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.