How a Republic Liquidates a Monarchy: France’s Crown Jewel Sale HT

On the 7th of December 1886, the Shambra de Deput voted to sell the crown jewels of France. The law was numbered, dated, and co-signed by President Juel Gravy and Finance Minister Sadi Carnau. It authorized the liquidation of every diamond, pearl, ruby, sapphire, and emerald in the national collection not deemed to possess scientific or minological interest.

A five member expert commissioner would decide which pieces lived and which died. The proceeds would fund the case damortismo, the national debt syncing fund. The bill passed. It was promulgated on the 10th of December and published in the journal official on the 11th of January 1887. The collection it condemned had been accumulating for 357 years since Francois I declared the crown jewels inalienable property of the French state in 1530.

It contains 77,486 individual stones and pearls. The commission appraised their total value at 21,267,040 Franks. Not one of the families who had warned them. Borborn Oleon Bonaparts remained on French soil to object. They had already been dealt with. The jewel sale was not an isolated act.

It was the final instrument in a coordinated legislative campaign that the third republic had been executing for months. And that campaign had a specific trigger. On the 14th of May 1886, Philipe, Count of Paris, the Orlanist pretender recognized by most French monarchists as Philippa IIIth, hosted a reception at the Hotel Galiera in Paris to celebrate the engagement of his daughter, Princess Amily to Crown Prince Carlos of Portugal.

The event drew the diplomatic corps, the old aristocracy, and enormous crowds. Press coverage was extensive. Republican deputies watched what looked in every particular like a rehearsal for a restoration. See twin 1885 legislative elections had already alarmed them. Conservative, royalist and bonapartist deputies had surged from roughly 90 seats to nearly 200.

The monarchist cause was not dead. It was holding receptions. The republic struck on the 22nd of June 1886. The Liril passed the chamber by 315 votes to 2132 and the Senate by 141 to 107. Article 1 declared the territory of the republic permanently forbidden to the heads of formerly reigning families and their direct heirs in the order of primogenature.

Violators face 2 to 5 years imprisonment. Article 4 barred all members of former reigning families from military service, public office and elected positions. The law targeted three houses simultaneously. Bourbon Bonapart and any surviving legitimist claimment. 5 months later, the jewel sale law followed. The logic was explicit.

Deputy Benjamin Raspel, who had first proposed the sale in 1878, had framed it as both philanthropic and political. Diamonds bought with the people’s money, he argued, must be used for the benefit of the people. The chamber had first approved the principle on the 20th of June 1882 by approximately 342 votes to 85.

But the measure stalled in the Senate for 4 years, years during which the monarchist threat grew. The 1885 election results broke the deadlock. The Senate voted on the 26th of October 1886. The chamber followed on the 7th of December. Raspel’s original proposal had called for proceeds to fund a workers’s disability fund.

Jules Ferry had countered that the revenue would be only a drop in the ocean and pushed instead for a museum’s endowment. What the republic actually created was a debt repayment mechanism. The people’s diamonds would service the people’s bonds. The republic had exiled the princes. Now it would scatter the stones.

The palaces were already burning or already rubble or scheduled for demolition. Sonuron peswand without a crown. No need for a king. The collection the law condemned was not assembled by a single monarch or a single century. It was the accumulated physical weight of every French sovereign from the Renaissance forward and its scale was without parallel in Europe.

Francois I established the principle in 1530. The crown jewels were not the king’s personal property. They belonged to the state held in trust by whichever dynasty occupied the throne. Inalienable and indivisible. Every successor added to them. None could subtract. By the time of the revolution, the collection had survived the wars of religion, the fond, the bankruptcy of Louis the 14th’s final years, and the near dissolution of the monarchy under Louis V 16th.

And through all of it, the stones remained. The centerpiece was the Regent Diamond, 140.64 carats, decolor cushion brilliant, type 2A. The purest chemical classification a diamond can hold. Discovered in the cola mine in Gconda, India around 1698. Purchased by Philip II, Duke of Oleons, regent of France in 1717 for 135,000 sterling.

A sum so large it required two years of negotiation and the involvement of the financier John Law. It was set into Louis X 15th’s coronation crown in 1722. It adorned Louis V 16th’s hat. Napoleon mounted it in the hilt of his ceremonial sword. The regent alone was worth roughly half the collection’s total appraised value.

Beside it sat the Kot de Bratana Spinel 105 carats carved into the shape of a dragon. The oldest stone in the collection listed in Francois I’s original 1530 inventory. The Hortensia diamond approximately 20 carats. Peach Pink named for Hortens de Bohane Napoleon’s stepdaughter and queen of Holland.

The 18 Mazeran diamonds bequeethed to the crown by Cardinal Jeul Mazeran upon his death in 1661. Each one willed with a specific instruction that they must never leave France. The Rus poly sapphire 135.8 carats a stone so geometrically perfect that curators at the museum national disturel would later exploit its shape to save it from the auction block.

Louis the 14th had been the collection’s most aggressive builder. His purchase of the Tavier blue, 115 carats of deep blue diamond, acquired from the gem merchant Jean Baptiste Tava in 1668 for 220,000 lera became the foundation stone of French gemological supremacy. He had it recut to 67.125 carats and renamed it the French blue.

It became the most celebrated colored diamond in European history. It would also become the most famous theft victim. Napoleon I rebuilt the collection after the revolutionary era losses, commissioning new coronation pieces, new perur for Empress Josephine and then Empress Mar Louise. Napoleon III expanded it further.

His wife, Empress Ojani, was the last sovereign to wear the crown jewels at state functions, and under her patronage, the collection reached its physical peak. The jewelers Lemonier, Baps, and Kramer created new diadems, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, combs, and corage ornaments in quantities that filled vault after vault in the guard merb and later the Pavon Delor.

[gasps] By the time the commission sat down to sort the collection in February of 1887, it comprised 51,43 brilliant cut diamonds, 21,19 rosecut diamonds, 2,962 pearls, 57 rubies, 136 sapphires, 250 emeralds, hundreds of additional colored stones, garnets, topazes, turquoises, amethysts, opals.

The total stone count of 77,486 made it the largest single collection of royal gemstones in the Western world. 357 years of accumulation. 15 monarchs, two emperors, one empress consort who wore more of the collection at public events than any other individual in its history. The commission had been given a few weeks to decide what survived and what went under the hammer.

Philipe, Count of Paris, was 48 years old. He had spent his life preparing for a throne the republic was now systematically dismantling beneath him. When the exile law passed, he departed from the chatau dur on the 24th of June 1886. At the port of Lreor, over 12,000 people turned out to see him off. His parting declaration carried the precision of a man who understood exactly what was happening. La republic aura.

The republic is afraid. By striking me, it designates me. He settled first at Sheen House in Richmond near where his grandfather Louie Phipe had lived in exile after 1848. Then he leased the Grand Stow House in Buckinghamshire. He published his packed national manifesto, briefly supported General Bulon’s movement, and made a tour of the United States where he visited the grave of General Mlelen, under whom he had served as a volunteer in the American Civil War, and knelt in the rain.

“No, no,” he told his companions. “I care nothing for the rain. I have been in showers of both water and bullets, and I fear neither.” He never returned to France. He died of stomach cancer at Stow House on the 8th of September 1894. He was 56 years old. His remains were not transferred to the Chappelle Royale Dru until 19.

58 to 64 years after his death in English exile. His son Louis Phipe Robert, Duke of Oleon, was 17 and enrolled at Sassir when the exile law struck. On the 6th of February 1890, his 21st birthday, he deliberately crossed into Paris and presented himself for military service in violation of the law.

He was arrested immediately, confined in the concierie and sentenced to 2 years at Clairvo prison. He served several months before being released and expelled. The gesture made him a monarchist hero. He became the Orleanis pretender upon his father’s death, married Arch Duchess Maria Doratha of Austria, and spent the rest of his life in exile, undertaking Arctic expeditions, maintaining a shadow court, growing old in foreign hotels.

He died of pneumonia in Palmo, Sicily on the 28th of March, 1926. He was 57. He never set foot in France again as a free man. Henry, Count of Shambbor, had already sealed the monarchy’s fate before any of this. Born on the 29th of September, 1820 as theostumous son of the assassinated Duke of Berry.

He was the last direct male descendant of Charles I 10th and the legitimist claimment to the throne. When the Monarchist Majority National Assembly offered him the crown in the early 1870s, when a restoration was not merely possible but probable, Shambbor refused to accept it unless France abandoned thericolor flag for the white flurles of the elder Bourbons.

Theirricolor, he said, was the flag of the revolution. He would not reign under it. The offer collapsed. The republic was established by default. Pope Pius I 9th reportedly said, “And all that, all that for a napkin.” Shambbo’s stubbornness inadvertently made the republic permanent.

Some Republicans jokingly called him the French George Washington. He died at Froztof, Austria on the 24th of August, 18 sa 83 without children. He was 62. The senior Bourban mail line ended with him. The monarchist cause passed entirely to the Oleon and the Republic freed of the legitimous threat turned its full attention to eliminating the Oleanist one.

Empressi was 61 years old and living at Farnborough Hill in Hampshire during the jewel sale. Napoleon III had died in exile in 1873. Their only son, the Prince Imperial, had been killed in the Zulu war on the 1st of June 1879, stabbed to death by Asagues while on a scouting patrol in Natal.

She had fled France in September of 1870 with the help of her American dentist, Dr. Thomas Evans, carrying what personal jewelry she could take. Her crown, 1,354 diamonds, 56 emeralds, had been returned to her around 1875 as settlement of civil list claims, saving it from the 1887 auction. She built St.

Michael’s Abbey at Farn as a moraleum for her husband and son, maintained a court in exile with Bonapart portraits and goblins tapestries, and lived to be 94. She died at the Liria Palace in Madrid on the 11th of July 1920. She had been empress for 2 years and a widow for 47. The Bonapart pretenders were also expelled.

Prince Victor Napoleon departed from the Gardor on the 23rd of June 1886. His father, Prince Napoleon Jerome, known as Plon Plon, left from the Gardel Leon the same evening, protesting the amalgamation with the Bourbon Orleon and insisting that the Bona party were defenders and soldiers of the revolution. The distinction mattered to him.

It did not matter to the republic. The auction opened on the 12th of May 1887 in the Saz Desitar at the Pavon de Flor inside the Twery complex itself whose main palace the republic had demolished four years earlier. The public exhibition had begun on the 20th of April and ran for 3 weeks.

Parisians and foreigners queued to see the collection one final time displayed in glass cases under gaslight. The catalog was published by the Empreary National with photographic plates by Michelle Berto and expert descriptions by Emile Vanderheim who had served as one of the five appraisers. The auctioneer was MRA UNESC. His assisting expert was Arthur Blush.

The collection was divided into 69 lots to be sold across nine sessions ending the 23rd of May. Each lot was assigned a minimum reserve price. The government expected brisk competition. Approximately 600 people attended the first session. The New York Times noted the crowd was mostly foreigners or petty bourgeoa and that the sale seemed to have excited more interest in America than here.

The French press was largely hostile. The collection had been appraised at approximately 8 million Franks with a reserve of 6 million. The hammer total reached 6,864,050 Franks with buyers premiums bringing the gross to approximately 7,27,252 Franks after the state’s 293,851 Franks in organizational expenses. Net proceeds were roughly 6.

9 million Franks. The republic had flooded the market with precious stones and depressed its own sale. Daniel alouff, grand conservator of the louv, later described it as the deplorable sail that vertigenously amputated the national heritage. Before the hammer fell, the commission had performed a different kind of surgery on the objects themselves.

Napoleon III’s 1855 crown created by Gabriel Lemonet was broken apart. The mount was melted down. The stones were sold as anonymous loose lots. Entire paras were deliberately dismembered. The ruby and diamond set was separated from its matching necklace. Diadems were sold apart from their bracelets. Corage ornaments were stripped of their pampelles.

Settings of extraordinary craftsmanship, work by Bapst, by Neto, by Lemonier were treated as scrap metal, valued only by weight. The most methodical destruction was administrative. Stones were removed from historic mounts before sale and grouped by type and size into anonymous lots. A diamond that had sat in Napoleon’s coronation crown became indistinguishable from one purchased by a restoration era jeweler for Empress Marie Louise.

The Republic had built an apparatus for severing stones from their histories. It didn’t burn the objects. It didn’t hide them. It rendered them anonymous. It scattered the atoms. The commission’s decisions about what to preserve were inconsistent, shaped by political imperatives as much as aesthetic judgment.

The Regent Diamond was kept. It was worth roughly half the appraised total and too famous to sell without scandal. The coat de Brang spinel was kept. The oldest piece irreplaceable. The Hortensia diamond was kept. The crown of Louis X 15 from 1722 was kept. But stripped of all its real stones and fitted with colored glass replicas, the reoquaryy brooch of Empress Sujenei containing Mazaran diamonds 17 and 18 was preserved through what the jewel historian Geran Baps later called a fortunate accident.

The commission had misidentified the piece and passed over it. The Ruspoli Sapphire was saved through an audacious deception. Curators at the museum national disturel claimed knowingly and falsely that its unusual faceted shape was a natural uncut crystal form which gave it minological rather than jewel value. The claim was accepted.

The sapphire was transferred to the museum along with the emerald of St. Louis. The grand sapphire of Louis the 14th, Marie Antwanet’s diamond pins, more than 800 additional stones and pearls for scientific study, and over 1,000 stones sent to the Achol dem. The scientists had outmaneuvered the politicians.

They had saved what they could by lying about what it was. [gasps] The dominant buyer was Charles Lewis Tiffany, who traveled to Paris with his gemologist, George Frederick Kuntz. Tiffany and company purchased 24 of the 69 lots for approximately $480,000, a sum greater than the combined purchases of the next nine largest buyers.

This represented roughly onethird of the lots and a disproportionately large share by value. The pieces were packaged in custom red and gold leather boxes embossed with Diam de Luron on the lid and Tiffany and company New York and Paris inside. Tiffany’s hall included Empress match natural pearl necklaces, her diamond Rivier, ruby and diamond bracelets from the Neto Peru, lots from the current leaf diamond Peru and diamond corage ornaments.

These were resold to America’s Gilded Age elite within months. The diamond rivier went to Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer. Corage ornaments went to Caroline Sherah Horn Aster, the Mrs. Aster, the woman who decided who mattered in New York society. The ruby and diamond bracelets went to Mr. Bradley Martin, who had them worn at his legendary 1897 ball at the Waldorf Hotel.

A ball so extravagant it was denounced from pulpits across New York and hastened the family’s departure for England. Many of Tiffany’s crown jewel purchases were displayed at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universal 2 years after the sale. The French crown jewels returned to Paris as American merchandise. The purchases cemented Tiffany’s international reputation and earned Charles Lewis Tiffany the title the king of diamonds.

Frederick Bushron acquired the GR mazarene diamond 19.07 carats, fancy light pink, and two other Mazaran stones for 101,000 francs. Cardinal Mazer had bequeethed all 18 diamonds to Louis the 14th in 1661 with the instruction that they must never leave France. 226 years later the republic sold them to a jeweler who sold them abroad.

The historic crown jewelers Baps and Sun bought back the large ruby and diamond necklace they had themselves remodeled in 1814 and 1825, paying the republic for their own craftsmanship. Carl Faber purchased La Re, the celebrated pearl, and resold it to Russia’s fabulously wealthy Yusupov family.

Emil Schlesinger purchased Eujenei’s diamond bow brooch for 42,200 Franks on behalf of Caroline Aster. The jeweler Jacobe acquired Eujenei’s pearl and diamond tiara and notably did not break it up. London firms Gard and Leverson took significant lots. The stones of French kings went to jewelers in New York, London, Moscow, and Geneva.

Within a generation, they had been recut, remounted, and absorbed into other collections. Their French identity was gone. Of all the royal exiles in history, the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, the Ottomans, which dynasty do you think lost the most after losing power? Not just thrones, but the physical objects that proved they had ever ruled. Tell me in the comments.

The Twery’s Palace, the primary royal and imperial residence in Paris, had been set ablaze by communards on the 23rd of May 1871. The stone shells survived largely intact. Restoration was technically feasible as proved by the rebuilt Hotel Deville, which had burned in the same conflration.

But the republic chose demolition despite protests from the architect Viole and Baron Houseman. The chamber passed the P law on the 21st of March 1882 and the Senate approved it on the 28th of June. Demolition ran from February to September of 1883. The contractor Akil Picar won the job for 33,500 Franks. Stones were sold as souvenirs.

Some were shipped to Corsica to build the Chateau de Launta. Balistrads ended up at the Karand dele Palace in Kito, Ecuador. The gap the Twillery left in the Louvre complex remains visible from any aerial photograph of Paris. It is the shape of a missing palace. The Chatau de Sanclue had burned on the 13th of October 1870 under French counter fire during the siege of Paris.

Its ruins stood for 21 years. The government demolished them in 1891, citing reasons of economy, security, and explicitly the desire to erase the royalist and imperial past. Only the gardens and the grander cascade survive. The national estate of 460 hectares is now a public park.

The Pal Royale, the Orleon family seat since 1661 was sacked in 1848 and partially burned during the commune. It was rebuilt and colonized. It now houses the Concar, the Concitel and the Ministry of Culture. The Republic did not destroy it, it occupied it. The courtyard contains Daniel Burren’s striped columns installed in 1986, 100 years after the exile of the family whose home it was.

The property confiscations had their own ark. The house of Oleon had been the richest family in France. Their fortune built on the vast Oleon Appanage and the colossal Pontierv inheritance brought by Louise Marie Adelide de Burbon. Two days before accepting the throne in 1830, Louis Phipe had executed a donation parties transferring ownership of his personal patrimony to his children, attempting to keep it separate from the crown domain.

Napoleon III’s confiscation decree of the 22nd of January 1852 issued weeks after his coup deta anulled this donation and seized everything. The chat de chat donois chat de laerte vidam vast forests movable goods. Even Napoleon III’s own allies were appalled. Andre Mari Dupan, former procurer general, protested that the advisers did not know the facts and had misconstrued all rules of law and equity.

The third republic reversed this in November of 1872 when the National Assembly voted 614 to0 to abregate the 1852 decrees. Properties not yet sold were returned. But the 1886 exile law, while not formally confiscating property, effectively severed the family from direct management of what remained. When the exile law was finally repealed on the 24th of June 1950, 64 years later, the returning count of Paris found, as one observer noted, little property left except for a few castles which didn’t produce income. The Duke Domal, Hri Doorleon, Philip’s uncle and one of France’s wealthiest men, responded to the 1886 exile law by announcing his intention to bequeath the Chat de Shantili and its entire art

collection to the Institute of France. His reasoning was precise. This was the best way to prevent the dismantling and dispersion that had befallen his father’s estates. He had protected Chantilei during Napoleon III’s confiscation through a dummy sale to the English bank couts, then repurchased it after the second empire fell and rebuilt it magnificently between 1875 and 1882.

The government lifted his personal exile decree in 1889. The donation went through. He died on the 7th of May 1897 at Zuko, Sicily. He was 75 years old. Today, the musea at Shantili holds one of France’s finest art collections. Preserved not by the republic but against it, the regent. Diamond 140 carats is the piece the republic kept.

It has remained in the Louv since 1887. The single most valuable object the state chose to preserve during the Second World War. It was hidden behind a stone panel at the chatau de Shambbor. Its current estimated value exceeds $60 million. The republic understood what it possessed even as it destroyed everything around it.

The hope diamond is the peace the revolution stole and the republic never recovered. The Tavier blue purchased by Louis the 14th for 220,000 LRA recut to 67 carats as the French blue was stolen from the guard mer during the chaos of September 1792. It resurfaced in London in 1812 as a 45.52 carat deep blue diamond.

Its identity confirmed in 2007 through three-dimensional modeling of a lead cast at the museum national disturel. It passed through the hands of Henry Philip Hope, Lord Francis Hope, Pierre Cartier, and Evelyn Walsh Mlan before reaching Harry Winston who donated it to the Smithsonian Institution on the 10th of November 1958.

He sent it by registered mail. The most famous diamond in the world began as French crown property. France has never recovered it. It sits in Washington behind glass, drawing six million visitors a year. The Grand Mazerat is the piece the republic sold and the market eventually judged.

Bequeathed by Cardinal Maseran to Louis I 14th in 1661 with the instruction that it must never leave France. It was sold to Bushron for 101,000 Franks in 1887. Bushron resold it to Russian royalty. It vanished on the 14th of November 2017. It resurfaced at Christies in Geneva. It sold for 40,463,493 uh roughly $144 times its 1887 price.

The market’s verdict on what the republic had discarded. The sansancy diamond 55 carats pale yellow shield-shaped was not part of the 1887 sale. It had been stolen during the revolutionary era heist of 1792 and never recovered by the French state. It passed through Spanish, Russian and English hands before reaching William Waldorf Aster in 1906.

In 1978, the French government purchased it from the Aster family and returned it to the Gallery Dolon 91 years after the republic had sold everything else. The cost of recovery exceeded any figure the 1887 sale had produced. Russia sold approximately 569 of its 773 diamond fund items under the Boleviks roughly 75% but retained the great imperial crown, the imperial scepter with the 189 karat Olaf diamond and the imperial globe.

Iran preserved its crown jewels entirely after the 1979 revolution. They serve as collateral backing the national currency valued at over $20 billion and remain on display at the central bank in Thyron. Turkey converted the Ottoman treasury into the top capy palace museum intact in 1924. France alone combined revolutionary era destruction of medieval coronation regalia.

The crown of Charlemagne and crown of St. Louis melted down in 1793 with a deliberate legislated Republican auction nearly a century later. The double blow made the French case uniquely thorough. Russia’s dispersal was larger but haphazard. France’s was surgical. The current head of the house of Oleon is Jean Doleon, Count of Paris.

Born the 19th of May 1965. He holds an MBA. He has worked at Lazard and Deote. He serves as a reserve colonel in the French army. He has five children. His era parent is Prince Gaston. Born in 2009, the family’s remaining significant properties are held through the Fondashian San Louie, created in 1974 by his grandfather to preserve the Orleon patrimony, the Chateau Donois, the Chateau Dru, and the Chappelle Royale Dudrru, the family necropolis where Philip, Count of Paris, was finally interred 64 years after his death in English exile. The Chatau Donis receives over 400,000 visitors a year. It contains the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci. In 2021, Jeang filed a lawsuit against the Fondon after the Institute of France announced plans to

convert part of the Ammoir’s property into a luxury hotel. The damages sought were 1 million. The descendant of a family that once owned forests covering tens of thousands of hectares was suing a foundation for the right to keep a castle from becoming a resort. On the 19th of October 2025, four thieves disguised as construction workers used a freight elevator to reach a second floor balcony of the Louvre, cut through a window and display cases with disc grinders uh and escaped in under 8 minutes with eight pieces from the gallery dapolon valued at 88 million. They dropped the crown of Empress Ujani during their escape. It was recovered on the pavement with deformationation and 10 missing small diamonds, but all 65 emeralds intact. The remaining seven pieces, including pearl and diamond

tiara, the Oleon sapphire peru, and Empress Mar Louise’s emerald necklace and earrings have not been recovered. Director Lawrence Dear resigned in February of 2026. The regent diamond, the sansi, the hortensia, and the coat de Britain spinel were not targeted by the thieves. The republic had spent decades buying those pieces back.

The ruby and diamond bracelets bequeathed to the louv in 1973. Ujane bow brooch repurchased at Christy’s in 2008 for 6.72 million. The Marie Louise mosaic peru recovered in 2001. Each piece cost more to recover than the entire 1887 sale had raised. The gallery dapolon, the room Louis the 14th built to celebrate the glory of the sun king.

Its ceiling painted by Sha Lra and completed by de laqua held the surviving crown jewels for 138 years after the republic chose to display what it had not sold. 10 million visitors a year passed through the louv. The republic that declared Sonuron Pabeswander charged€22 admission to see the crown it kept. The republic has spent the last century trying to undo what it did in 1887.

The sansancy diamond was repurchased from the Aster family in 1978. The ruby and diamond bracelets Tiffany bought were bequeathed to the Louve in 1973. Ujane bow brooch was repurchased at Christy’s in 2008 for 6.72 million euros. The Murray Louise Mosaic Peru sold for 6,200 Franks in 1887 was recovered in 2001.

Each piece cost more to reclaim than the entire 1887 sale had raised. The republic bought back at millions what it had sold for thousands. And now the cases in the gallery dapolon are emptier than at any point since May of 1887. The jewels that survived the republic’s auction, survived two world wars, survived a century and a half in the most visited museum on earth are gone.

Scattered again not by legislation but by four men with disc grinders in 8 minutes. The louv has announced restoration of the damaged Uenei crown. The gallerid polo will eventually reopen, but the collection the republic preserved, the fraction it decided was too important to sell, the remnant it spent the 20th century augmenting at extraordinary cost, is smaller now than at any point in its modern history.

The republic that broke apart the French crown could not in the end keep the pieces.