FOOTNOTES:
[344] Souvenirs, VII. 87.
[345] Souvenirs, VI. 470.
[346] Ibid., VII. 241.
[347] Ibid., 331.
[348] Souvenirs, III. 227.
[349] Ibid., VII. 321.
[350] Souvenirs, VII. 365.
[351] Souvenirs, VII. 404.
[352] Ibid., 366.
[353] Ibid., 392.
[354] Souvenirs, VII. 324.
[355] Après l’Abandon de la Revanche.
CHAPTER XVII
VIEWS ON FOREIGN POLITICS
1878-1917
“La Politique extérieure qui a toujours été la grande préoccupation, le grand apprentissage de ma vie.”—Mme. Edmond Adam, Souvenirs, VII. 218.
A fortnight after the appearance of the first number of La Nouvelle Revue, on the 17th of December, 1879, Émile de Girardin gave a dinner-party; un dîner de gala it was called by Mme. Adam, who was one of the guests. Among other distinguished persons present were Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone and Gambetta.[356] At dessert the talk fell on the new review; and Mr. Gladstone asked the editress what were its objects.
“I have three,” she replied: “to oppose Bismarck, to demand the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, and to lift from the minds of our young writers the shadow of depression cast by national defeat by giving them fame ten years earlier than they would otherwise have acquired it.”
“And you expect to accomplish your three objects?” Mr. Gladstone inquired.
“Perhaps not all of them,” replied Mme. Adam. “But of one thing I am certain: that I shall see Bismarck’s fall during the existence of the review.”
“Gambetta, who was listening,” adds Mme. Adam, “smiled defiantly at these words. Gambetta, qui écoutait, eut un sourire et un regard de défi.” He may have smiled. But it is more than probable that his defiant air existed alone in his friend’s imagination. For, as she herself has frankly confessed elsewhere, Gambetta was never malicious.[357]
“What are you yourself going to write in your review?” Gambetta asked. “Doubtless you will appropriate foreign politics.”[358] Gambetta was right. And by no means the least valuable and striking contributions to the review were those fortnightly letters on foreign politics—Lettres sur La Politique Extérieure, which for twenty years Mme. Adam never ceased to contribute, and which she continued to write for some months after the magazine had passed out of her hands. Her last letter appeared in June 1900. In 1916 she collected all her articles bearing on Bismarck and his policy and published them in a volume entitled L’Heure Vengeresse des Crimes Bismarckiens. Her articles on the Emperor William II have likewise been collected and published in book form under the title of Guillaume II. (1890-1899).
In everything Mme. Adam wrote throughout these one-and-twenty years, la Revanche was the dominating idea. Nevertheless, we cannot too often repeat that which we have said in a foregoing chapter:[359] she never advocated an aggressive war with Germany, even for the purpose of regaining the lost territory.
In 1887, at the close of the Schnœbele Incident, one of those Teutonic pin-pricks by which Germany was for ever stirring up French hostility, Mme. Adam wrote in La Nouvelle Revue:[360] “Whatever our enemy may think, his neighbours on the west have long ago lost their craving for the battle-field. Thither they no longer hasten madly; but thither if attacked they will march resolutely.”
Mme. Adam’s object in perpetually harping on la Revanche was to keep France in a state of preparedness for the attack she felt convinced could not fail to come, and also to assure her brethren in Alsace-Lorraine that they had not been forgotten. Her policy was the reverse of Gambetta’s pensons y toujours n’en parlons jamais. She believed in for ever, in season and out of season, speaking and writing of la Revanche.
La Revanche was by no means the only subject on which Juliette Adam and Gambetta had fundamentally disagreed. They had differed, for instance, on the question of the attitude which France, after her defeat, should assume towards Europe, notably at the time of the Berlin Congress, in 1878.
The place of the meeting alone would have sufficed to provoke Mme. Adam’s hostility to the Congress. For France, at the conqueror’s bidding, to go to his capital there to discuss, without mentioning her own wrong, the affairs of Europe on the basis of the status quo, seemed to la grande Française nothing but a new humiliation. And this view finds justification in Professor Oncken’s contribution to the Cambridge Modern History.[361] Here, in accents of pride, the German Professor describes the Congress, which brought statesmen from every European country to the capital of the new empire, as a magnificent acknowledgment of the position of Germany, and one of Bismarck’s greatest achievements. One cannot help sympathising with Mme. Adam’s patriotism when she protests against a French contribution to this new crown of glory for the German Empire.
While Gambetta argued that France, by standing out of the Congress, would lose in prestige, Mme. Adam maintained that she would gain by standing aloof as a Power which it was necessary to win over. Moreover, she told Gambetta that her friend, Cialdini, the Italian Ambassador in Paris, had assured her that if France should refuse to be represented at the Congress Italy would follow her example.
Such having been Mme. Adam’s attitude towards the Congress from the beginning, she naturally inclined to find fault with all the decisions and arrangements made at Berlin.
She was in Rome when the Congress closed on the 13th of July. “Jour néfaste,” she writes, “s’il en fût jamais. Le Congrès de Berlin se termine. L’encouragement aux troubles, aux ambitions futures est signé.”[362] And now that well-nigh forty years have passed she still regards ce jour néfaste as a black-letter day. “Le Congrès de Berlin,” she wrote only last year, “ma bête noire, l’un des deux motifs pour lesquels je me suis brouillée politiquement avec mes meilleurs amis.”[363]
As Russia’s faithful friend[364] and the ardent advocate of a Franco-Russian alliance, Mme. Adam strongly resented Russia’s treatment at Berlin. She suspected that one of Bismarck’s ideas in summoning the Congress had been to rob Russia of the fruits of her victories in the Russo-Turkish War. She saw that as a result of the Congress Russia had become as isolated in the East as was France in the West. That Russians were themselves of this opinion was proved, when on leaving Berlin the Russian Chancellor Gortchakoff declared “the Congress to have been the darkest page in his career.”
Gambetta’s attitude towards Russia has puzzled not a few. It must ever be difficult to discover the personal views of so opportunist a statesman. “The real truth about Gambetta’s life, death and opinions will never be known,” said recently one of those with whom he was most intimately acquainted. In his early conversations with Mme. Adam he annoyed her extremely by his mistrust of Russia, which he shared with most French Radicals of that day, and which resulted from Russia’s autocratic Government and her treatment of the Poles. For Mme. Adam, to be the enemy of Germany was to be the friend of Russia. “Anti-allemande passionnée et violente, j’étais logiquement slavophile,” she writes.[365] And in one of the numerous quarrels with Gambetta at the time of his proposed interview with Bismarck, she confesses that she darted at him this insult: “You are Prussian, I remain Cossack.” But Gambetta was well inured to such venomous words from his too candid friend; and the patient endurance with which he suffered them speaks volumes both for his equanimity and for Mme. Adam’s powers of fascination.
If France must needs emerge from her isolation and form an alliance with some European Power, Gambetta would have preferred that Power to be England rather than Russia. Mme. Adam, animated by her Picard dislike of England, unable to forgive us for standing aloof in 1870, would not hear of an English Alliance. There came a time, however, when Gambetta began to see that both an English and a Russian alliance might be necessary to protect France against German aggression. Dimly foreshadowing the Triple Entente of a quarter of a century later, he began to overcome his dislike of Russia. Writing to Mme. Adam in January 1877,[366] he says in reference to Russia’s alarm at Bismarck’s designs on the Baltic Provinces: “Le ressentiment est flagrant chez les Russes, il s’agit de l’exploiter.” Gambetta, however, does not take to himself the credit of originating the idea of the Franco-Russo-British Entente. In his recently published letters to his friend and supporter Ranc,[367] he ascribes this idea to the Prince of Wales (afterwards Edward VII), whom, in February 1878, he met more than once at the Café Anglais. By the Prince’s insight into European politics Gambetta was deeply impressed. In this matter he was far from sharing the views of a recent English writer on King Edward.[368] Was that growing passion for luxury, that love of fashionable life, which Mme. Adam so frequently deplores, casting a spell over Gambetta and warping his judgment so far as to make him attribute to his royal acquaintance opinions which were really his own? We cannot say. But at any rate, in this letter to Ranc, Gambetta describes His Royal Highness as predicting that Russia would find her political aspirations in the Near East thwarted by Austria, that Austria would influence Roumania, that together Austria, Roumania and Turkey would ally themselves against Russia. “What a conflict!” exclaims Gambetta. “Nevertheless, this is what the Prince of Wales foresees. He does not share that hostility to Russia which animates part of his nation. With all his young authority he opposes any measures likely to injure Russia. He has in him the stuff of a great statesman.”
That Gambetta over-rated the Prince’s “young authority” (jeune autorité) will be obvious to all acquainted with the British constitution, and to those who know what was the position accorded to the Prince of Wales during his mother’s reign.
The enthusiasm of the Prince of Wales for Russia ought to have pleased Mme. Adam. But she does not record that Gambetta confided it to her, although he spoke to her frequently of his meetings with the Prince.[369] Gambetta protested to her that the Prince was far from being what rumour represented him, a mere festoyeur. “He loves France seriously as well as gaily,” said Gambetta. “His great dream of the future is an understanding (une entente) with us.”
Thereupon Mme. Adam rejoined bitterly: “We know what an understanding with England brings to any country, which is so simple as to enter into it.”
In those days, when Disraeli was Prime Minister, Mme. Adam regarded what she described as “the insatiableness of Great Britain” with an apprehension almost as grave as that inspired by her fear of Germany. While for our liberal statesmen, for Mr. Gladstone and John Bright notably, she had a profound admiration; Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury she regarded as hand and glove with Bismarck.
It was with this triumvirate, she believed, and not without reason,[370] that had originated at Berlin an idea, which, realised three years later, was to prove disastrous not to France alone, but to the peace of Europe. This idea was the French occupation of Tunis. The colonisation of Tunis had long been an Italian dream. To northern Africa Mazzini had directed the ambitions of his countrymen as early as 1838.[371] Probably British statesmen, by suggesting Tunis to France merely intended to give her something which should atone to her for the British occupation of Cyprus. But Bismarck had other designs: he wished above all things to distract French attention from the north-eastern frontier. As later he was to say to a French diplomatist: “Go to Morocco, it will help you to forget Alsace-Lorraine,” so now for the same reason he encouraged France to go to Tunis. But there is little doubt that when he gave this encouragement the wily fox at Varzin was entertaining a yet subtler design: already he had come to an understanding with Austria, and to the German-Austrian Entente he was eager to add Italy. By embroiling Italy with France he hoped to achieve this object, and he succeeded. The year after the French occupation of Tunis, Italy joined Germany and Austria; and on the 20th of May, 1882, the Triple Alliance was concluded. Its formation and its periodic renewal[372] rendered yet more imperative the conclusion of the Triple Entente. And it will generally be admitted that one of the causes of the present conflict lies in this unfortunate, though possibly inevitable, arrayal of the great European Powers in two hostile camps.
Here, therefore, in the French colonisation of Tunis, we have an event fraught with momentous consequences. How did Mme. Adam regard it? In the last volume of her Souvenirs, which we must remember were compiled nearly twenty years later, she sees in it one of Bismarck’s designs for the ruin of France. But, in her articles contributed at the time to La Nouvelle Revue, it is interesting to find her refusing at first to believe in the possibility of any alliance between Italy and Austria. Bismarck may plot if he likes; but in that direction, not even such an arch-schemer as the German Chancellor could possibly succeed. Mme. Adam, herself an irreconcilable Revancharde, felt confident that her Latin brethren in Italy could never so far forget their unredeemed territory as to ally themselves with the Austrian plunderer, “and to consent to be dragged behind the chariot of Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns.” But alas! that swift Gallic intuition, which had often led her to see into the future of European politics, had for the moment forsaken her. Italy was not true to la Revanche. She came to terms with the conqueror. When the Triple Alliance was formed Mme. Adam saw one of her brightest dreams vanish. She had hoped to substitute for Gambetta’s Triple Entente between France, England and Russia another three-cornered understanding, one between France, Italy and Russia.
Now that Italy had joined the enemy Mme. Adam turned with more enthusiasm than ever to Russia. Writing[373] of her articles on foreign politics in La Nouvelle Revue, she announces that she will give Russia a prominent part. “Pour mes lettres sur la politique extérieure,” she writes, “mon siège est fait, la lutte à plume armée contre Bismarck et pour l’alliance russe.”[374] Already her friendship with Tourguénieff had taught her something of the Russian soul. She studied Russian history, especially the history of the revolutionary movement. She was in constant correspondence with General Chanzy, the French Ambassador at Petrograd. Finally, in 1882, she visited Russia.
She stayed at the Hôtel de l’Europe. There she was visited by numerous persons of distinction. No one impressed her so much as General Skobeleff, the heroic defender of Plevna. They were well matched, these two passionate patriots—this handsome Western woman, la grande Française, and this typical Cossack, this fervent Slav. He was called “the white General,” because it was his custom to wear, in battle, a white coat, which challenged the enemy’s bullets to defile its spotless purity with blood-stains. Alike for the Russian Pan-Slavist and the French Revancharde there was but one device, “the German is the enemy.” No one in Russia did Mme. Adam long more to see than this hero of the Russo-Turkish War. Their meeting, which occurred in the vast yellow drawing-room of the Hôtel de l’Europe in January 1882, she has vividly described in her little book on Skobeleff, first published in 1886, and reprinted in a revised edition in 1916.
“We looked at one another,” she writes, “not wishing to make any trivial remarks.... It was of his cause I spoke to him before my own. And this is what he said to me about the Balkan peoples: ‘I assure you they are tyrannised over. They must fill you with pity. For example, in Bosnia, in Herzegovina, the oppressor forces the children to serve in the very army which has slain their fathers and brothers. Into their hands is put a gun all dripping with the blood of Slavs. This thought drives me mad, as it must you when you think of the people of Alsace-Lorraine serving in the Prussian army.’
“‘Yes, but they were actually our brethren, they were so near to us, the Slavs of Bosnia and Herzegovina are not so intimately related to you.’
“‘Not these Slavs! Why, they are our brethren,’ he said in a tone which thrilled me through and through. ‘Pray do not let us argue about the relative acuteness of our suffering. Russia waged war in order to deliver the Slavs beyond the Danube from the Turkish yoke.... And now she cannot permit Austria’s yoke to be substituted for Turkey’s. The former is also more oppressive, for it tyrannises not merely over the individual’s person, but over his conscience....’
“‘Austria,’ I argued, ‘has for some years been hardly responsible for her action in the East. It is Germany who is urging her to dominate over the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, and to conquer them both by force of arms and by diplomacy.’
“‘Germany!’ he repeated, and into that one word he breathed all the fire of his hatred.
“The preachers of the Crusades must have looked like that apostle of the Slavs.
“‘I no longer love war,’ said Skobeleff. ‘No, I love it no longer; I have waged it too often,’ he added, as if replying to his own inmost thought. ‘No victory is worth all it costs of energy, of strength, of public money and of men. Yet there is a war for which I should ever be ready, and which I should never deem too costly. It is a holy war. Sooner or later the devourers of the Slavs must be themselves devoured. On that day, I see it, I will it, I predict it, Germany will be devoured by the Slavs, the Latins, the Franks.’”
Mme. Adam and her new friend had far too much in common for their friendship to cease with her departure from Petrograd. He followed her to Paris. There he visited her salon. They agreed to work together, to unite all their forces in order to oppose what Skobeleff described as le système d’enveloppement bismarckien. But their hopes were disappointed by Skobeleff’s early death at the age of thirty-nine. Shortly before he died he said to one of his compatriots: “Carry on my work, and do not neglect to bring into all your plans our friend in Paris.” Mme. Adam is one of those who lay at Bismarck’s door the sudden passing of this brilliant soldier and irreconcilable Germanophobe. But the Chancellor has enough crimes accredited to him without this. A distinguished French journalist, who knew Skobeleff, and in many ways greatly admired him, wrote to me recently: “I do not believe he was assassinated by orders from Bismarck. I know too much of his death to believe that. Mais les défauts de ses propres qualités l’ont conduit à une mort rapide.”
The effect of Skobeleff’s influence on Mme. Adam was to render truer than ever the words of her friend, Mme. Novikoff: elle a la Russie au cœur.[375] Now with all her heart and soul she began to work for a Franco-Russian Alliance. It was precisely this alliance that Bismarck feared. Mme. Adam’s persistent advocacy of it in the columns of La Nouvelle Revue, and the numerous charges on which she never ceased to indict the Chancellor, provoked him on one occasion to cry out: “Is there no one who can silence cette diablesse de femme?” The German Ambassador at Paris is said to have repeated this question to M. Jules Ferry, then Prime Minister. “Only one person,” he replied, “and he unhappily is dead: her husband, Edmond Adam.” Ferry, however, Mme. Adam has told me, desiring to obtain German support or acquiescence in his policy of colonial expansion, and wishful, therefore, to please the German Government, did ask her to discontinue her Germanophobe articles. “Only if you imprison me,” she replied. “And what an honour! To be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck.”
Keeping closely in touch with her Russian friends Mme. Adam was overjoyed as the years went on to find sympathy with France growing in Russia. At first it had existed only among Russian Revolutionaries. But it began to spread to the conservatives, and finally to the Czar, Alexander III, himself. Then came the glorious days of Cronstadt and Toulon. When the French squadron, under Admiral Gervais, entered Cronstadt harbour, on the 25th of July, 1891, Mme. Adam was in an ecstasy to hear with what immense enthusiasm it had been received. When, in the following August, the Treaty of Alliance between France and Russia was signed, Count Ignatieff, the ex-Minister of Interior, sent her a telegram beginning: “To you is due the honour of having predicted the sentiments which unite French and Russian hearts,” and ending with the wish that “the bond which unites our two countries may endure for ever.”[376]
In October 1893 a detachment of the Russian fleet entered Toulon harbour on a return visit. Mme. Adam, we may be sure, took care to be in the South of France during that visit. In the festivities with which the Russian soldiers were entertained at Toulon, and later in Paris, she played a prominent part. On behalf of the women of France she presented the Russian sailors with numerous gifts, and each married officer received from her hand a gold bracelet for his wife. On another occasion, a distinguished Russian, visiting Paris, was proud to find that Mme. Adam had been deputed to bestow upon him his brevet de commandeur de la légion d’honneur.[377]
Mme. Adam’s sympathies as an ardent Slavophile were by no means confined to Russia. No Slavonic people is without a place in her heart. Their struggles against Teutonism have always appealed to her. With Gambetta she believed that one of the surest ways of pulling down the Germanic Tower of Babel is to hold out a helping hand to the Slavs of the Lower Danube.[378] She has ever been the friend of Roumania. In La Nouvelle Revue she wrote on the 1st of September, 1881: “Roumania’s attitude will never be aggressive.” Again, in the same publication, on the 15th of the month, she continued to preach confidence in Roumania: “I believe,” she wrote, “that Roumania, by reason of her smallness, constitutes the best safeguard of international interests and the surest guarantee of the liberty of a river (the Danube) which she has no intention of exploiting for her own personal ends.”
Throughout the eighties and nineties, whenever she could escape from her editorial duties in Paris, Mme. Adam would start off on some journey to Central Europe—to Vienna, Hungary, North Italy or Montenegro.[379] Thus she has been able to study on the spot the Near Eastern question. And for twenty years she conducted in Austria and the Balkans a veritable crusade on behalf of nationalism, anti-Teutonism and Slavism. Everywhere her charm of manner and her acquaintance with Ambassadors in Paris obtained for her an entry into diplomatic circles; and it may well be imagined that the insight she thus gained into the most complex of European problems was invaluable to her in writing her articles on foreign politics for La Nouvelle Revue.
In 1884, during her visit to Hungary, which she has described in her book, La Patrie Hongroise, she found herself up against a difficulty, the stubbornness of which she had not suspected. She was dismayed by the Magyar indignation at her Slavist propaganda. For the Magyars Russia was as much “the enemy” as was Germany for French Revanchards. Socially, the Nationalist party was charmed to receive her; on that field, as always, she proved irresistible; but her Slavist gospel they rejected with scorn. After her return to Paris the leader of the Hungarian nationalists, Count Apponyi, wrote her a letter expressing irreconcilable antagonism to Russia. He declared that in case of a conflict between Russia and Germany, Hungary’s instinct of self-preservation would lead her to place her army of 600,000 men[380] at Germany’s disposal. Again, in June 1888, Count Apponyi wrote: “Even under the charm of your pen, madame, the most ingenuous of readers cannot help smiling to see the name of Russia coupled with any ideal whatsoever.... We for centuries have been the safeguard of civilisation. We arrested that wave of barbarism, the inflow of the Turks, which broke against our frontier. The same fate will attend the Russian wave.”
In no country did Mme. Adam more passionately espouse the national cause than in Egypt. Here her motto was, “Egypt for the Egyptians.” She had great faith in the Egyptian people, and she strongly approved of the French refusal to join the British in their bombardment of Alexandria.
Mr. Gladstone’s action in this matter was a sad blow to her admiration of this illustrious statesman. She had regarded him as the apostle of the oppressed, as “the initiator of democracy.” She had admired his championship of Armenia and Bulgaria and of Home Rule in Ireland. Of the Irish problem, she had written: “Mr. Gladstone is the only man, not in Great Britain alone, but in Europe, capable of dealing with such a desperate situation.”[381] Contrasting the British Prime Minister with the German Chancellor, she writes:[382] “While Europeans are accustomed to await in agonising suspense the acts and speeches of M. de Bismarck, they await in hope and in confidence the utterances of Mr. Gladstone.”
When she saw Mr. Gladstone taking what seemed to her the anti-nationalist side in Egypt, she could only believe that he had been forced into this concession fatale by “British mercantile Chauvinists” and Palmerstonians.[383] Mr. Gladstone’s good-will towards France she never doubted; but she deplored that it had been unable to permeate the British Foreign Office.[384]
The influence of mercantile Chauvinism Mme. Adam discerned in the Fashoda Affair. It was then giving birth to that British Imperialism, which whether advocated by Mr. Chamberlain or Lord Rosebery[385] seemed to her equally dangerous. In the South African War she saw what she had described as l’insatiable ambition des agents britanniques in Egypt, developing into la voracité scandaleuse de l’Angleterre en Transvaal.[386]
It was with some dismay, however, that on this question of the Boer Republic’s Independence Mme. Adam found herself in line with her arch-enemy, the Emperor of Germany. And one can hardly congratulate her on the fiction with which she tried to extricate herself from such a lamentable position; for she genuinely persuaded herself that William II was only supporting Kruger in order to please his subjects, and that in reality Queen Victoria’s grandson could not fail to side with his grandmother.
Mme. Adam’s hereditary suspicion of la perfide Albion was, as she herself confessed to me, by no means allayed by the Entente Cordiale. It was not until Great Britain retrieved the error of 1870, and definitely entered the Great War as the Ally of France, that this grande Française began to trust us.
That she has completely changed her opinion of us, and that she is not ashamed to own it, is proved by this extract from one of her letters written to me in 1916. She is referring to an Englishman who had recently visited her at Gif....
“Abbaye de Gif,
”S. et Oise,
“Le 8 octobre, 1916.
“... Comme le grand député capitaine respire la volonté, la conviction, le patriotisme! Quelle joie d’apprendre nos alliés si autrement que je croyais les connaître.”
One of her British confrères, she describes as le plus parfait gentilhomme du monde. Now in 1917 she writes: “L’Angleterre est admirable. Vive l’Angleterre. Her improvised army is worth the most ancient of armies. Be proud of it. Such words on my lips are not without their value. For I was once your enemy. I blamed your policy at the Berlin Congress and in Heligoland.” “Now, side by side, fer à fer, France and the United Kingdom will drive out of France, out of Lorraine, out of Belgium, the German, who is the enemy of us all.”[387]
In conclusion, we must not omit to note that Mme. Adam’s classical interests could not fail to lead her to sympathise with the national movement in Greece and with the ideals of her friend, Venizelos, with whom she has corresponded during the present war. We are not surprised to learn that the leader of Greek Nationalists welcomed with enthusiasm the publication of Mme. Adam’s book, L’Heure Vengeresse des Crimes Bismarckiens. For his poor distracted land has indeed been one of the worst sufferers from Bismarck’s crimes, and from the decisions taken by that bête noir of Mme. Adam, the Berlin Congress.