Book Description

Excerpt from Men and Manners of the Third Republic 'Your improvised chiefs of the National Defence are simply so many chevaliers du pave,9 said Bismarck to Jules Favre at their interview at Ferrieres, a fortnight after the fall of the Second Empire. Bismarck was not strictly within the truth; the ten men who kicked from their path the lifeless body of the Second Empire, killed three days previously at Sedan, were not 'knights of the pavement, ' in the sense of having won their spurs in heading popular riots; seven of them were so-called veterans of the Second Republic, the three others were political spadassins of a younger schoc I, and Rochefort, who was added to their number a few days after the 4th September, was a journalistic d'Artagnan with as much physical pluck, though not with as much stamina, as the hero of Dumas' two greatest novels. In these papers I shall treat of them in detail, for with the exception of two, I knew them all, though not to any equal degree, long before they assumed the roles of ' Saviours of France.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.