It is this thread which in this little book I shall endeavour to bring to light. In so to speak detaching the nation from those forms of government which have been successively imposed on it, sometimes by a turbulent minority, sometimes by the supreme necessities of the moment, my aim is to show how the work of 1830, of 1848, and of 1867, was to compromise the results gained at the price of so much labour and effort in 1824, in 1846, and in 1856. And is it improbable that the highly advantageous position attained by the Third Republic in 1893 may be compromised in its turn? There are signs which point to this conclusion. If it be so, it will only be one more display of the peculiar incapacity of the French people to profit by their successes, their tendency to lose in victory the force gained in struggle.
From a higher point of view, the career of the French people throughout the nineteenth century is not without a certain grandeur. At the first glance it resolves itself into a series of contradictory experiments in government, cut short by the caprices of revolution; but if we look to the heart of things, we see in it the perpetual beginning of the same work, the
