Yet victory has taken away from France her greatest prestige, her fascination as a democratic country. Now all the democratic races of the world look at France with an eye of diffidence—some, indeed, with rancour; others with hate. France has comported herself much more crudely toward Germany than a victorious Germany would have comported herself toward France. In the case of Russia, she has followed purely plutocratic tendencies. She has on foot the largest army in the world in front of a helpless Germany. She sends coloured troops to occupy the most cultured and progressive cities of Germany, abusing the fruits of victory. She shows no respect for the principle of nationality or for the right of self-determination.
Germany is in a helpless and broken condition to-day; she will not make war; she cannot. But if to-morrow she should make war, how many peoples would come to France's aid?
The policy which has set the people of Italy against one another, the diffusion of nationalist violence, the crude persecutions of enemies, excluded even from the League of Nations, have created an atmosphere of distrust of France. Admirable in her political perceptiveness, France, by reason of an error of exaltation, has lost almost all the benefit of her victorious action.
A situation hedged with difficulties has been brought about. The United States and Great Britain have no longer any treaty of alliance of guarantee with France. The Anglo-Saxons, conquerors of the War and the peace, have drawn themselves aside. Italy has no alliance and cannot have any. No Italian politician could pledge his country, and Parliament only desires that Italy follow a democratic, peaceful policy, maintaining herself in Europe as a force for equilibrium and life.
France, apart from her military alliance with Belgium, has a whole system of alliances based largely on the newly formed States: shifting sands like Poland, Russia's and Germany's enemy, whose fate no one can prophesy when Germany is reconstructed and Russia risen again, unless she finds a way of remedying her present mistakes, which are much more numerous than her past misfortunes. Thus the more France increases her army, the more she corners raw materials and increases her measures against Germany, the more unquiet she becomes.
She has seen that Germany, mistress on land, and to a large extent on the seas, after having carried everywhere her victorious flag, after having organized her commerce and, by means of her bankers, merchants and capitalists, made vast expansions and placed a regular network of relations and intrigue round the earth, fell when she attempted her act of imperialistic violence. France, when in difficulties, appealed to the sentiment of the nations and found arms everywhere to help her. What then is able organization worth to-day?
The fluctuations of fortune in Europe show for all her peoples a succession of victories and defeats. There are no peoples always victorious. After having, under Napoleon I, humiliated Germany, France saw the end of her imperialistic dream, and later witnessed the ruin of Napoleon III. She has suffered two great defeats, and then, when she stood diminished in stature before a Germany at the top of her fortune, she, together with the Allies, has had a victory over an enemy who seemed invincible.
But no one can foresee the future. To have conveyed great nuclei of German populations to the Slav States, and especially to Poland; to have divided the Magyars, without any consideration for their fine race, among the Rumanians, Czeko-Slovaks and the Jugo-Slavs; to have used every kind of violence with the Bulgars; to have offended Turkey on any and every pretext; to have done this is not to have guaranteed the victory and the peace.
Russia sooner or later will recover. It is an illusion to suppose that Great Britain, France and Italy can form an agreement to regulate the new State or new States that will arise in Russia. There are too many tendencies and diverse interests. Germany, too, will reconstruct herself after a series of sorrows and privations, and no one can say how the Germans will behave. Unless a policy of peace and social renovation be shaped and followed, our sons will witness scenes much more terrible than those which have horrified our generation and upset our minds even more than our interests.
Meanwhile, in spite of the frightful increase of scrofula, rickets and tuberculosis, from which the conquered peoples are principally suffering, the march of the nations will proceed according to the laws which have hitherto ruled them and on which our limited action can only for brief periods cause small modifications or alterations.