flicts, and there is nothing to assure us
that France will not one day find herself involved in a great European
or world conflagration. Her obligation to provide for her defence
increases not a little those difficulties which arise from a social
order profoundly agitated by competition in production and antagonism
between classes.

An absolute empire obtains its defenders by inspiring fear; democracy
only by bestowing benefits. Fear or interest lies at the root of all
devotion. If the French proletariat is to defend the Republic
heroically in the hour of peril, then it must either be happy or have
the hope of becoming so. And what use is it to deceive ourselves? The
lot of the workman to-day is no better in France than in Germany, and
not so good as in England or America.

On these important subjects I have not been able to forbear expressing
the truth as it appears to me; there is a great satisfaction in saying
what one believes useful and just.

It now only remains for me to submit to my readers a few reflections
on the difficult art of writing history, and to explain certain
peculiarities of form and language which will be found in this work.

To enter into the spirit of a period that has passed away, to make
oneself the contemporary of men of former days, deliberate study and
loving care are necessary. The difficulty lies not so much in what one
must know as in what one must not know. If we would really live in the
fifteenth century, how many things we must forget: knowledge, methods,
all those acquisitions which make moderns of us. We must forget that
the earth is round, and that the stars are suns, and not lamps
suspended from a crystal vault; we must forget the cosmogony of
Laplace, and believe in the science of Saint Thomas, of Dante, and of
those cosmographers of the Middle Age who teach the Creation in seven
days and the foundation of kingdoms by the sons of Priam, after the
destruction of Great Troy. Such and such a historian or paleographer
is powerless to make us understand the contemporaries of the Maid. It
is not knowledge he lacks, but ignorance--ignorance of modern warfare,
of modern politics, of modern religion.

But when we have forgotten, as far as possible, all that has happened
since the youth of Charles VII, in order to think like a clerk in
exile at Poitiers, or a burgher at Orleans serving on the ramparts of
his city, we must recover all our intellectual resources in order to
embrace the