Sybel's is the narrative of a past that is doubly ended, the past of a country and of a political system, the past of Prussia as personified by the Hohenzollerns, and of a military and oligarchical absolutism as represented by Prince Bismarck and Marshal Von Moltke. It is the chronicle of an epoch whose glories, from 1700 to 1870, none can dispute, but whose _real life_ was extinct, and whose capacity of future expansion in its original sense was stopped at Sedan, or a few months later, at Versailles. Sybel conceives his history as a thoroughly well-trained functionary must conceive it; he is brought up in traditional conventionalities, and is rather even an official than a "public" servant. The foreign author, on the contrary, feels what has lurked during long ages in the soul of the innominate throng of the people, and been expressed in the thoughts and impulses of such men as Hagern, Scharnhorst, Gueiseman, and Stein, _Germans_, patriots who taught Prussia to speak, think, act, and embody the inspirations, passions, and instincts of a whole land; arousing the conscience and vindicating the honor of seemingly divided communities whose hearts were already _one_. No sooner had M. Levy Bruehl's book appeared than the effect was evident; it was felt that it told the _true truth_ (_"la verite vraie"_) as the French say; that it set forth the real _"raison d' etre"_ of the astounding achievement that had taken the world by surprise, puzzling the patented politicians on one bank of the Rhine almost as much as those upon the other.[3] [3] Few events since the deceptions and catastrophes of the war itself ever produced the sudden impression of Levy Bruehl's boldly outspoken, utterly impartial book. Published in the first days of last September (1890), in one week it was famous throughout all France where serious literature does not reap renown quickly. M. M. Lairesse De Voguee, Bourdeau, Sorel, all welcomed it as a revelation, in the _Debats, Revues des Deux Mondes_, and elsewhere, and its real title was awarded it in the _Temps_, by M. Albert Sorel, whose experience and competence as an historical critic has never been denied, and who unhesitatingly proclaimed it, _Le Fuit et l'Idee_, namely, the announcement of the ruling national idea whence the fact of German unity was immediately derived.