Download or read book Contemporary French Politics (Classic Reprint) written by Raymond Leslie Buell and published by . This book was released on 2016-06-13 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Contemporary French Politics To many, the results of the French elections of November 16, 1919, came as a welcome surprise. An American observer in Paris who had perhaps taken but a casual interest in French domestic problems would have been convinced, upon visiting the Palais Bourbon, that France was on the verge of being engulfed in a tidal wave of Bolshevism from the Russian deep. He would have heard aghast, the Extreme Left, led by the grandson of Karl Marx, Jean Longuet, shrieking its defiance at all things bourgeois. Possibly to his dismay, he would also have heard the thunderous stamping of feet by which the Socialists drowned the sound of the huge silver bell, through insistent ringing of which the President of the Chamber bravely struggled to maintain order. To the Americans at home the situation must have appeared no less ominous. Judged by the press reports, the tumult arising from the First of May celebrations, and the Socialist vituperations against the Peace Conference, surely gave cause for grave foreboding. But a deeper knowledge of the currents which underlie the surface of the political waters in France belied any such catastrophe as the "storm prophets" had predicted. Those currents were deep; they were silent. Indeed, to their depth they owed their relentless power and their persistence in their normal course. The strongest of these forces was the sterling character of the French people themselves. Only a very superficial estimate of national temperament will judge the French to be excitable, unpractical and unstable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.