From what can be inferred from the composer’s correspondence and writings, Debussy was indifferent to political debate. It is noteworthy that the names of politicians are virtually absent from his letters, and that none of the major affairs or terrorist episodes that shook French public opinion are the subject of his public or private writings. This chapter describes France’s volatile politics and the impact of the Prussian invasion, the Commune (1871), the Dreyfus affair, the First World War, and other events that shaped the country. Relations with Germany and the catastrophe of the First World War are discussed. Although Debussy was directly affected by some political events, for example his father’s involvement in the Commune, he comes across as fairly apathetic in his few political pronouncements.

This chapter traces the emergence of the Zionist movement and the colonization of Palestine from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. It begins with two Zionist pioneers. The first, Theodor Herzl––the father of political Zionism––was important both for his approach to Jewish colonization (he sought the backing of a Great Power for the project) and for his organizational skills which created structures in Europe that nurtured the movement. The second, Leo Pinsker––the father of Practical Zionism––believed the Jews of Europe could not wait, and thus organized Jewish emigration to Palestine. While the first attempts at colonization failed, the chapter goes on to discuss three more waves of immigration. The second and third wave were inspired by socialism and Romanticism, and the structures they created––which lasted well into the statehood period––reflected this. The fourth wave, however, was mainly made up of economic refugees who were attracted to a rightwing, petit-bourgeois ideology. They and their descendents became influential in Israel beginning in the late 1970s.

This chapter explores the close, if often vexed, relationship between the novel and the Republic towards the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how the dominant aesthetic of prose fiction in this period, naturalism, framed itself as an ally of democracy – most directly with its expansion of the novel’s horizons to include, and do justice to, the experience, idiom, and political claims of the working classes. The political use of the naturalist novel as a critical document of social life resided, as Émile Zola saw it, precisely in its declared objectivity. But the form of naturalist fiction produced more contradictions than its theory allowed. This chapter returns the evolution of the naturalist novel to its political context, while tracking the rise of its rival forms (Symbolist and Decadent literature; the psychological novel), which often repudiated those central tenets of the Republic: positivism, scientism, democracy, anti-clericalism. Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget scrutinised the academic and intellectual principles of a generation schooled by the Third Republic, in ways which offered an alternative pedagogy. By the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the novel had become a prime vehicle for conflicting ideological visions of a nation that was increasingly divided against itself.