in more ways than one, with the…
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