General Trochu, military commandant of Paris during the siege, has also, in his _Mémoires_, published in 1896, dwelt upon the all-important part which the capital might have played in the great drama of the national defence. "I dreamed," he says, "of a Parisian population forgetting before the grandeur of the common peril its animosity toward the Empire, in order to associate itself with us in the supreme effort which we were about to make in conjunction with it; of Paris, with its immense resources, put in a state of defence by the labor of a hundred thousand arms and, after a brief delay, rendered impregnable." This theory of the great importance of the capital is, however, by no means held by all the military critics of the war.
[Illustration: AVENUE DE L'OBSERVATOIRE, FROM THE CARREFOUR.]
It is, perhaps, well to dwell, at some length, in any effort--however superficial--to appreciate the present condition and the promise for the future of this nation and this capital, on this period of the war with Germany, for the burden of contemporary testimony seems to be that there has been, practically, no recovery from the blow. Nothing is more interesting in contemporary sociology than the tone of depression, almost of humility, of lack of national elasticity and self-assertiveness, in the current French literature. There are still to be met with, of course, the familiar assertions that France is "the cradle of enlightened liberties," the "hope of struggling nationalities," and similar vague phrases, but always qualified with some allusion to the present depression and extinguishment. These admissions appear on every hand:--in _Le Temps_, of November 7, 1898, in its review of the second volume of M. Samuel Denis's _Histoire contemporaine: La chute de L'Empire_, we read: "The period comprised between the 15th of July, 1870, and the last months of the year 1875 is, perhaps, of all our national history, the most fruitful in dramatic events. It is, without any doubt, that which has for us all the keenest interest,--the most poignant. The history of these days of mourning, it is what our fathers did, with their tears and with their blood, and it is the history of events which still oppress with all their weight our national life. It is that which constitutes our malady; it is, that after twenty-eight years, we are still the vanquished." The Duc de Broglie, in an article in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, July 1, 1896, a review of the colonial policy of the Third Republic between the years 1871 and 1896, a period in which her ministers strove--with very doubtful success, he thinks--to recover in some degree the prestige lost in the war and in the subsequent check in Egypt, _vis-à-vis_ with England, sums up: "We are not alone in bearing the heavy heritage of the war of 1870; all the world has its part in the sentiment of general uneasiness, from which no one escapes. It is the common condition, and even though France should be the only one to suffer from it, the other peoples, still, should not resign themselves to it without mortification.... Well! behold it revived, this sombre right of conquest, in all its nakedness, in all its rigor;--it has installed itself in the very centre, in the full light of civilization, and all, statesmen as well as doctors of philosophy, political and social, have bowed before it.... So long as this spectacle lasts, a brand is imprinted upon the front of modern society like a _memento homo_ which recalls to it that the progress with which it flatters itself has purified only the surface and which notifies democracy, so proud of its puissance, that it is only a dust of men, a plaything, like all human things, of all the winds that blow of brute strength or of fortune."