Five Republics and Two Empires

 

With le writer’s bloque tormenting me yet again, and finding most of my initial inspirations dashed by seeing I’ve already commented on them, I’ll fall back to my usual subject:  FRANCE, from the Revolution to the present day.

First Republic (1793-1804).  We all remember Bastille Day, July 14, 1789, marking the beginning of the French Revolution.  But Louis XVI didn’t lose his head to the guillotine until January 1793.  For that four year interim period, the French experimented with a constitutional monarchy, giving the people some degree of power, taking that away from Louis XVI.  But when the Terror erupted, no one was safe – not even its own leaders, Danton and Robespierre.  Thereafter, France experimented with a variety of different systems, collectively referred to as the First Republic, which ended with First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte. 

First Empire (1804-1815).  Napoleon I crowned himself Emperor of France and then went about conquering most of Europe, including Spain, Italy, what passed for Germany back then (effectively ending the Holy Roman Empire), Poland, and much of Russia.  As with Hitler, Big Cold Russia defeated Napoleon, and at Waterloo he was finally conquered once and for all.  Thus the First Empire only had ONE emperor.   Napoleon’s troops in Egypt brought back hashish, introducing France to Le Weed. 

We Three Kings.   Louis XVIII (1815-1824), Charles X (1824-1830) (both younger brothers of Louis XVI), Louis Philippe (1830-1848) (descendent of Louis XIV’s younger brother).  We’re familiar with the major revolutions of 1848, wherein the Communist Manifesto was written (Marx & Engels).

Second Republic (1848-1852).  Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, who had lived in exile in Switzerland and England, finally came home and ran for the first elections after Louis Philippe abdicated.  As a somewhat of a celebrity, LP won the election and started the Second Republic, being its only president.

Second Empire (1852-1870).  In 1852 Louis Napoleon had sufficiently consolidated enough power and prestige to get away with declaring himself Emperor, Napoleon III, in 1852.  [Napoleon II was Napoleon I’s son, who died in captivity in Austria]. Thus began the Second Empire, which like the first one only had one emperor.  N3 went off to Mexico, colonized Indochina, got France involved in the Crimean War, but his most important legacy was expanding Paris to its current size and nature with the help of his right hand man, Baron Haussmann.  This period also has distinctive architecture, some of which made it here to the USA. 

Franco-Prussian War (1870-71).  Bismarck successfully engineered a series of wars, first against Denmark (1864), then Austria (1866), and finally against France (1870-71).  Germany, not quite unified but dominated by Prussia, defeated the French at Sedan and then proceeded to besiege fresh, brand new bigger Paris, which finally surrendered in January 1871, N3 himself having been captured at Sedan with his forces.  Then from March to May 1871 was the Paris Commune, in which Paris itself was taken over by communists for two months, finally put down by Adolphe Thiers. 

Third Republic (1871-1940).  With the Commune crushed and its leaders executed in the Parc Monceau, France could start this republic thing going again, which this time around lasted until World War II.  The first of 14 presidents was the one who crushed the Commune, Thiers, with the last being Albert Lebrun in 1940.  This period covers La Belle Epoque of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

World War II (1939-1945).  Naturally the Germans inconveniently invaded France in May 1940 and defeated the French, resulting in a four year occupation.  Some put Petain as the final leader of the Third Republic, though as a Nazi Puppet that sounds a bit strange. 

Fourth Republic (1948-1958).  With the Germans pushed back where they belonged, far eastern German given to Poland, and the country itself divided into east and west (until 1991), France could get back to being a normal country again.  For its fourth attempt at democracy, it picked a confusing system of parliamentary democracy like Britain’s, in which the head of state was a prime minister, the leader of the majority party.  This resulted in some 21 prime ministers between 1947 (Ramadier) and 1958 (De Gaulle) – some serving multiple nonconsecutive terms alternating as the majority party bounced back and forth, at which point the French figured this system might work well enough across the English Channel, but fell short of expectations in France itself.  The last prime minister of the Fourth Republic was Charles De Gaulle.

Fifth Republic (1958-present).  And the first President of the Fifth Republic, which is still going on today, was Charles De Gaulle.  He was followed by Georges “Weird Pipe Museum” Pompidou, Valery Giscard D’Estaing (President when we moved to Paris in 1979), Francois Mitterand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Francois Hollande, and now Emmanuel Macron, whose wife we saw at the Louvre in October 2017.