His early writings were devoted to classical antiquity, studied not only in books but on the actual Greek sites which he visited in 1868. He published successively Histoire d’Apelles (1867), a study on Greek art; L'Armee dans la, Greet, antique (1867); Histoire d’Alcibiade et de la République athénienne, depuis la mort de Périclès jusqu’à l’avènement des trente tyrans (1873); Papers on Le Nombre des citoyens d'Athenes au V'me siecle avant l’ère chrétienne (1882); La Loi agraire a Sparte (1884); Le premier siège de Paris, an 52 avant l’ère chrétienne (1876); and two volumes of miscellanies, Athenes, Rome, Paris, l'histoire et les moeurs (1879), and Aspasie, Cléopâtre, Théodora (6th ed. 1889).
The military history of Napoleon I then attracted him. His first volume on this subject, called 1814 (1888), went through no fewer than forty-six editions. It was followed by 1815, the first part of which comprises the first Restoration, the return from Elba and the Hundred Days (1893); the second part, Waterloo (1899); and the third part, the second abdication and the White Terror (1905). He was elected a member of the Académie française in 1895.
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