To keep this idea alive, Mme. Adam has written and laboured for forty-five years. With this object, as we shall see, she founded a fortnightly magazine, La Nouvelle Revue. In an article in this review, dated September 1881, replying to an accusation made by the German Press that France was likely to appeal to force, Mme. Adam writes: “We have never ceased to ask M. Gambetta to remind our brethren separated from us that we have never renounced the hope of reunion with them.” Then she adds diplomatically: “Nothing in this affirmation need alarm Germany’s military hegemony. Nevertheless, it is well for her to know that, though far from dreaming of a rash war, we shall never be guilty of the crime of forgetting.”
The wave of patriotic and nationalist fervour, which, as the result of the Tangier (1905) and Agadir (1911) incidents, swept over France during the ten years which preceded this war, indicated no desire for aggression even on the part of the most rabid revanchard. It was purely for a defensive war that France was preparing when in 1913, in reply to Germany’s threatening military measures, she increased to three years the term of military service, which in 1905 had been reduced to two. By that time any idea of la Revanche as a practical measure had vanished from the majority of French minds.[288] It was not on her eastern frontier so much as in her vast colonial empire that France now saw herself threatened by Germany.
Mme. Adam, still passionately clinging to the forlorn hope of la Revanche, had in her old age come to find herself practically alone except for a little group of literary idealists. Her adherence to this idea, which had been renounced by the majority of her nation, explains her political and religious evolution during the last thirty years.
Previous chapters of this book will have shown how completely in accord with Mme. Adam’s passionate, patriotic and energetic disposition was this persistent advocacy of la Revanche. Retaliation was in her blood. Even as a child, whenever she or any one else received an injury or suffered an injustice her first thought had been that some one must be made to pay for it. She had never been able to take any wrong lying down. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, was her motto; and nothing appeared to her so humiliating as the Christian doctrine of resignation.
After the war her desire for retaliation grew into a consuming passion. “I suffer acutely,”[289] she writes, “from that malady of defeat, that perpetual pain which maddens a Frenchwoman who has been conquered at every turning of the roads of Alsace, of Lorraine, who has been crushed at Sedan, deceived and surrendered at Paris.” That suppressed combativity (combativité rentrée),[290] which on the capitulation of Paris she felt well-nigh bursting her head and her heart, pursued her from February 1871 until August 1914.
Mme. Adam argued like Mr. Wells’ Letty when she believed her husband, Teddy, to be dead.[291] “You see, if he is dead, then Cruelty is the Law, and some one must pay me for his death. Some one must pay me.... I shall wait for six months after the war, dear, and then I shall go off to Germany.... And I will murder some German. Not just a common German, but a German who belongs to the guilty kind....”
On much the same lines did Mme. Adam reason when the iron of defeat entered into her soul—she, too, would exact payment, not for any personal wrong, but for a national injury; she would murder some German, not only of the guilty but of the guiltiest kind, the arch-criminal himself—none other than Bismarck. Only she would murder him not with the sword, but with a weapon in the handling of which she was more expert—with her pen. With this object, as we have said, she founded, with the fortune her husband left her, La Nouvelle Revue. In the pages of this magazine, in a series of powerful articles entitled, “Letters on Foreign Politics,” she pursued unceasingly the Man of Iron, revealing his hidden designs, disclosing his plots, and warning France against the snares he was perpetually laying for her.
It was impossible that so terrific a disaster as l’Année Terrible should leave any serious-minded French person the same as before the war. But it had not the same effect upon every one. While most of Mme. Adam’s circle embraced the policy of la Revanche, there were some who, like George Sand and Arlès Dufour, turned their hatred not so much against Germany as against war as a whole, and who found their internationalist principles strengthened by defeat. With such ideas Mme. Adam had not a particle of sympathy. They sundered her from many of her friends. They caused her to turn with more enthusiasm than ever to the one man who seemed capable of realising her hopes, to Gambetta, l’Homme de la Revanche. Indeed, Gambetta’s immense energy, his marvellous organising power, marked him as the one man in Europe capable of confronting and checkmating that sauvage de génie, Bismarck.
But, as we have said, Mme. Adam’s hope in Gambetta as l’Homme de la Revanche was doomed to disappointment. In order to see how her idol came to be dethroned from his pedestal, we must retrace our steps, returning to that critical year for the Republic, 1875.