For the Soul of France

Frederick Brown, cultural historian, author of acclaimed biographies of Émile Zola (“Magnificent”— The New Yorker ) and Flaubert (“Splendid . . . Intellectually nuanced, exquisitely written”— The New Republic ) now gives us an ambitious, far-reaching book—a perfect joining of subject and writer: a portrait of fin-de-siècle France. He writes about the forces that led up to the twilight years of the nineteenth century when France, defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, was forc