France Conquered

Edward VII and Clemenceau

Émile Flourens
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs
French Third Republic

Originally published in Paris, 1906, under the title, La France Conquise.

Translated by F. E. Moser (moserfrede@yahoo.com)

1
Table of Contents
Translator's Notes.........................................................................................................3
The Accession of Edward VII......................................................................................5
Edward VII and Russia................................................................................................15
Edward VII and Germany...........................................................................................35
Edward VII and France...............................................................................................65
Edward VII and Catholicism.....................................................................................89
The Dictatorship of Clemenceau...........................................................................109

2
Translator's Notes

Émile Flourens was the French Minister of Foreign Affairs (1886-

1888) in the government of the Third Republic. Due to that privileged
position in the foreign relations hierarchy, his knowledge of the
international politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(La Belle Époque) can certainly be considered authoritative. Whether
Edward VII was quite the stolid evil genius this book portrays is another
question, but the reader can only conclude that if he was not a genius, he
was certainly very lucky in the way events played out during his reign so
as to extend the power of Great Britain to unprecedented heights.

The prose of Flourens can be surprisingly entertaining, and in the

best of results, the original flavor of this style will be amply reflected in
the translation.

The book translated, La France conquise : Édouard VII et

Clemenceau, was downloaded from the French National Library (BNF)
website as a PDF file. The translation maintains a page concordance
relating back to the original French text, marking the first paragraph of a
page with a '+' sign followed by the page number. The reader can use this
indexing to verify the fidelity of the translation. Obviously, some
allowances will have to be made for paragraphs that cross page
boundaries.

For readers not having an express acquaintance with the significant

events and personages of this era, now more than a century distant,
there are keywords embedded in the translation, marked by brackets ([]),
which can be used to search for background information. Brackets are
also used for a few other purposes which will become obvious as they
occur. The interruption of bracketed text is kept as sparse and brief as
possible.

The author's use of the term 'civilized' might leave the modern
reader somewhat perplexed. This adjective was an outgrowth of the

3
ideology of colonialism, and was used to delimit the part of the world that
maintained a civilization worthy of the name, which was Europe, and the
further west in Europe, the greater the civilization. To speak of “civilized
nations” expressed the predominant faith in the superiority of European
culture over all others, a notion which facilitated European infiltration
into Asia and Africa in the guise of noble missions of education, rather
than a more underhanded project of mercantile exploitation. Just about
every region on these continents in the late nineteenth century was
considered as some kind of exclusive sphere of influence, protectorate,
or sovereign colony of one European country or another. It is highly
doubtful whether Flourens would have allowed that any of those other
European countries were bringing the light of civilization to primal
savage darkness with the same humanitarian concern as France.

'Propaganda' is another word which might be misunderstood in

implication, having a history in American English as a pejorative term
since being fatally paired with 'communist' as a constant companion.
However there is also a recognized religious usage of the word in
relation to spreading Christian belief.

On rare occasions Flourens's sentences can run quite a bit longer

than what is conventionally written in modern American English. This
style seems to imitate the sentence structure of Latin literature, where
the interjection of a number of dependent and sub-dependent clauses
can leave the introductory subject long forgotten by the time that the
sentence is closed by what might seem like a completely disconnected
verb phrase. Some effort was expended to make the phrasing more
amenable to the modern English sentence style, but sometimes these
clause webs could not be untangled without losing some significance in
the whole.

Flourens seems to like metaphor from the science of physics.

Countries are called powers, and much like the molecules of a substance
are held together by physical forces, people are held together in society
by social forces, and people, like molecules, can be agitated to the point
of disassociating or exploding.

4
Chapter 1
The Accession of Edward VII
+1

After France was weakened by the [Franco-Prussian War]

catastrophe of 1870, from which we still have not recovered, whatever
our national vanity might say, a foreign element has taken so much a part
in the management of our internal and external affairs that, if we want to
fully appreciate our circumstances and understand our politics, this
foreign influence must be studied.

On the death of Queen Victoria, no one doubted the dominant role

that her heir was about to play in the direction of world affairs, especially
in the dominance that he would exert over the government of the French
Republic.
Certainly no one dared question that the leading lady who was
exiting the scene had occupied a considerable place in contemporary
history, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of the Indies, whose
domains, extending across both hemispheres, never see the setting sun;
but what nobody foresaw was the lengths to which her son was planning
to carry this British dominance over nations and governments, people
and things.
+2

The Prince of Wales scrupulously forbade himself from intervening

in the politics of his country; he had always carefully distanced himself
from fights between parties, and rivalries between ministers or
statesmen, with a firm and steadfast character which had not been
sufficiently noted. He had not assumed responsibility for any high
command in the armed forces, nor of any diplomatic mission. He had not
looked for any occasion to stand out with a dazzling act; furthermore,
when these occasions were offered to him, he had dodged them and had
them diverted. In brief, he had not given the enthusiasms of the English
people, so quick to be passionate when it concerns a member of the
royal family, let alone the presumptive heir of the throne, any occasion to
be exalted. Neither the hazards of war attracted him, nor any role as a

5
chancellor, for which, nonetheless, to those who had a closer access to
him, his mind, so subtle, detached, calm, and analytical, seemed to be
prodigiously gifted.
If this prince, whose great destiny was awaited, had neither wanted
nor known how to give to the world the full measure of his political
worth, if he had remained in this regard like a sphinx, an unfathomable
mystery to even his friends, his figure in private life was well-known. In
Paris this figure was familiar to the elegant class who frequent clubs and
round tables, sporting events and stage shows, restaurants and drawing
rooms; it was known even in working class areas.
+3
In order to adhere to the demands of his role as heir to the throne,
he was paraded in triumphal style throughout the world; he let himself be
exhibited in great pomp, to all his subjects, from his British colonists,
whose hyperactive lives knew no moment of leisure, to the indolent
blacks in Africa, and the Buddhists of India, whose life goes by in
contemplation of their belly button; but the corner of the world where he
most gladly returned, the one which was the object of his secret and
admitted predilections, was our good old Paris. It is only in Paris where
he was at home and at ease, where he could be himself.
Some anecdotes, sometimes on the sleazy side, had shined a light
on all his characteristic ways, even the most intimate, and had
underscored all his tastes, tendencies, and habits. Out of all British
figures, his surely was the most congenial to Parisians. He was so
attentive and friendly a guest, of such fine and courteous disposition that
he exerted a presence ascending over all classes, even those most
recalcitrant to the aristocracy.
Consensus was in this way formed on his story among both his
friends and enemies. It was agreed to affirm that he was a refined
hedonist, an exquisite player, a worldly man, masking an arrogance of a
particularly British kind with an outer aspect of good fellowship. The
most ardent zealots of his accession were his creditors. It was not
without anxiety, after all, that they viewed his advancing age and physical
decline; they wondered, with great concern, whether the thriftiness of
Queen Victoria would enable her to recognize her son's debts after her
death, when her virtue kept her from knowing his expenses during her
life.
+4

6
 Consulting statistics, Edward VII ascended to the throne at an age
when seventy-five percent of kings have already been lowered into the
grave. He left long a long life of leisure to begin working at an age when,
for all public careers and offices, men claim their right to a pension.
If there had been a review board for kings, as there is for military
conscripts, he would have been declared unfit for service.
Obesity deformed his body, burdened his gait; all physical activity,
all intellectual power seemed paralyzed under the growth of fatty tissue.
His physique, constricted by pain, momentarily betrayed the suffering
that an iron will endeavored to master, so as to dissimulate to the eyes of
his subjects the illness which at that very instant threatened his life.
To see his unhealthy corpulence, one could not keep from recalling
the words that Shakespeare put into the mouth of one of Edward's
ancestors, in the speech addressing famous Falstaff, the dissolute
companion in the waywardness of Prince Henry's youth, where the latter
counsels him to consider working, to decrease his belly and increase his
worth, to leave his dissolute life behind, to look at the grave which is
opening a pit three times wider for him than for other men.
+5
Prognosticators from all sides, from the Archangel Gabriel
[reference uncertain] to the no less renowned Madame de Thebes [a
Parisian clairvoyant], were agreed on encompassing his accession with
the most sinister predictions, to proclaim his near demise and another
vacancy on the English throne.
There was a more serious indication. The oracles of science were
no less alarming than the prophecies of soothsayers. Twice, the solemn
procession of his coronation had to be called off, twice the banquets
postponed and the Chinese lanterns extinguished. The regal guests,
called to assemble from all parts of the world to partake in these
celebrations at great expense, anxiously awaited the announcement of a
much sadder ceremony.
The doctors, terrified by the history of excesses in the prince's
youth, the flushing of the blood and the corruption of the flesh, in part
withdrew from taking responsibility for the affair, or else they refused
authorization for their patient to brave the fatigue of the public
ceremonies, which they did not believe him to be in any condition to bear
with impunity.

7
 The resolve of Edward VII triumphed over all these objections. He
declared with unrestrained energy that, whatever the cost, he was
determined not to go into his grave before having placed on his head,
with all the splendor and traditional solemnity, to the astounded gaze of
representatives from all over his vast empire, and to the envious eyes of
the world, the crown of his ancestors, his double crown of King and
Emperor, which the avid hands of death seemed to want to wrest from
him.
+6

In the time of the coronation of Edward VII, what was the situation
of that throne to which the new monarch was ascending with such
faltering steps? Perhaps it was faltering even more.
The Empire seemed almost as sick as the Emperor.
England was just then coming out of the Transvaal War. It came out
of it victoriously, no doubt, but battered. It came out of it diminished in
moral prestige, and nullified in military prestige. Outside of England
everyone said out loud, while in the heart of England everyone secretly
affirmed, that it had escaped certain disaster in an unjust war only with
the heedless European complicity that abandoned the South African
Republics to slaughter, after having lavished them with deceptive
encouragement.
Recall the time, which now seems so distant to us, yet hardly a few
years ago, when the announcement of the Boer victories stirred up as
much enthusiasm in our towns and rural regions, in same way that the
announcement of French victories would have, when journals competed
with each other to publish news of the defeats, the routing, and the
desperate retreats of British troops, when the names of Kruger, Joubert,
Delarey, Botha, Viljoen, Villebois-Mareuil, and so many other heroes,
whose recognition is now erased from capricious memories and who
would deserve a place in history equal to the greatest glories of Greece
or Rome, flying from mouth to mouth, not only in France but outside of
France, not only in the old and new worlds, but also the entire world.
+7
The people, then stunned by so many exploits, had seen the British
colossus teetering on its pedestal, that colossus with feet of clay, who
oppresses overly credulous nations through bluff and arrogance, with
plunder and insatiable rapacity, who now grips the world like a gigantic

8
octopus and sucks its marrow through the innumerable tentacles of its
commerce until the day when all will be enslaved in its domination,
unless it might run into a more powerfully destructive microbe which
halts it and kills it.
If Emperor Nicholas II examines his conscience, in his [summer]
retreat [at Catherine Palace] in Tsarskoye Selo, more like a prison now
than a palace, he ought to cry with tears of blood about his disastrous
decision to plug his ears to the prophetic voice of President Kruger, for
refusing him the pledge of liberation. If he had sent onto the border of
India some of the regiments that he dispatched to certain death, without
profit or glory, on the icy plains of Manchuria, he would not have allowed
England to asphyxiate the Transvaal under the weight of its armies from
Bengal and Nepal, he would not have seen his empire, having been
crushed beneath a continuous series of disasters on land and sea, being
agitated by the convulsions of a terrible revolution of which neither the
goal nor the end is foreseen, and threatened with disintegration.
+8
The popular sympathies for the enemies of England, then in ferment
in all the civilized nations, are forgotten now. They were still seething at
the moment when Edward VII placed the Imperial crown on his head.
Beyond the past peril and its agonizing emotions, the perception of the
new sovereign, with a dispassionate look no ruse could deceive, saw the
peril to come, more agonizing still. In the west, the German peril, and in
the east, the Japanese peril; two vital young nations ready to unite
against England, with the same resentments that it has seeded, all over
on its path, the most formidable alliances.

The nearest peril for England was Germany. Everywhere in the

world, Germany was waging a gigantic trade war against England.
Everywhere in the world, Germany was victorious in that
commercial battle, through a low price for its products, the briskness of
its sales, and the ingratiating nimbleness of its representatives. Even in
the heart of the British colonies and in the empire of the Indies, German
products were replacing those of England.
After having contested England for world trade, Germany was
getting ready to dispute its rule of the seas.
+9
Supported by a victorious army, the strongest on the continent in

9
both number and discipline, carried by an unrelenting patriotic impulse,
aware of its power and the greatness of its goal, no less methodical and
analytical than enthusiastic, Germany was working without respite to
create for itself a naval fleet, fearsome in its scientific perfections, its
unity and cohesion, and the training of its crews.
Already assured on the continent with the alliances of Austria and
Italy, whose navies are not to be scorned, Germany was making
unmistakable proposals to France. Since it was skillful enough and
fortunate enough to succeed even at the price of greater sacrifices in
these attempts to come closer to its former hereditary enemy,
consequently it was easily enticing Russia, still linked to Prussia by their
complicity in the partitions of Poland. It would then bring into existence
that continental coalition against England, a design which had always
obsessed the genius of Napoleon. The ambition which he had vainly
pursued on the battlefields of Jena, Wagram, and Austerlitz, on the
scorching plains of Egypt as well as on the icy steppes of Moscovy, and in
so many places immortalized by his renowned victories, would be
accomplished. British tyranny would at last succumb to the combined
effort of so many nations desirous of regaining liberty of the seas and
mastery of their colonial prospects.
Never had a such an enormous storm cloud arisen on the horizon
of England. Never had it run so dire a risk.
+10
At the other end of the old world a nation was rising, a newcomer
to civilization whose military power was all at once bursting into the
astonished view of the world with the abruptness of a volcanic eruption,
and revealing an accumulation of extraordinary human energy, sheltered
for years with covetous care in the inscrutable silences of the Orient.
For carrying out its extensive plan, for the necessary release of the
expansive force which was being manifested within it, Japan was looking
for an ally among the great Western powers. After having pored over a
world map, it set its eyes on France.
Full of rancor against Russia and Germany who, after having
deprived it of the fruit of its victories by the Treaty of Shimonoseki [1895,
ending the First Sino-Japanese War], cynically expropriated the Chinese
spoils; wary of England whose preponderance in far eastern seas
already seemed too exclusive and despotic, it was looking for a
necessary counterweight in an alliance with France.

10
 Japan had gotten to know France from the exploits of the fleet of
Admiral Courbet. It admired the eminent talent of command, the tactical
superiority of movements, as well as the discipline, endurance, and
audacity of the crews. It had contemplated, at first with astonishment
then with an enthusiasm mixed with fear and envy, a weak squadron of a
few naval units, badly supported and maintained by an indifferent and
skeptical, when not openly hostile, homeland, holding at bay with
unprecedented mastery that vast empire [China], which by the
innumerable masses of its population and the immensity of its territory,
inspired respect in all nearby nations, and imposed on them the
subjugation of at least a nominal suzerainty, and impeded their
expansion. Japan had seen that gallant few holding back that crushing
force, vanquishing its obstinate resistance and laying down the law to it
[in the Sino-French War, 1884-1885].
+11
It swore to itself that the lesson would not be forgotten, that it
would know how to exploit it and show the world what courage and
military science made possible, sustained in this case by the ardent
patriotism of a unified nation.
It kept its word. Disconcerted itself by the rapidity and ease of its
triumph, it had let an alliance of the covetous pilfer the fruit of its
victories. It needed to reconquer its conquests; it would know very well
how to do it, but to ensure its victory, what better ally than the country of
Admiral Courbet and its heroic sailors; France, that master of the
Indochina peninsula, so rich in naval bases of incomparable value for the
Empire of the Rising Sun in case of a maritime conflict with the great
empires of the West.
Let France and Japan join together in the ties of a solid alliance,
and that new pair would become the uncontested master of Chinese
seas. England would be relegated to the background. The two
confederates would share the Chinese market, the largest and most
populous in the world, the only one which still remains to be conquered,
and the ardently desired objective of every mercantile nation. The naval
power of the allied fleets would draw an incomparable expansion and
irresistible force from it.
+12
Attentive and shrewd observer, knowing in depth the strengths and
weaknesses of all statesmen from east to west, on one continent and the

11
other, having penetrated the secrets of every royal court and the
mysteries of every chancellery, Edward VII maintained the fewest
illusions of anyone about present difficulties and future dangers.
He immediately sped to the most urgent. Set France at odds with
Germany on one side, and with Japan on the other; get the Empire of the
Mikado, whose power he recognized, into a fight with Russia, whose
hidden causes of weakness and disintegration he intimately and deeply
understood, then complement the foreign catastrophes of the latter with
domestic revolt, and in that way take it off the battlefield for a long time;
such must have been his opening ploy.
His plan was conceived with an unrivaled clearness of vision,
carried out methodically, with a simplicity and certainty of execution
which, if they have been equaled, have certainly never been surpassed.
With the goal of kindling the mistrust of Japan against France, and
at the same time, to stoke its hatred against Russia, he had the rumor
accredited in Tokyo that the governments of St. Petersburg and Paris had
secretly come to an agreement the day after the Treaty of Shimonaseki,
when the squadrons of those two powers, ordered into the Gulf of Bohaiji
[Petchili] so as to protect the respective foreign interests of their
citizens, were still together in the seas off Japan in order to expedite the
command to their admirals to ambush the Japanese fleet, stationed
unsuspectingly at that time in Yokohama Bay, to torpedo it and wipe it
out. Furthermore, this plan for destruction had only misfired because of a
delay or error in transmission, perhaps due to the qualms of the French
admiral charged with its execution.
+13

Whether it was fact or fiction doesn't enter into my plan to

investigate at this time; what is certain is that the rumor was widely
spread, and it was skillfully exploited by England who made it into an
instrument for transferring the sympathies of Japan to our favor and
carry animosity against Russia to the point of violence. The ambush of
the Russian squadron, torpedoed by Admiral Togo in the harbor of Port
Arthur prior to a declaration of war, was in the mind of the Japanese
government only just reprisal for the plan of destroying the Japanese
fleet.
It must be recognized that, on this point, the skillfulness of Edward
VII was greatly assisted by the ignorance of our chancellery. Our foreign

12
office was obstinate in considering Japan a negligible quantity, and until
the [Russian] catastrophe at Moukden [Shenyang], it persisted in
prognosticating the terminal destruction of that pygmy by the Muscovite
colossus.
Such was not the view of Edward VII. On this point that bold
monarch permitted himself not to share the opinion of his friend [the
French foreign minister Théophile] Delcassé. Thus, once he had
succeeded in excavating a chasm between France and Japan, which he
could take pride in making unbridgeable, he hastened to lay his hands on
Japan itself, isolated at that time in facing incessant incursions from
Russia, blind hostility from Germany, and jealousy from the United
States, and to make it into an ally.
+14
In his mind, Japan was the torpedo which he was about to use
against that giant of the North, whose prodigious continental
development, bold aspirations to share in the rule of the seas, and
incessant advance toward the borders of India, had so many times
haunted the anxious thoughts and troubled the sleep of his
predecessors, in order to have that Russia blown up, tossed aside as
wreckage, a wreckage still exploitable for the secret designs of England
in the West, but which from then on would be barred access to the seas,
the advance towards India and the vast horizons of the Orient.
In order to completely neutralize Muscovite power, in order to
make that dream, embraced for so long by England, into a reality, it
would be necessary to ensure not just a lukewarm victory to Japan, but a
scalding victory. A Russian defeat would not suffice; a catastrophe for
Russia would be needed. It would only be necessary to leave a nation
secretly undermined by clandestine attacks of revolutionary fever
confronting the savage patriotism of Mikado soldiers.
Against a Russia fully cohesive and unified, inflamed by fervent
fanaticism from high autocrat to the most humble muzhik [Russian
peasant], from the commanding general to the lowest ranked soldier,
such as we have known in all the modern wars, whether the endeavors
of Japan would have resulted in victory, nobody knew. Even given the
final triumph of Japan, such an event might only to lead to partial and
modest results, perhaps sufficient to free the Empire of the Rising Sun
from the clutches of its enemy, to temporarily divert the great flow of the
Slavic wave to another destination, but without practical utility for

13
England.
+15
What England needed is for a nullified Russian navy to be
condemned for centuries to remain confined to the Baltic and North Sea,
for the incomparable prestige of its army to evaporate, for its expansion
into the Orient to be smashed, for the magnetic energy drawing the
conqueror of the arid steppes toward the fertile plains of India to be cut.
A foreign war, however disastrous it might be supposed, could not
be enough to attain outcomes so grand. In order to obtain them, it was
necessary to know how to add, as the case may be, a civil war onto the
foreign war; the revolt of soldiers and sailors onto the defeat of army and
navy; administrative and political disorder onto the disorganization of the
military, by means of the insurrection of peasants and factory workers,
and fits of insanity in all classes of society.
Edward VII fully understood the importance to his country of not
letting this providential occasion pass by for attaining, in one stroke, a
key outcome for the achievement of a destiny which promised it the rule
of the world. He was resolute in not neglecting any element of success in
that enterprise, which needed as much discreet and prudent reserve as
consummate skill. He knew in depth all the difficulties of making a
complicated mechanism function; not any aspect of the problem nor any
requirement of the situation escaped him. Guided by the clear vision of
what national grandeur commanded, inspired by the very genius of
England which was incarnated in him, without weakness, without
hesitation, and without listening to any consideration alien to exclusive
British interest, he proceeded to his goal and he succeeded. He ensured
the complete triumph of his ally, and the complete fragmentation of his
rival, without risking the life of one soldier in his army, or the loss of one
coin from his treasury.

14
Chapter 2
Edward VII and Russia
+17

The kings of Israel are enthroned in London. The wealthy Jewish

bankers of The City manage the future of the Hebraic people, guard and
defend their interests everywhere in the world, motivated by a racial
patriotism which cannot be rebuffed.
The barbarous persecutions under the reign of Alexander III, of
whom the Jews of Russia have been victims a number of times, have left
a deep anger in their hearts and a desire for a yet unsatisfied revenge.
It is always a crime with no good reason to persecute someone for
religious practices which mark them for the abhorrence of an ignorant
and fanatical society. But, when the persecutor is incapable of doing
without the assistance of the persecuted; when he is condemned, by his
apathy, to having recourse for the satisfaction of his needs, passions, and
vices, to the daily intervention of the one who he makes his victim, the
crime is doubly senseless.
+18
Without the beneficial services of the Jew, the muzhik [Russian
peasant] would not know how to sell his wheat or buy his cattle, the
merchant to stock his store or make payments due, the officer to pay for
his gambling debts and those sumptuous dinners where the
headquarters' staff squander their cash and their health, or the noble to
support his retinue of valets and the sumptuous frenzy of household
accessories. The Jew infiltrates into all public and private
administrations; he has access to ministerial bureaus, the secretariats of
the grand dukes, on up to the private chambers of His Imperial Majesty.
He is the organizer of industrial and commercial enterprises, the discreet
middleman in both financial and romantic affairs. He has entry into the
intrigues, in the restless coteries who squander themselves on the futile
activity at the heart of a class that is anxious, troubled, and demoralized
by idleness and boredom. He is the purveyor of debaucheries and
promoter of orgies. He is just as acquainted with the secrets of
bedrooms as the mysteries of chancelleries, the faults of statesmen as
the vices of courtiers. He is the spring mechanism at the core sluggish

15
inertia and general numbness; in the end, he is the hated master behind
the scenes.
High class and low, everyone loathes him; yet they fear him. They
see him as no less thirsty for the blood of his victims than their gold.
After having stripped them of their goods, he takes their flesh, the last
collateral of the insolvent. By the pitiless accumulation of his demands,
he drives the depressive into insanity, the gambler into suicide, and the
drunk into crime. Debtors sense him at their side everywhere, spying on
them, looming over them. He waits for them at every life-changing turn,
like a highwayman in a wooded recess. He is hated and scorned, and that
hatred and scorn are incapable of disguising themselves; they spit in his
face, for a particular reason or for no reason at all. At the first rumbling
of a riot, the people mob him and slaughter him.
+19
Eluding the massacre, he resumes his exploitation of the Christian
the following day. No rampage or violence discourages him. Thrown out
of the master's window, he returns through the servant's door; he bends
his back lower so that the cane is lifted so much higher to strike him. He
redoubles his servility to assist his torturer, and the torturer yields to the
imperious demands of the victim, because he cannot do without the
victim's services. In reality, the Russian is a slave to the Jew, but a slave
in eternal revolt, both against the yoke which oppresses him and the
weakness which makes him bear it; a slave who has enough strength to
whip his master, but not enough to break his chains.

When the Muscovite Jew sees that his Western counterpart, whose
means of existence and sources of profit, the proceeds from the
exploitation of human misery, are clearly the same that he also utilizes,
while still enjoying, in the Western countries where he lives, not only all
the rights of the common law and all the privileges of the most favored
classes, but also the special consideration linked to public powers, with
honors and exceptional distinctions, as a Jew he becomes filled with a
strong repugnance to Russian society, now the only one in Europe that
spits insults at him and treats him like a pariah, persecutes and banishes
him. With all the force of his soul, he plots its annihilation.
+20
Too few in number to ever hope to take vengeance by force of arms
against the power that oppresses him, he leaves poison in charge of

16
ensuring the satisfaction of his rancor. Right into the Western regions
most deeply contaminated by anarchist doctrines, he goes looking for the
most contagious virus, and he inoculates it slowly but surely into a
population whose conscience is yet as dull as its intelligence,
predisposed by secular fanaticism to believe everything without
discernment.
Those working class masses, collected hastily and indiscriminately
around enormous factories budding like mushrooms all over the length
of the empire, when, in the initial fervor of the alliance, French capital
was flowing into Russian enterprises, industrial stocks as well as state
bonds; those human swarms, managed by Muscovite engineers often as
authoritarian as incompetent, where the muzhik, barely uprooted from
rural lands and homes, ignorant and credulous, rubbed elbows with the
German worker, exiled from his country because of his socialist opinions,
and picked by the Russian industrialist because of his knowledge of the
trade and superiority of technical training; together those made for the
collectivist microbe a cultural agar of remarkable fertility from which
waves of a devastating virulence were set to be released at the given
time. The Jews understood this with the instinctual acuity which hatred
gives to persecuted people. They dedicated themselves to planting,
tending, and breeding the collectivist microbe there to this effect; they
spread pamphlets and tracts profusely, they called for propagandists and
initiated public or secret conferences according to the vigilance or apathy
of authorities who indifferently went from one extreme to the other, then
the Jews busied themselves with connecting these diverse revolutionary
dens and linking them to large foreign centers by the wireless telegraph
of their colleagues moving endlessly across the regions as brokers of all
sales.
+21

The rural population is accustomed to land in commons, and to an

annual allotment for the field to cultivate by means of a random drawing;
from then on, it is incapable of strong feelings for a patrimony made
productive by the labor of ancestors, that profound attachment which
shapes the personality of the French peasant, and to this day has this
one respecting the property of another, so as to get respect for his.
According to an old Muscovite saying, nothing belongs to the Russian
peasant but the wooden spoon for eating his soup; as such he knows

17
nothing about that powerful enchantment of the land made fertile by the
ceaseless labor of its owner, and paying him the cost of his sweat
through the increase of its fecundity. He only knows private property as
the birthright of more fortunate classes that he envies. He is therefore
disposed to considering it like a privilege which should disappear with a
more equitable application of social justice.
+22
The peasant, cowering in his lonesome izba [cabin made of split
pine trunks], dies of poverty beside the harvest, the full advantage of
which he does not know how to take. He waits for the visit from the
Jewish broker. Only the Jew has the cash needed to buy the cattle and
the grain. Only the Jew owns the wagons and hitches of draft animals
indispensable for transporting the grain to the nearby village, through a
region deprived of roadwork, where the paths are replaced by ruts when
the snow thaws. The sale concluded, the buyer says to the muzhik: "You
are very poor, brother, and the price of your harvest doesn't let you pay
off your debts and feed your family, which has grown larger." "Oh well,"
responds the seller, "what can you do? These are lands which are lacking
to the commons; even larger families than mine have no better lot."
"Land is not lacking in Russia," replies the tempter. "There are the lands
of the crown, the church, the abbeys, the nobility; are they shared not
among the peasants? The Emperor, who is your father, would like this
very much, but the nobility prevents him." "What can I do about it?" sighs
the unfortunate man, spellbound. "Revolt, and take what they refuse to
you."
The Jew who uses this language is not speaking in levity. He knows
what he wants to come from it. For him the job is to collect a good
commission.
While buying the commodities of the farmer, brokering his
merchandise, trading in livestock, peddling the smuggled vodka and
cheap kvass, he preaches a new distribution of land which fixates the
mind of the peasant with private property: "Look, brother," he says, "the
land of the lord is of a higher quality than what has been allotted to you.
Every year his improves, while yours, in passing from hand to hand, is
being ruined and wastes away. The distribution made after the freeing of
the serfs has been unjust. You've only had the dregs. That which had good
production remained with the lord. Even if the tithe to the lord has not
increased, the population of the village has grown. The families, more

18
numerous, can no longer live on the meager production of the lot which
falls to them in a lottery. The children must become exiles in order to go
and make an itinerant and precarious living elsewhere." These insidious
words, endlessly repeated in a thousand insinuating ways, drop a
seething ferment of excitement, envy and rebellion into the mind of the
peasantry, which waits for no more than the occasion to explode into
bloody sedition.
+23
The mortgage bank and the land bank, doubtless called the
peasants' bank in derision, have fallen into Israeli hands. The Jew knows
that the land which will pass from the hands of the lord to the hands of
the peasant, will rapidly pass from the hands of the peasant into the
hands of the Israelite banker. It is a vast land liquidation that he is
arranging, where there will be big profits to be made for the middlemen,
and these profits entice their greed. As soon as individual property is
established for the profit of the muzhik, as soon as he can have the
property at his disposal, he will hasten to mortgage or sell it in order to
settle his debts and satisfy his taste for alcohol. In Russia, where there is
collective property, the Jew pushes for individual property, just as in
France, where there is individual property, he pushes for collective
property, with the same motive; in both cases an immense real estate
liquidation will put on the market all land assets, which he does not
possess, into the discretion of liquid assets, of which he is the master. In
view of this operation, he has thrown a gigantic net of speculation over
the breadth of Russia, and the defunct duma [Russian parliament] has
only been his obedient agent.
+24

Since the end of the last reign, the youth in universities, all of the
scholarly world, professors as well as students, were buffeted by
clandestine agitations of indiscipline and insubordination, shaken by
intermittent fits of insurrectionist fever.
Every year secondary schools and universities flush into city
streets thousands of diplomas and degrees, physicians, lawyers,
chemists, artists, engineers, and various others. How is all this
intelligentsia to be fed, how are all these useless mouths to be
nourished, when in a country of one hundred thirty million people, more
than one hundred twenty-five million will never in their life will even

19
have the thought of calling for the help of a doctor, or the advice of a
lawyer, any more than they will have the money needed to pay for their
services.

All those young people, with ardent enthusiasms and boundless

ambitions, so much the more disposed to believing themselves capable
of anything since, being reduced to inactivity, they are not receiving the
moralizing lessons of practical work, the difficulty overcome, the edifying
effort of the soul; they grow pale in the darkest misery, the most
degrading idleness. Embittered by their forbearance, their stomach
empty of food and their brain filled with hallucinations from alcohol and
opium, burning with unsatisfied desire, they embody an always glowing
furnace of revolution.
+25
The Jew, by favor of some loans and subsidies of foreign origin and
a high price, pokes at that fire by profusely throwing into it scurrilous
tracts by the apostles of political assassination, the liberating bomb, and
propaganda in effect. There he recruits the agents, the unknowing
instruments of his vengeance, ready to obey the impulses of his hatred
and the commands of his religion, the fanatics disposed to commit the
worst crimes with no fear of punishment and death.

Far away from a royal court sad and somber like a monastery and
closed and guarded like a Turkish harem, cut off from imperial favors,
removed from high ranking civilian and military positions which the
emperor's family keeps to itself, and rejected from state jobs where an
invasive class of chinovniks [czarist bureaucrats] closed all entry, the old
Muscovite nobility sulks in their isolated chateaus, lost in the middle of
forests and steppes. To counter the boredom that gnaws at them, they
get their remedy in foreign countries at casinos and spas, gambling
houses and pleasure parlors. When they return to their native land, their
wallet empty and their head emptier still, they ingratiate themselves with
businessmen in the vague hope of mending the holes in their fortune.
+26
That is when they become the prey of the Jew. They mortgage their
domains, pawn their estate, lend their name and manorial prestige to
industrial enterprises where the Jew is enriched and the noble becomes
poorer still. Under the shock of these financial disasters, hereditary

20
loyalty and fervent czarism gradually turn into a secret and irascible
discontent, an irresistible aspiration toward a general overthrow which
liquidates all liabilities, abolishing private debts along with the public
debt.
The Jew has made a blind agent of revolution out of the former
pillar of the throne.
The merchant is vexed in his self-esteem and righteous feeling of
dignity, harassed in his commercial operations, his fortune extorted by a
haughty and meddlesome administration, needy and insatiable. For him,
the chinovnik bureaucrat is the enemy.
Formerly his pride and joy was in overshadowing the nobility,
humbling him with a showy display of luxuries that they were not able to
match. These days the splendor of the old landed aristocracy has been
overshadowed. The merchant assigns his efforts to no more than one
goal, to beat down administrative despotism, cut short the harassment,
thefts, and embezzlement whose victim he has continually been, no more
to be squeezed dry by the chancelleries of the grand dukes, cabinets of
governors, and bureaus of ministries.
For that work of destruction, the Jew becomes his insinuating and
suggestive aid. Weary from endlessly standing around in the
antechambers of functionaries, wallet emptied by the countless bribes
that he has to distribute, his brain numbed by the battles endured to
defend his wealth and liberty, when the merchant returns at night, he
finds the Jew waiting at his counter in order to stir up, through
duplicitous consolation, the flames of his rancor, and whisper hatred and
the hope of revenge into his heart.
+27

The clergy and the army, formerly the boulevards to the autocracy,
are no longer qualified to play that role. The high clergy like the high
military command have lost their influence as guides to their
subordinates. They should have kept them under control, both
intellectually and morally, but they let them go adrift, pawns to the secret
agents of the revolution.
The bishops live enclosed in monasteries, between a half-
cloistered and half-worldly existence, in the heavenly shadow of
medieval mysticism, encompassed by an oriental ostentation accessible
to some privileged few.

21
 They have lost all contact with the lower clergy of town and
country.
The generals and superior officers, tormented by their gambling
debts, overwhelmed by the age and languor of their garrisons, by
outlandish banquets where they drown their sanity in a crazy multiplicity
of toasts, no longer recognize the soldiers and are no longer recognized
by them.
Priests and soldiers have lost any guiding light for leading them to
the way of their duties, toward their God, their Emperor, and their
Country. They drift aimlessly, dispossessed, carried away, often despite
themselves, by the insurrectionist movements of the civilians and lay
people around them.
+28
They commit the worst disciplinary violations, then they obediently
return to duty without knowing why, by chance disposition. Today, victims
of the most dangerous agitators, they are amazing in the wild audacity of
their dereliction; tomorrow may they feel a compassionate heart being
moved by their hardships, a spirit attentive to their needs, a firm hand to
direct them, and they will again become the heroic warriors who had
earned the admiration of Europe.

Edward VII - who as Prince of Wales often used the good offices of
the bankers of The City [London], the good offices to which he always
scrupulously payed the interest, in hard currency or consideration, a coin
for which the Jew is no less avid, especially when it falls from so high
and from which he can draw such fat profits - holds in his hands, no less
reactive than skilled, all those kings of cosmopolitan finance.
From London, the Israelite bankers of Saint Petersburg and
Moscow take the marching orders which they send out to the Jews of the
Empire. These more readily obey these directives the more nearly it
corresponds to their passions. In this way they become secret and
dedicated agents, and ensure, each in the measure of their power over
the total extent of their territory, the execution of the general plan.
+29

Edward VII had no less influence on the Armenian revolutionary

cadres taking refuge in London. After the massacres which bloodied
certain provinces of the Ottoman Empire - when, on the command of

22
[Sultan] Abdul Hamid [II], who was changed into a raging fool by fear, the
human victims fell by the hundreds of thousands, without distinction of
age or sex, beneath the blows of a fanatical army with a sophistication of
cruelty which horrifies the imagination - England alone remembered the
most glorious and refined traditions of Western Civilization.
England proposed an intervention which would have put an end to
the bloodbaths. France, then forgetful of its past, entranced by the
primitive fetishism of its Russian alliance, and Russia, blinded by its
hereditary hatred of the Armenian people, the roadblock to [Russian]
Orthodox [Church] expansion into the territories of Asian Turkey,
deserted their seats of honor, had the initiative from England fail, and
thus assured impunity to the executioners and the undisturbed
completion of their crimes.
From that bloody crisis the Armenians reserved a passionate
animosity against Russia at the same time as a keen appreciation for
England, in whom they placed their hopes from then on. The King of
England has a zealous, discreet, and reliable agent with any young
Armenian, in case of any open or secret conflict between Great Britain
and the Muscovite Empire.
+30
The Armenians, a prolific and migratory people, are spread
throughout the southern Russian provinces which border the Ottoman
Empire. They are in the majority in some districts, in others they are
balanced by Muslim tribes, against whom they maintain a racial and
religious hatred that the Muscovite government should dampen, which on
the contrary it tries to maintain, and stoke up when needed as an
instrument of rule.
Exuberant, audacious, and active, here providentially endowed to
understand, speak, and translate all languages, elsewhere shepherds
and nomads, hard-working farmers, industrious merchants, expert in
large and small businesses, they gladly dedicate themselves to silver
trading, and everywhere they establish themselves they evict the Jew;
and so they are the equal of the Jew, dishonored, feared, and persecuted
by the neighbors they exploit. Like an ethnicity targeted by ambient
hostility, they have established among themselves a kind of Freemasonry
to warn each other and join together in view of the common threat. They
comprise, for whomever knows how to utilize them, a corps of informers
always on watch.

23
 The western borderlands of European Russia, from the ersatz line
which separates it from the German Empire in the west, as far south as
the border of Catholic Poland, and as far north as the city of St.
Petersburg, are inhabited by populations either exclusively or almost
totally Lutheran. Vestiges of the Teutonic Order or Scandinavian domains,
conquerors of yesteryear, the Lutherans still have a most oppressive
yoke weighing on the Finnish ethnics who they have subjugated. In part in
order to maintain their supremacy over the indigenous people, in part to
ensure their autonomy and evict Russian Orthodoxy by slow and steady
action, they instinctively required outside support. By custom they turned
their aspirations toward Stockholm first, then to Berlin.
+31
Faced with the decline of Sweden and the stable accord between
Germany and Russia, which Bismark made one of the fundamental bases
of German policy in the West, these Protestant populations looked
elsewhere for a point of religious and political support. They found it in
the Bible societies of London. Against the irksome measures with which
they were hounded by the persecuting orthodoxy of the procurator
general of the Holy Synod, Pobedonotzeff, they appealed to their English
protestant colleagues. These lent an attentive ear to their sufferings,
stood up for them and greatly supported their demands. These Bible
societies, whose politico-religious influence extends like a vast web over
all the world, are the most loyal and active soldiers of the King of
England; they are the ones who, little by little, conquered the world for
him.
The people of the Baltic provinces, more civil, more educated, more
in the European mode, are more adept than those at the center of the
Empire at bureaucratic functions; in this way they crowd provincial
administrations and ministries, chancelleries of princes and military
stewardship. As such they are up to date with everything that is being
prepared, elaborated on, or whispered about in the innumerable ranks of
chinovniks, from high to low on the hierarchical ladder, from the minister
himself to the least of the transcribers who he employs. Nothing is
decided without them knowing about it, without them speaking about it to
the Protestant minister, and without the minister informing the biblical
society of London about it.
+32

24
 Edward VII is thus better informed than anyone, moreover better
than the unfortunate Nicholas II, of everything that is happening and
everything that is being plotted in the empire of the czars.

The Muscovite empire is recently formed. Following some

successful wars of rapid conquest, nations of the most diverse origins
were annexed on all sides, in Europe and Asia, which do not speak the
same language, which do not have the same customs nor the same
degree of civilization, who practice the most hostile worship, who until
the annexation sealed into their blood by the sword of the victor, were
only known for fighting and exterminating one another, who in brief have
no link but the commonality of defeat and the commonality of the yoke.
When the yoke is managed by a personality aware of his power and
steadfast in his plans, when he is covered in the laurels of victory and is
ennobled with the prestige of military glory, he can impress himself on
heated imaginations inclined toward the fanatic and ecstatic, making
himself obeyed by people who for the most part have never known
liberty, who don't even have the instinct for it, and by being conquered
merely had anarchy exchanged for despotism. But, when the autocrat
lacks the will to follow through with his plans; when he is weak,
indecisive, and irresolute; when he lets himself be controlled by the
passions of his relatives and their favorites, when his agents deceive him
and return him at will to satisfying their greed and venality, then all these
diverse populations feel that they are no longer under control; like a
skittish steed they are ready to buck the rider out of the saddle.
+33

Then, Finland remembers that the Constitution, as sacred

guarantee of its autonomy and a condition of its annexation to Russia,
sworn to by the czars on their accession, has been violated; the Baltic
provinces, none of whose successive conquerors ever had the wisdom to
free from servitude, the detested vestige of the reign of the Teutonic
Order, agitate to fulfill the dream, gestated for centuries, of the abolition
of the feudal order; Poland hears in its heart the clarion call of
independence resounding, and the weapons of insurrection, so many
times taken up, are convulsively trembling in their hands; the Tatars and
Armenians kick each other around to appease their secular hatreds of
race and religion; in the endless steppes and in the deep forests of

25
Siberia, political prisoners escaped from the forced labor of prison
camps and mines, plot an uprising which would free these still badly
assimilated regions and establish a United States of Northern Asia; and
in the very heart of old Russia, holy Russia, the populace, preyed on by
the convulsive delirium of the worst revolutionary passions, knows that
in all its excesses it will be supported, if not encouraged, by the criminal
connivance, the reckless complicity, of the upper classes, deviant,
corrupt, and given over to visions of the most culpable ambitions and
disastrous utopias.
+34
None of these details escaped the powerful mind over which the
crown of Great Britain and Ireland sat.

Edward VII knew the sources and origins of all these agitations,
their force of expansion, and their limits, how they break out in
formidable insurrections, in firestorms threatening to devour all the
empire, and how to lead them into thwarting each other, reciprocally
annihilating each other, as a forest fire is extinguished by turning the
flames against themselves. Ready to give the signal which will detonate
the explosion of materials accumulating for a long time, he remains the
master of having the mine defused and the fire smothered if it impairs
his designs.
He knows exactly the extent to which venality and corruption have
thrown the provisioning of the Russian army into disorder and confusion,
that the example coming from the top has infected the entire corps; that
the guilty remain assured of impunity by the fear of scandals which
would rebound to the steps of the throne, and that war is no longer
considered, even within the highest circles responsible for the support
and resupply of the army, an occasion for being seen in the light of glory,
in demonstrating one's capability and devotion to country, but as an
occasion for procuring gross profits, illicit gains through rigged
speculation, for getting rich through criminal waste and manipulation.
+35
He knows that neither on land nor sea is anything prepared, for a
war made inevitable by the accumulation of mistakes of a diplomacy
without foresight, badly masking its weakness beneath its guile, for a
war which the chief of state, lost in his pacifist dreams, neither knows
how to intend nor prevent, which only shameless speculators want,

26
those who have cast their eyes onto the mines of Manchuria and the
forests of Korea. From the opening of hostilities, the oceans will be
closed to Russian squadrons by the superior fleets of their forearmed
enemy. The army contingent stationed in Manchuria is too weak; their
insufficient troops incapable of resisting the onslaught of a tactically
astute invader. For the duration of the campaign this initial deficit would
never be possible to rectify. The capacity of the Transiberian railroad is
insufficient for reestablishing numerical balance; delays and stoppages
of traffic cascade on that incomplete, deficient, and badly constructed
line.

In London, in the worlds of both business and politics, the

respective situations of the two armies in view is no mystery to anyone.
No one does not know that Japan has methodically prepared for this war
for years. All the resources of the most modern industrial refinements
and all the discoveries of science have been requisitioned for giving the
utmost of resistant power and irresistible momentum to the troops,
whose patriotism is supercharged to the verge of ecstasy, to ensure all
the essentials of victory to them. It is furthermore not unknown that
everything is lacking on the Russian side, and that the belated efforts
trying to remediate that deprivation are paralyzed by disorder,
carelessness, and corruption.
+36
Through the reliable and detailed information of their
correspondents in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and all other large
commercial centers of the Empire, the merchants, industrialists, and
shippers of The City [of London] have learned that the canned foods
intended for feeding Muscovite soldiers are of low quality and spoiled;
the armor plating on ships, lacking the necessary thickness, only
represents an illusory protection; the blankets are deficient for the ice-
cold nights of Manchuria, and those that a patriotic underwriting of the
Merchants Guild had enabled collecting, have been kept in Moscow and
sold at a low price for the profit of rich and powerful concession holders.
To them the Russian army appeared weakened, emaciated, and
exhausted by fatigue, hardships, and countless deprivations, demoralized
by disobedience, which the high command lavishes a contagious
example. A lack of discipline makes frightening progress there. The
adversary is no longer confronted by those famous grenadiers of which

27
Napoleon said, "It is not enough to kill them, they still have to be thrown
to the ground," but troops without cohesion, without confidence in their
leaders or flag, susceptible to panic and prone to chaotic retreat.
+37
This Empire, whose enterprises in the Orient would always induce
there an endless undefined terror, in their eyes is no more than a weak
corps destined to fall beneath the pounding of a well-prepared fighter
who punches on target. Thus their admiration redoubles for the monarch
who, in making an opportune alliance in due time with the future victor,
knew how to ensure his country with the better part of the spoils of
victory.

Edward VII was not then acting heedlessly when he allied with
Japan, and immediately after concluding the treaty sent it to war. He
knew that he was sending it to certain victory. However, in following with
an attentive eye its uninterrupted series of victories, he likewise knew
the exact moment when he would stop the advancing flood, where the
conquering wave itself would be obliged to put an end to its invasion and
withdraw on the riverbed it had carved.
Exhausted by its own victories, drained of men and money, Japan
risked jeopardizing its success by dashing across the endless steppes in
the pursuit of an enemy who, by scattering its forces, by not offering it
any fixed line of resistance, was depriving it of the prospect of unleashing
a decisive engagement capable of putting an end to the war. Unsettled by
dark clouds of jealousy that it sensed accumulating over its head,
schooled by experience with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, when a coalition
of the envious had despoiled it of the fruit of its victories without a shot
fired, the government of the Mikado was too wary not to seize the first
opportunity to close out hostilities and ensure the conservation of the
results obtained.
+38
This was the psychological moment which Edward VII had skillfully
arranged for the entrance of President [Theodore] Roosevelt onto the
scene. The King's status as an ally [of Japan] did not allow him to play the
role of mediator and referee, but for a long time his keen aristocratic
sensibilities had revealed to him the desire of Brother Jonathan [a
personification of New England or more broadly, the U. S.] to officiate in
world politics. He felt able to give satisfaction to that ambition, and in this

28
way to consolidate the reconciliation that he had worked out between the
two branches of the Anglo-Saxons, in opposition to the Teutons.
President Roosevelt enthusiastically accepted the representative role
which was offered to him, but the maximum extent of Japan's demands
was already limited by negotiations between him and his ally.
The success of the mission of [Sergei] Witte [lead Russian
negotiator] had thus been assured in advance, and the financier-
diplomat, in a turn of the famous phrase of Francis I after the Battle of
Pavia: "Everything is lost except honor," was able to close the
negotiations with the triumphal shout, "Everything is lost except the
kopecks."
Here is a beautiful example of that much extolled international
solidarity. If this solidarity no longer reigns in the humanitarian realm, it
has triumphed this time at least in the financial realm. Making the
Russian imperial treasury, already indebted by the defeat, responsible for
the expenditures that Japan had to set out for victoriously sustaining that
long and costly war, would have been to bear a fatal blow to the credit of
Russia, and no less perhaps to the financial stability of France, from
whom England expects effective assistance whenever needed. The
European markets in total would have received a jarring counter punch
from it, and in consequence, The City markets would have been affected.
The course of international payments must be preserved; as for soldiers,
governments can sacrifice their lives without keeping a count; they are
values which are not quoted on the exchanges nor written on the signs of
money changers.
+39
How even more advantageous to open a large scale trade in loans
to Japan. In this way the Mikado government would incur another
obligation in relation to its powerful allies. The London bankers would
lose nothing from it and would more sweetly sing praises to their
sovereign. The Japanese peasant would slim down his stomach to pay
the interest, while the British belly would grow fatter.

From then on the Japanese card was played and its role ended. It
could rest on its laurels and bandage the many wounds from which the
purest of its blood and the brightest of its gold had flowed, or prepare in
the shadows for the realization of its warrior future.
Edward VII was vigilant. The work begun in Russia through foreign

29
war, had to be continued by civil war. On a signal coming from London,
the mass of explosive material, whose accumulation we have mentioned,
was about to be ignited. He needed to follow step by step the firestorm
about to break out in order to not allow it to spread its ravages beyond
the limits set by British interests. For if England determines that it is
vitally important to it that Muscovite expansion should come to an end in
the Orient, on the contrary it doesn't want Russia to stop being a factor
among the great military powers in Europe. Can Russia not be used in
fact as a counterweight to German hegemony as needed? This was the
most delicate and arduous work of all.
+40

What new harvest of human lives was this sinister scourge going to
reap? What new torrent of calamities was it going to pour over that
unfortunate Muscovite people, already so worn down? Such
considerations could not enter into the mind of the King of England.
Certainly not that the omnipotent monarch, who maintains so many
diverse nations under his scepter, is barbarous and cruel. Far from it. As
a prince he is receptive to universal peace, to arbitrated treaties, and the
conference at the Hague. As much as any of our modern politicians, he is
imbued with the great principle of solidarity among all peoples. He cares
only for the happiness of humans and is stingy with their blood, but only
so long as the extension of all those generous virtues is not incompatible
with the necessities of the unceasing evolution of imperial politics.
Edward VII is an aristocrat to the tips of his finger and an
Englishman to the marrow of his bones. I know of nothing capable of
stopping him in the pursuit of the ideal to which he dedicates his efforts:
ensure the supremacy of Great Britain over the entire world, and to
assert the superiority of the English race over all other races.
+41
Read the annals of Great Britain and tell me when, and under what
circumstance, an English statesman has hesitated to unleash on rival
nations the worst calamities, when the interests of the English people
appeared to require it? Now, what more grandiose end could the genius
of an English king imagine than to unburden the horizon of his country of
the nightmare which endlessly troubled the tranquility of its victories, of
that colossus of ice which, alone since Napoleon, appeared to the eyes of
an expectant world to be capable of countering British fortune, and

30
perhaps one day to defeat it in India?
Are you going to believe that he orders the pillages, the arson, the
murders, and the massacres? He is not the one who exhorts criminal
hands to lob incendiary bombs; they are the innate passions, the blind
hatreds of people and nations, the secular rivalries of races and
religions, whose creator he is not, for whom no one can make him
responsible. He is only the providential agent putting into motion the
bloody drama which clears the way for the people predestined to the
apotheosis of universal hegemony to which they are called.
He can serenely contemplate them from the imperial throne on
high, as from heaven on high the Lord of Hosts, from whom he learned to
revere the august decrees in his Bible, was contemplating the
extermination of the Philistines, guilty of preventing the progress of his
chosen people.
+42
A base and vindictive spirit, seeing at his feet the Muscovite bear
grievously wounded, would have thought of finishing it off, chopping it up,
and throwing the scraps as fodder to its voracious neighbors. Edward VII
is removed from this pettiness. He wants to turn the defeated from the
old power into the ally of tomorrow, when it might please him. He
demands that the life of the czar be respected, that his throne should
remain standing, that his European states should not be split off. He
knows the heart of Nicholas II, he knows that services rendered are not
forgotten by him, and that Edward will never be deaf to the voice of
gratitude.
Among the great lords of the royal race, he knows that obligating a
friend in distress is to obligate him twice. He knows that after a long and
unfortunate war there is a pressing need for money. He facilitates the
arrangements pertinent to pulling his young cousin from a financial bind,
and he does it so much the more generously as the cousin definitively
accords the moral support of the operation only to England, while
lavishly spending only the gold of his loyal allies and friends, the French.
Edward VII shows himself so much the more solicitous in offering
his services when the pleasure of serving a friend is joined with the no
less satisfying pleasure of inconveniencing a rival. For a long time
Bismarck has made a strong alliance with Russia the base and pivot of
German policy. William II has overlooked nothing in gaining the trust of
the Muscovite crown and people. In order to be assured of this precious

31
balancing point, he has overlooked nothing: promises of support and
offers of assistance have cost him nothing.
+43
Edward VII aspires to replace him on this terrain. He is very
attentive to his popularity on the banks of the Neva. A trend in his favor is
gathering momentum there: the neglect of French, the language of
aristocratic salons in recent centuries, is becoming complete. German,
which was tending to supplant it since our catastrophe of 1870, is being
unlearned. Instead, English is becoming stylish. In the realm of the
Jewish liberation movement these days, the old hereditary enemy is
infatuated with it.

In circles which flirt with revolutionary parties, there is no longer

any doubt about an Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance. The visit of an
English squadron to the ancient fortress which defends the mouth of the
Neva River was recently being advocated, and was soon being forecast,
and a visit that the remnants of the Russian fleet would be hurrying to go
to make at Portsmouth. It was hoped in this way to parody the
unforgettable feasts of Kronstadt and Toulon [reciprocal diplomatic visits
by the French and Russian navies concerning the Franco-Russian
Alliance]. Nicholas II doubtless thought that it would still be too soon to
celebrate with festivities, and praise the loyal ally of Japan on the banks
of the Neva.
Satisfied in having closed Russian access to the oceans, proscribed
its route to India, and stifled its expansion in the Far East, Edward VII
would be pleased to see it rise again from its ashes and reconstitute its
army to cooperate with its ally France, as needed.
Let the empire of the czars develop the inexhaustible riches of its
terrain and sub-terrain, and world trade, of which England shares a good
part, will profit from it, more so than overly ambitious aims. To forestall
the reprise of an attack of megalomania, the fast acting poison of
revolution will be replaced by the slower and more anemic action of
parliamentary rule. It will be infected with sleeping sickness.
+44

In the view of an Englishman, an informed and wise observer, all

those parodies of British parliamentary rule performed on our
[European] continent are an amusing spectacle. The Duma of St.

32
Petersburg, the last to arrive on the world scene, has surpassed all
others in its grotesque and odious nature in only a few weeks.
Without any idea, prior preparation, procedural knowledge, or
instinct for the duties of a legislator and the prerogatives of the
government, the Duma intended to overturn and transform everything
from top to bottom, but has only ended up with semantic disputes empty
of meaning and filled with criminal incitement. It has repudiated all
cooperation in the benefits it could assist in bringing about; it has
admitted its responsibility in all the murders, pillages, and arson
perpetrated by the revolution.
Staring at the faces of hecklers at the Tauride Palace [the royal
palace in St. Petersburg] was quickly done In London; beneath the
disguise of a disheveled collectivism, of an unlimited communism, a
shameless financial speculation was quickly unmasked. The alleged
collectivists were only land speculators, the famous Jewish bande noire
[French land speculators after the Revolution] who intend to buy land
from the nobility at a low price, in order to resell it high to the peasants.
+45
The people's common sense protested against the debilitating
attacks of this powerless dementia. They would have liked the new
parliament either to be reformed or be banished. In London, on the
contrary, the idea was to impose it on the imperial government. The right
of the czar to be rid of it was not recognized.
When with a fit of unexpected strength Nicholas II dispersed those
puppets, at first the astonishment among our [English] neighbors was
extreme, but then great anger followed the big surprise. It was necessary
to make the czar grasp that he was no longer the master of his house
and that Romanov autocracy had been succeeded by English autocracy.
They vehemently protested and it was decided to go in a group to take the
protest to St. Petersburg and impose a retraction on the Emperor.
Russia made known that it was not yet a British satrap and that
Nicholas II was not an Indian maharajah.
Edward VII likes to make use of revolution, his loyal assistant
everywhere, but he does not like revolution to endanger him and treat
him as its slave. Disavowed by their master, the charlatans of liberalism
hid themselves in the shadows. Russia regained control of itself. The
world saw that it still had blood in its veins and that Stolypin was not
Clemenceau.

33
 That tactlessness of incorrigible gaffers has resulted in the foreign
policy of Edward VII losing a piece of captured territory, and he surely is
not the last to realize it. He will know how to fix it.
From now on, supported by the alliance with Japan whose troops,
still invincible at this point, make up the guardians of his rule over India,
Edward VII, with no rival in the Far East, the master of the Persian Gulf
and the Red Sea, with nothing more to fear in Asia or Africa, can turn all
his effort against his rival in the West.

34
Chapter 3
Edward VII and Germany
+47

From even before the accession of Edward VII to the throne, the
tight bonds of political friendship, which for many years had joined
England with Germany, were going slack.
Minds lingering on closely held grudges from the past, on the mean
feelings of Puritanism against the new Babylon, or Anglican Methodism
against Roman Catholicism, had tried to rekindle the sympathies of a
previous age from a perspective of shared action against France.
Chamberlain became the spokesman and proponent of this policy.
All his endeavors had elicited only a faint resonance among his
own countrymen; in Germany, they had aroused only blatant mistrust and
rejection.

On ascending to the throne, Edward VII brought loftier ideas, more

reflective and broader perspectives, and a more rational comprehension
of the contemporary situation of Europe and of the respective positions
of the different continental powers.
+48
He very clearly saw that from then on only one power in Europe
was capable of contending with England for world trade, and some day
perhaps even naval supremacy, if need be; that power was Germany.
From then on, England no longer had to see any enemy on the
continent other than Germany.
The king of England could consider the other continental nations as
merely pawns to maneuver on his chessboard to checkmate the emperor
of Germany. Gaining their friendship and ensuring their alliance, or at the
very least their eventual assistance from the perspective of certain
determinate hypotheses, would be so many trump cards in his hand.
Conversely, to follow the plan of Chamberlain, to be in favor of
another war between France and Germany, to assure in that conflict
another German triumph, would have been, in the eyes of Queen
Victoria's successor, the blindest of follies. That would have been to
multiply tenfold the power of Germany in its inevitable future war with

35
England; that would not have been to divert or delay this dreadful
eventuality, but to deliver it sooner and more dangerously.
Edward VII was harboring no illusions about the serious
consequences of this commercial and maritime duel between England
and Germany which, from even before his accession to the throne, was
clearly taking shape, and was preoccupying minds and enlivening
imaginations on both sides of the straits.
+49

The idea of war is generally unpopular on the European continent.

Germany is not afraid of the war which it believes itself ready for.
War has yielded unforgettable benefits to it, with glorious triumphs over
an army famed until then as the world's best, with conquests so much
the more precious inasmuch as they not only comprised a rich addition of
territory, but also, in the eyes of a temperamentally rancorous people
nourished from their schooldays on abhorrent historical memories, a
necessary redress of the injuries sustained. Finally, Germany is indebted
to war for its unification, out of which it draws great pride and numerous
other spiritual as well as material benefits.
Nevertheless, the nation taken in its entirety does not want war. It
is convinced that time and peace work in its favor. If it is already
equipped for victory; in knowing how to wait, it will be even better
equipped. If at present it has the strongest army in troops and training on
the continent, by continuing its endeavors with perseverance, before long
it would have a no less formidable fleet. It sees its unification
consolidating and its force of expansion advancing with a momentum that
cannot be held back. There is more profit in letting the work of
insinuation, the continual and methodical grafting that it has set about
doing in all parts of the world, to stabilize before wanting an untimely
harvesting of its fruit.
+50
Germany, absorbed in the work of developing its financial,
industrial, and commercial forces, above all does not want to jeopardize
this growth. It sees this work now sufficiently advanced so as to elicit the
jealous tendencies of its rivals, but still too recent and fragile to fear a
clash with them; it would like not to be disturbed in its advance, not to be
distracted from the goal which it has set before it. As such, outside of
military circles where, through sped up promotions, professional

36
indoctrination, and idleness, officers dream of medals to be collected on
the battlefield, Germany is not wishfully precipitating the outbreak of
another war.

France, anxious about its future, terrified by the increasing

disintegration of its social affiliations, which alone render any resistance
to a powerful enemy possible, is instinctively horrified by war. It would
only accept war as a last resort. Its ally, Russia, is not worth mentioning.
That country has looked like a casualty of war for quite awhile. Austria,
whose disparate elements are falling farther apart every day and
threaten, at any moment, to break the feeble bonds which unite them, has
scarcely any less need of peace than France. Only Italy can appear to be
agitated with aggressive and bellicose impulses, but more superficial
than deeply felt. Under the leadership of that megalomaniac [Francesco]
Crispi, it pushed Bismark to declare war on us. Italy was dreaming of
another dismemberment of France, and was looking to enrich itself on a
piece of our spoils. Its Franco-phobic schemes were entombed with
Crispi [in 1901]. The course of our sister on the other side of the
mountains [Maritime Alps] is entrusted to wiser hands, less hostile to us.
Italy oscillates between English and German alliances with an acrobat's
consummate agility. It has not yet arrived at deciding between the two
poles, equally attractive and equally perilous, and in its own interest it
postpones the restoration of the Roman Empire.
+51

As such, nations all over the European continent either fear war, or
at the very least are not wishfully calling for its immediate outbreak.
Completely different is England's state of mind. Nations which make a
living and become rich through maritime trade are fundamentally
warlike. They cannot tolerate their mastery of the sea being challenged.
Any reach to their naval superiority is a direct threat to their trade and
prosperity, and their very existence. In the realm of international
commerce, history teaches us there is neither procrastination nor
concession possible. Beware to those who are left unopposed to rise up
to the first rank! In a short time they are fallen into rack and ruin.
An island nation, mistress of the sea, who sees a competitor rising
up off its coastline, has every interest in beating back its arrival. There
would be obvious folly on its part to wait for the rival fleet to become

37
strong enough, whether alone or with alliances, to come to besiege it on
its island and smother it in its nest.
+52
England is therefore fated, by the very logic of its location, to keep a
jealous eye on the maritime progress of all other nations. The moment
that there appeared on the horizon a force capable of some day entering
into conflict with it, its egoistic and practical good sense commands it to
pounce on the reptile and smash it in the egg before it had time to uncoil
itself and crush England instead.
The growth of German maritime trade has attracted the attention of
the entire world. How would it have escaped that of England, more
interested than all others in keeping an eye on its advancing stages? How
could it not have induced English trepidation?
It is true that England and Germany have been friendly for a long
time, but what bond was uniting them? Only one: France was indignant at
the supremacy of English sea power and the supremacy of German
continental military power. France was their common enemy. It was
necessary to knock it down. At the present time, France is beaten down,
and the attempts it had made to get back up are paralyzed by the petty
aims of the party in power and the disorder of its finances. It is no longer
indignant at anyone. However, the expanding fleet of Germany is a
menace to England, and German commerce is supplanting that of
England. Germany is now the enemy; the British animosity that has beset
us for centuries is carried over to Germany.
Certain wary commentators predict that in a new war, should
Germany inflict another defeat on us, we would again see, as in 1870,
London celebrating the German victories with Te Deum thanksgivings,
despite the Entente cordiale [a 1904 agreement between France and
England settling some colonial disputes]. I think they are completely
mistaken. As long as Germany had not laid waste to our ports and burnt
our ships (and to me it does not appear disposed to do that, even to
regain the precious sympathies of its old friend), there is no danger that
German victories would be celebrated by our neighbors across the
English channel. On the contrary, I would say that if in a disloyal moment
victory should come back to our flag, nowhere would our success be
welcomed with so much sincere enthusiasm as in England. If there is no
other obstacle to stop us than the fear of displeasing our new friends, we
can immediately reconquer Alsace-Lorraine and march on Berlin. From

38
their side, we will only receive encouragement.
+53

Under the reign of Queen Victoria, it was commonly said that the
sentiments of reciprocal esteem and affection that the two monarchs
lavished on each other awoke a sympathetic echo in the heart of their
subjects and powerfully contributed to strengthening the bond between
the two nations. Need one say at the present time, that the weaker
feelings of sympathy that the two nations show to each other are equally
the image of the sentiments that their sovereigns reciprocally feel for
each other? I have no idea. It is not my place to fathom the hearts of
royalty and extricate the hidden etchings in the depths of their souls.
Edward VII is the most English of hearts to exist in England. If his
consensus reputation is believed, Edward VII does not easily forget
offenses against the persona of the King of England, nor even the Prince
of Wales; what is certain is is that he never pardons any offense to the
English people.
+54
The letter of congratulations addressed to President [Paul] Kruger
from William II, following the failure of the [Leander] Jameson Raid [1895]
perpetrated against Transvaal independence [from Britain], Edward VII
considered an insult to the British people. The more this act was
unjustifiable, the more it was scorched in world opinion, the more it was
cruel to English pride to see itself denounced and pilloried by a young
sovereign, who until then England had treated as a favorite child, and
who in large part owed to the connivance of that very England, in its
undeniable complicity, that imperial crown with which he so proudly
girded his forehead.
The offense was so much the more sharply felt since the imperial
letter was followed by invitations, discreet but not secret, to the great
continental powers confirming, and aggravating, the threatening
inference of this unusual message to the head of a state which Great
Britain had considered to be placed under its suzerainty. From then on,
England saw it as an exhortation by the Kaiser addressed to the South
African republics, urging them to shake off the yoke of British suzerainty
and raise the flag of rebellion, encouraging them in effect to call for the
aid of European intervention and to place their independence under its
protection.

39
+55
If the other great powers, having no reason to dedicate the
sentiments of gratitude which the German Empire owed to England, had
listened to the prophetic voice of William II, if they had followed that
guidance so favorable to their interests and had taken the path which his
genius was opening to them, the peace of the world would have been
safeguarded for a long time, and the freedom of the seas would no longer
have been a meaningless expression.
This would have meant reversing the plans so amorously embraced
by England of exclusive control from Alexandria to the Cape of Good
Hope. As a result, William II would have ripped from the forehead of
Edward VII the crown of Emperor of West Africa, which would soon be
going to be joined with the crown of Emperor of India.

Edward VII is not one of those grandiloquent sovereigns who in

resounding speeches reveal their resentments from offenses committed
against their persona or their country. He knows how to dissimulate. He
is content with turning a cold shoulder to his imperial cousin and not
responding to any of his solicitations. He has apparently left stranded any
attempt at a return to closer relations. He is stripped clean of all
loquacity.
By this obviously calculated attitude, he has endorsed the
reciprocal attacks exchanged between the newspapers of the two
countries; he has authenticated them, so to speak. This is no longer mere
verbiage from unauthorized personalities; these are echoes, exaggerated
perhaps, a retraction sworn to when needed, but in essence faithfully
reflecting the feelings of the two nations and their governments. In this
way he has given the very clear impression, to Europe and the rest of the
world, that they were in the presence of two champions ready to joust
each other in an ultimate match whose prize is supremacy on the seas
and preponderance on the continents.
+56

If Edward VII shares the feelings of his people, he does not share
their enthusiasms. He knows how to keep the premature bellicose
passions around him contained. He lets them flow in waves of innocuous
ink in newspaper columns. In the midst of popular uproar, he keeps a
cool head; he knows in depth his trade as a king, a methodical study of

40
which he has been able to make on the very steps to the throne, and
incurs no responsibility at all but appropriate discretion.
His movement is calculated with a precise knowledge of the terrain
to cross; his pace is as measured as his footsteps are certain. He directs,
and intends not to be directed by anyone; in his ministers as in his
subjects themselves, he wants only to see the docile instruments of his
will. His people know him, they have confidence in his star, they certify
the direction that he imposes on their future, proud and glad to cooperate
in the full measure of their capabilities to carry out the decisions of their
master. His promptings are followed by all his subjects, without
distinction of class or rank, and with zeal, loyalty, and enthusiasm. No
discordant note, no disordered movement roils the unity of national
policy.
+57
Edward VII is not unaware of the difficulty of the battle that
circumstances imposed on him, and the enormous effort which victory
will cost. He knows that he not only faces an empire, fearsome to all by
force of arms and patriotism of the people, but also an emperor who
owes an empire only to him.

He caricatures, perhaps with a sly smile, the pretensions of William

II when he plays the role of medieval hero, a grandnephew of
Charlemagne, or a knight of the Round Table. He does not accept
William's affectation of playing the role of world emperor, of claiming the
rights of Germany in parts of the world where Germany has no claim, and
claiming to be wronged somewhere it could not be wronged because it is
not there.
The clear perception of these eccentricities does not prevent
Edward VII from doing justice to the rare qualities of a rival, marvelously
gifted for making fanatics of a population and an army, the extraordinary
penetration of his mind, his tireless activity, his bold initiative never
lacking, his admirable understanding of all the interests of his subjects,
his passion for serving them, his skill in speaking to their imaginations
and keeping them inspired, of making himself loved, valued, and, as
needed, feared by all.
Edward VII concedes to him these natural gifts, sufficient for
making a great monarch, and he recognizes that their power has grown
in him through an iron will continuously applied to greatly multiply their

41
effects. Are they not nevertheless balanced by eminently dangerous
shortcomings for a virtually absolute sovereignty? Too impulsive a
character, too theatrical a pose, an exuberance of language at times
detrimental, always a noble gesture but perilous in certain cases, since
for an emperor the difficulty is not in realizing a gestural aesthetic, but in
responding to the hopes that it engenders, or in carrying out the threats
that it entails. A sage and impassive observer, Edward keeps an eye on
all these faults, determined to mercilessly exploit them.
+58

William II has behind him the prestigious genius of Bismarck who,

with his powerful hands, seized all the sons of European politics and
monopolized them in the service of Germany, so well that no secretary in
a chancellery was replaced without him being advised that a telegram
was not to be sent without the contents of that message having been
submitted to him and received his approval. The fist of the Iron
Chancellor has left deep imprints which time has not erased and which
dispose the continental powers to circling in Germany's orbit.
William II has beside him the Triple Alliance, the most extraordinary
work of the genius of Bismarck; this alliance cemented not by the
reciprocal sympathies of the nations that form it, but by the mutual
hatred that two among them incite in each other, and simultaneously by
the fear felt in common for a third; a pact rendered indissoluble because
two of the powers which signed it, Austria and Italy, are not unaware that
the rupture of the bond which unites them would be the signal for an
inevitable war between them, where they would both exhaust
themselves so as to fall victims to Germany, who covets their ports on
the Adriatic and their trade in the Mediterranean.
+59
Breaking up that bundle, so diabolically tied together by Bismarck,
and which fear brings together as soon as hatred drives it apart, is an
arduous task, but leaving it intact presents a serious danger to England.
The aspiration of William II in extending the sphere of that alliance
of central European powers, of having, along with Austria and Italy,
France and Russia enter into it, of fusing the duplex together with the
triplex, of making them all into a great permanent continental coalition,
over which he would be the economic and political chieftain, and whose
arrow would be more or less overtly pointed at England, was no secret

42
to anyone in Europe. It was widely discussed on all sides and, it is
necessary to note, in general favorably received.
Throughout the world, England has sown the seeds of so many
discontents, hurt so many national sensitivities by its arrogance,
damaged so many interests by its egotism, that the idea rapidly gained
momentum. It was encountering a spontaneous following from ardent
and convinced apostles in every country, not only among the great
powers, but also, perhaps especially, in the second rank states, whose
addition is not to be scorned.
The plan for a maritime league of all the continental powers, to
defend the freedom of the seas, and the security of the European
colonies against the always threatening firepower of the British
squadrons, was not new; it goes back several centuries. It has always
been very popular.
+60
At another time, France was designated to preside over that league.
At the present time, Germany seems fully recommended to lead it, and
from the moment that France is to take a seat there as well, full
guarantees of fairness and force are assured.
In view of the incessant growth of industrial and commercial
development in the United States, Australia, and the North American
English colonies, and the apprehensions caused in many prudent minds
by the fierce competition which certain products from the Far East
already present to us, the idea of a continental customs union for
protecting the European market and reserving it for European agriculture
and industry had numerous advocates.
The league was then assuming a double aspect, no longer only
political and military, but also extending its project into the economic
realm, and on this basis was being transformed into a vast continental
Zollverein [the customs union of German states in the 19th century].
The proponents of this aggregation emphasized that a pact for the
naval defense of coasts, ports, trade, and colonies, and a customs union
for the protection of the internal market for the profit of industry and
agriculture in the diverse coalition of nations, would of necessity bring
along the progressive relaxation of tensions between them, the
forgetting of past grievances, and the exchange of cordial and trusted
relations which by the simplest, most certain and effective way would
lead to the reduction of those excessive armaments which overburden

43
continental budgets, and make the economic battle of European nations
against New World nations so difficult.
+61
From the domain of academic theory and the polemic of journals,
the issue was gradually being sponsored by diverse chancelleries on the
European continent. Nowhere was it unfavorably received. It was made a
frequent theme of conversations among diplomats. At the start, of
course, it was entirely separated from an ulterior motive unfavorable to
England. Advocating a purely defensive union on an exclusively economic
basis was easily agreed to. Under this very prudent cover, by favor of
some proposals for customs tariffs of the new Zollverein, very shrewdly
studied, very skillfully assembled for giving satisfaction to all the
interests as well as all the appetites in play, the plan was taking shape
and consistency. It was moving smoothly forward to a fortunate
conclusion. Should France give its adherence, then the work would be
complete, or not far from it.

With slow but steady progress, William II had very significantly

changed the attitude of Germany towards France. Following the brusque
and arrogant tone of Bismarck, the incessant threats of war and invasion,
the ambushes on the border, the abduction and imprisonment of our
agents, he ordered more normal relations, courteous and polite. He
substituted honey for bile.
+62
William II made a thorough psychological study of the soul of our
fellow citizens. He knows how much they are welcoming to overtures,
honorifics, and flattery. He had multiplied the enticements, and he is a
seducer who is difficult to resist.
In celebrations of veterans, he gradually revoked and let fall into
disuse the commemoration of bloody occasions, the anniversaries of
mass human sacrifice. The old slogans disparaging the hereditary enemy
were vanishing from both political journals and official speeches. The
German authorities hardly let any occasion slip for exchanging good
wishes and congratulations with the French authorities, as soon as
circumstances permitted. The Emperor was pleased to start giving these
symptomatic indications.
Our officers, greeted with mistrust and hostility not long ago, were
received with open arms. Not any notable Frenchman passed through

44
Berlin without being the object of thoughtful consideration. Meanwhile,
the colonial conflicts that we had with Germany, some thorny disputes
over borderlines, were rapidly settled to our satisfaction by the
tentatively commodious relations between the delegates of the two
countries.
These advances would not have remained unproductive. Who would
have believed it only a few years ago? The Kaiser was starting to be
believed among us, if not a political party, at the very least by some
persuaded journalists. If popular sympathy for the emperor of Germany
was still being refused, it was letting itself be mollified by the personality
of William II, whose expressions in favor of the South African Republics
had resonated in French hearts.
+63

If the seductive activities of William II had succeeded in extending

their domain up to France, inevitably the most recalcitrant center to their
action, in nations who were not holding the bloody memories of 1870
against the new empire, and not bearing the barely healed wounds of a
recent war, but who were instead tied to Germany by commonalities of
language and heritage, by being former comrades-in-arms, by services
rendered or received, they were becoming more prevalent every day. By
his multiple excursions and repeated visits to the royal courts, by his
cruises on all European seas, he was creating sympathetic relations
everywhere.
From north to south, he was not yet proclaimed, but was accepted
in popular imagination then as the future Emperor of the West. His
influence counterbalanced that of England, even into the Iberian
peninsula, while supplanting it in Constantinople.

Prince Bismarck always said, "The road to Constantinople passes

through the Brandenburg Gate." The German Empire, from the time that it
was consolidated, has aspired to play a predominant role in
Constantinople. This is not without cause. The power which exerts a
dominating influence on Ottoman affairs often possesses, on that basis
alone, a decisive effect on joint European resolutions, whether in
reference to the heated rivalries which the always available succession
to [the financially troubled status of] l'homme malade incites, or the
numerous internal conflicts of race and religion which roil and bloody the

45
provinces of a state.
+64
For a long time France and Great Britain made that axiom [of
influence over the Ottoman Empire] the basis of their policy. They would
contend with each other for the highest rank, and they would not allow
any other to substitute for them and usurp their place, both ready to form
a coalition to drive out the intruder. At the present time, due to various
motives, both have deserted their post and seem to have relinquished the
prestige attached to it.
The height of French influence in those regions, of capital
importance to our country from all three of the maritime, commercial,
and strategic perspectives, was during the epoch of our military
expedition to Syria [most notably during the Napoleonic Wars]. We had
shown so much grandeur and generosity; we had demonstrated an
altruism unheard of until then, and not imitated since; we had been so
impartial and humane, such skillful peacemakers; we had affirmed the
two eminent qualities which in Oriental eyes constituted the ideal of
perfect governance: force and justice, to such a degree that we had won
over their hearts; we were teachers to all minds: Turks, Druse, or
Maronites, Muslims, Greeks, Armenians, or Catholics; all races the same
as all religious persuasions would swear only to the name of France.
+65
After that, our prestige did nothing but decline. The abandonment of
our secular mission as champions of human rights in opposition to
Islamic extremism, by our refusal to cooperate in stopping the massacre
in Armenia, has dealt it a fatal blow. The brutality of our armed
intervention to have the shyster debt of the Lorando-Tubini deal collected
[a loan to the Turkish Porte by these two naturalized French bankers]
has compromised our reputation. The abandonment of Egypt and, above
all, the disbandment of our missions and religious schools, now sound
the death knell of our influence.
Religious differences established between populations of diverse
origins and customs, coexisting in the lands of the Ottoman Empire, still
form an impassable chasm. All those who do not belong to the
conquering ethnicity and religious sect live perpetually under the threat
of fierce despotism and atrocious persecutions. Consequently, the
religious question necessarily takes precedence, relegating all others to
the background. All Catholics were clients born of France, clients not

46
only of its policy but also its commerce, language, education, and
mentality. They looked to France for all enlightenment and protection.
From now on, they will turn their sights to another source of support, and
offers of a protectorate will not be lacking.
+66

Even England has also renounced playing the dominant role in

Constantinople, to which it had previously attributed capital importance.
But this change of attitude in respect to the Ottoman Empire does not
have the same causes for them as for us. They are something else
entirely. They originate from a plan, whose advantages versus
disadvantages England carefully weighed, thought over for a long time,
and whose realization it methodically pursues with customary tenacity.
The mistress of Cyprus and Egypt, of the Indian Empire and East
Africa, having placed the Red Sea and Persian Gulf under its exclusive
control, it is preparing for the conquest of Arabia in the near future. In
fact, essentially it intends to place Mecca, the sacred city and religious
capital of Islam, under its authority. In its Asian and African possessions
it counts millions of Muslims, which in all parts comprise the most active,
intelligent, mercantile, and warlike segment of the population, and the
most disposed to be disciplined.
England now has more Muslim subjects than the commander of
believers himself. It does not want to leave to a foreign sovereign with
such a convoluted, Machiavellian, and multifaceted policy as the Sultan,
the high religious magisterium that he exercises over the members of
Mohammedan sects. With its admirable comprehension of the obligations
which devolve to it to render its rule over the people durable and
indisputable, it does not want to only rule over bodies, it also wants to
rule over souls. As ancient Rome transported the divinities of vanquished
peoples into its Pantheon to demonstrate to nations that even Olympus
could not escape from its law, England cannot permit the spiritual
direction of the nations that it governs to be exercised in a city
independent of its rule, by a religious authority removed from its law. To
the commander of believers who is seated in Constantinople, England
intends to oppose another Islamic leader whose religious authority is
just as authentic and indisputable, and who, enthroned in the holy city
surrounded by the respect of the faithful, would receive countless
pilgrimages and exercise his supreme magisterium under British control.

47
+67
From then on, the material and spiritual weakening of the Sultan in
Europe, and especially in Asia, far from hindering, favors the plans of
England; if it keeps watch over what remains standing of that renowned
unity of the Ottoman Empire, which Europe seems to have collectively
taken into its protection only to dismember it at whim, it is for the
purpose of preventing this dismemberment from serving to strengthen
dangerous rivals and, above all, to remain mistress of the route to India
by land as well as by sea.

This successive abandonment of the Sultan by his formerly jealous

guardians had not escaped the attentive eye of Bismarck. With clear
vision, William II then assessed its import and discerned the capital from
which he could profit for the grandeur of his country, and his goal of
global empire.
+68
Winning the friendship of the Sultan, to present himself as his only
genuine support against the hatred of his unfaithful subjects and the
meddling schemes of neighboring nations, thus capturing his trust and
acquiring the key to the favors his good will dispenses, would be to gain
a ranking in the hierarchy of great powers with whom Germany would
have to be counted from then on in the Mediterranean, also to ensure
first rate stationing ports to its navy, to open its trade to the most envied
markets in the world, to deliver the promised land of colonization for the
extension of the Germanic race into the fertile provinces of Asia Minor, to
train one of the most feared armies in Europe and have it conform to the
discipline of its military schooling, and finally to ensure an outlet to
German capital as productive to the interests of the country as for its
investors, by the construction of a rail line across the rich Ottoman
territories and the plains of Mesopotamia, intended to link the
Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean, and European railroads to the
Persian Gulf.
As such, William II would assert his right to intervene in the affairs
of the Orient. He would assert it resolutely, with a character of absolute
independence and autonomy, to all and against all.

William II is an attentive and informed observer of the Muslim

world. He takes its pulse by means of his business emissaries. He

48
follows step by step the slow but continuous movement of evolution
which is acting on that politico-religious association, so closed off to
European inroads. A feeling of solidarity, until now unknown, has been
awakened in the soul of all Muslims, wherever on the globe the hazards
of war, conquest, or migration had dispersed them. Now this feeling no
longer lacks an occasion to be asserted. To the extent that they become
aware of civilization and realize their past grandeur, their present
abasement, and their still immense power, members of the Prophet's
sect feel an impulse of private revolt and badly restrained indignation
towards those Western powers who suppress them in all places or
enslave them with their laws and who, too often, display to their face the
cynical spectacle of their vices and divisiveness.
+69
In the recent conflicts in which it has been engaged, whether
against Muscovite armies or Greek troops, the Ottoman army has
demonstrated absolutely remarkable qualities of solidarity, endurance,
and heroic self-sacrifice. Everywhere it has not been sold out or
betrayed, everywhere it has not been forced to yield under the
irresistible pressure of a Europe allied in order to put an end to its
victories, it has been triumphant. If the safeguard of Ottoman Empire
unity had been entrusted only to the courage its army, nobody would
have cut a slice out of it, and if it has suffered so many painful cuts, it is
because the powers who have been deceitfully authorized as its
protectors have forced endless concessions on the weak and corrupt
Porte [the Turkish sultan].
The Turkish generals have often demonstrated outstanding
strategic qualities. The victories [in the Russo-Turkish War] of Muhtar
[Ahmed Muhtar Pasha] have stunned Europe, while it has been filled with
admiration by the heroic resistance of Osman Pasha at Plevena [in the
same war]. Without the betrayal of Suleiman [Pasha, another commander
in that war], the Russian troops, thrown back on the Danube, would not
have encamped outside the gates of Constantinople.
+70
This military aptitude could not pass the knowing eye of William II
unnoticed. These warrior virtues elicited an instinctive sympathy in his
heart. He would say to himself that, if such men were commanded by a
leader worthy of them, instead of a venal and cowardly tyrant paralyzed
by the shadow of assassination, they would have acted quickly to restore

49
to Ottoman power its past prestige and the borders of its former empire.
The Kaiser was finding those qualities, which he so highly valued
among the Turks, in Muslim populations spread throughout the diverse
countries subject to the British crown in Africa and Asia. Well disciplined,
well armed, and well commanded, they could furnish contingents equal in
military status, if not superior, to the European troops or auxiliaries
which could be their opponents.
In the case of a conflict with England, what more formidable a
diversion? The commander of believers unfurls the flag of the Prophet
and galvanizes all members of Mohammedan sects in the unanimous and
irresistible momentum of religious fanaticism against the infidel invader,
from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea!
If France was feeling the foolish whim of lending its support to
England, an insurrectionist movement opportunistically arising in its
North African possessions, from the borders of Tunisia and Algeria to the
center of Senegal and Sudan, would suffice to paralyze this movement
and fully absorb its military forces and overextended treasury.
+71
Of all the great colonial powers of Europe, only Germany would
have nothing to fear from this vast wildfire. Therefore Germany alone
would be able to prepare it, ignite it, and utilize it to its advantage without
fear of seeing the conflagration return in its direction.
A skillfully exploited friendship with Abdul Hamid [the last of the
Ottoman Empire sultans (1876-1909)], and the proven support of the
Muslim cause even in the thorniest of circumstances, shrewdly made
known, would frame the image of William II in high relief unequaled in the
eyes of the Muslims who live on the coasts of Africa, from the Straits of
Gibraltar to the Bosporus. This would let him position himself on the side
of leaders and people that are rooted in Islam, the sultan of Morocco and
the viceroy of Egypt, as a guardian, fair and generous in the same
measure as powerful.
At the time of those triumphal cruises that he loved replicating
across the sea of azure waves, that old world cradle of maritime
commerce, which was once fittingly called a French lake, and which after
our victories of Magenta and Solferino [in the wars of Italian
independence] had become a Latin lake, and which our abandonment of
Egypt and the protectorates of the Orient is about to transform into an

50
Anglo-Saxon lake, the German Kaiser could present himself with the
prestige of an Emperor of the Occident at whatever port he made a call.
He was no longer speaking as a ruler, but as an all-powerful protector.
His voice was welcomed as that of a powerful and impartial sovereign,
capable of keeping in check the conqueror whose yoke was detested, of
holding back the neighbor whose invasion was dreaded.
+72

The vigilant eye of Edward VII was measuring the steady progress
of that repetitive and methodical work. He was following every step of
the progress of his relentless adversary, resolved to strike, at a time of
his choosing, with certain and decisive effect, to bring down that
construction, grandiose in appearance yet unsteady on its foundation.
He pledged to take this wrecking ball to Paris. No theater was
better known to him, none was better arranged for the success of this
plan. Nowhere was he certain to find among statesmen minions of his
will more blindly docile, more mindless, more disposed to sacrifice the
permanent interests of their nation, even the necessities of its security,
to the satisfaction of their personal appetites, to the foolish vanity of
posing as friends to a great king, to the tribute which was bound to recoil
on the unstable power whose representative agents they were.

Edward VII has deeply probed into the faults of William II. He counts
them as his most valued allies. He knows him as critical and touchy,
incapable of swallowing even a mock insult in silence, quick with
rejoinders whose effects he does not adequately foresee.
At the first sting from that France, onto which for some years he
had lavished thoughtful gifts, the Kaiser would respond with a direct
riposte and would place his hand on the hilt of his sword, his always
sharpened sword, but would he take it out of its scabbard? That was the
problem. Edward VII was inclined to think not. William II, he thought, will
guess that behind the audacious author of the provocation, or whoever
he might like to consider as such, there is England. He will not want to
fall into the error, so often rebuked, of Napoleon III [that of the Prussian
"Ems Dispatch" goading the French into declaring war on Prussia in 1870
without sufficient preparation to counteract the close and rapid
deployment of their superior forces]. He will not want to leave himself
exposed to ambush in the act of mobilizing. As long as his maritime

51
forces had not reached the degree of development that he designates in
his methodically conceived and executed plans, he will do all that he
humanly can to evade testing his fleet in battle formation against a
British fleet having reached the height of its power. He will thus be led to
what will be for him an elementary lesson and a serious diminution of
prestige, because public opinion is always inclined to attribute weakness
to any threat not backed by action, that is, to withdraw into the diplomatic
arena. Then, as on the changing currents of the ocean, on the terrain no
less undulating and variable of diplomacy, Edward VII believed himself
certain to thrash his young adversary.
+73
If, contrary to his expectation the Kaiser would opt for war, Edward
VII was ready to follow him onto the field of honor. His ally [France]
doubtless would have to endure the heavy burden of the German
invasion, but in any case England would not lack a propitious opportunity
to annihilate the fleet whose rapid growth was causing anguish to its
patriotism, to destroy the rival trade, and to incinerate the ports on the
North and Baltic Seas and leave them in ruins. Then, when hostilities
ended, when the fated moment had arrived when the exhausted
adversaries would be forced to negotiate the outcome of the war,
England, Mistress of the Seas, would dictate the terms. It would work to
raise opposition from all other continental powers to any new territorial
addition to Germany, such that the Kaiser, even in victory [over France],
would have to renounce demanding another slice of France as his spoils.
If, on the contrary, he was defeated both on land and sea, England would
support the reclamation of its ally and would have it succeed.
+74

His plan as such definitively ending in opposition to Germany, it

remained for him to have France accept the thankless and dangerous
role which he had reserved for it. In order to attain this result, he had
recourse to a simple but ingenious plan of action; settle all issues
pending between the two countries in favor of England, notably to
persuade France to countersign a complete withdrawal from Egypt,
against which it had vehemently protested until then, and to retire the
competition of our fishermen from Newfoundland, where they disturb the
peace and remind British subjects of their vulnerability; in exchange for
all these very real sacrifices, offering us as compensation, fictional or

52
actual, profitable or costly, it matters little, but in any case, of the kind to
get us immediately into a conflict with Germany, by ruffling the personal
sensitivities of William II, by bursting the bubble of his Pan-Islamic
dreams.
+75
For acting as the source of discord between France and Germany,
Morocco was marvelously chosen.
Because of its contiguity with Algeria, from which it is divided only
by a line drawn by treaty over a long borderland lacking any natural
obstruction, and given over to perpetual incursions of warlike and
pillaging tribes, Morocco is an offer which France cannot refuse. For it to
let another power challenge the dominant influence which it must exert
over the Makhzen [the Moroccan royal government during the French
protectorate], would be to jeopardize all its African project.
France nevertheless could not take control of the power necessary
for assuming the duty and responsibility of maintaining order and good
policing in the rule of the Sherifs [in Morocco], without inciting Spanish
jealousy, without going against their claim on Morocco going back
centuries, without risking conflict with a neighbor whose friendship we
have every reason to cultivate.
Only England had the necessary authority to play the role of arbiter
and friendly mediator between the respectable claims of Spain and the
legitimate interests of France. Eliminating an unsettling source of future
conflicts to the reciprocal satisfaction of both neighbors would render an
unquestionable service to both. It would render one yet greater to
England.
Not only without running into the resistance of France, but instead
with its assistance, England to its profit would at last bring into effect
“The Spanish Alliance,” over which France and England were fighting for
centuries, at the cost of the bloodiest wars ever to unleash chaos onto
Western Europe, and the most laborious negotiations to ever roil the
chancelleries.
+76
This was a source of contention between France and England, over
which the two rival nations disputed, with various outcomes, but with an
equally indefatigable tenacity.
By truly strange happenstance in its constant repetition, each time
that the outcome of battles, and the talents of our generals and diplomats

53
seemed to ensure to us the definitive and peaceful possession of the goal
pursued, an internal revolution seized the fruit of our labors and put
everything back into question.
The War of Spanish Succession, the principal cause of the decline
of prosperity during the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, and the older line
of the Bourbons, led to the French Revolution and, because of the
frightful misery which it produced in the countryside, the terrible
reprisals of the Jacobins. Still more than the war with Russia, the war
with Spain hastened the fall of Napoleon I. The transitory triumph of
[François] Guizot [foreign minister during the reign of Louis-Phillippe], at
the time of the famous Spanish marriages, led to the Revolution of 1848
and the abdication of King Louis-Philippe. Finally, the principal source of
our catastrophe of 1870, and the overthrow of Napoleon III, was our
opposition to the accession to the Spanish throne of a prince allied with
England.
Presently this conflict is ending with England unconditionally and
completely triumphant. It is an overthrow of policy, in regard to both
England and Spain, which a concern for our security and independence
had decreed to the succession of French governments since the
seventeenth century: to the older as well as the younger line of
Bourbons, to Orleans [Louis-Phillippe] the same as to Bonaparte, the
same as to this very Republic.
Will we at least be able to hope that this surrender will have the
fortunate consequence of inducing England to no longer be meddling so
intimately and constantly in our internal politics, to no longer be
fomenting revolutions among us so frequently? One can have their
doubts.
England, which already had the allegiance of Portugal, absorbs
Spain in addition. England in this way reconstitutes an integral Iberia for
its exclusive usufruct.
In this way, from the northernmost point of the archipelago of Great
Britain and Ireland, to the southernmost point of Africa, with the
exception of some German enclaves without any strategic importance,
you will not find one sole coastline, one sole port, which does not belong
either to England itself or to one of its three great western vassals,
Portugal, Spain, and France; not one harbor where its squadrons might
not be able to be provisioned, no arsenal or storehouse which might not
be open to resupplying them.

54
 Even now it is a grandiose result. It is not the only benefit that
Edward VII plans to draw from that collection; his genius anticipates one
other from it more important yet. Not only the oceans are what he has in
view, he likewise and especially has the Mediterranean Sea in his sights.
+78
It seems that the possession of naval stations in that sea, such as
Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, and Alexandria, has already given to him a
noticeable dominance. Even so, this dominance has not yet appeared to
him sufficiently overwhelming for achieving his goals. But if Bizerte,
Toulon, and Corsica were added to the English naval stations on the
eastern side, and Barcelona, Mahon, and Cadiz on the western side; if
moreover the French fleet was adjoined in to the English fleet; finally, in
the event of a conflict between Germany on one side and England and its
allies on the other, if an army amassed atop the Alps was threatening the
Italian peninsula with another invasion, what could Crispi's Italy do?
Remain heroically loyal to the memory of that great man [Bismarck] and
the stipulations of a leonine treaty [of the Triple Alliance]? That was,
perhaps, to be covered in glory, but it was certainly to be exposed to a
war, risky on land and disastrous one at sea, the destruction of its naval
and merchant fleets, the bombing of its coastline, the burning of its ports,
and the annihilation of commerce, already flourishing and in the middle
of expansion. A timely disengagement from the alliance with the
Germans? Doubtless a cruel separation, especially given its well-known
feelings for Austria; but there is consolation for the most deeply felt
griefs. Certain compensations could perhaps be imagined for the
heartfelt sacrifices which would be imposed on Italy for breaking with the
Triplex.
+79
Perhaps that famous Triple Alliance has not given all the
compensations to Italy which it thought it had a right to expect for the
cost of its ingratitude to France. England would have little trouble
showing more generosity without costing it anything. The things coveted
by Italy being so plentiful and commonly known, England only had the
problem of choice.
It would be decided according to the penchant of Austria; it would
be carved in the north or south, to the east or west.
If Austria stands proudly loyal to Germany, the answer is obvious.

55
For quite some time, Italy has not been secretive about how [the Austrian
territories of] Trieste and the Trentino would be of great expediency to it.
Is it not one of the finest diplomatic traditions to compensate an ally for
its defection by allocating to it something plundered from the partner it
betrayed?
Should Austria turn in the same direction as Italy, England will not
be any more troubled by it, and it would be Turkey who yet again would
pay for everything. It is accustomed to it. Tripoli on one coast and Albania
on the other would satisfy the piqued appetite.
Concerning Austria, will it turn [towards England] as well? A subtle
problem with many complications! It is certain that with Italy leaving the
Triple Alliance and becoming an ally of England, the situation for Austria
would be perilous. Even so, Austrian diplomacy is the most expert in
Europe for getting out of the most inextricable situations and sometimes
even having them turn out to its benefit. It has mutual interests with
Berlin; it has no less of them with London. It will play one against the
other. Against the appetite of Italy, it would make an appeal to Germany;
against the covetousness of Germany, it would make an appeal to
England. It will maneuver; it is accustomed to it, and will wait on events.
+80

The assiduous work of Edward VII to modify the map of European

alliances, in view of the eventualities being planned, was not going
unnoticed in Berlin.
Negotiations of that magnitude would not be able to proceed
undetected by the one against whom they are directed. They were
destined to provoke in him an intense vexation. This vexation in a young
and fervent prince need find only one occasion to explode.
The role of our diplomacy should have been to not furnish that
occasion to him, and above all to avoid the animosity and anger provoked
by the devious actions of a third-party being turned against us by our
fecklessness.
Edward VII was of course seeing things from a different
perspective. After having sown the wind, he entered into his plan for
leaving us with the chore of reaping the whirlwind.
The negotiations which we had conducted with England, for
resolving various ongoing disputes between us in the Mediterranean
basin, could not be matters of indifference to the powers which have

56
wide political and commercial interests in that sea. We recognized it
ourselves in successively bringing these negotiations to the attention of
Spain and Italy. Germany complains of having been left out. This fact is
disputed by our diplomacy, and it seems to us that, about this matter,
from one side and the other, it is mistaken.
What is certain is that France had no reason to make its
negotiations a mystery to Germany. In assuring itself from the start of
that power's adherence, France would have avoided some serious
difficulties which are far from being definitively resolved, and it would
have found across from it a more flexible and less punctilious diplomacy.
But the objective of England was precisely to get us into a conflict with
Germany, and to redirect onto our heads the anger that it had amassed in
the heart of William II. Everything has been dedicated to that end.
The negotiations between England and France [of the Entente
cordiale] referred to two places: Egypt and Morocco.
In what concerned Egypt, the respect for our word from the
perspective of other powers, our duties to the Egyptian people whose
tutelage we had in part assumed, and our obvious concern demanded us
to call in Europe as a third party in our negotiations with England.
We had solicited and obtained from the other equally interested
nations the diplomatic mission, the most sensitive of all but not without
honor, of demanding from England, at an opportune time, the fulfillment
of its commitments. These commitments, solemn and many times
repeated, had not only not been fulfilled with respect to France, but also
with respect to Europe on one hand and the Egyptian people on the other.
England was obligated to evacuate from the Nile Valley as soon as order
was being restored there, and return to the Egyptian people their
freedom under the authority of its recognized suzerain [i.e., France]. We
had offered ourselves as guarantors of the fulfillment of that promise,
and as such we had assumed a double responsibility, responsibility with
respect to Europe and responsibility with respect to Egypt, and we could
not have extricated ourselves from that double responsibility without it
being known to one and the other.
+82
When, with a perseverance and a firmness which whatever some
superficial and narrow minds might say, were neither without dignity, nor
without utility for maintaining our prestige in the Orient, toe to toe we
defended the unalienable right to liberty of people in the Nile Valley,

57
European equilibrium in the Mediterranean, and in the privileged situation
that treaties and glorious traditions had won for us, we did not act in our
name only and in pure self-interest, we acted like a trustee between
Europe and Egypt, and this trusteeship is not in the hands of England
alone, we were obligated to leave it in the hands of all our trustors.
If we no longer believed our shoulders strong enough, if we no
longer possessed enough psychological independence from England to
continue on to completing the task that we had assumed, we had the
perfect right to decline it. We had the right, at our risk and peril, to
exchange all or part of the rights recognized by the treaties that we
signed in Egypt, in return for the rights to acquire Morocco, which
England could eventually cede to us, but this exchange should not have
assumed the character of a secret deal in the eyes of anyone. We should
have clearly shown to the eyes of all, to those with interests the same as
to those who fraudulently lay claim to them, that we were not pursuing a
selfish desire for territorial expansion in Morocco, but in some forced
and obligated way we were heeding the unyielding demands of our
situation in Algeria, and our duties toward civilization and humanity.
+83
The rights in the Sherifian rule that we were resolute in
immediately conceding to everyone, to Germany and to all others, were
the same as what Germany gave itself the thankless role of demanding
from us in the sterile debates at the conference of Algeciras, which only
resulted in diminishing European prestige in the Makhzen and fomenting
disorder and insurrection there.
The adoption of this policy in the full light of day, the enemy of
obscurity and mystery, would have saved the peace of the world from
miserable worries, and France and Germany from new and dangerous
sources of conflict. It therefore would have been eminently favorable
both to our dignity and our interests. But it would have left the plan
conceived in London in complete disarray.

Edward VII used his influence to have it thrown out. Everyone

knows how much the head of our foreign-office took to heart pleasing
that powerful monarch in every little thing; the alacrity with which he
accepted all missions, even the least desirable; the docility with which he
obeyed a prodding which came to him from so high and before which he
bowed so low.

58
+84
What England needed was to corner William II into a binary choice:
either declare war and see his fleet, the object of his most cherished
hopes, destroyed by the English fleet, or retreat and in this way
acknowledge his inferiority in front of Great Britain and his allies.
The plan outlined by Edward VII was effected from start to finish.
On the sting of the direct hit to his vulnerability, William II reared
up. His ill humor was huffed out in his famous harangue at Tangier. The
logical conclusion of that discourse was war. With the blade of his sword,
like Napoleon in another epoch, he had to cut the web of that coalition
with which England was trying to ensnare and paralyze him. But this was
not Napoleon, he did not have Austerlitz and Marengo behind him;
mindful of protecting his fleet, he withdrew into the diplomatic arena.

There England was waiting for him. England contrived some

difficulties for accepting the proposed conference in order to show that it
was ready to fearlessly accept war and have its signature respected by
whosoever when placed at the bottom of a treaty.
Basically, England did not fear war, but a conference seemed a
more propitious arena at that time for giving Germany the lesson it had in
store for it.
Around the green upholstery of a conference room, England was
going to make clear to proud Germany, who was so thoughtlessly
pretending to lead the continent on an assault to British supremacy, how
much in reality it was largely isolated in Europe and powerless
everywhere else.
+85
Before the Aeropagus [the high court of ancient Athens] brought
together at Algeciras, Germany was doomed to play an undesirable role;
it is stunning that this was not understood. It was placing itself into a
situation of obvious inferiority relative to its rival.
What was Germany going to bring before those representatives of
all the civilized powers from the old and new worlds? Matters of
personal vulnerability, of wounded vanity? The conference could not be
the judge of them. The protectorate of Morocco? There could be no
question of it. France itself was not claiming it. France was only claiming
rights resulting from its special situation [in Algeria] as immediate
neighbor of Morocco over a long stretch of border territory, rights paid

59
for, and then some, by overwhelming expenses. An open door to its
trade? From day one France had declared that the door would remain
more widely open than ever to international commerce. Questions on the
details of internal regulation of the Makhzen, about power sharing and
the local police? Why would the representatives of America, Sweden,
Russia and so many other powers have protested, when nations with the
most direct interests after France declared themselves satisfied? The
attitude of Spain, England, and Italy in supporting French proposals, gave
to all objections that German diplomacy raised the appearance of strictly
German quibbles unworthy of keeping the attention of the entire world in
suspense, especially when everyone clearly saw that the regulations,
scholarly and complicated, elaborated on by the diplomats assembled at
Algeciras, all had exactly the value of the leaf of paper that they were
written on, insofar as it would not be guaranteed that Morocco was
sincerely committed to applying them, an obviously improbable
hypothesis, or that a power would itself take responsibility for imposing
them by intimidation or force, which the attitude of Germany was making
impossible.
+86

Before leaving to complete the quite thankless chores that the

haughty demands of Germany had imposed on them, the diplomats had
received from their government and from circumstances generating the
conference, a double mission of unequal importance: to immediately
conclude an agreement to the best of the interests in question and
without offending anyone, the financing and policing of the Sherifian rule,
and then, above all, to safeguard the peace of the world against imminent
peril. In everyone's mind, this second part of their mission far outranked
the first. That was the work whose successful completion was anxiously
expected from their wisdom and experience.
In that atmosphere of Universal Soul, each one of the claims, quite
petty anywhere else, and each one of the new objections in which
Germany indulged, disconcerted opinion, antagonized public support, and
made Germany appear to be less concerned with the defense of serious
national interests than the resentful satisfaction of obstructing a project
of civilization, a project which was to be advantageous to all, to itself as
well as others, and which should necessarily be completed by hands
other than its own.

60
+87
It has been said that at the Algeciras Conference, there was neither
victor nor vanquished. This is one of those comforting adages through
which diplomacy is accustomed to dressing the wounds that it makes,
and soothing the discontent which its actions leave behind. At Algeciras,
there was two vanquished and one victor; the vanquished are France and
Germany; the victor is England. The bad will of Germany resulted in
France losing a favorable occasion to create a project of civilization
which it had prepared for a long time and would have been advantageous
to everyone. The prestige of Germany came away obviously diminished
from the very conference that it had called for; the prestige of England
was augmented in the same measure.
England obtained this outcome, in that moment of capital interest
for it, to prove to William II that, far from being able to have the European
continent marching behind it, if he attempted to raise the flag of rebellion
against British supremacy, he would remain isolated. In the voiced vote,
Britain had Germany put into the minority, and William II could only avoid
the humiliation of a total defeat with the intervention of Austria. By favor
of a compromise proposal from that power [on some minor detail of
policing], the demands of Germany were not totally discarded; but this
compromise proposal itself only passed by favor of the highly
conciliatory attitude of the [Austrian] government of Franz-Joseph, and
of the great personal influence which that sovereign wielded at the Court
of England.
+88
In brief, Edward VII succeeded in making it known in Algeciras, by
the whole of Europe and Germany in particular, that if the Triple Alliance,
constituted a formidable weapon against an isolated France, it became
powerless and broken as soon as England was allied with France, and
that a France in opposition to England did not exist.
Under penalty of jeopardizing its vital interests in the
Mediterranean, its hope for commercial development and its future of
colonial expansion, Italy is fated to disengage from the Triple Alliance.
From then on, Austria would find itself in a very precarious situation and
must isolate itself in an attitude of absolute neutrality, under penalty of
dismemberment. The Russian catastrophe has deprived Austria of
support from the north, which is indispensable to it for defending against
attacks from its neighbors to the south, supported by England and

61
France.
The error of William II is not to have realized that after the Russian
catastrophe, something in Europe was changed, that the insular forces of
England had profited from all that the continental forces had lost, when,
on the plains of Manchuria, where there were neither the English nor the
Germans, the Germans had been beaten in the persona of the Russians,
as the English had been victors in the persona of the Japanese, and that
the counter punch at Moukden made itself felt all the way to the
Mediterranean, right into to Algeciras.
+89
The talent of Edward VII is in having known how to create the
favorable occasion in the West for taking full advantage of the victories
of his allies in the Far East. France, frightened by the political and
military collapse of its [Russian] ally, would be all the more anxious to
grasp the hand which the English would extend to it and follow the
directions which would be impressed on it. Italy, whose acquisitive
aspirations in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire had been
tempered by the friendly relations between Russia and Austria, would
profit by the non-combatant disposition of Russia in order to retake a
forceful opposition to Austria. Italy would recall that, despite the
arrangements between Bismarck and Crispi, it was above all a maritime
power by the inevitable effect of its peninsular situation, and that it would
only be with the cooperation of the great maritime powers that it could
hope to succeed in its prospects. Finally, an Austria deprived of the
assistance which it must depend on from its neighbor to the north, would
put all its efforts, not in indifferently supporting all German policies, but
in forestalling a conflict whose victim it risked becoming. In futility
William II tried to draw Austria into his retinue, to accentuate the role of
conciliation that it had played at Algeciras and characterize that as
formal support of German policy. These untimely approaches have been
considered compromising and received with a marked reserve. The
resounding certificate of approval which he addressed to Count [Agenor]
Goluchowski [Polish statesman serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs for
Austria-Hungary, 1895-1906] only had the effect of destabilizing the
position of that minister. The diplomatic mission of his military chief of
staff and his own visit to Franz-Joseph have not visibly attained the
result that was promised. Austria has obstinately maintained itself on the
strict grounds of the conciliation that it had fostered, doubtless a

62
benevolent conciliation in regard to its ally, but above all to keep the
peace.
+90
England, on the contrary, resolutely followed up on its gains. It
sought to strike the hammer a second time while the iron was hot, and it
turned to confront Turkey, an emphatically avowed friend and follower of
Germany. It revived the Tabah Incident between the Turks and the Anglo-
Egyptians [a Turkish intrusion on territory claimed by the Anglo-
Egyptians at Tabah, on the Gulf of Aqaba]. It suddenly inflamed the
dispute. It let the Ottomans, whose rights appeared indisputable, commit
themselves, then made them retreat with a brutal ultimatum. In this way
England achieved its goal: to demonstrate to the Sultan that the support
of Germany was useless to him, that it was powerless to keep him
shielded from the strikes of the English hammer.
The time is passed when the Kaiser, in his triumphant crossing
through the Italian peninsula, declared to enthusiastic crowds that he
enjoyed himself in their midst, because in Italy he felt at home.
The time of those travels in the Holy Land and in Asia Minor is
passed, when Christians and Muslims, without any distinction of race or
creed, came to place themselves under the wing of his imperial
protectorate.
The time for sensational cruises on the Mediterranean is passed.
Edward VII has won the first match and has played his opponent to
check and mate.
The second match will not be played in Paris, which at this time is
totally dominated by English influence; it will be in Saint Petersburg.
+91
Will Russia rebuild its land and sea forces under a government
honest and liberal, but also firm and stable?
Cured of his pacifist dreams by so cruel a lesson of their danger,
will Nicholas II understand that, under penalty of dismemberment, Russia
must be prepared, weapons in hand, to reconquer its place in the world?
Will England, on the contrary, succeed in pointing Russia in the
direction of continual collapse by rebellion and anarchy, by the rule of a
revolutionary parliamentary government, an analogue of the spectacle
which the First Duma gave to us? There is the problem!
The idea of an address to that duma originating in London, the
number of signatures which covered it, the plan of a huge deputation

63
which was to have gone to St. Petersburg to impress it upon the Russian
people and government, demonstrates that England intends to make the
internal governance of the Muscovite Empire an English matter.
The refusal of Russia to receive those invaders from the
international revolution has demonstrated that, at least for the moment,
the Muscovite people are less inclined than the French to be subjected to
foreign domination in the management of its internal politics. [The First
Duma was dissolved before the British delegation left Britain, and the
idea of visiting former members of the duma was dropped once it was
made clear that the delegation would not be entirely welcomed as
guests.]
The third round will be played on battlefields, on land and sea.

64
Chapter 4
Edward VII and France
+92

Edward VII reigns in London, and governs in Paris. In England, his

power is exercised only through the mediation of the ministers in charge,
under the control of a parliament jealous of its prerogatives, doubtlessly
attentive to all manifestations of national life, but above all the vigilant
guardian of public liberties and citizens' rights. In France, the
instruments of his authority are devoted men who have distinguished
themselves all their life by their docile eagerness to serve the interests
of his policies, even when, above all when, they were in opposition to the
interests of their own country; men who came into power only with the
intention of obeying his wishes, which is doubtless to anyone in or out of
France.

In France, there is no taking into account a Parliament indifferent to

the foreign policy of its country and unaware of the dangers to which this
policy can expose it. It has seen the Parliament at work for years. It has
listened to it, hearing only electoral self-interests, wretched rivalries
between groups and coteries, and petty contests of ambition, giving
thunderous applause and voting its approval by turns: the policy of
[Gabriel] Hanotaux who, in launching the Marchand Mission across the
Bahr-el-Ghazal [a region of northwestern South Sudan] to the occupation
of Fashoda [where the lines of French control of the Sahel and the British
control of eastern Africa crossed], was cutting the [British] lines from
Alexandria to the Cape [of Good Hope], undermining if not overthrowing
British domination in Egypt, and in this way was pushing us, as
undeniably evident, into a brutal war with England; and the policy of
[Théophile] Delcassé who, in throwing us headlong into the arms of
Britain at the most crucial moment of its conflict with Germany [First
Moroccan Crisis], with no less obvious certainty was running us into a
fight to the death with the German Empire.
+93
Could it at least be maintained of the conduct of that assemblage of
the insensible, that between the session when it was applauding

65
Hanotaux and accepting responsibility for the policy of Hanotaux, and the
session when it was applauding Delcassé and accepting responsibility for
the policy of Delcassé, it had changed opinion about the advantages and
disadvantages of an alliance with Germany versus one with England? In
no way. In the one period as the other, it was perfectly indifferent to that
problem, it was not answering to any concern of national interest or
foreign policy; it only wanted, in the one event as in the other, to assure
sustenance to the activities of a ministry which, by a sweet reciprocity,
was assuring to the legislative majority the exclusive enjoyment of a
slush fund.
+94
Could it at least be said in pardon. that on the day when that
Parliament, into which the nation had placed its confidence and handed
over the sum of its destinies, heedlessly left the nation to be thrown into
the supreme peril of a naval war with the principal naval power in the
world, or into a land war with the best disciplined, best armed, and most
formidable army in its spiritual and material force, it had at least been
assured that the nation was ready for the battle?
Could it be granted that it had checked out the storehouses and
arsenals and was assured that, at the time of its entry into the field, the
army would have at its disposal, in sufficient quantity so as to provide for
all contingencies, the most proven and perfected equipment, that the
forts and posts, in complete defensive readiness, would repulse the
attack of besiegers, that the command was in the smartest, most
qualified and experienced hands, that the reinforcement troops were
fully instructed and trained, and finally that from the front-line troops
selected to hold back the first strike of the enemy, to the last drafted
reservists or indigenous soldiers, each was fervid with the same ardor
for battle, respect for discipline, and passionate love of country, as the
adversaries foolishly incited by us possess, and without which victory is
impossible and disaster certain?
In no way; these concerns, of too general a kind for minds so
limited, escape their very comprehension.
After the incident at Fashoda, whose sudden explosion sprayed
such sharp anguish into the country and whose outcome was so painful
to our national dignity, it was certified that nothing was prepared for a
conflict with England, that we marched into a disaster as appalling as
certain by our lack of foresight.

66
+95
One could hope that this harsh lesson would be beneficial to us and
that from then on we would no longer expose ourselves like that to
succeeding perils of war without us being in condition to bear the
consequences of them.
Vain hope! When the incident at Tangier burst onto the scene, the
disarray was even worse than at the time of Fashoda. For some years,
the ministry in power, encouraged in its wretched work by the
unremitting approval of the Parliament, had labored without respite not
to reorganize but to disorganize our national defense, to shatter the
integrity of our army by instilling it with the viral solvent of denunciation,
with all the retinue of hatreds, vendettas, and rancor that it draws along
in its wake, to demoralize it calmly and methodically as though we were
alone in the world, as though we only had to take into account our
internal disputes and the grudges between political parties.
Our storehouses were empty, our arsenals not provisioned, our
inner ring of defensive fortifications were falling into ruins, our defensive
regiments were emaciated and decimated, and a revolt stirring against
military duty was turning our regiments into fireplaces of insubordination
and indiscipline. Known and seen by the government, with at least tacit if
not admitted toleration, the schoolhouses, which should be the sacred
refuge of patriotism, became the pulpit where hatred of nation and scorn
for the uniform and flag were preached.
+96
To fend off the immediate danger, it was necessary to have
hundreds of millions [of francs] swallowed outside of budgeted
expenditures, in hurried preparations, too late nonetheless if we had not
placated the immediate wrath of Germany by the abrupt dismissal of
Delcassé, to the detriment of our honor and prestige in the realm of
foreign affairs.

These incidents, so powerful in dramatic poignancy considering that

so cruel a lesson is a matter of the life of a nation, bypass the narrow
views of a French electorate accustomed to only consider the interests
of the steeple; but they do not circumvent the eyes of foreign countries.
They reveal the depth of the moral decay into which French
parliamentary government has fallen, through the corrupting effect of
cynical and shameless office candidacies. The impassive observer

67
realizes that this criminal mistake which the French Parliament has
already committed twice, and is willing to commit a third time, with the
same carelessness, blindness, and lack of foresight, as soon as it will
please a ministry obedient to a prompting from abroad to plunge the
country into new perils of war. The possibility of a third retreat remains;
in order to avoid it, it is enough for the promoter of the adventure to have
the responsibility for it backed, not only by the transitory guest at the
quai d'Orsay [location of the French Foreign Affairs Ministry], but by the
head of the government himself, with his cabinet of henchman gathered
around him, supported by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and a dedicated
Minister of War.
+97
In regard to public opinion, it has become a negligible quantity in
France. The majority of the electorate neither thinks nor reflects. It lets
itself be blindly led by radical and socialist journals; the radical journals
are satisfied on condition that they are left in complete freedom to feed
on the priesthood, to the great joy of the stout bourgeois spirit, and the
socialist journals are satisfied provided that they are left in peace to feed
on the bourgeoisie, to the great joy of the working class in need of
revolutionary dreams. So as not to be disrupted in their lucrative
exploitation of the dupe, they entertain their readership with beatific
optimism, and ensure to them perpetual peace, a general disarmament,
and the embracing of all nations in the paradise of universal rationalism
or international collectivism, according to class and preference. They fill
the popular mind with childish illusions, to the degree that it no longer
has the necessary lucidity to perceive the reality of the facts and discern
the traps into which those clever writers make it fall.

What I am saying everyone abroad knows; but nobody knows it

better than Edward VII. He is too probing a psychologist, he has spent too
much time in France and lived our life for too long not to know in depth
all the weak points of our society, not to have plumbed all the defects of
our statesmen.
He senses that a nation, fallen into this state of the soul, is ripe for
servitude, but too divided by internal factions and by hatred between
parties to support a native tyrant, it summons foreign domination.
+98
This domination, this high suzerainty, must belong to the superior

68
race, that is, the Anglo-Saxon race. The patrimony of France is rich with
too many treasures accumulated during centuries of glory for it to be
without honor and profit, if it is trained with firm and skillful guidance. In
this body which appears to be anemic and lacking direction, there are
vital forces which can be reawakened and profitably utilized for the work
of both war and peace.

The time is passed when Parisians sang together the popular

refrain, "No, not in France will the English ever rule...." Whether this
should be the English or the Germans, in fact, what does it matter to us?
So long as our new master does not have the race course closed, that he
maintains the national institution of the Paris-mutual, that he has respect
for an industry as interesting as that of the 'bookmaker,' that the
merchandising of the red ribbon [?] will not be prohibited, that on the
occasion of countless inaugurations, [there will be] countless statues
raised in the honor of great men, junk dredged from the surplus of
statuary warehouses with a shortage of orders, that our ministers should
continue to profusely distribute [Orders of] Academic Palms and
Agricultural Merits, nothing will be missing from the charm of our
existence. At the time when Greece was seeing its ancient freedom
succumb to the victorious armies of Philip of Macedon, that king, hardly
bothered by moral qualms, had the habit of saying, "In order to take over
the citadels reputed as impenetrable, it is enough to have a mule go in
loaded with gold." Nowadays, in order to conquer the most independent
sections of Paris, an ass loaded with leeks is enough. The fathomless
masses of universal suffrage, left more or less dysfunctional by the anti-
militaristic and anti-parliamentarian ideology of [monarchist Édouard]
Hervé, will barely notice the difference. In the name of freedom of
thought, M[onsieur] Homais will continue to persecute his fellow man, if
they do not think like him, and M[onsieur] Vadécard to denounce his
neighbor. [Both these last names now lack any firm distinction.] A
member of the bourgeoisie, driven crazy by theories of the deputy who
he voted for yesterday, and will vote for tomorrow for fear of being
compromised in not appearing sufficiently pro-governmental, will not be
displeased to learn that on the other side of the border there is a king
who will protect him; a member of the working class, proud of being able
to read the prose of [(then) socialist Jean] Jaurès without understanding
it, but who firmly hopes that his grandnephews, when they shall be

69
receiving the "integral education" [of Mikhail Bakunin], will be able to
figure it out, will rejoice in seeing the nationalism and chauvinism of the
bourgeoisie humbled.
+99
One needs to have the courage to tell the truth and to repeat, on
this side of the border, what is often said on the other side.
A nation, who after having closed ten thousand private schools in
the land of the Republic so that all young people without exception
should receive the same moral education and should possess the same
idea of the duties of a person and a citizen, then left the public schools
unchecked in teaching scorn for the flag, hatred of military service, and
desertion in the face of the enemy, is due for punishment. A nation who,
after four years of a government which, known and seen by all, has
squandered its finances, disorganized its military on land and sea, and
blindly took it within an inch of war, triumphantly reelects the
collaborationist majority is, by the unflagging constancy of its votes,
complicit in this government from the perspective of both moral and
political direction, has furnished the severity [of the punishment].
+100
To all the nations that surround it, it gives the very clear impression
that it no longer thinks of its ambitions, nor of its duties to itself or to
humanity. Through lack of courage, it abdicates the right to rule itself. It
is nothing more than a shipwreck that drifts in the tides of revolutionary
currents and the shift of populist breezes, with neither compass nor pilot.
It endangers its neighbors by the contagion of the sick theories that it
propagates and the discouraging examples that it spreads, and, as it is
necessary that any power not being able to serve in the cause of the
general progress of humanity should not be lost, the posts deserted by
the weak are taken by the strong, the cowards who proclaim their
intention to betray their country are enslaved by the brave determined to
defend theirs and have it triumph; however glorious its past may have
proven to be, the abandoned ship belongs to the bolder ones who dare to
throw a hook onto it, give it a worthier crew and have it follow in their
wake.
+101

There is nothing of the ordinary tyrant in Edward VII. Peremptory in

his intentions, he excels in not having his iron hand felt on those he

70
directs. He is horrified by domineering attitudes and the posturings of a
conqueror. With practiced diplomacy, he knows how to seize the
psychological moment when the employment of brutal force is necessary
to smash resistance, and then he never steps back, but he prefers to
have recourse only to persuasion, to all means of persuasion without
exception. He owes to his great familiarity with the human heart, and of
the French character in particular, the art of utilizing with impeccable
aptness the kind of persuasion most appropriate to the appetites and
needs of each personality.
More than anyone else he is an expert at working on vulnerabilities.
He sees himself set high enough to be able to always appear solicitous
without ever losing an inch of his superiority. It is a game for him to puff
up the vanity of a provincial townsman [of no obvious reference now],
propelled to the highest judiciaries of the Republic by the absence of
scruple and discernment and by the wily hypocrisy of feigned fellowship,
and persuade him that he fills the role of a grand potentate with perfect
dignity. When needed, he does not recoil from the necessity of swelling
the pride of the little mustachioed man [Delcassé], whose cheek is still
red from the schoolmarm slap that he issued to him at the time of the
Fashoda Incident, to the point of making him neglect not only the perils to
which he commits his country, but also the risks to which he exposes the
ministerial portfolio pressed so lovingly to his heart.
+102
With a calculated fellowship, he allows the new arrivals to
demagoguery to envelop themselves beneath the corona of his royal
dignity, to brush their vulgarity against the purple of his imperial cloak, in
the hope that they will take away from it a new radiance in the view of
their electors, fanatical republicans, proud when it is offered to them to
acclaim a king.
He gladly endures the weariness of that obligation, all those boring
details; he can relax in the intimacy of our aristocratic salons. From the
importunity of annoying people he consoles himself with affairs of the
heart or simply the high society relations of his choice.
No city is richer in all kinds of utopianists, and passionate
proponents of sophism and paradox, than Paris; how many of them have
tried to wend their way to the king of England! Not one has left his
presence without being convinced that he had made the British Majesty
into a zealous advocate of his ideas. He is compensated for the

71
weariness which the harangues and epistles of pacifists cause him by
signing royal directives which double the assault capacity of his naval
fleets; and the pedantry of the apostles of public decency and
temperance by swigging champagne in a drawing room.
Not for an instant does he forget that the horse that he mounts
today, with such casual ease, was acting skittish at another time. With his
hand he caresses and strokes it, reserved for being killed beneath him
on the day of battle, for the triumph of his race and the greater glory of
his empire.
+103

For a long time he has had his hand in this game. It is with regard
to the matter of Egypt and as Prince of Wales that he gave us the first
demonstrations of his dexterity. The capability and patriotism of the
heroes of national defense inspired a strong admiration in him. He
bonded in close relations with [Leon] Gambetta [a popular politician who
was prime minister for a brief time]. That great populist could only be
sincerely touched by so spontaneous a friendship, coming from so high.
Egypt was one of the principal objectives of Gambetta's grandiose
dreams, which he fostered for the revival of his country, so cruelly put to
the test. His heart so French and his mind so broad showed him one of
the most fertile fields in the rich Nile valley delivered to the expansion of
a nation which, amputated and restrained for a long time in the north,
under penalty of atrophy had to thrust itself southward to new horizons.
Egypt was an especially French land, paved with our most glorious
mementos, ripped by our arms from the barbaric yoke of the Ottomans,
permeated by our language, imbued with our ideas, shaped with our
customs, that we were obligated to instruct in liberty and broadly open to
civilization.
For the completion of this grandiose work, France did not exclude
any assistance, the assistance of England less than any other. England
was, on the contrary, particularly valuable to it; but France had to keep
the preponderant role to which its history and the primacy of its interests
gave it the right.
+104
Nobody understood these noble sentiments better than the Prince
of Wales; nobody was reputed to have a more generous heart than the
chivalrous heir to the English throne.

72
 He offered some friendly advice. The most urgent was to close
entry to other rivals less disinterested than England. Italy was already
badly disguising its covetous desires; behind Italy, Germany was stepping
forward, also desirous of taking a place among the great Mediterranean
powers. And why not Austria? And why not even Russia? It was
necessary to quickly shut the door on all these ambitions.
To this effect, let us consolidate the Anglo-French condominium, let
us make it exclusive so as to give it stability. Let us make it the token of
indissoluble alliance between the two sibling nations who lead the march
of civilization, and cannot be separated without failing in their common
mission.
England would not know how to be disinterested in this first stage
of the route to India, but it yields the high leadership, important
ministries, and financial administration to France; England is modestly
content in the subordinate role.
Only, Ismail [Pasha] [khedive (viceroy) of Egypt-Sudan 1863-1879] is
still there. Ismail is a popular prince and devoted to France, but
inordinate and prodigal. It is necessary to depose him. A young viceroy,
who will owe everything to the joint powers, will be a more flexible and
docile instrument in their hands.
Ismail is deposed, Tewfick [Pasha] proclaimed. This somewhat
brutal transferal of power offends sensibilities, harms financial interests,
and provokes discontent. Agitation begins to spread in a part of the
population and in the Egyptian army. A wind of national independence
begins blowing in the country in opposition to this foreign tutelage, which
has its start in offending popular sentiment with such blunt disregard. It
is necessary to act if you want to forestall a rebellion that is rumbling in
the barracks and proletarian neighborhoods. It is necessary to act, but
doing what? Will the action be diplomatic only, or diplomatic and military?
Will the nations who take charge of it request a European mandate to this
effect? Or will they limit themselves to keeping the various cabinets
informed by diplomatic dispatch about the situation and the decisions
which it brought about in them? A delicate problem, on which France and
England do not succeed in coming to an agreement. When England says
yes, France says no; and when France wants to proceed, England blocks
it.
+105
The course of events accelerates nonetheless. A revolt breaks out,

73
which would have been easy to prevent at the first appearance. To the
same extent that the urgency to make a decision is more peremptorily
imposed, the more the indecision in our ministry grows. In the face of our
vacillations, England unilaterally takes up a course of action. It resolves
to suppress the insurrection by force, and it summons France to comply
with the obligations of power sharing in giving it an active role.
In that solemn hour, the French ministry, driven back to its last
defensive positions, realizes that if it retreats the result is Egypt falling
under the exclusive control of England, and French military power
eliminated from the Nile Valley; [Ahmed] Urabi [Egyptian nationalist
military officer and leader of the revolt] is only an agent bribed by British
gold; it is the quartermaster sergeant of foreign occupation; will the
occupation be multi-national? By our desertion of a joint mission, are we
going exclude ourselves from it?
+106
The government of the Republic settles on proposing to Parliament
to participate, not in the suppression of the Urabi revolt itself, but simply
in keeping international order; of shipping out two thousand men in order
to ensure the safeguard of Suez Canal neutrality.
It is then that the government falls under the most formidable of
coalitions.
Strange coalition, which two men are seen leading who until then,
had never met, and who were bound to no longer be meeting in the future
except as irreconcilable adversaries; on one side, the organizer of
national defense, whose intransigent patriotism wanted a continuation of
war to the death [Léon Gambetta]; on the other side, a man who, on the
day after our catastrophe [of 1870] was proposing the sale of Corsica to
Italy for one franc [Georges Clemenceau]; the ardent restorer and zealot
for our army, versus the virulent polemicist who relentlessly worked
with implacable acrimony to destroy military morale; the populist with
regenerative and fecund breath, who, on the respected foundation of our
national traditions, wanted to reconstruct a new France, greater, more
splendid, ever more glorious, versus the cool and subtle orator with a
desiccating and sterilizing exhalation, who seeks, with ever implacable
hatred, the destruction of all past traditions, and proposes no other goal
to his ideal than the satisfaction of brutal resentments and the
oppression of the vanquished.
+107

74
 It is under these circumstances, which have left such a painful
impression on every French soul, and which have had in our
contemporary history such a pernicious influence, that Clemenceau
made his first sensational appearance in international politics.
To be fair, it must be conceded to him that he always remained
faithful to that debut. Not for one moment has he ever contradicted
himself. Such as he appeared the first time, so he remained, and each
one of his interventions was marked by the sound of an ominous
cracking in our military organization, by the downfall of a ministry at the
moment when it could have realized the hopes it was born with, by a
disappointment for French foreign policy.
Like Gambetta himself, Clemenceau is a self-admitted partisan of
the English alliance, but he understands it in a completely different way.
Gambetta wanted a greater France through the English alliance;
Clemenceau wants the world triumph of British policy, to the equal
detriment of French interests, which he sacrifices.
He has successively fought each of the men who have managed our
foreign policy and has toppled one onto the other, until the arrival of the
predestined man capable of signing the definitive abdication of our
secular mission in Egypt.
If in the present day England rules undivided in the Nile Valley, if we
have let go of the most beautiful flower in our Mediterranean bouquet, if
we have excluded ourselves from a country to which so many links
connected us, if we have abandoned the last vestige of the conquests of
our First Republic, our prevailing role there as educators and
emancipators of the public mind, and our industrial and commercial
interests in the eastern Mediterranean, if we have deserted that future
foreign posting, the greater part of the glory reverts to Clemenceau.
+108
With singular doggedness, he has reduced to rubble all the
ministries which have demanded that England keep its promises and
withdraw from Egypt; for overthrowing them, he has no fear of joining in
endless coalitions with the irreconcilable enemies of the Republic, and
has not hesitated in destabilizing the very idea of power in the French
people by the ministerial uncertainty which he made into a game; the
institutions of France have even been at the point of being endangered by
his questionable compromises with the conspirators who conceal

75
themselves beneath the popularity of General [Georges] Boulanger
[Minister of War 1888-1889, and the succeeding Boulangist Movement].
After having been in the battle, it is only fair that he should share in the
spoils, and England, mistress of our fate, is only paying its debt in placing
him [Clemenceau] at the head of the government.

Through this succession of events, has England acquired that

devotion, a devotion driven to the height of which few examples are
found in the history of disinterested dedication? It does not enter into my
plan to investigate this, and I do not lend my ear to any story which has
not been examined by the impartial testimony of history. I will not be
going to question the ghost of Cornelius Herz in the cemetery at
Bournemouth; I will not ask for the key to this mystery in the Paris Opera
dressing rooms any more than in the boudoirs of diplomats; in the salons
of aristocratic wives any more than in the bedroom of cabaret dancers.
After all, what do the motives of that man matter to us, certifiable or not;
what we need to know is the path on which he sets us and the end to
which he intends to take us.
+109
In my knowledge of French history, only the ministry of Cardinal
Dubois [1715-1723, under Louis XV] had the same kind of devotion to
England. To please our neighbors across the Channel, Cardinal Dubois
sacrificed all of our navy and colonies. History is believed to have
unraveled the secret motives of the conduct of that corrupt minister. It
has judged and pilloried him. No one has challenged its verdict. In regard
to our dictator, let us leave the completion of that function to history, if
necessary.
The private life of Clemenceau does not belong to us. His public life
is known to everyone. It has a perfect unity; from the first day to the last,
with pen as well as with speech, he demolished France to the benefit of
England. If that is not enough to enlighten us, we are affected by
incurable blindness. The example of Cardinal Dubois shows us that
certain men do not recoil from certain crimes. So much the more must
our vigilance at the present time be ever alert since, it is no longer only
our navy and colonies which are at stake, but also our independence.
+110

When the issue of Morocco failed to detonate the powder keg

76
between Germany and France, the pacifists, the internationalists, the
hervéists [representing pacifist socialism], and all the retinue of the anti-
militarist readers of l'Aurore [journal published by Clemenceau], have
been dumbfounded by the unrestrained chauvinism which has all of a
sudden been incited in the heart of Clemenceau. It had changed their
Clemenceau during the night, and it converted him to revanchism,
transformed by the carnage. War was necessary for him. He did not want
to hear talk of concessions, his tone was sharper than the edge of the
always sharpened sword of William II. He advocated the worst
resolutions. If a leaflet suspected of nationalism had dared similar
language, it would have been denounced to the world by the partisan
press as the arsonist of European conflagration.
Malice has driven some progressive journals to the point of
congratulating Clemenceau for his warmongering patriotism. Indeed,
Clemenceau has a very touchy war nerve, although not when it is a
matter of French interests, but of English interests instead.
The toughest concessions that Germany would have been able to
impose on us in Morocco, where we can only hope for some dubious and
problematic benefits, will never equal one tenth of the certain and easily
realized benefits deprived to us by the abandonment of Egypt.
Clemenceau upended a ministry in order to forestall that, by the
deployment of a contingent of two thousand men to represent our
participation in the reestablishment of order in Egypt, England would
have declared itself satisfied, and we would have protected the privileged
situation that treaties assured to us in Egypt. [At the time of the Urabi
Revolt, Clemenceau held no political office, but was advocating anti-
colonialist policies in his partisan journal.] Clemenceau would rather
have us sacrifice some hundreds of thousand Frenchmen so as to make
way for the British fleet to annihilate the German fleet.
+111
I hope that the former editor of [the journals] La Justice and
l'Aurore is no longer going to talk to us about humanitarianism. He is
going to throw his cast-off pacifist clothes onto the rag pile, heap ridicule
on universal disarmament, and renounce the great sound of those
meaningless words with which he lured the chumps for close to a half-
century, and acquired a tainted popularity. These days, General [Marie-
Georges] Picquart [a notable Dreyfusard and Minister of War 1906-1909]
must be allowed to earn his medals on the battlefield. It is necessary for

77
French blood to flow in waves in order to wash the shame from his
promotion.

Clemenceau was the ax which Edward VII used to chop away the
last ramparts of our independence, the obstacle that was hindering his
conquest. In the present day, Clemenceau is the schoolmaster's paddle
with which Edward VII is armed for keeping the politicians motivated
who, knowingly or not, have cleared the way for him. Since the opening of
the new chamber, his Cossack's knout was exercised on the shoulders of
his docile ally [Jean] Jaurès during the election campaign. Ask Jaurès for
news on the expertise with which he knows how to wield it.
+112

Without a doubt, Edward VII loves France. Who would dare to doubt
it? But it is not the France of Louis XIV and Napoleon I, but the France of
Clemenceau. It is the France that grovels and lays down at his feet like a
pet dog.
Without a doubt Edward VII desires with all his heart that the
armies of France should be great and powerful, and that in the next war
they should be victorious: are they not about to fight alongside the British
army and in service to England? But he would rather see them wiped out
than to see them turn against his Empire, and if they were to leave his
command, the more they were incapacitated, the happier he would be.
Most importantly, it is not that they should be powerful, but that they
should be placed under the authority of his stooge, Clemenceau, the only
one he has faith in, the only one that he believes to have sufficient
stomach for getting into a war, and sufficient authority to have the rest
follow him, even if despite themselves.
There is the clue which serves to unravel the mystery of the story
of France in recent years.

Leading Clemenceau by the hand to the possession of the coveted

portfolio, of having him seated firmly in the chair of the Council
Presidency, was not an easy job; the genius of Edward VII was not
enough to succeed in it.
Oh the obstacles that arose on the path of the future dictator! What
resistance, what revolts! Patriotic feeling, the national instinct of self-
preservation, began an uprising.

78
+113
President [Jules] Grévy [Republican, 1879-1887] who, although he
was not unrelenting on matters compromising to his conscience,
declared that he would never consent to sign a decree naming the
formidable editor of [the journal] Justice to a ministry. Why? I repeat: it
does not enter into my investigative plan. What is certain is that the
motive, whatever it was, was momentous in the eyes of Grévy, because
he was not unaware of the danger to which he was exposing himself in
announcing this exclusion. It was well enough made known to him. The
Wilson affair, and all its terrible consequences for the family of Grévy
had no other origin. [Wilson, Grévy's son-in-law, was found to be
involved in scam selling of Legion of Honor awards.]
Nevertheless, it was easier for Clemenceau to avenge himself than
to be accepted. Despite his talent and the modern ideas that he put on
display, he still was not popular. In the Parliament he was more feared
than revered; he counted more on fans than friends.
His continual victories over all the transitory ministerial coalitions
which attempted to wield power marked more his skill in forming
alliances with the right wing than the reach of his personal influence and
the number of his followers. Opposition journals hypocritically praised
the irresistible force of his dialectic, when if they had been honest they
would have acclaimed most of all his lack of scruple for dealing with
their friends so as to counterattack the government and render the
establishment of stable power under the Republic impossible.
These achievements were putting his adversaries at a
disadvantage, and preventing them from achieving a results oriented
politics, more than they were advancing his own agenda. He could
dissolve ministries at his pleasure, and he could impose the acceptance
of his friends on them, but he could not enter them himself. The door
always remained closed to his overly prominent personality. Public trust
rejected him, and public opinion persisted in not designating him as the
head of government.
+114
Between himself and power stood an unscalable wall that neither
his skill as a polemicist, nor his talent as an orator, nor his parliamentary
schemes let him circumvent. Positioned higher up, and a more impassive
observer than even Clemenceau, Edward VII discerned the obstacle that
was stopping the ascent of the man who he made his instrument of

79
domination, and he was resolved to shattering it.
He had already rescued Clemenceau from worse predicaments; he
had cast him a line and kept him afloat when his enemies thought to have
had him captured in their trap. This was insufficient in the plans of
Edward VII; it was necessary to order him to complete his mission.
Double were the obstacles that were looming ahead of
Clemenceau, and Edward VII was clearing the way. The Gambetta faction,
opportunist or progressive as it alternately described itself according to
time and circumstance, which the long time master of power was
protecting the access to, nursed a deep-seated grudge against
Clemenceau because of some traps into which he had made it fall in the
often dishonest fight that he had relentlessly led against it.
+115
In face of the necessities of parliamentary conflict, it accepted
sharing power with the under-bosses or colleagues of Clemenceau, but
blindly persisted in slapping him with ostracism and making it in fact
impossible for him to take the ministry.
Elsewhere, between Clemenceau and the army a ravine was being
carved which, far from being filled in, grew wider every day. From the
time of his first appearance in public life, Clemenceau had presented a
barely disguised antipathy towards the military mindset. The terrible
allegations which were brought against him on the occasion of the
assassinations of Generals Lecomte and Clément Thomas [during the
Paris Commune, 1871], further aggravated a breach which the politics of
his journal, stamped in bile and acrimony, only made wider.
Without a doubt the army has nothing to do with the composition of
ministries; it is not consulted and it does not have to be, but for the
accomplishment of the plans of Edward VII, it was necessary that the
War Ministry and the high command of our military forces, far from being
imbued with the spirit of scorn and hostility to Clemenceau, should be
totally in his devotion and directly under his thumb.
With his usual resolve, Edward VII decided to break the resistance
of both and reduce them to nothing.
Given the obstacle was double, double was the battering ram which
he used to pulverize it.
Against the longstanding henchmen of Gambetta, who were trying
to perpetuate themselves in power, it was the Panama Affair; against the
army, it was the Dreyfus Affair.

80
 At the start of the Panama Affair, which united the great leaders of
opportunism in the same disgrace, Clemenceau led a roaring campaign.
Then gradually he softened his tone and eased [Henri] Brisson into his
role as gravedigger, when the heads of opportunism were bowed before
him, asked for mercy, consented to following his instructions and to no
longer deny his accession.
+116
[Émile] Loubet was the primary beneficiary of the deal; as the price
of his connivance he received, from the hands of Clemenceau, the
presidency of the Republic [1899 to 1906].
In the Dreyfus Affair, Clemenceau had to defeat a more obstinate
resistance with harder hitting punches; he did it with ferocity and finally,
by favor of the long duration of the [General Louis] André [War] Ministry
and the perpetual and implacable operation of the cleaver wielded by
Freemasonry, he came to the end of all resistance, and at the present
time he can have his total victory certified to all the world by the
installation of Picquart to the ministry of war.
[Armand] Fallières in the presidency of the Republic [1906 to 1913] is
the hostage of Clemenceau.
Such outcomes are not obtained without leading to a case of
national enervation, a great weakening not only of its military power but
of all its vital forces. Edward VII understands this, and he regrets it but
does not see it being dangerous to England; at the present time, the real
peril for England would be to have men at the head of French
government who understand the real interests of France.
+117
The greatest mistake we could make for the future of our people is
to let the freedom of the seas be expropriated and the control of inter-
oceanic trade be monopolized by a rival nation. It is blind folly to lend our
assistance to the annihilation of a fleet whose intervention can some day
be indispensable to the protection of ours, assisting in the defense of our
political and commercial independence.
The greatest crime Louis XIV ever committed was to ally himself to
England in order the destroy the Dutch navy and ruin the prosperity of
the Batavian Republic [Batavia is the Latin name of the Low Countries;
the war referred to occurred 1672 to 1678]. In armed conflict against
England, Holland at that time defended, weapons in hand, the cause of all
people in supporting the principle of liberum mare [open sea]. England, in

81
becoming the protagonist of clausum mare [closed sea], intended to
confer on itself the monopoly of maritime trade.
The Batavian fleet would have become France's most prized
auxiliary. It was turning into an indispensable counterbalance, because
France, in having to defend itself on land and sea, cannot on its own
maintain equilibrium with the naval forces of England.
Since then, France has been exhausted by futile efforts to
reestablish that equilibrium necessary for the security of its commercial
and colonial expansion, both indispensable to the development of its
prosperity.
Starting in the century of the seventeen hundreds, it is the essential
goal which had been assigned to all the governments that had taken our
country's future to heart. In order to make these endlessly renewed
efforts fail, England endlessly banded into coalitions against us. When we
carried our victorious banners right into the center of the European
continent, toppling the combined forces of enemy armies in our way, our
strikes were aimed less at the continental powers than at England,
whose monopoly of the oceans we wanted to eradicate, and who was
seeing its sea power threatened by our land victories. On the contrary,
when fortune betrayed our flags, it was England that was winning most
boisterously, and it was justified because it was the true beneficiary of
victory.
+118
Indeed, the real issue of those murderous battles, when the
Austrians, Prussians, and Spanish competed to shed more of their blood
against the French, was not this or that province, whose possession
could only contribute in a very minor way to the force of the power which
would gain or lose it, and which in any case was adding nothing to the
general prosperity of its subjects; it was the sea trade that England
wanted to corner, for itself alone, and whose share France was claiming
because it was one of the essential elements of its prosperity; what
England wanted was to keep to itself the monopoly of the world market,
from which it draws inexhaustible wealth, and to exclude France, and by
that exclusion, to maintain it in a state of needy mediocrity out of which
no amount of laborious effort could take it.
We have payed for the crime committed by Louis XIV by the loss of
the most beautiful colonial empire which might ever be imagined, by a
series of setbacks on both land and sea; by the fatal outcome of big wars

82
which we sustained since then, and which were all ended to our
disadvantage and to the advantage of our rival; by incessant revolutions,
each of which marked a lowering of our prestige in the world and whose
common factor must be looked for in the state of enervation and
pathological mania into which so many uninterrupted setbacks threw the
French people, who successively saw being closed off all the paths of
expansion where the instinct and genius of its race were drawing it, in its
love of enterprise and its natural aptitude for business on a large scale.
+119

In these last twenty-five years, it seemed like, in taking a lesson

from so painful an experience, we had learned to again take the path
where our forefathers had won fortune, glory, and internal prosperity.
At our side, a powerful navy was created, but not yet powerful
enough to do without our assistance in the event of a naval battle with
England. These energetic, industrious and persevering neighbors had an
interest equal to ours in restoring the equilibrium of force on the oceans,
to ensure the free flow of commercial maritime traffic at any time, to
safeguard the colonial expansion of the continental powers.
By some strange mental aberration, we had not understood that we
should have looked favorably on the development of that new force,
called on to lend us some useful assistance should the need arise, and
not under any pretext to let its absence again have us fall under the
subjugation of British supremacy.
+120

The English, being an astute people accustomed to calculation and

only being bound by a contract after having weighed its costs verses
benefits, are astonished that we committed ourselves without any such
consideration. They have no doubt about our sincerity, but rather our
reliability. They fear that a better informed public opinion might suddenly
go through one of those abrupt shifts, which is quite customary on this
side of the channel.
To secure their domination over their new subjects, they consider it
indispensable that power should not leave the hands which hold on to it
at the present time.
By their great influence on the masonic lodges, the societies of
Protestant propagation, and the Israelites, they have powerfully assisted

83
in assembling the Judaeo-Protestant-Masonic coalition which currently
controls the majority of the electoral body in France.
It has been said and often repeated that high finance was
cosmopolitan, that it had a stateless status. This is not true for British
high finance; it is very British and it exerts an indisputable effect on the
whole continent, especially on France. British finance knows how great
an influence the realm of money has on the current political realm, and
makes use of it in order to serve the plans of its government. In this
climate, where the lusts are avid, the appetites limitless, the thirst for
enjoyment sharpened by longtime privations impatiently suffered, the
scruples rare and temptations frequent, although not all moral qualms
are up for sale, there are certainly some to buy. Competition leads to a
cheapening of the price. The demands of the creditors, tired of waiting,
anxious to not let the opportunity for the bald head [of Clemenceau] slip
through the hands of their debtor, overcome the remaining scruples.
+121
Our conquerors deem that the fall of the current governing staff
would be a defeat for their enterprise. As such, each decline of the
intellectual and moral level of our national representation is celebrated
as a triumph of English policy by the quasi-official press on the other
side of the channel. All the major conservative newspapers of The City [of
London], from the Times to the Standard, cheer-lead the candidacies of
our socialists, communalists, communards, and collectivists, with as
much excitement as though it were a matter of the candidacies of the
most extreme British Tories.
It is taken for granted that they are good friends, but these are
friends who rejoice more in our decline than our worst enemies. What
can you expect? Memories from several centuries are not erased in a
single day. When any good Englishman, in the privacy of his conscience,
weighs all the problems of his nation versus ours, he is not bothered to
see the scale stabilizing on our liabilities versus his assets. Comfortably
ensconced in his home, he laughs at the thought of the bourgeoisie of
Paris, reduced to piling up cans of food so as not to die from hunger on
days when the worker celebrates May Day in keeping comrades from
working.
+122

That old France, whose last vestiges vanish more every day and are

84
even being erased from our own memories, but which still live in entirety
in his English imagination, enlivened by the writings of historians and
novelists, in regard to which he feels several different things. He feels
admiration, then perhaps a little jealousy, and still, let us say it quietly, an
old stench of hatred and apprehension. For him these are atavistic
effects and we could not blame him for them. So many battles, as
ruthless as civil wars, more savage than foreign wars, conducted
virtually without a truce during a multiple series of centuries, so much
violence, and such terrible violence, given and received in turns, that the
coldness of death made the shoulders of a whole nation shiver! Really, to
ask for complete oblivion is to be too demanding. After the hearty
embraces, what the next day will bring cannot go without saying. So that
I might have confidence in that next day, so that I might believe that it will
be much like today, it is necessary for me to see Clemenceau at the head
of the Republic. With him, I am sure that we do not have to spy on the
[French] encampment at Boulogne and the next day at Austerlitz [1805].
From now on the dictatorship of Clemenceau is necessary to the security
of England.
"[Émile] Combes [radical, Freemason president, 1902 to 1905] had
some good ones: with [Louis] André at War [Minister of War] and
[Camille] Pelletan at Navy [Minister of Marine], you could sleep in peace;
a raid of the French army on England would be unreal. Now, the fatal
hour is about to toll when our friends across the English Channel must
confront and engage the German hordes in battle. In the presence of
danger, they must again become patriots, the old Gaulish blood, too long
a time somnolent, must again be awakened in their veins. In facing the
Prussian, we must find at our sides, the worthy sons of the heroes of [the
battles of] Fleurus [1794] and Jemappes [1792]. The more their patriotism
has been compressed, the more necessarily it must violently explode
over that land of the brave called France, in our service. May the lessons
of the anti-militarists be quickly forgotten! May the Internationale [left
wing anthem of socialism] be forgotten, and Marseillaise [national
anthem of France reminiscent the French Revolution] be relearned. The
cannon is about to thunder, more civil wars, more class conflicts, all
Frenchmen are soldiers and the first soldiers in the world [presumably
since, after the Revolution, France was the first country to draft the
general population into military service]. Down with Hervé! Throw
[Amédée] Thalamas [author of a rationalized treatment of Joan of Arc]

85
overboard! Long live Clemenceau, long live Picquart!"
+123

Thus, for the foreign policy of Edward VII, it would not be in

Germany where he would win the first victories against Germany, it
would be in France; it would not be on the fields of battle, it would be in
the electoral campaign; it would not be with cannon fire, it would be by
dint of banknotes and ballots. The other bloodier battles would be our
business to sustain.
It appeared that London was not without some apprehension about
the outcome of the latest electoral round. As such, His Majesty did not
think it a waste of time to visit during the general elections. It was not
enough for him to be sure of the ballot boxes in the hands of his loyal
subject Clemenceau. His Imperial and Royal Majesty wanted to inspect,
close up and personal, the electoral kitchen, to see the bubbling kettle
from which the victory of his liegeman must come. The inordinate
machinations of the government, the revolutionary strikes [of miners,
and some viticulturists], the terrifying May Day demonstrations which
were being forecast, a grotesque conspiracy which, like a bizarre
specter, was roiling the misty horizon, and the excessive nervousness of
his impresario were not without arousing in him some mistrust in the
final result. The King of England was saying under his breath, "If I took
the liberty of such pranks, my loyal subjects, despite their legendary
faithfulness, would have had me locked up in Bedlam a long time ago. In
the end, perhaps it makes sense. Every nation must be served according
to its tastes. In any case, it is tremendous! I would have regretted not
having rewarded myself with this divinely eccentric spectacle!"
+124
On the first of May, while protected by an army of sixty-six
thousand bayonets, his Excellency [President Armand] Fallières was
exuding fear behind the gates of the Elysée [Palace], His Imperial and
Royal Majesty was calmly strolling on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, as
an English tourist, curious, resolved to see everything and to sample the
strange spectacle being offered to him. The city was gloomy, deserted,
silent. Never, even on the day after the worst catastrophes, had it
presented such a mournful aspect. Not a bystander, not a passer-by, not
a car passing by, not a bursting tire reawakened the movement of life. A
death-like silence was everywhere. In a town where he is known by all,

86
Edward VII was enjoying the pleasure of strolling incognito for the first
time.
+125
"This stage set is too sinister," he said to himself. "Clemenceau
clearly has a mind as morbid as his physiognomy. Let us hope that this
Shakespearean tragedy will end in an operetta of Scribe or the vaudeville
of Labiche." In that very human need of escaping that desolate solitude,
His Majesty hastened his step toward La Place de la Republique. He was
hoping to come across at least some human faces there, in the species
of striking workers or policeman. By chance, he was recognized and had
to take a cab to reach his hotel in a hurry and so remove himself from
the ovation. Indeed, everyone knows that if under the Empire the Parisian
gladly shouts: "Long live the Republic!" under the Republic he yet more
gladly shouts, "Long live the King!" or "Long live the Emperor!"
Nevertheless, rumor about the promenade of the King of England
soon spread throughout the astounded and anxious population. They
ventured to open the blinds and put a nose near the window. He was
getting closer and closer to the Place Beauveau and the Place de la
Republique. This news returned some of Clemenceau's composure. He
regained his mocking demeanor, and the cops of [Louis] Lépine [Paris
chief of police], being so informed that they were working for a king,
bashed harder, and poleaxed their fellow citizens more conscientiously.
+126

On getting out of bed the following morning and looking over the
smoked hams and tin cans piled high in his pantry, the bourgeois man
said to his wife: "Now what are we going to do with all these emergency
provisions? We have gotten away from the greatest risk that we could
have ever run. The Revolution would besiege us in our homes and make
us die of hunger. The King of England has saved our lives, let us never
forget it. If we have fresh milk and butter for our breakfast this morning,
we owe it to him. And now that I know that behind Clemenceau there is
the King of England, I will not hoard any more provisions."
From his side, the worker, getting back gladly to his workshop,
which he reluctantly deserted the previous day to conform to proletarian
solidarity, said to his companion: "What an operator all the same, this
Clemenceau. If he had not had his police thumping and sixty-six thousand
citizen-soldiers mobilized, yet again we would have been devoured by a

87
military coup. You have seen the conspiracy! As always the worker was
duped! The reactionaries have never schemed anything so repugnant!"
On election day, the bourgeois and the workers rushed eagerly to
the ballot boxes so as to ensure the triumph of the candidate of the
government, of that government which had pulled us out of so many
dangers, of that government which had the brilliant idea of saving the
Republic by placing it under British protection. Pitt and Cobourg, from
heaven on high, their final residence, must have had a good laugh on
seeing this vaudeville act, and they must have found our present day
Jacobins more amusing than those of their own times.
+127
Edward VII, made serene on the durability of his latest conquest,
was able to board a ship to his hereditary estates. Nothing in France can
obstruct his domination. Clemenceau hopes in vain to give us change in
declaring that he will not allow the revolutionary coalition to be touched,
that not one particle should be taken from it. He has pulled out the most
beautiful gem from the history of those whose heritage he claims: the
love of country, the invincible devotion to national autonomy.
Clemenceau is the proconsul to the king of England, responsible for
governing his province of Gauls.

88
Chapter 5
Edward VII and Catholicism
+128

Rightly or wrongly to the eyes of the world, England and France

were not considered friends. Since the renowned commune, a well-
known antipathy had existed between the two nations. How could this
opinion not be believed? If all the attacks, insults, fierce or perfidious
diatribes against France that the British press published were put end to
end, there would be enough to cover the immensity of the seas; if all the
passionate, vehement, or immoderate tirades that the French journals
spewed at Great Britain were adjoined one next to the other, there would
be enough to cover the continental landmasses. But, if the animosity was
equal from one side to the other, there was a categorical difference
between the sources generating this reciprocal aversion.
For us, the cause was strictly political. France hated England as the
fortunate rival who so many times had destroyed its maritime trade, who
had plundered the product of its ingenuity and its richest conquests.
+129
England not only hated us as the nightmare who for centuries
troubled the peace of its days and nights, the often victorious, always
indomitable adversary who yielded for the moment only to rise again,
stronger and more valiant. England also hated France as the great
Catholic nation.
England fosters an unquenchable hatred of Catholicism, calling it
Papism, and aspires to take away its character of being a universal
religion with the spiritual supremacy which it claims over Christianity.
This point is too often neglected but nonetheless of major importance for
those who seek to understand the course of English policy across the
vicissitudes of modern history.
However predominant in France might have been the ideas of
toleration, or even indifference and skepticism, in religious matters since
the end of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution, in the
governing of our internal politics and in the management of our external
policy up to the start of the [Émile] Combes ministry [1902], we had
realized that our interest and honor were demanding us to remain

89
faithful to our traditions, often secular, and to maintain our support of the
Catholic missions in Africa and Asia wherever they were persecuted. We
had assumed the role of guardians of Catholic expansion, the leading
edge of French expansion, and this role was universally recognized as
ours.
For its part, England had monopolized, to its exclusive profit, the
ardent proselytism of Protestant missionaries all over the face of the
earth. It had made them into bold and enterprising pioneers dedicated to
the growth of its Empire, the capable operators of its commercial
introduction to the remotest of regions.
+130
England's hatred of Catholicism is thus not only motivated by the
memory of past grievances, of persecutions borne and rendered at
another time; it is maintained by a rivalry of propaganda, no less
economic and political than religious, by a fight for life constantly in
contention everywhere on the planet.
Wherever England seeks to infiltrate, where, as forerunners and as
loyal quartermasters charged with preparing housing for its troops and
merchants, it sends the cohort of its missionaries armed with their
Bibles and bales of cotton, it runs up against the Catholic missionaries
who have preceded it, who have taken root in the land and not only
contend for the conquest of souls, but also for the political and
commercial clientele to the benefit of the Catholic guardian nation.
The English nation is idealistic and practical at the same time.
Profoundly religious, it seeks the propagation of the true faith, but no
less avidly seeks to always open yet another market outlet, ever more
populous and profitable for its manufactured goods; it is a matter of life
or death for its increasingly productive industries. On this battlefield, it
cannot abide any negotiation or sharing. The Catholic missions which
succeed in stopping this expansion, in opposing it with a double
competition, are doubly hateful to it.
+131
England knows that matters of political liberties and social
progress, which in the present day so deeply excite and agitate the
nations of Europe, are impenetrable and indecipherable for the people of
Asia in general, and especially for those in Africa; but that religious ideas
more readily open access into their minds, and that the Christian spirit,
more clement and humane than that of the old Oriental religions, wins

90
many fervent followers everywhere. Religious propaganda is thus the
most effective means of gaining entry that Western commerce could
adopt for establishing and asserting itself, and having itself welcomed in
those regions which were recently closed off to it. As such this is the key
which in certain cases opens the door, according to the prospect of the
event, whether that might be brutal conquest by arms or diplomatic
conquest by protectorate. England wants to have this key only in its own
possession.
It is thus of the utmost necessity for the success of British
prospects that Catholic missions should be dismantled. To reach this
result, there are only two paths to follow: either France must cease to
exist or France must cease being Catholic. After our neighbors decided to
make us their allies against Germany, they ended up with the latter
solution.
If France stops supplying Catholic missions with men and money, if
it withdraws its political support, they will not be able to survive British
competition. From then on, England is relieved from the constant rivalry
with whom it has fought for centuries, using in turn both force and guile,
and over whom it has not been able to triumph.
+132
To bring France to disband religious orders, above all the teaching
orders, to dry up the wellsprings of their recruitment, is a matter of
primary importance for England. To prepare in a short time the closure of
the schools that these orders have opened with continual success, even
in the regions most recalcitrant to Western instruction, where they
spread our language, our customs, our tastes, our habits, and as a result,
our trade, where they train the young people to reject the invasion of the
schismatic English, and set their sights on Catholic Rome and Catholic
France, is for our neighbors the realization of a dream which barely a
few years ago had been declared unrealistic, and whose realization
currently seems near.

The opening phase traversed in the methodical succession of his

policy, Edward VII resolutely approaches the second phase.
England considers [Catholic] religious orders as obstacles to the
extension of its spiritual and temporal supremacy over the world. That is
the secret of the permanent hatred which it has vowed for them and that
is why it has extirpated them in France. That is not enough for it.

91
Catholicism is likewise a difficulty. That also must be taken down, which
is the secret of the constant support that it lends to Freemasonry.
+133
Sharp and vigilant over its United Kingdom, England knows how to
keep Freemasonry exclusively within the sphere of philanthropic work,
without letting it encroach on the religious domain of diverse rites of
worship, nor still less on the political domain. On the continent, in
contrast, England exalts it, swelling its pride and overstimulating its
ambition. In this way it is turned into an auxiliary, a reporting apparatus,
an espionage agent and informant in a class by itself. It is a charmed
countenance for putting the heat on governments when they should dare
to demonstrate disobedience to British instruction, a wrecking ball
utilized to slam incessantly against the Catholic edifice.
The Christian world, which assumes a more estimable importance
every day by the expansion of territories subjected to the domination or
influence of Western powers, currently has two capitals: London and
Rome. Whatever the latter loses in power and prestige, the former gains.
London climbs to the summit, whereas Rome seems headed into decline.
That fall must be hastened. There were two heads, one of them must be
beaten down!

This plan, the obsession with which has been troubling minds on
the other side of the Channel for years, can only be set into motion with
the connivance of the French government. This connivance was missing
in state affairs until the arrival of the Combes ministry [Prime Minister
1902-1905].
+134
No doubt since the outset of the Third Republic, anti-religious
tendencies have been gaining momentum in our country. Gambetta had
launched the famous war cry, "Clericalism is the enemy!" But did he not
add, "Anti-clericalism is not an exportable product!"
In the time of endless parliamentary fluctuations, despite the more
or less accentuated divergences in their political programs, the
statesmen who rapidly succeeded each other in the administration of
public affairs agreed on two points, always accepted, even acclaimed in
near unanimity by both Chambers: a policy resolutely adhering to the
Concordat [of 1801, between Napoleon and Pope Pius VII] for the interior;
for the exterior, the development of French influence through all

92
channels, notably by the support of our secular traditions of expansion in
the Middle and Far East; by the encouragement of Catholic schools; and
by the protection granted to the Catholic missions.
The theoreticians of the absolute, the politicians eager to boost
themselves into power, endeavored to seduce simple minds by the
promise of an ideal more consistent with the requirements of pure
rationalism, and were undeniably demanding the separation of church
and state. But those voices found little resonance among the Deputies,
desirous above all of being assured of the support of the clergy in their
reelection campaigns, and were not inciting anyone in the country, with
little care to see change to a regime contrary to their customs.
The observance of the Concordat and the continuing support of our
religious schools in the protectorates in the East, remained the two
undisputed bases of our national and international policies.
+135
To the general applause of the National Assembly on the subject of
religious orders in 1872, Henri Brisson formulated the doctrine of the
Republican Party in these terms, "Neither on my part,” he said, “nor, I am
sure, on the part of any of the members who hold seats on the same
benches as me, will there arise the demand to have the laws revived
suppressing the freedom of religious associations. We here present
ourselves to demand equality among all associations, but equality in
freedom."
In a report deposed to the office of the Chamber, on November 9,
1895, René Goblet, speaking in the name of a commission mostly made up
of deputies sharing the most advanced opinions, such as Misters Lavy,
Alexandre Bérard (Ain), Groussier, Gustave Isambert, Delarue, Antide
Boyer, Souhet, Jumel, Rouanet, Jules Guesde, etc., said, "These measures
apply to all associations, whatever their purpose might be," just as much
to religious associations or orders as to all others. He concluded,
"Without exception they should all enjoy the same liberties."
I agree that religious orders had some adversaries, motivated by
less liberal intentions, who sought their complete and absolute
elimination; that the Catholic Church as well as religion in general
without distinction by sect were taking notice of irreconcilable enemies
who announced their intention to remove Christianity from French
culture, to have atheism rule over the ruins of the Faith, to restore the
cult of the goddess Reason in order to walk in the footsteps of great

93
ancestors and to spare France none of the sinister inanities whose
bloody ordeal it had undergone [in the Revolutionary Era]; but I think it is
possible to say that, neither on the benches of our deliberative
assemblies, nor in the electorate who choose them, not one sole brain
would have been discovered where the idea had sprouted of violently
separating the Catholic majority from the Holy See, of destroying, all at
once, the ecclesiastical hierarchy to create a layman's religion, and with
this Catholic population torn from orthodoxy, establishing a schismatic
Church in a Presbyterian form, independent from Rome.
+136
The idea of making France Anglican in order to please England was
accepted and propagated by the masonic lodges only after the Entente
cordiale; an obvious movement toward a closer relationship having been
affirmed, the masonic lodges directed to the King of England the same
adulation with which they had embraced, in turn, Napoleon the First, the
Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Empire, all the governments,
in brief, that have succeeded each other in France, so long as France had
a government of its own people. They will renew these adulation for all
powers, foreign as well as French. In effect, they need to instill the
conviction of their absolute and unlimited devotion into whichever
government it might be, so that it might tolerate their secret organization,
their hidden schemes, their work of continual destruction of anything that
becomes an obstacle to their accession to power, to their need for
domination and widespread enslavement.
+137
Some [Ministerial] decrees of 1880, putting back into effect old
revolutionary laws, had already slapped certain monastic orders with
disbandment. Without here intending to join in the controversy over the
legality and scope of those decrees, I will limit myself to recalling that
they did not aim at any female religious orders, and that they did not in
any way extend to religious institutes like the Brothers of the Christian
Doctrine or the Brothers of the Christian Schools, where perpetual vows
are not taken.
These institutes, previously annexed to the Imperial University
[l'Université impériale] by Napoléon, have rendered outstanding service
to public education. Everyone, whether employed by the universities or
not, agrees on giving unconditional praise to their teaching excellence;
they have received the highest awards in all contests and exhibitions.

94
Outside of the country they gave honor to France; there is not a nation to
which we did not send them. It is only that [Léon] Bourgeois had brought
an accusation against them which was received with immediate
enthusiasm in the masonic press, propagated, exaggerated, and
amplified. Bourgeois had discovered attacks against our institutions in
the textbooks of their students. On being checked, Bourgeois had been
mistaken, and the incriminating editions were not originating from their
students. It is purely and simply one of those unintentional errors like so
many that have slipped into basic education texts, in regard to which the
religious orders have been condemned and executed. When the falsity of
the accusation was established, the Chamber rushed to grant an act of
rectification, but was dissolving the religious order nonetheless. [The
translator had trouble verifying the events concerning Bourgeois and the
copies incriminées.]
+138
Encomiums have not been able to save these institutes from
proscription. The crime that they have been made to expiate, no one
dares to say out out loud; it was to have founded in Egypt écoles modèles
[where French language was taught to the Egyptian students], which by
their success were offensive to Lord [Evelyn Baring, First Earl of]
Cromer.
This destructive ferocity of the ideology of servility was still not
enough to give full satisfaction to English demands. England is infinitely
superior to us in terms both political and practical. This is already plenty
of superiority, but not the end of it. England is just as infinitely superior in
religious terms.
Every Englishman is an apostle who has the gift and the passion for
proselytism.
He not only wants to rule over bodies, he also wants to rule over
souls in saving them from sin and leading them on the path of truth. He is
horrified by Papism. A papist France fills him with feelings of painful
commiseration; so if France is intended to be made into the worthy sister
and ally of England, it is necessary to wrench it from the darkness of
Papism and make it schismatic like England.
To respond to this item on the agenda, the law of 1905 was enacted,
mistakenly called the law on the separation of Church and State, and
which should more accurately be called the law intending the separation
of the Church of France from the apostolic Holy See, and the conversion

95
of all French Catholics to Protestantism.
+139
There you see the gift for the joyous accession that the masonic
lodges were keeping in reserve to offer Edward VII.

Contrary to what seems should have been the outcome, the

abolition of the rule of the Concordat was not initially caused by
functional problems, or the irresistible pressure of a popular majority
enchanted by systemic separation. However much it had strained ties
with the Vatican, the accession of a former seminary professor [Combes]
to the Ministry of the Interior and to the Presidency of the Council,
strongly opposed to the Church which he had repudiated with no lost
love, some notes of official origin announced that an incident concerning
the redaction of [papal] bulls of canonical institution [regarding the full
recognition of a religious institution by the Church] was smoothed over,
and that the Vatican and France had come to an agreement on a formula
intended to give satisfaction to their reciprocal demands.
It is a diplomatic incident of minimal importance in itself, buried at
first in the boxes of the quai d'Orsay, then suddenly revived by a
calculated perfidy, which caused the rupture.
The cause of the split was a note, meant to remain secret, sent by
the Roman chancellery to the chancelleries of Catholic powers other
than France. Neither the expediency nor the content of that note are part
of my plan to discuss here. Everything on this subject has been said
elsewhere. I limit myself to saying that before its exposure in a partisan
political publication [l'Humanité], this note was already known at the quai
d'Orsay, which was content to consider it irrelevant and had discovered
in it neither casus foederis [case for alliance], nor, still less, casus belli
[case for war]. Without looking up the identity of the agent responsible
for the disclosure of that piece, I certify that this was published in a
pamphlet dedicated to the policy of the ministry, and that the editor of
that pamphlet [Jaurès], a strong supporter of Combes, did not designate
it without a previous agreement with the cabinet.
+140
What succeeded in giving this incident its true character is the part
which speakers seated in the center right benches of the Chamber had
taken in the discussion motivated by it, resolute adversaries of the
Combes Ministry, but no less resolute partisans of the English alliance.

96
Their unexpected intervention saved Delcassé in a bad situation.
Delcassé was at a loss to justify his sudden about-face, to explain how
an incident, at first estimated by him of too slight an importance to make
the object of a protest, was all at once drawing such disproportionate
attention, by the sole fact that it had been denounced to the press by
Freemasonry, that it was enough to provoke a break with a power
motivated by demonstrated intentions of conciliation and amity. By that
sudden and incomprehensible evolution, he who had shown himself until
that day the convinced and absolute defender of keeping our embassy at
the Vatican, had resolved, all at once, first to recall our ambassador at
the Holy See, then soon to withdraw along with him all the embassy
personnel, to completely cease all diplomatic relations and to close off
any route for reestablishing them.
+141
Delcassé was exposed to seeming like a coward in the eyes of
public opinion, betraying his convictions, deserting his duty, and
sacrificing the permanent interests of the country in an issue of capital
importance, for fear of the howling of the far left and the screaming of
the radical socialist press.
When some orators, who certainly were not used to being counted
among the supporters of the Combes ministry, who were legitimately
taken to be even the most ardent of his opponents, were seen standing
up so as to take the defense of Delcassé, in order to lavish their high
praise on his conduct, without even intimating a timid protest against the
irremediable haste of his decisions, the scene changed in aspect.
To the eyes of that assembly, ignorant of diplomatic affairs,
incapable of qualifying the decision which it unexpectedly found itself
called on to approve, the incident took on outsize dimensions. Before the
gravity of the insult, party distinctions had to be effaced, and a
unanimous echo of disapproval for its authors had to arise from all sides
of the Chamber, expressed by voice even from open adversaries in the
cabinet. As a result, supported and acclaimed by the entire Parliament,
Delcassé grew into the eminence of a patriot minister, faithful interpreter
of the sentiments of the country, the heroic avenger of aggrieved national
honor.
This scene setting, prepared in advance, was perfectly arranged for
making an impression on the overwhelming masses of universal
suffrage, who have neither the time nor the disposition necessary to

97
understand the real meaning and scope of these events, but who let
themselves be led without resistance by theatrical effects. By favor of
that, the myth was given credulity, one of those legends firmly anchored
and rooted in the popular mind, against which nothing could prevail, that
an attack on our national dignity had been premeditated and perpetrated
in the shadow of the Vatican. That the Papal Court was insulting France
and the Republic, was offending us all in the person of the chief of state.
+142
The repercussions of that feat of parliamentary theater echoed
through every press outlet. From the collectivist pamphlets and those of
Jaurés, to the liberal and progressive pamphlets, all resounded in
unison. The occasion for singing out a brief patriotic couplet, along with
their socialist brothers, had become too rare for the progressive journals
not to seize on with alacrity. The spectacle was truly comic, to see the
hervéist and anti-militarist journals, those who spit on the flag daily, who
drag the national honor through the mud and order the soldier to shoot
his general in the back, being exalted at the thought that a supposed
offense made on the dignity of France, by a secret diplomatic note, had
been left unpunished for an instant. This one proposition made them
shake in horror and shamefully blush. What was sadder was seeing the
moderates following from behind in their footsteps.
From then on, all reprisals against the Vatican became legitimate in
the eyes of that public bias.
+143
All reprisals, it may be; yet on the one condition that we will not go
beyond the limit that reason itself imposes on reprisals. Reprisals ought
never be pushed to the point where they jeopardize the interests of the
power which employs them.
That our ambassador to the Vatican was recalled, that the papal
nuncio to Paris was given his traveling papers, was seemingly a
sufficient rebuke for dressing the wound made to our national pride as
represented in the persona of [Émile] Loubet. The reproach for how much
we had resented their lack of diplomacy was made to be felt at the
pontifical court with sufficient harshness. Was it necessary to go any
further? Was it necessary for healing the wound, whose very existence
was not at all apparent, to abrogate the Concordat, to take away from
priests their means of subsistence allotted in compensation for the
revolutionary confiscation of their property? Was it necessary to nullify

98
that bilateral agreement, in all its effects, without any diplomatic
dispatch, without even any previous informal warning, to the power
which placed its signature on it next to ours and on the faith of ours? Was
it truly indispensable for the French Republic to no longer maintain at the
Vatican any representative, neither official nor even simply unofficial, not
even a chargé d'affaires or an embassy clerk; for it to no longer have
with the Holy See any declared relation, either public or private; for the
Holy See to be declared a negligible quantity by France and considered
as though non-existent?
+144
Certainly not, if French interests were being referred to, but French
interests were not what the government of the Republic was consulting
at that time.
Completely the opposite, it was apparent to even the least
clairvoyant vision that the most serious and pressing issues, internally
as well as externally, commanded our government to maintain diplomatic
relations with the Roman Pontificate more diligently than ever, and to be
in a position to exert on its decisions an influence as energetic and as
predominant as possible.
Internally, religious peace was now profoundly troubled; if the
government wanted to reestablish that peace, since it was its duty and a
necessity of the first order, and if it was hoping to reach that result in
replacing the rule of the Concordat with the rule of separation, it was
incumbent to start negotiations with Rome to liquidate, with as much
agreement and reciprocal satisfaction as possible, the closely related
interests that the application of the Concordat over the last century had
initiated and developed, so as to prepare at the same time, through prior
agreement, a framework favorable to the new system of separation that
we wanted to inaugurate, in a way to ensure its success by avoiding
moral offenses and the irritation of religious sensitivities.
That if we did not find on the part of the Roman Court the
conciliating attitude that we had a right to expect, if it was demonstrating
intransigence, and raising claims incompatible with the modern mind, our
social circumstances, and our republican institutions, at least we would
have reached that result having put public opinion on our side, both in
France and the civilized world, which is still an appreciable outcome.
+145
In foreign affairs, the break with the Holy See can only be

99
detrimental to us at a time when England, Germany, and Italy are
swooping down on the Muslim states on the Mediterranean coast with an
avidity gaining momentum every day, where we see our influence
constantly retreating under pressure from our invasive rivals, where
England chased us from Egypt, Italy from Tripoli, where Germany
uprooted us from Morocco, which we had been promised as
compensation for our losses [to England], where even our possessions
of Algeria and Tunisia are agitated by foreign missionaries inciting Arabs
to holy war against us, where the presence of our schools and missions
in the Orient are put in peril by our own most culpable blindness. Never
have we more needed the dedicated cooperation of the Holy See in
preserving the few places where we can hope to maintain ourselves.
So the interests of France were not what motivated our
government when, without caring to see or hear anything, it sought at all
costs, a brutal, complete, and absolute rupture with the Vatican; those
were the interests of England and Italy being served. It intended to make
the vote for the separation of church and state a foregone conclusion for
the French Parliament. How indeed to maintain the rule of the Concordat,
if engaging in any discussion with the Holy See is rejected, if the papacy
is regarded as nonexistent.
+146
[As a general rule], when war is declared and all diplomatic
relations are broken, an ambassador from a third country is tasked with
taking charge of the protection of the nationals and the permanent
interests of the country; at the Vatican, our government took no
analogous precaution, so much it took to heart making it impossible for
any continuation whatsoever of a modus vivendi [means of coexistence].

The establishment of the rule of separation of Church and State in

France was in no way bringing about as a necessary consequence,
according to an uninformed opinion which they are treacherously trying
to firmly set into ignorant minds, the breaking of diplomatic relations
with Rome. Quite to the contrary, perhaps the states with which the Holy
See currently maintains the most satisfying diplomatic relations, in the
old as well the new world, are those that have enforced the rule of
separation between Church and State, such as Belgium, Brazil, the United
States of North America, etc. Everywhere that Catholicism is respected
in terms of its traditions, its hierarchy, and its indissoluble union with its

100
visible leader in the world, no cause of conflict exists between the
Apostolic Holy See and the governments.
This religious peace, with a respect of religious liberty and the
freedom of conscience, was certainly not what the authors of the law of
1905 wanted. Just the opposite; what they wanted was that France should
become schismatic on the model of England, at whatever the cost. To
attain that result, they have promulgated a law which does not
completely plunder the clergy and faithful Catholics, like the laws of the
[Revolutionary] Convention; it still leaves them the benefice of certain
precarious and transitory, though nonetheless appreciable, advantages.
However, it subordinates the concession of these advantages to certain
conditions, and even at first glance it is evident that the acceptance of
these conditions leads to a break with Rome.
+147
For every Catholic, the hierarchical structure of the Church is of
divine origin. from none other than Jesus Christ, who founded it, and had
it seated on the foundation the same as he crowned it at the summit, by
the sovereign authority of the Roman Pontiff, his vicar on Earth. This
power is exercised by the Sovereign Pontiff with the aid of representative
agents, that is, the bishops, and of sub-agents, such as the diocesan
priest or priest from a religious order, each one in the sphere of duties
which are entrusted to him.
The law of 1905 makes a blank slate of this constituency and
hierarchy. It neither cares to know anything about pontifical power nor
episcopal and sacerdotal authority. It recognizes neither pope, nor
bishop, nor priest. The pope is, to the eyes of its authors, a foreign power
with whom the government of the Republic can neither negotiate nor
even discuss the business of France; the bishops and pastors are foreign
functionaries who, with this title, under the terms of our laws, have lost
French nationality, and from then on fall under the discretionary
application of the power of expulsion, with which the minister of the
interior and regional prefects are empowered in reference to foreigners.
+148
The government of the Church passes into the hands of private
associations, called by the newly coined term, cultual, submitting, in what
concerns their constitution, to all the regulations which preside over the
validity of a contract of association. Now, it is in the very essence of a
contract of association that the association obeys the changeable laws of

101
majorities in all matters. These associations have not only the sovereign
temporal administration of the cult, but also the unrestricted
management of the activities of the cult, the exclusive right of
determining the pay of the cult minister, of selecting him to their
satisfaction, or of dismissing him at their pleasure, that is to say, the
spiritual as well as the temporal.
From there, the cynicism of the calculation became apparent. The
pope could not accept an organization constituted on this basis without
abdicating, without profaning in the eyes of the world, the sacred mission
with which he had been invested by the universal Church. He would
refuse his assent to the formation of cultual associations. He would
condemn them. At first, the clergy and lay faithful would genuflect before
the decision of the Sovereign Pontiff, but in France, a government which
does not fear resorting to revolutionary violence has at its disposal such
means of action, that the authors of the law were hoping to promptly
arrive at overcoming all resistance and to lead the more or less
unconscious Catholic masses into the schismatic movement. The
transitions would be guided by a specific course of action, as needed. In
acting with promises and bribery on one side, and with threats and
intimidation on the other, in recurring as needed to even the most savage
persecution, in proscribing and exiling, the feat of changing the religion of
an entire people would be accomplished from one day to the next,
through a true juggling act, by the simple effect of passing a law whose
true sense and scope the country had not grasped, not even the
Parliament when it was voted on.
+149

In this way France was obligated to pay for the hazardous honor of
becoming the ally of England, not only with the abandonment of
Newfoundland and Egypt, the peril of another German invasion and
dissection of territory, but also with a change of religion, with a forced
conversion to Protestantism.
We will no longer have the right to be free-thinkers or Catholics,
believers or non-believers, atheists or theists; we all would have to join
cultual associations if we want to have some share of governmental
privileges. Already, [Georges] Truillot, a former student of the Jesuits
who afterwards had a more or less brilliant internship in free-thinking,
declared during one of his ministerial harangues that, "Of all the

102
religions, the Protestant religion was decidedly that which had his
preference." This sudden conversion made big news in the world of
functionaries, because the example of Truillot is not one of those which it
can afford to ignore when rapid advancement is in view.
+150
From now on, if one is not a member, or at the very least a
supporter, of a cultual association, it will no longer be permitted to aspire
to the leek, or to academic palms or the red ribbon. Even now the
professors of our law faculties are conscripted to be apologists for that
new kind of organization, and underscore the benefits in the eyes of the
awestruck people. Soon enough, when the [state] university has the
monopoly on teaching, the government will have them rendering
judgments to condemn bulls from the Pope and convict him of heresy.
These judgments from the university added to those from the State
Council, ruling on the querulous, will fasten the faith onto France.
Beware to free-thinkers if they abstain from participating in the duties
and ceremonies of the official cult; their refusal will be badly viewed, and
they will soon be grouped with the papists and treated like clergy and
reactionaries. A country which abdicates its freedom of conscience and
religious liberty would not know how to keep freedom of thought for very
long.
In all this religious revolution, I can see very well what England and
Italy will gain; it is impossible for me to see what France will gain; on the
contrary, I clearly discern what it will lose.
In the domain of foreign policy, diplomatic power can only rest on
two elements; either the force of arms or the force of traditions. When a
nation is victorious, the prestige of its triumph ensures it an authority in
the face of which foreign chancelleries are more or less inclined to be
attentive, so long as the radiance of its victories has not dimmed, and so
long as their effect remains uncontested. Outside of these honors
rendered to brute force, a nation only obtains from other powers what
traditions, recognized and confirmed by long-held status, allow it to
demand. Treaties, like private contracts, are of value only by the
interpretation which is given to them, and this interpretation is itself only
fixed and authenticated by tradition.
+151
This truth had been recognized until now by all governments that
have followed one another in France since 1789; by both monarchies and

103
by the empires the same as the republics. The [Revolutionary] Convention
itself, at the time it was internally applied with savage force to shatter all
the jurisdictions of the old society, had proclaimed it louder and more
resolutely than its predecessors. In all places, at the Vatican as
elsewhere, our diplomatic agents had accepted the mission of speaking
the same language as their predecessors, to claim the same rights, and
to exercise the same prerogatives. Their instructions directed them to
impress upon all foreign powers, on all points on the globe, that,
whatever the internal political vicissitudes might have been, the foreign
policy of France remained one and indivisible; that it was always the
same France which was facing them and speaking to them, a France
committed to not abdicating any of the moral or material appropriations
of its past, to not renounce any of its advantages, privileges, or claims, to
resolutely not desert any of its duties, to face up to all its obligations,
whatever might have been their origin, to neglect none of its partners,
whatever might have been their race or religious faith.
+152
It is for that continuity of the personality of France, through all its
overthrows and revolutions, that our country was obliged to not see our
historic role in the world rapidly decline, the heritage of our glorious past
be annihilated, with ourselves being rapidly reduced to a third rate
power.

In the present day, by the break in our relations with the Holy See,
by the refusal to engage in any conversation with the Vatican, we are
brutally shattering the traditions of our diplomacy. Now in the Mideast
and the Far East, the regions of the world towards which the powers of
the old and new worlds are turning, covetous in expanding their
commerce and industry along with their political influence, where their
efforts in making inroads vie in activity, where animal spirits and
ambitions make a headlong rush, we are deserting locations which, in
concert with Catholic Rome, a long perseverance of effort had acquired
for us; we are neglecting our partners, we are letting go of the rank that
belongs to us, which rivals immediately take up too shrewdly to ever let
it be retaken by us.
+153

It is easy to understand why the visits of Loubet at London and the

104
Quirinal [Rome] had been welcomed with equal enthusiasm. He brought
to them, as a gift both free and priceless, a share of the influence that
France had known how to acquire in the Mideast and Far East through
centuries of assiduous diplomatic effort, and that our envious neighbors
are about to share.
For Italy and England it is piece of good luck which they really
should not have expected.
Italy immediately showed that it understood the total value of the
heritage that we left to the profit of whoever would have liked to collect
it. Italy immediately readied itself for the harvest.
The government of Victor Emmanuel II has made a great effort to
mend relations with the Vatican. Winning the favor of the congregation of
propagation of the faith has not cost it any financial sacrifice. The Vatican
has lavishly endowed its religious schools in the Mideast, and it has
granted rich subsidies to its Catholic missions in the Far East.
In this eminently patriotic work, the Church has been assisted with
remarkable unity by the entire country. The Italian people, whose political
sense is more developed than ours, immediately apprehended the vast
horizon that our desertion opened to the ambitious ardor which inflames
their passion. The electoral body, more astute on that side of the Alps
than this, has inferred that a new and unexpected road was opened to its
country's prospects, that, by that road, it was going to be able to reach,
without any upheaval, the outcome that Crispi was foolishly pursuing
through a fratricidal war against France: the mastery of business in the
eastern basin of the Mediterranean and the worldwide expansion of its
maritime trade, from then on called to fill the role that France filled in the
days of its prosperity in the frontiers of the Mideast.
+154
Immediately the axis of the majority shifted, passing from left to
right in the [Italian] parliament, the same as in the electorate. Socialist
and Freemason deputies have had to give up their seats to the Catholics.
So Victor Emmanuel II calls on the right wing party bosses to manage
affairs for consolidating new relations with the Vatican, and to negotiate
passing to Italy the heritage from our ancestors, repudiated by our
government.

As it happens that members of the religious orders, the principals

and teachers of the schools, and the superiors at the missions, will come

105
to be taken away by death, old age, or disability, then the French will be
replaced by Italians, the French language by the Italian, the political and
commercial clientele will pass over to Italy, and even the name of France
will disappear from entire regions where it was loved and respected.
Perhaps our minister of commerce imagines that, because he has
publicly shown his sympathy with Protestantism, the Protestant
missionaries are going to stop or slow down their ardent proselytism for
English trade and against French trade, that the Entente cordiale and the
multiplied embraces between London and Paris will appease their
inveterate Franco-phobia. It is the silliest of illusions.
+155
From North Africa to the last confines of our Indochina, they will
continue to work against our existence as a colonial power and they will
take advantage of the weakness that our break with Rome will bring to
Catholic expansion, in order to bring Protestant England to greater
predominance.
In our coastal Mediterranean possessions, which are increasingly
populated by Italians, Maltese, and Spanish, all practicing and many
fanatic Roman Catholics, with the vital springs of French Catholic clerical
recruitment drying up by the law of 1905, there soon will be nothing more
than an Italian clergy for preaching annexation to Italy. Between the
activities of English missionaries, who are already invading Algeria and
Tunisia, Bible in hand and disparagement of France from the mouth and
who succeed more in Muslim nations with their propaganda against
France than their propaganda for the Bible, and the inflammatory
sermons from the Italian priests, it is questioned with alarm, how French
influence could be maintained, how transitory its duration and illusory its
rule will be.

As the schism in England dates from the reign of Henry VIII, the
schism of France will date from the reign of Edward VII. But the
consequences of this same religious revolution in the two countries will
not be the same; they will be different from all to all. In making England
the great schismatic maritime power, Henry VIII was ensuring to it a
separate role, and by favor of the action of biblical propaganda, was
giving it a powerful instrument of gaining entry. In regions where the
religious issue outweighs any other, it put into his hands a valuable
weapon to take away clientele from the other two great Catholic nations,

106
Spain and France. By contrast, schismatic France loses all reason for
being in these same regions, that is to say, in both Asian and African
continents. Neither a Catholic nor Protestant clientele will go to it. The
first will go to Italy, the second to England.
+156
It is yet another right that Edward VII acquires for the recognition of
his people.

Truthfully, when I report these results and when I hear Clemenceau

treating these French priests and bishops like agents of foreign
countries, I ask myself if I am dreaming and if words have lost their
meaning. I ask myself who in France is working for the destruction of
France to the profit of rival powers, who acts as a good and loyal agent of
a foreign country, if it is not Clemenceau.
The Catholic religion imposes on its followers an absolute
submission in the domain of faith, but it leaves them complete liberty in
the domain of politics; Freemasonry demands from its followers absolute
submission in both religious dogma and politics. The Catholic religion
makes dedication to country a peremptory duty that is not surpassed by
any other; Freemasonry demands the subordination of patriotic duty to
masonic duty.
+157
It is absurd to say to a man who the government of the Republic
itself has named as bishop, who it has mindlessly appointed to the office
without investigating such person for that sensitive mission, that he is a
foreign agent because he continues to carry out the functions which
France has entrusted to him.
It is unfair to threaten him with expulsion if he should criticize a
law that is applied to him, when all French citizens have not only the
right, but also the duty to seek the reform of a law when it harms
interests whose safekeeping has been entrusted to them.
Clemenceau proclaims the liberty of cults, and at the same time,
declares priests of a certain religion to be disqualified from French
identity by the sole fact that they obey the head of that religion and its
constitution in not accepting the dispositions of a law that they consider
to be creating obstacles to the success of their mission, mattering little
whether rightly or wrongly since they likewise have the right to be
mistaken.

107
 It is said that these threats will always be empty, and I would like to
believe it; but it is already intolerable that a minister, that a head of
government imagines for himself the right to so seriously abuse the
ministers of a religious sect, and consequently, all citizens who follow
the teachings of those ministers. If they have committed crimes, they
should be prosecuted; if they have not committed any, they must be
respected, themselves and their beliefs.
+158
If Clemenceau wants to learn about the illicit activities of the
ministers of a religious cult, and foreign agents, he only has to have an
investigation made into the propaganda of English missionaries active in
certain of our western provinces, in areas around our large maritime
towns, mainly in Bretagne. These missions insinuate themselves among
impoverished populations by the distribution of household relief; they
station doctors there who give free consultations, and pharmacists who
deliver free remedies, then, little by little, begin their work of
proselytism, and what they preach above all is separation from France
and annexation to England. It is the kind of proselytism that the masonic
lodges abstain from reporting.
In reality, Clemenceau would consider them more auxiliary than
adversarial to his policies. Is it not his dream to install Protestant
pastors in the chairs of [Bishops] [François] Fénelon [St. Francis de
Sales] and [Jacques-Bénigne] Bossuet, and English preachers at Notre
Dame?

108
Chapter 6
Conclusion
The Dictatorship of Clemenceau
+159

What Agincourt and Poitier [of the Hundred Years' War] could not
do, the genius of Edward VII has accomplished. England's old rival, who
countered its ambitions so many times, is now no more than its satellite.
Not only does France circle in its orbit, like Spain, Portugal, and so many
other secondary powers, but a more decisive role is reserved for it; on
the continent it must turn against the adversaries of Great Britain, who
will destroy them at sea.
The maharajah who sits on the throne at the Elysee Palace is
destined to only perform at public ceremonies, a dummy who clutches its
strings. The real head of government is his puppeteer. Under so many
circumstances he has proven his singular dedication to British policy, to
which he offers as many, if not more, assurances than the English
ambassador.
Justice is still not rendered in the name of the King of England, but
more importantly, it is rendered in conformance with his wishes. I am
speaking here of the justice that civilian judges render. Military tribunals
had shown some whims of independence. They are going to be abolished.
Freemasonry surveys and spies for his benefit; revolutionary
organizations are instantly mobilized with a signal from his hand. We
have Pax Brittanica, the same that rules in India.
+160
In view of the enormity of this outcome, the astonished mind
wonders and inquires how it could have been attained.
Since we became a [Third] Republic, two men have imposed their
will on Europe, Bismarck and Edward VII. How very different the methods
to which they recurred for arriving at an equal supremacy,.
Bismarck acted with audacity and trickery, by iron and fire; if he had
not been sustained in his plundering exploits by an always victorious
army, he would have ended his criminal existence like a pirate, hung
from a tree limb. This enormous success, the gratitude of the fatherland,
which he loved with single-minded and unreserved energy, perhaps

109
some day will absolve him before History; they have made him into a god
in the eyes of his contemporaries, worshipers of triumphant force. Had
he failed, he would have been demoted to the rank of the worst criminals
in the opinion of the same men.
Edward VII owes his triumph only to himself: to his profound
understanding of the human heart, the sagacity with which he knows how
to discern the vices and weaknesses of men and nations, and make them
into more dangerous weapons against themselves than the worst war
machines which the incessant progress of modern science has bestowed
on us; and to the unflagging perseverance with which he works to
gradually subjugate them in order to definitively wipe them out. He does
not utilize the devastating physical forces at his disposal against his
adversaries; he observes and spies on their shortcomings; nothing he
can profit from is lost on him for carrying out his plans.
+161
He has made an in-depth study of the mental illnesses which erode
contemporary democracy in the foremost nations of our continent, and
from this force of disintegration, which is an incessant cause of fragility
and collapse for other governments, he has known how to make an
instrument of rule to his profit.
He holds in his royal hands the spout of revolutionary storms, and
when it suits him he rains them down on the nations which must be
delivered to devastation and paralysis in the methodical efficiency of his
vast designs.
In the sixteenth century, the minor principalities which, under
diverse qualifications, tyrannized Italian republics, maintained their
despotic power only by dagger and poison. These criminal and barbarous
methods were essentially repugnant to the very Christian policy of the
king of England. Never would that policy assume the moral responsibility
of the assassination of an individual, but it is not afraid to assassinate a
nation, by an inoculation of viral anarchism. Its poisons are derived from
neither the mineral nor vegetable kingdom; it prefers to have recourse to
intellectual and spiritual poisons. It is always through the intervention of
secret societies that it operates, but its agents are not thugs or lackeys,
but humanitarians, sociologists, and pacifists; never has the blood of
their victims sullied their pure hands; denunciation and defamation are
dispatched to get rid of those who get in their way. Perhaps it is slower
to take effect, but is no less certain; in any case, the method is less

110
dangerous to the one who employs it.
+162

An empire, built on the foundations of eternal human foolishness,

will appear imperishable so long as there are charlatans to drone on
with lies, sophists and orators to spew paradoxes and a nation of saps to
believe them, so long as St. George's Golden Cavalry [colloquial
expression for a British coin] is able to regularly function to convince the
incredulous.
British domination, based on the intellectual and spiritual
abasement of the nations where it is exercised, provokes in the core of
these nations a destabilization of all social forces, whose frightening
effects each one can affirm; in Russia, by the suddenness and generality
of their explosion, in France, by their continuity.
In France, universal suffrage is shoved down a road where it does
not appear close to stopping; on the contrary, by the effect of the force
acquired, the movement is accelerating. Even if by some remote chance
the people should come to discern that they are being deceived by
conspirators and fooled by utopians, it must be feared that the nation is
sliding down a deadly incline, no longer finding in itself the forces and
resources necessary to stop its fall, or even to slow it down, and above
all to go back up the slope.
+163
This situation has not gone unnoticed in England. It is the cause of
some serious worries. England wonders, from both military and financial
perspectives, what kind of force of resistance we would still be in a
position to exert. The report of [British] General [John] French was not
completely reassuring in that regard. It concluded with the incapacity of a
civilian minister to manage the war department. [Eugène] Etienne has
been thanked and General [Georges] Picquart has been called to succeed
him. Picquart, according to Clemenceau, was the only general whose
presence at the head of the war ministry he could brag about making his
friends in Parliament tolerate, in impressing upon them that, not as a
general is he placed at the head of our army, but as a supporter of
Dreyfus.
From the other side, Clemanceau is the only man in whom Edward
VII had confidence for setting the latch of the trap that he helped to
spring so as to facilitate his accession to power. However, he is not

111
pretending that the matter is difficult.

To start with, can the Clemenceau ministry allow itself to have

great expectations and grand ideas? Is it assured of any duration?
[(Auguste) Jean] Jaurès, the head of the collectivist party - the party
which, according to all semblance of reality, is called to succeed the
radical-socialists when these will have run out of paper on their roll -
has put a term and time limit on the current cabinet on the day when said
Jaurès will have succeeded in straightening out the nebulous mess
which is agitating in his brain and discerning his ideas clearly enough to
be able to couch them on paper in the form of one or several legislative
proposals. We look forward to these legislative proposals with justified
impatience; but we strongly fear having to wait for them a long time. In
order for Jaurès to have us clearly understand what he wants, it would
be necessary for him to know it himself. Now, many times we have had to
point out that the more he tries to clarify his ideas, the more they become
confused; the more he wants to shed light on his mind, the more
impenetrable the darkness becomes. From that side then, the ministry is
not threatened with imminent danger.
+164
It is rather from the financial side that danger appears to be
imminent; on that side the situation is more unsettling. There are some
lethal accounts overdue, some irrevocable demands which will be
difficult to face and render full satisfaction.
On this ground at least, Edward VII will be able to help Clemenceau
escape from the most pressing difficulties. He will be able to facilitate a
large loan for liquidations of past debts, intended to serve as prelude to
other, yet heftier loans for the reorganization of our military forces.
Since, after all, collateral needs to be given, the first collateral which
England demands is the rapid and energetic transformation of our army,
brought to the maximum of offensive and defensive powers.
In this regard, England expects much from the energy of
Clemenceau, but it is already becoming nervous and impatient.
General Picquart suggests the elimination of war councils in which
he shows more concern with avenging personal insults than serving the
present interests of his country.
+165
For the work that is planned, reinforcing military discipline is

112
indispensable. Everyone agrees that, even for peacetime service, it is
currently too relaxed.
To eliminate war councils is to weaken that already erratic
discipline and diminish the authority and prestige of the officers over the
soldiers. Armies of all civilized nations have analogous functions. No one
can do without them, especially in wartime, and in a time perhaps even
more delicate and difficult, of preparation for war, which we are now
entering.

The world has its attention fixed on our new dictator. Among both
his allies and his adversaries, there is a great curiosity which verges on
anxiety. Is he going to be revealed as a statesman doubling as a warrior,
like Napoleon I? Is he another washed up journalist, as we have seen so
many of in recent years, climbing to the summit of power only to
plummet into oblivion or public scorn from a greater height? To demolish
and to build are different things, and, if Clemenceau has masterfully
given his full measure in demolition, if, in this regard, no one doubts his
capacity as being in a class of his own, as a builder he still has
something to prove.
The first construction job that he had to work was the construction
of his own ministry. The outcome has been mediocre and he has accrued
doubts rather than augmented hopes. The minister whose selection was
necessarily the most interesting to foreign powers was the minister of
war. I must say that the choice made by Clemenceau has resulted in
great disappointment for his best acolytes. It has been reported as a
complete misunderstanding of the dire necessities of the current
situation of our country.
+166
Italy, which was prominently turning towards closer ties with
France and England, is already turning and retracing its steps back to
Germany. In case of war and the defeat of France, Italy in effect would be
the nation most exposed to bearing the weight of resentment of its
former allies and to pay dearly for the consequences of its defection.
Italy is willing to assist in the Dreyfusist agenda and lavish praise on
Picquart as its apostle. But, wisely administering its finances, ably and
prudently conducting its domestic and foreign policies, it does not care to
jeopardize the outcomes acquired and those that it has a right to expect
from its sage decisions, by committing itself to a game so rife with

113
perilous consequences for the continental powers who are going to play
it. It refuses to be associated with breakneck politics conducted by
sleepwalkers. England, an insular power, can afford this venture; a
peninsular nation cannot.
I have not vacillated in giving the justice due to the marvelous
ability of Edward VII. I have affirmed that he has brought British grandeur
and prestige to the greatest degree of development that they have ever
attained. But if the genius of Edward VII succeeded in masking the cause
of incurable weakness, which always renders the position of England
precarious, he has not eliminated it.
+167
England has painfully admitted this incurable cause of weakness by
its treaty of alliance with Japan. It saw itself diminished in asking for the
support of the Mikado's troops to defend the borders of its Indian Empire.
Hey what? An empire of more than one hundred million inhabitants is
proclaimed incapable of defending itself, which inside its borders
numbers not only the Buddhists, those Eastern pacifists incapable of
defending themselves, I would agree, but also energetic and warlike
Muslim populations. To avoid being threatened by possible attacks, It
admits being forced to appeal to the cooperation of a nation which is
infinitely inferior to it, whether by population total, extent of territory, or
economic output. More than one hundred million people, supported by the
invincible fleets and the inexhaustible resources of Great Britain, come to
beg for the aid and protection of a relatively small nation with an
impoverished population of forty million. Aid and protection against who?
Against Russia? Who could claim that Russia, in its reduced condition
after its disasters in Manchuria and the internal disorders that followed,
constitutes a threat on the northern border of India? I assume it is no
longer France; but what about Germany? The supposition of an Ottoman
army allied with Germany in the conquest of India will remain illusory for
a some time to come. It is therefore against Asians that England is
obliged to appeal for that protection, and it is Asians from whom it is
obliged to ask for it.
+168
England is no longer only an insular power, it is a continental
power, and a continental power without an army to defend its territories
dispersed across all continents. There is its weakness.
England is reduced to admitting to itself and publicly confessing,

114
that from now on it is a great Asian power only by favor of Japan. If in the
Far East it is still a first rate power, it is through its alliance with Japan
and no longer through its Indian Empire, because that empire would be in
jeopardy if Japan were to refuse to fight in its defense. Terrible
confession! Fraught with implications, and something that had an
enormous resonance in all the Far East. It is the beginning of Asia for the
Asians.
I want to believe the Japanese are as faithful to treaties as heroic
in war, but in the end, they are Asians. They would lose the immense
prestige which their victories have secured for them in all the nations of
Asia, if they were to consent to becoming for an extended period the
police force for Europe, if they were to reduce their role to that of a
border patrol against Western invaders.
If they are momentarily resigned to accepting this unpopular and
thankless role, it is to obey unavoidable necessity: to stabilize their new
conquests and power through a loan signed with Western nations, to be
accountable for the costs of war.
+169
By natural momentum, whether it likes it or not, Japan will be
called to make itself into the champion of Asian irredentism against
European conquerors, mattering little whether they are called English,
French, or German. And now I ask you: Quis custodiet custodes [who will
guard the guardians]? Who will protect this vast empire, incapable of
defending itself, and which England admits to being in no condition to
secure alone and without the cooperation of an Asian auxiliary.
The alliance with Japan and the defeat of Russia have, at first
glance, consolidated the position of England in the Far East. May it be
warned that the consolidation is only apparent and the impenetrability
problematic. One and the other will last only as long as the good will of
Japan lasts.
In their relations with the nations of the Far East, until now the
European powers were intent on keeping intact their common prestige,
which was gained by easy victories due to the superiority of their
weapons. Whatever their commercial and political rivalries were, they
always had the prudence to present themselves to the great Asian
empires like a strongly united group, so as to have the rights of European
civilization respected, the supremacy of the white race over the yellow.
England was happy to cooperate in the destruction of that prestige,

115
of that faith in the superiority of the white race. It rejoiced in seeing a
small Asian nation of a few million people unrelentingly beat to a pulp the
greatest military empire of our continent, to give to the world the
demonstration that a few well-armed and disciplined yellow people
could, without fail, grind down millions of whites. It is an object lesson
which has been perfectly understood in all the Orient, from which
everyone pledges to use to their benefit. England will come to regret its
effects. In Asia, England is not the insular power against which our
ambitions in Europe are dashed. It is a continental power, and vulnerable
in the highest degree.
+170
After the victories at Salamis and Marathon, the Greek Republics
passed as invincible for a long time. Among all nations of the eastern
Mediterranean basin the settled opinion was that any king who dared to
do battle against the Hellenic people was marching to certain defeat. By
favor of this common conviction, they managed to keep their freedom
intact. The day when, blinded by petty rivalries, they cried to the
Macedonian infantry for help, their prestige was destroyed; they were
rapidly enslaved and their role in the world was finished. The crime
rarely goes unpunished.

The offensive and defensive alliance [Entente cordiale] between

France and England, which for some time has occasioned so much
uproar, whether it is finalized or being finalized, will it give to England the
force and security that its advocates like to attribute to it?
I don't think so.
+171
First of all, resulting from the geographic position of our country,
the alliance with France will never be able to render the eminent
services to England that the alliance with Austria procured for it during
the battle against Napoleon.
When the army of Napoleon encamped at Boulogne was
threatening the English coast, the prompt intervention of Austria, at the
head of a coalition, uprooted Napoleon and his army from the Manche
seacoast, and made it march on Vienna, leaving England to breathe easy.
When Napoleon was victoriously entering Vienna, in back of Austria he
was finding Germany and then Russia; the unflagging diplomacy of
England was always inciting new enemies for him, building new alliances

116
against him, mobilizing other armies and obligating him to incessantly
pursue other conquests, each one of which was moving him away from
the shores of Albion; while he was pursuing his enemies across the
steppes of Russia and the mountains of Spain, England never had to
worry about his presence on its coastline.
In the hypothetical case of a war pitting France and England on one
side, against Germany on the other, what would happen? We can hope for
victory, it is our duty; but our duty is also to envision the case where the
fortune of war would turn against us again. In that case, our ally could
not hope to see the gunfire of its enemy turned away from it. On the
contrary, each of its victories would get William closer to England; each
step of his triumphant army would lead him toward Boulogne and Calais,
where he would only have to wait for the cover of a favorable fog in
order to put the plans of Napoleon into effect. What would England have
gained?
+172
A victorious William II would enter Paris. He would lay down the
law to the vanquished, and, imitating the example of Napoleon, he would
turn his enemies of the eve into his allies of the next day. I do not see
Spain and Italy forcing it by a powerful diversion to abandon its latest
conquest and go to the ends of the Italic and Iberic peninsulas to seek the
defeat of its enemies. No, it would remain absolute master of the
defeated country and would utilize, with its organizing genius and all-
enveloping activity, all the forces of our country for doubling theirs.
The occupation of the peninsula of Cotentin or Bretagne by a few
thousand English would not make a significant change.
The British fleet undoubtedly remains the master of the seas. But
however well the battleships are armored, they are not invulnerable.
They are imperiled in a pass as narrow as the Channel, both on the water
and under it, both in the air and on the ground. There are coastal canons,
torpedo boats and anti-torpedo ships, submersibles and submarines, not
to mention dirigible airships and floating mines, and so many other
armaments whose scope of action endlessly increases, and whose
destructive power has not reached an end.
England will have to admit that it is protected by no more than
some iron hulls of a determinate thickness and of a limited number. For
William II it will be no more than a sacrifice of time and explosives.
Because he will not be satisfied, as they like to imagine it in England, with

117
a victory over France in order to position his weapons; he will only stop
when he will be able to recover the losses that England will have
inflicted on his commerce and navy from the commerce and navy of
England.
+173

From another point of view, England has no fewer illusions about

the France that it has before it, the France that it was or will be dealing
with. It is not the France of a previous age with whom it has gloriously
battled; that France no longer exists. By its longstanding role, acting as a
constantly corrosive force, England has contributed to destroying it.
Perhaps some day it will rise again from its ashes, under the edifying
lesson of misfortune, which like a purifying fire sometimes consumes all
defects. Nations have these marvelous initiatives of resurrection. But it
does not depend on the pleasure of our neighbors across the channel to
hasten that movement and have it revive at the exact moment when it
might best serve their interests. It does not depend on them to light or
extinguish the sacred flame as they wish.
After our disaster of 1870, for a quarter century France has worked
without respite on the reconstruction of its military forces. We said in one
voice, "We must be strong if we want to remain free; if we want to avoid a
war always hanging over our heads, to not live at the mercy of the daring
adventures of a great military monarchy. We must be invincible if we do
not want to again see the ground of the fatherland contaminated by the
presence of foreign armies, France dismembered of additional provinces,
impoverished by the payment of another ransom, if we do not want to
work eternally, like slaves, so as to enrich the luxury of our conquerors
by the billions, the fruit of our sweat."
+174
On this point there was not a dissonant note in all the land,
whatever party one belonged to, whichever the point on the political
spectrum one's preferences were oriented, either public or private,
whether it was monarchist or bonapartist, moderate or socialist
republican, everyone was in agreement on this special point, this
principal point, that above all it was necessary to rival efforts to render
France more invulnerable than ever to foreign attack. In effect, everyone
equally understood, by reasoned conviction among some, among others
by spontaneous instinct, that the well-being of France, the maintenance

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of its independence and security and its immunity in regard to foreign
invasion, were the foremost conditions for conserving the progress
achieved in the present, and completing the progress hoped for in the
future.

At that time everyone loudly proclaimed that military service was

the principle duty of a citizen, that the law must not at any price tolerate
that anyone, whoever it might be and under what pretext it might be,
could indoctrinate that one is permitted to exempt oneself from the strict
fulfillment of that primordial obligation; that the equality of all children
from the same fatherland facing that great social necessity of military
service was the foremost condition of their equality before civil law and
political law, the primary basis and necessary justification of the
electoral right conferred on all, of universal suffrage, and universal
aptitude for all public functions. The fulfillment of that great duty, the
noblest and finest of all because it elevates a man above himself and
induces him to make, for the common welfare, the sacrifice of his
individuality as well as his dearest affections, because it is the most
complete expression of the social solidarity on which modern society
rests, born of the French Revolution and all future progress of nations,
outside of which everyone recognized that there is nothing but servitude,
shame, and misery.
+175
Then every school was a blazing forge of patriotism. A teacher took
pride in teaching children that the first duty, the one which surpasses all
others and to which it is necessary, if needed, to sacrifice all, even life,
even the sacred affections of the family, was duty to the fatherland. The
French schoolteacher had read and repeatedly heard that the German
schoolteacher had been the true craftsman of our defeats, and in turn he
was putting his rightful pride in becoming the craftsman of the
resurrection of France and the necessary reparations, to have the spirit
of his students internalize the breath of courage, abnegation, and
heroism, to render them stronger than the children of the surrounding
nations by moral strength, by respect for discipline voluntarily accepted,
not as a restraint but as a support. He was focused, with a noble passion,
on making them understand that every Frenchman, besides the natural
gifts which he might have been granted by nature, and the benefits that
he can receive from relatives, derives from the quality of being French, a

119
patrimony of civilization, intelligence, love of liberty, and glorious
traditions more precious than all others, and which he must neither cede
to others, nor let be severed, at any price, under penalty of forfeiture.
+176

The army was loved and respected by all, as the ramparts of

national territory, of our honor, our work, and all our possessions, not
only of material goods, which some do not have and that even those that
do have them can lose from one day to the next, but of liberty, that
immaterial possession, the total value of which unfortunately the people
only come to appreciate when they have lost it. The nation and the
Parliament do not recoil in the face of any sacrifice to render the army
equal in spiritual force, and as much as possible in material force, if not
by quantity at least by the perfection of armaments, with those of the
neighboring nations, who encircle us with a belt of iron and fire, dry
powder and sharpened swords.
Everyone understood that the primitive epoch is past when it was
sufficient for the farmer to grasp a plowshare with a vigorous arm, to
raise up the blade of his scythe, to make them into fearsome weapons, to
run down the invader and make him bite the dust. It appeared even to a
vision with the least foresight that in order to be usefully served by
modern weapons so clever, complicated, and well-crafted, the young
soldier needs to receive prolonged instruction for acquiring dexterity in
handling a weapon, an exactitude at a glance and an agility of movement
which require particular instruction, special preparation, and continual
exercise; that men exposed to the murderous effects of long range fire
who have not learned by methodical training with sufficient repetition to
take advantage of all the variations of the ground, the folds of the terrain,
so as to take cover and be protected at the start, to then advance by
leaps and bounds, to finally surprise the enemy and victoriously dislodge
him from his positions, is to commit them to a death both certain and
futile. Then, they did not plan to reduce the term of military service from
three years to two, to soon bring it to being no more than one. They were
not striving to render the periods of duty for reservists completely
delusional, with no real instructional effect on the men, nor to turn the
native colonial troops into a mere army in theory. Anyone who would
have proposed at that time the substitution of a militia or a national
guard for the regular army, would have been taken for a fool or criminal

120
who wanted to have the flower of his country's population stupidly
mowed down by foreign bullets.
+177

The general consensus was that one of the causes of the inferiority
of our armies in 1870 had been the superiority of education, homogeneity,
and solidarity of the German military command over its French
counterpart. They wanted a working officer corp, seriously taught and no
longer expecting promotion through privileged relationships, but only
through merit and personal valor, confirmed by commanders directly in
charge. They would have considered anyone a traitor who would have
proposed having the career of officers depend on favors due from their
servility to unscrupulous politicians, or their subjugation in a secret
society; whosoever would have cast their fate into the hands of men
alienated from the army, ignorant of military matters, imbued by
sectarian prejudices and by a deplorable mania of cliquish exclusivity
and mistrust. They would have wished public scorn on anyone who would
have declared that to his eyes, the officer worthy of Third Republic
government protection is not one who had known how to acquire the
esteem and affection of his commanders, but one who had profited from
deserting the brotherhood in order to betray his brother-in-arms, by
spying on the secret of their beliefs or those of their family, and
denouncing them; one who had made himself a stairway of rapid
advancement out of the annihilation of their hopes and the destruction of
their future.
+178
This France has been cut down. Nothing remains of it but some
sparse and solitary vestiges. The old city has been taken by assault,
surrendered to pillage and razed; the ground was plowed over and
seeded with salt.
Internationalism had been substituted for patriotism; pacifism for
the warrior spirit; anti-militarism for the spirit of duty to country;
hervéism for discipline.
+179
The head of the nation and the head of the army are two men who,
each in his own sphere of activity and particular means, have most
contributed to this transformation. Even you, our dear allies, have loudly
applauded that metamorphosis. You encouraged it, and to the extent of

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your material forces, you assisted it.
Now that you currently envision the eventual use of our military
support, you are frightened by having succeeded so well. You appear
totally surprised by it. You think then that it was a laughing matter that
General André worked for the disorganization and demoralization of our
army. No, it was very serious. These days you want to put the vehicle in
reverse! So be it; but then stipulate to your proconsul [Clemenceau] to
treat serious things seriously, to not ridiculously battle against papal
canons, which do not threaten us, but to put us into position to counter
German cannons, which do threaten us.
You want France to be the English citizen soldier, and we should
assume the risks of war on the continent, so that you should garner the
advantages of victory at sea; so be it again. But, on condition that you will
impose on those who you celebrate seeing in leadership, to whom you
have contributed with all your means for assuring their triumph, the
obligation of putting us into position to endure the conflict without too
much of a disadvantage, and with a serious chance of success. For that,
you already know, there is no time to lose. We must concentrate all our
efforts on military preparation. This must absorb all our social energy
and all our financial means. Only at that price can it be equal to the task
to be accomplished.
+180
If you permit your proconsul to continue the work that he has
pursued until now, of the disintegration of our motive forces and the
dilapidation of our public funds, you know where we are going: for
France, to the most lamentable of disasters; for you, to the most perilous
of misfortunes.

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