France And the War As Seen By An American
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II The German menace dates, of course, in its present form?speaking as if before the present war broke out?from the war of 1870, after which France found herself in a position of humiliation. She had good reason to see, in the terms of the treaty of Frankfort a threat of repeated aggression and possible extinction. During the early years of the Republic, however, the theories of the Jacobins were so "violently pacific," and were to such an extent based on international tolerance and brotherhood, that the French lost their fear of German aggression and also much of their own proper patriotic feeling. The sense of security based on internationalism was aggravated by thesuccess of the socialistic party in 1902, and by the subsequent radical development of theoretical democracy during the administration of Com
...bes. But the fear and the patriotic feeling were both revived by a series of unprovoked diplomatic and military provocations which seemed to the French to be due, on the one hand, to the German appreciation of the national insouciance, and on the other hand, to German jealousy of the cultural successes of Prance. During a series of years, the French met this policy of pinpricks with a moderation, sang-froid, and dignity to which all the world testified on the occasion of the Agadir incident and during the entire Morocco embroglio; the more striking in that this incident followed the Tangier affair and other events all calculated to excite suspicion and arouse resentment. Anyone who cares to look up the files ofthe Temps, the Debats, the Figaro, during those anxious days of 1911, when the issues of war and peace were in the balance, will find evidence of this. Calm, resolute, as in the similar days of last July, the French press pointed out reasons for the aggression, fin... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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