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France and the French in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. Transl
France and the French in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Transl Author:Karl Hillebrand General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1881 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. PARIS AND THE PROVINCES. We have endeavcmred to give an account of the family and of education in France, and of the moral and social conditions of the country. It remains for us shortly to characterise the intellectual and political life of the nation, as it has been developed under these influences during the present century. Even if less slight, these sketches would still be inadequate to explain these two aspects of French life. To do so, it would be necessary for the economist, the geographer, and the statist to contribute the results of their researches on the productiveness of the soil, on climate, extent of coast, on commerce, industry, and agriculture; we should require histories of literature and politics, in order to trace back for centuries the intellectual and political development of the nation, to show what tendencies in the " modern state " and in contemporary literature are due to this development. Above all, it would be necessary for the student of jurisprudence thoroughly to investigate the civil and criminal laws of the land, and to offer a clear and full account of their form and their spirit. Only then could an attempt to give a detailed description of modern France make any claim to completeness. In one sense, it is true, this work has been done, not by a student of law or history, but by a singularly gifted novelist. For although Balzac lived and wrote in the first half of the century, yet with a seer's eye, to which past and future are as the present, herevealed the secret growth of new France, and depicted with prophetic certainty the state of society under the ...« less