Power and Pleasure: Louis Barthou and the Third French Republic

By Robert J. Young

One of the great political figures of his day, Louis Barthou was also labelled a thief, an accomplice to murder, and a sexual pervert. He was France's foreign minister when, in 1934, he suffered a fatal bullet wound during the assassination of Yugoslavia's King Alexander. Barthou had spent forty-five years in public life as lawyer, journalist, deputy, senator, and cabinet minister. In 1913 he was appointed prime minister and the following year, when France's armies contained the German offensive in northern France, he was celebrated as a national hero. For this, and in recognition of his work as an author, Barthou was elected to the Acad mie fran aise.

Neither Barthou's contemporaries nor subsequent historians have known quite what to make of this bourgeois politician who fought a duel with Jean Jaur s and flew with Wilbur Wright. Many concluded he was an individual of considerable talent, few principles, and excessive ambition. No one, reading Power and Pleasure, can maintain that view. Robert Young, constructing a complete picture of Barthou, effectively refutes the charge of unprincipled ambition and deftly deals with the tension between political principles and pragmatism.

Young has written a social biography, situating Barthou's life -- both public and private -- in the political and cultural context of the Third Republic. Barthou was a centrist in his politics and, while current scholarship maintains that centrists adopted regressive strategies in response to the social question, Young presents an alternative reading of their position. He argues that although centrists like Barthou were not socialists -- for them "bourgeois" was a positive term -- they were capable of adjusting their ideals to meet the social changes of modern France. Barthou's turbulent political career was tempered both by a thirty-five-year marriage to his supportive wife and by a lifetime of pleasure derived from music, art, history, books, and literature.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773508635
• ISBN13: 9780773508637
• Release Date: October 1991
• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.