The politics of pessimism

the long version

Despite his importance in conservative politics of the early years of the Third Republic of France, Duc Albert de Broglie has been largely ignored by historians. Historian Alan Grubb seeks to right that oversight in this book. Broglie was the most outstanding, influential, and controversial figure of the conservative group. He bore an illustrious family name, but because of the vicissitudes of French politics, he entered public life only in 1871, at the age of fifty, following the collapse of the Second Empire. Elected to the National Assembly, he became the acknowledged, if not always liked, leader of the monarchist majority, the spokesman of conservative union, and the Right's most effective - and to the republicans, confounding - political strategist. As such, he played a central role in political developments of the day - in the overthrow of Thiers, in the attempt to restore the monarchy, in the creation of the seven-year presidency or Septennat, in the monarchists' reluctant adoption of a republican constitution in 1875, and finally in the Right's desperate attempt to hold on to power in the so-called Seize Mai affair of 1877, the Republic's first major political crisis. There is no biography of Broglie in either French or English, a lack that Grubb tries to remedy in this study. The author uses Broglie's published memoirs and family archives of his close friends to examine his political career and conservative politics of the period. For in Broglie's "failure" there was also the Right's and his own "brief passage in affairs," as he later called it, that proved to be an important one in French history: for himself, the Right, the Notables, and the Republic itself.