6. In 1815 the Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, but when Napoléon escaped from the island of Elba on February 26 and returned to rule in Paris, Louis XVIII fled the country. The French defeat at Waterloo on June 18 led to Napoléon’s abdication and exile on Saint Helena, the return of Louis XVIII, and the Second Treaty of Paris, which finally ended the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) and made peace between France and her adversaries Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia.
7. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck goaded the French into declaring war on Prussia on July 19, 1870, thus drawing the other German states to his side in the Franco-Prussian War. Soundly beaten, France not only lost most of Alsace and some parts of Lorraine but witnessed the unification of Germany under Wilhelm I of Prussia, crowned kaiser of this new and threateningly powerful German state in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on January 18, 1871. Fueled by anger over France’s humiliation and the monarchist sympathies of the Assemblée Nationale, a revolutionary uprising broke out two months later in Montmartre, but the socialist government of the Paris Commune held power in the capital for only two months and was crushed by the French army in a week of carnage during La Semaine Sanglante (May 21–28).
8. Google “gueules cassées” and click under “Images”; the injuries are stunning.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jean Echenoz won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for I’m Gone (The New Press). He is the author of eleven novels in English translation — including 1914, Big Blondes, Lightning, Piano, Ravel, and Running, all published by The New Press — and the winner of numerous literary prizes, among them the Prix Médicis and the European Literature Jeopardy Prize. He lives in Paris.
Linda Coverdale’s most recent translation for The New Press was Jean Echenoz’s 1914. She was the recipient of the French-American Foundation’s 2008 Translation Prize for her translation of Echenoz’s Ravel (The New Press). She lives in Brooklyn.