Excerpt from France in 1802: Described in a Series of Contemporary Letters Some months ago Lady Sykes accidentally came across a very rare work - Henry Redhead Yorke's Letters from France, written in 1802. She immediately be came its possessor, and a perusal of its contents suggested the excellent idea of editing the book for modern publication. For, although intensely interesting, Yorke's Letters were written in the verbose style characteristic of his day. By judicious pruning and omissions Lady Sykes has reduced the volume by about a third, without, however, omitting anything of the least importance; whereby she enables in a concise manner students of French history to bridge over the important though little known period which elapsed between the downfall of Robespierre and the Consulate. Many imagine that immediately after the Reign of Terror ended things settled down very quickly in France, and that whatever benefits accrued from the Revolution soon blossomed and bore abundant fruit. It was, however, very much otherwise and the prevalent idea, that the prosperity of modern France 18 due to the great Revolu tion, is a fallacy for, independently of the chaos created by the Reign of Terror, we must take into consideration the decade of Napoleonic despotism which separates the Revolution from the beginning of what is known as la France modems. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.