France was the nation of society, the nurse of arts and manners. England and France supplied reciprocal wants. Their friendship is a pledge for European peace. Had the Czar been made aware of it in time, the blunder and misfortune of the Crimean War would not have taken place. In Coningsby he called Paris “the university of the world,” and enlarged on commercial exchange between two first-class powers in a vein at once light and serious. In 1845, France regarded Peel as the guardian of Anglo-French cordiality, and feared the chance of Palmerston’s return to office as fraught with a possible treatment of “the French connection with levity or disregard.” Louis Philippe relieved his anxieties by consulting Disraeli on this point.[130]
“A good understanding,” was Disraeli’s interpretation in 1864, “between England and France is simply this—that so far as the influence of these two great powers extends, the affairs of the world shall be conducted by their co-operation instead of by their rivalry. But co-operation requires not merely identity of interest but reciprocal good feeling. In public as well as in private affairs, a certain degree of sentiment is necessary for the happy conduct of matters.” In another speech ten years earlier he also observed that Anglo-French relations were not dynastic, but depended on commercial interests.
Perhaps his most remarkable expression on this theme occurs in a speech of 1853,[131] when Sir James Graham had gone about saying that the Emperor was a despot who turned his people into slaves, and when there was one of those periodical outbursts of Gallophobia to which we are accustomed. Disraeli pointed out that peace with France had then subsisted for forty years, that social relations had multiplied, that an identity of interest in high policy existed. He exploded the fallacy that national hostility was a true tradition. Even Agincourt and Crécy stood for a struggle between two princes rather than between two nations. “... No one can deny that both Queen Elizabeth and the Lord Protector looked to that alliance as the basis of their foreign connections. No one can deny that there was one subject on which even the brilliant Bolingbroke and the sagacious Walpole were agreed—and that was the great importance of cultivating an alliance, or good understanding, with France. At a later date the most eminent of the statesmen of this century, Mr. Pitt, formed his system on this principle....” The traditional prejudice, therefore, was the reverse of true. The natural tendency was to concord, for after the great European revolutions at the close of the eighteenth and dawn of the nineteenth centuries, a durable peace had emerged. Nor were the defences (which Sir Robert Peel had really inaugurated) due to the rise of the Third Napoleon; they were due to the changes in scientific warfare. It was true that in France there was then a military government. “But there is a great error also, if history is to guide us, in assuming that because a country is governed by an army, that army must be extremely anxious to conquer other countries.” The lust for conquest under militarism is due to home-uneasiness, and from a feeling in the army that its power is not felt. The real prejudice was that France had subverted her constitution. This prejudice had foundation, but it was the very cause of those acts which indiscreet journalism was now criticising so angrily. “Some years ago,” he resumed (and the glimpse of Louis Philippe is interesting), “I had occasion frequently to visit France. I found that country then under the mild sway of a constitutional monarch—of a prince who, from temper as well as policy, was humane and beneficent. I know that at that time the Press was free. I know that at that time the Parliament of France was ... distinguished by its eloquence, and by a dialectic power that probably even our own House of Commons has never surpassed. I know that under these circumstances France arrived at a pitch of material prosperity which it had never before reached. I know also that after a reign of unbroken prosperity of long duration, when he was aged, when he was in sorrow, and when he was suffering under overwhelming indisposition, this same prince was rudely expelled from his capital,[132] and was denounced as a poltroon by all the journals of England, because he did not command his troops to fire upon the people. Well, other powers and other princes have since occupied his seat, who have asserted their authority in a very different way, and are denounced in the same organs as tyrants because they did order their troops to fire upon the people. I think every man has a right to have his feelings upon these subjects; but what is the moral I presume to draw upon these circumstances? It is this, that it is extremely difficult to form an opinion upon French politics; and that so long as the French people are exact in their commercial transactions and friendly in their political relations, it is just as well that we should not interfere with their management of their domestic concerns.”
The same ideas animated him in 1854, when he pointed out that ten years earlier the Czar had, by a secret manœuvre, sought to provoke an estrangement which had not endured, but which the Czar was led to believe enduring when the Crimean War broke out. The same guided his hearty approval of Mr. Cobden’s aims in relation to France. What he objected to in the later Italian Treaty was that it embodied “reciprocity” too late—at a time when for England reciprocity could secure no more. In 1858—the Walewski affair—Disraeli termed our alliance with France “the key and corner-stone of modern civilisation.” After the Treaty of Villafranca, Disraeli advised England not “to go to congresses and conferences in fine dresses and ribands, to enjoy the petty vanity of settling the fate of petty princes,” but to have recourse to “your ally the Emperor of the French”—a monarch who, as Disraeli said some years afterwards, “... has been created and can only be maintained by the sympathies of his people—a proud, imperious, and apt to be discontented people.” In 1860, when many were jubilant over Italy’s united nationality, Disraeli, demonstrating its present incompleteness, asserted that its accomplishment must come not through the “moral influence of England,” but “by the will and the sword of France”—though this did not blind him to contingent perils.
“It is the will of France that can alone restore Rome to the Italians. It is the sword of France, if any sword can do it, that alone can free Venetia from the Austrians.” But in a long and splendid speech he urged, almost prophetically, that by forcing the French Emperor to a policy which he was unwilling to pursue, we should eventually give him a dangerous preponderance: “... It will be in his power ... to make those greater changes and aim at those greater results which I will only intimate and not attempt to describe.” In 1864, on the Danish crisis, advocating firmness of action following on firmness of statement, he once more repeated: “... If there is, under these circumstances, a cordial alliance between England and France, war is most difficult; but if there is a thorough understanding between England, France, and Russia, war is impossible.” Though here, again, this consideration would not deter him from the single object of England’s welfare.
Finally, he consulted French sentiment in the delicate arrangement at Berlin. “... There is no step of this kind that I would take without considering the effect it might have upon the feelings of France—a nation to whom we are bound by almost every tie that can unite a people.... We avoided Egypt, knowing how susceptible France is with regard to Egypt; we avoided Syria; ... and we avoided availing ourselves of any part of the terra firma, because we would not hurt the feelings or excite the suspicions of France.... But the interests of France ... are, as she acknowledges, sentimental and traditionary interests; and although I respect them, ... we must remember that our connection with the East is not merely an affair of sentiment and tradition, but that we have urgent and substantial and enormous interests which we must guard and keep.”
I pass now to Germany. Prussia, in his early days, he had described as “the Persia” of Europe; the Austrians as “the Chinese.” Some thirty years before Germany became united, and Bismarck had brandished the mailed fist, Disraeli regarded much in the air as “dreamy and dangerous nonsense;” he considered theory and “inner consciousness” as distinctive of the German nature, and he failed to perceive the rising wave of its instinct for united nationality. Here certainly his foresight flagged. When Prussia dismembered Denmark, he pointed out that by the arguments used she, too, might be deprived of Posen. Here certainly his foresight failed. But when the great war broke out, he rose to the occasion and realised its meaning to the full. “It is no common war,” he said at the onset, “like that between Prussia and Austria, or like the Italian war in which France was engaged some years ago; nor is it like the Crimean War. This war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century. I don’t say a greater or as great a social event. What its social consequences may be are in the future. Not a single principle, accepted by all statesmen for guidance in the management of our foreign affairs up to six months ago, any longer exists. There is not a diplomatic tradition that has not been swept away. You have a new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope, at present involved in the obscurity incident to the novelty of such affairs.... Lord Palmerston, eminently a practical man, trimmed the ship of State and shaped its policy with a view to preserve an equilibrium in Europe. But what has come to pass? The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers, and feels the effects of this great change most, is England.” He recommended an attitude of “armed neutrality,” such as Austria’s occupation of the Danubian provinces, which certainly abridged the Crimean War. Such a policy tends to prevent, if possible, to shorten if it cannot prevent a conflict; and when that conflict is finished, to temper the terms for the vanquished. Had it been feasible in the then state of our armaments, it might have produced lasting results. As time went on Disraeli grew to understand Germany better, though he never ceased to regret the humiliation to France. In Bismarck, however, he found a powerful friend, and one of his last utterances regarding Germany was to praise her as a peacemaker.
At the Berlin Congress Lord Beaconsfield made his speeches in English. This was of design. A story was told that an eminent English diplomatist, in attendance on his chief, had adroitly suggested this course out of apprehension that “Dizzy’s” French accent might not impress foreign representatives. But however this may have been, I am convinced it was not the real reason, which was to assert the leadership of Great Britain.
Disraeli’s French was fluent, if insular. In Italian he was naturally proficient. Italian literature was familiar to him, and next to Dante, he was fondest of Alfieri, a fine passage from whom, it will be remembered, he quotes in Lothair. He knew German well enough to read it.
No sentiment surrounded his favour to Austria. It was her partition that he feared. So early as 1848 he objected, from the sole standpoint of England’s interest, to championing the Magyars and the Italians against Austria, the Sicilians against Naples. We should, he then said, “mind our own business.” And in 1856, when he combated the views of his opponents who sighed for the dismemberment of Russia, he also pointed out the dangers to European peace that must attend the dismemberment of Austria. The complete dismemberment of that empire—partly a few years later to be accomplished—would involve the independence of Hungary and the emancipation of Italy.