Henri Mercier and the American Civil War

ISBN: 9780691620404 出版年：2015 页码：418 Carroll, Daniel B Princeton University Press

The year 1860 presented a dull enough prospect to Henri Mercier, newly sent to America as minister of the French Empire. It had been some decades, after all, since France had been first nursemaid then scourge to the young republic; more recent events seemed lighter fare indeed. The Bourbon-Bonaparte policy of using the United States against Britain had been laid aside these forty years or more; there were no wars to fight, no empires to sell, and Merrier could contemplate no special glory or excitement from his stay in the New World. His first reaction to the presidential campaign of i860 was a relaxed one, and as the curtain rose on the great crisis of federal democracy, he foresaw neither the awful dimensions of the drama nor the real importance of his own role. There are three aspects of that role which bear some close discussion: the American influences upon Mercier’s “pro-Southern” thinking, the issue of European intervention in the Civil War, and Mercier’s view of the whole American democratic dream, its racial failures included.