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This article investigates clerical child sexual abuse in the first decades of the French Third Republic. Thanks in large part to the difficulty of accessing relevant archival records, we know very little about this crime or how it was investigated by judicial officials. This study addresses this gap by drawing on a rich and untapped collection of correspondence between local prosecutors and the Ministry of Justice in Paris. The files reveal the process for investigating and prosecuting abusive priests, as well as the reverberations within local communities. Though generated by the state rather than the church, they offer an insight as well into the response of ecclesiastical authorities. Finally, they shed light on the relationship between clerical crime and the culture wars pitting French republicans against Catholics, a conflict that was reaching a peak of intensity in this period. What emerges from this study is an appreciation of the personal toll and political impact of clerical sexual abuse, as well as a new perspective on the recent scandals which have engulfed the Catholic church in a range of nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature has pointed out the negative aspects of political dynasties. But can political dynasties help prevent autocratic reversals? We argue that political dynasties differ according to their ideological origin and that those whose founder was a defender of democratic ideals, for simplicity labeled "pro-democratic dynasties," show stronger support for democracy. We analyze the vote by the French parliament on 10 July 1940 of an enabling act that granted full power to Marshall Philippe Pétain, thereby ending the Third French Republic and aligning France with Nazi Germany. Using data collected from the biographies of parliamentarians and information on their voting behavior, we find that members of a pro-democratic dynasty were 9.6 to 15.1 percentage points more likely to oppose the act than other parliamentarians. We report evidence that socialization inside and outside parliament shaped the vote of parliamentarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparative spatial history using GIS, this article examines the similar and differing effects of railway expansion on the growth of postal communications in Great Britain and France from 1830 to the eve of the Great War. It argues that the modern Postal Age in Great Britain and France began in the 1830s. In Britain in 1839, the Parliament obligated private railway companies to convey the Royal Mail throughout the kingdom at reasonable rates. Thereafter, the expansion of postal services and railway networks went hand in hand. Over the years, thousands of new post offices were established and were closer to rail stations than before. As the years wore on the geography of postal communication expanded greatly and by 1914 the majority of rural districts became part of the system of regular, daily mail. In France, a country four or five times larger than England and Wales with a relatively vast rural population, the task of modernizing postal service was a greater challenge. The inauguration of a "rural service" in 1829 employed some 5,000 men as postal carriers to deliver and collect mail throughout the countryside. Thereafter, their numbers grew as new post offices were established to serve villages and small towns with mail deliveries every other day. In the 1880s, under the Third Republic, the state greatly expanded the postal service, deeming it a national mission. It was then that the growing rail network came to shape the national geography of postal service. Hence, at the turn of the century the patterns British and French postal expansions converged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decade of the 1880s was a turbulent period for the French Third Republic. Corruption scandals that discredited republican parties and a lacklustre economic performance after the Paris Bourse crash of 1882 gave rise to widespread public disenchantment with the republican political elites. The rise of the Boulangist movement was the most representative example of this disillusionment. In 1887, Georges Boulanger, an army general and former minister of war, began orchestrating a populist mass campaign against the ruling republicans and the parliamentary regime. His political agitation, supported by a heterogeneous coalition of socialists, radicals and royalists, reached a climax in January 1889, when, after winning a Paris by-election, he had an opportunity to stage a coup d'état , which did not materialise. To understand whether French investors perceived the Boulangist campaign as a real threat to their interests, I use an original dataset of daily stock prices to analyse the effect of the January 1889 by-election on the value of politically connected firms listed on the Paris Bourse. The results show that firms with links to the republican parties experienced positive cumulative abnormal returns after Boulanger's refusal to stage the coup, while there was no effect on firms connected to the royalist parties or with no political ties. These findings suggest that French investors reacted positively to the prospective subsiding of the Boulangist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of empire and internationalism in French revolutionary socialist thought at the beginning of the Third Republic. Whilst French revolutionary socialists frequently employed colonial examples and operated within wider traditions of either imperialism or anti-colonialism, the concept of ‘empire’ itself remained vague and undefined in their thought. Previous literature on the subject has focused overwhelmingly on the writings of Communards deported to New Caledonia in the 1870s; however, this article argues that the deportees in fact remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and international questions. Rather, it was those who remained in Europe that produced more clearly elaborated theories on empire and international engagement. Such ideas subsequently served to demarcate the limits and possibilities of universal equality and solidarity, which were central to revolutionary socialist thought during this period. Consequently, it will be suggested that despite their recent rise in popularity, empire, and colonialism are not the best categories of analysis for approaching such themes, for they cannot be isolated from broader concerns with international and transnational thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers views of the author concerning downfall of the French Third Republic. The author says that it is true that France was defeated because she did not have enough tanks, planes and allies and also because there were many competent or careless men among her military and political leaders. He presents a sociological case history to explain France's defeat and the downfall of the Third Republic.