The Second Empire lasted longer than any French regime since 1789, yet most historical accounts of the government of Napoleon III have been overshadowed by the knowledge of its disastrous and tragic end. As Professor Plessis shows in this detailed thermatic study, such an approach ignores the major social, economic, and political developments of a period that witnessed the gradual acceptance of univeral suffrage, the establishment of large-scale industrial capitalism, a massive improvement in communications, and the birth of impressionism in art.

This is a most thoroughly researched book on Napoleon III's Second Empire. It makes a vital contribution to the quarter-century of French history following the 1848 revolution, which saw major developments in the 'modernization' of the French state and in its relationships with its citizens.

The French Second Empire (1852-70) was a time of exceptionally rapid social, industrial and technological change. French literature also underwent fundamental changes during this period as writers embraced ‘modernity’ and incorporated new technologies, fashions and inventions into their work. Focusing on cultural areas such as exhibitions, transport, food, dress and photography, ‘Changing France’ shows how apparently trivial aspects of modern life provided Second Empire writers with a versatile means of thinking about deeper issues. This volume brings literature and material culture together to reveal how writing itself changed as writers recognised the extraordinarily rich possibilities of expression opened up to them by the changing material world.

An excellent one volume portrait of Napoleon III and the short-lived second French Empire which was brought to ruins by the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. “ONCE again J. M. Thompson has given us a colorful, arresting, and interpretative account of a period of French history—this time of the Second Empire. In this instance, as in previous works, the author makes the biography of a man (Louis Napoleon) the vehicle for a history of a period, thereby infusing the warmth of a very human personality throughout the history of a complex and fateful era. Thus we follow the life of a man who followed his star of fate from youthful refugee to insurrectionist, prisoner, president, emperor, economic reformer, arbiter of a continent, prisoner-of-war, and, alas, to refugee again until death. Nothing of the romance, the contrasts, the shaded significances is lost by the author's telling. Those who have read his French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte cannot fail to discern and appreciate the same trenchant pen and deft brush which restore life and odor to a much-told tale of the past. While Mr. Thompson does not attempt to conceal the faults and mistakes of the man, in the main he joins with some current revisionists in understanding (not justifying) the "crime of December 2nd" and crediting Napoleon Ili with constructive policies at home and abroad and exonerating him of the major responsibility for the outbreak of the war of 1870. The author rightly blames Bismarck and French public opinion of all classes for pushing Louis Napoleon into the war (p. 272) rather than just a small war party and the empress.”-Lynn M. Case

A distinguished French historian traces the history of France under the Second Republic. His approach emphasizes the relationship between the political history of the period and the history of popular culture and thought.

A sparkling account of the nineteenth-century reinvention of Paris as the most beautiful, exciting city in the world In 1853, French emperor Louis Napoleon inaugurated a vast and ambitious program of public works in Paris, directed by Georges-Eugè Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine. Haussmann transformed the old medieval city of squalid slums and disease-ridden alleyways into a "City of Light" characterized by wide boulevards, apartment blocks, parks, squares and public monuments, new rail stations and department stores, and a new system of public sanitation. City of Light charts this fifteen-year project of urban renewal which -- despite the interruptions of war, revolution, corruption, and bankruptcy -- set a template for nineteenth and early twentieth-century urban planning and created the enduring landscape of modern Paris now so famous around the globe. Lively and engaging, City of Light is a book for anyone who wants to know how Paris became Paris.

With a penetrating eye and a deep and spiritual intelligence, Betty Adcock writes poems that range from elegy to dark humor as they confront both loss and possibility. Intervale, selections from her first four books plus a new collection, traces the continuity of her vision and shows that lyric intensity can bring light to even the most obdurate darkness.Moving from the original loss of a world at her mother's death during the poet's sixth year to the world's loss of the arboreal leopards of Cambodia and Vietnam; from vanishing farmland to the endangered Sacred Harp music that once flourished in backwoods churches; from the difficult history of a little-known rural place to the weighted ruins of Greece -- these poems frame lessenings, divestations, and devastations in the midst of plenty. A wilderness disappears into cozy myth, farming into industry, tiger and elephant into zoos; the very ground underfoot, with its attendant necessities and contingencies, can seem to fade into fabrications we take for reality. The seam where such themes touch Adcock's personal history is the path these poems travel toward a harsh but luminous transcendence.