ABSTRACT
The final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo in 1815, thirty years before the birth of Gabriel Fauré, was less decisive than it seemed. The French had first chopped their rulers and then changed them with some regularity in over half a century of political vacillation. They finally settled for the Third Republic of 1870, which, after a violent birth in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, held sway for seventy mostly peaceful and prosperous years. This was the state umbrella under which Fauré sheltered safely for more than two-thirds of his life – a haven of bourgeois stability disturbed only by the upheaval of the First World War. As an older man the composer took a keen interest in current affairs, although little in his maturity could match the colourful political vicissitudes of his childhood and adolescence.
