France: Empire and Republic, 1850–1940: Historical Documents (Document History of Western Civilization)

## FRANCE: EMPIRE AND REPUBLIC all the hazards, preferences, prejudices, and disputable choices of any individual judgment. Yet it remains true that, although others might have produced a volume of materials somewhat different in range and often different in precise choice, and although they might have arranged and even interpreted them in other ways, there are many documents in this volume which no adequate selection could reasonably omit. Some have undeniable importance and relevance, as laying the basis for long-term developments. Such are the written Constitution of 1852, or the Commercial Treaty with England of 1860, or the Constitutional Laws of 187 5. These and other indispensable documents have been given in full. Others, again, have come to be recognized by a common consensus, as measured by the frequency with which they are referred to or quoted (and sometimes misquoted) by historians, to have a basic importance. Such are Leon Gambetta's appeal for "war to the end" in October, 1870, or Karl Marx's remarkable contemporary assessment of the Paris Commune in 1871, or Emile Zola's article "]'Accuse" of January, 1898. The whole of the relevant sections of these famous statements have been quoted in this volume. Yet others are expressions of policies (party manifestoes or declarations of principle by national leaders), or statements of prevalent attitudes or interests (of sectional or pressure groups), which have definable importance or which convey, in concise form, forces and ideas that have clearly mattered in the life and thought of these years. Here, again, the whole or the most relevant sections of the documents have been given, with conscious effort to avoid the disjointed snippets which sometimes masquerade as "documents." In this third category, however, there is more room for personal choice as to which statements are left out or put in. The volume contains yet a fourth category of documents, the inclusion of which would have caused mild surprise to historians brought up in the older French (and Anglo-American) school of historiography, which drew excessively sharp and clear distinctions between "primary" and "secondary" sources. ~These range from the passage quoted from Anatole France's L'Ile des pingouins, to the personal records of trips into the villages of central France by the historian Daniel Halevy. Inclusion of such extracts in a volume of "documents" is in tune with modern notions of the serious and scholarly study of history, and is justifiable on It is a device increasingly used as such in universities and colleges. But there should be no assumption that "history in the raw" is somehow more objective or more authentic than the finished product of the historian. It may, for reasons mentioned above, reflect just as much of the personal taste, tendentiousness, and idio- Front Matter....Pages iii-xii Introduction....Pages 1-22 Chronology....Pages 23-31 The State and Its Foundations....Pages 31-115 The National Economy....Pages 117-179 Conflicts Within Society....Pages 181-303 External Relations....Pages 305-364 Back Matter....Pages 365-386