Tag: Napoleon III

3,010 words

Emile Zola’s 1892 novel Le  Débâcle is almost familiar reading these days, for when I recall this book, while set in the supposedly serene and ordered nineteenth century, has a horror of déjà vu that shrouds America, Iran, and the Donald.

The novel, part of a series Zola wrote to capture France in the nineteenth century and especially the Second Empire, deals with the collapse of Napoleon III’s empire from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 as told through the eyes of French soldiers Jean Macquart and Maurice Levasseur; the first a peasant and former soldier and the second, a bourgeois. (more…)

3,355 words

Ian Kershaw
Personality and Power:­­­­ Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe
New York: Penguin Press, 2022

This book caught my eye when it came out a few months ago because its format reminded me of Standardbearers: British Roots of the New Right, which I reviewed here some seasons back. That is to say, a collection of short critical biographies of a dozen or so worthies, assembled together on a common theme. (more…)

Captain Semmes and Lieutenant Kell aboard the Alabama, ca. 1863.

3,770 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Grand Tour of a Cause-Célèbre

Perhaps just as galling to Unionists as Alabama‘s destructive impunity was her sheen of romance that so enthralled the public imagination. (more…)

Battle of the ironclads, the Merrimack vs. the Monitor

4,699 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

II. Out of Space: Fever

The thickened present manifested also in both a more expansive and a more constricted space during Gothic Science Fiction wars. (more…)

Grahame Baker-Smith’s 2017 Folio illustration for War of the Worlds.

3,882 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Introduction

It was perhaps the most famous description of a (space) alien in English literature. The narrator felt an “utter terror [grip] him” as a thing from a nightmare emerged slowly, slowly from the pit that its smoking spacecraft had cratered in the Earth. As its body “bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.” A pair of huge, fathomless dark eyes regarded him intensely, “steadfastly. (more…)