Abstract: After the repression of the Commune, the Third Republic thrived financially. The Church, the Army, politics, and philosophy fell into an orderly arrangement in the wake of the Prussian wars, and wealth was established from top to bottom of the State apparatus. The intrigues of industrials, bankers, and their agents form the subject matter of the Roman de l’Énergie nationale, a realistic fresco of this age of scandals in which Barrès lived as a protagonist, and which he evokes with incomparable talent in his writing.
