The New France has brought forth a New Woman!
Through all the organised approach to Self-Sufficiency and Economic Rehabilitation, France has not lost sight of her grudge against the Germans. Indeed, no phase of her business life to-day is more picturesque than the campaign now in full swing not only against Teutonic trade, but against any resumption of commercial relation with the hated enemy across the Rhine. Right here you get a striking difference between English and French methods. While Britain takes out some of her enmity against German trade in eloquent conversation, France has gone about it in a practical way, shot through with all the colour and imagination that only the French could employ upon such procedure.
Preliminary to this campaign was a characteristic episode. Almost with the flareup of war, the French mind turned sentimentally to those fateful early Seventies when Germany in the flush of her great victory seized the fruits of that triumph. Some of those fruits were embodied in the famous Treaty of Frankfort in which the Teuton clamped the mailed fist down on every favoured French trade relation.
The war automatically annulled this treaty, and although the nation was in the first throes of a struggle that threatened existence, it celebrated the revocation in characteristic fashion. Millions of copies of the Frankfort Treaty were printed and sold on the streets of Paris and elsewhere. The excited Frenchman rushed up and down brandishing his copy and saying: "Now we will ram this treaty down the throat of the Boche!"
This emotional prelude was now followed by a definite crusade for the elimination of German goods. Anti-German societies were formed all over the country. Backing these up are dozens of other formidable organisations, such as Chambers of Commerce and Business Clubs. Typical of the campaign is the formation of a Buyers' League which is intended to assemble all persons who will take a resolution never to buy a German product and be satisfied for the remainder of their lives with the French manufactured article.
Wherever you go in France, you find some concrete and striking evidence of the Anti-German wave. When you get a bundle from a Paris shop, you are likely to find stuck on it a brilliantly coloured stamp showing a pair of bloody hands holding a number of packages, the largest one labeled "made in Germany." Under it is the sentence in French reading: "Frenchmen, do not buy German products. The hands that made are reddened with the blood of our soldiers."
There is great variety in these stamps, which are used on letters and packages. One of the most popular shows a helmeted German with a brutal face holding a smiling mask before his visage. In one hand he holds a bundle marked "Made in Germany." On this stamp is the inscription: "Mistrust their smiles—in every German there is a spy."
Still another and equally popular stamp pictures a soldier with bandaged head standing by a prostrate comrade and pointing to a fleeing German. The inscription reads: "We chase the Germans during the war. You, civilians, will you allow them to return after peace?"
One stamp used much throughout the Provincial French cities shows a woman in deep mourning weeping over a grave marked with a cross surmounted by a red soldier cap. The woman is supposed to be saying these words: "French people, buy no more German products. Remember this grave."
A companion stamp shows a figure representing the French Republic and holding the tri-colour. The flag is attached to a spear with which she is piercing the breast of a German eagle on the ground. At her side is the national bird of France, the Cock, crowing triumphantly. Underneath are the words: "Refuse all German products."