Rupert Christiansen is as excellent a writer as they come, and makes an exciting, turbulent time all the more enjoyable in his dissection and analysis of the transition from the second empire to the third republic of France. The similarities to our present American pandemic are uncanny...
The world knew Paris for its carnival flash, a crazy tinsel circus of all fleshly pleasures and all earthly magnificence. Moralists were chilled by the siren grin behind which rotted a greed and cynicism without parallel in 19th century Europe. "The religion of money is the only one today that has no unbelievers," wrote Theophile Gautier. "All very beautiful for the moment," said another disenchanted romantic, Alfred de Musset, of a ball at the Tuileries palace, "but I wouldn't give two sous to see the last act." "I think there never was a more corrupt, abominable city, nothing but a brothel and a gambling hall," roared the splenetic Thomas Carlyle. He was not alone in his sentiments. By 1869 the knowledge that the curtain would soon fall on the extravagant spectacle the city had made of itself was coming uncomfortably closer. Government functioned without any clear chain of command or direction. Authority clouded, alliances shifted, certainties crumbled, as the French drummed their fingers and waited for the Second Empire to admit its own political bankruptcy and bring to an end - if not a nemesis - an extraordinary episode in French history.
