THE PRELUDES TO THE TRIPLE ENTENTE.* IN Problems of Power
Mr. Fullerton has given us a most informing summary of the diplomatic history of Europe "from Sadowa to Kirk-Kilisse." Whether we agree with his conclusions or not, there can be no question as to the value of his premises, for his premises are the actual facts of the intermediate years. The reader may question his prophetic faculty, but he cannot find fault with his narrative. It is the beat account we have seen of the understandings and mis- understandings between the Great Powers during the last half-century. In Mr. Fullerton's opinion they have their origin in two "Titanic blunders " —the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein and the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine. Mr. Fullerton has not quite made out the claim of the first of these " blunders " to take equal rank -with the second. It supplied, no doubt, the immediate occasion of the war between Austria and Prussia. But the cause lay deeper, and the two claimants for the headship of Germany would have settled their quarrel by arms even if Schleswig-Holstein had remained Danish. The annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was a more serious transfer of a hostile population to a new master. Probably it would never have taken place if Bismarck had foreseen the capacity for recovery of which France was to give such wonderful proof. As early as 1875 he had become alive to his mistake, and but for the intervention of Russia he would have completed his unfinished work. If a ruined France had not forgotten the lost pro- vinces, at all events she would have remembered them to no purpose. But a France which after the war of 1870 and the Commune "found the 3 per cent. rente between 50 and 51, and, in spite of an enormous ransom and colossal loans, raised the credit of the State to a point that had been unknown under the Restoration, under the July Monarchy, or under the Second Empire," remained a France to be reckoned with. If there had been no severance of territory, the memory of 1870 would have died out, as a man forgets a disease from which be has suffered when the cure is complete. But with Alsace and Lorraine gone the sore remains open and capable at any moment of becoming angry. The Russian alliance has indeed put the question aside—for the time. In the first instance its purpose was misunderstood. If the French nation, as a whole, welcomed it, "it was because it felt that France could now hold up her head in Europe, and that one day perhaps she could tear up the Treaty of Frankfort." As regards the persistence of this dream, Mr. Fullerton quotes a striking passage from M. Lavisse : "Never has our Government taken care to explain to us the exact meaning of the Alliance. It has thus far spoken and acted as if there were an understanding warranting vast hopes. It has encouraged the very natural illusion of a country given to enthusiasms. It has not perceived that we needed the real truths, naked and dry— harsh if necessary." The Franco-Russian Alliance had a very different aim from that which Frenchmen not in the secret had attributed to it. The object of the Russian statesmen was to prevent any breach of the European peace, and the road to this object lay through the maintenance of the status quo. In becoming a party to the furtherance of this policy the French Government had acted in the spirit of Gambetta's maxim : "If France would come to an understanding with Russia she could do more than recover her position in Europe: she would be able to destroy the German hegemony.' . . . The essential thing for those who were responsible for the destinies of France was to effect the alliance at all costs. Its bearing and significance could be explained later on."
The way in which the French people accepted this " disillusionment" is one of the most notable passages in their history. They displayed that "stoic courage to see and to take things as they are which is the primary condition of practical statesmanship." They distinguished between what was within their reach and what was out of it.
• Problems of Power. By William Morton Fullerton. London Constable and Co. L78. 6d. net.]
They did not suffer their passion for things which could only be gained by a European war to blind them to the existence of other things which, in the actual European position, could be gained without war. Such a sacrifice of national sentiment cannot be made without loss. "We must not overlook the fact," says II. Faguet, as quoted in this volume, "that from a certain point of view it [the Russian Alliance] did us consider- able harm—I mean moral harm. Until the Alliance, hope of reparation for the disasters of 1870 was a living sentiment in. French hearts. . . . I date from the Russian Alliance le flgchissement, nzomentane, je l'espere, du patriotisme en France."
Recent events have shown that 31. Fagnet's hope was well founded. France has learnt to content herself for the present with what is alone possible in the present. She recognizes not only that the object of the Triple Entente is to keep Europe at peace, but that in a Europe at peace she will find opportunities for that national recovery which, after all that she has done to bring it about, is still incomplete. But this does not mean that she accepts the Treaty of Frankfort. " Pour retronver In libert6 de sea mouvernents," so M. Lavisse told the Alsace-Lorraine students in 1911, " la France n'aurait qu'h. dire un tout petit
mot : J'oublie. Ce tout petit mot, elle ne le dira pas." And the prosecuting counsel in the recent trial of a political
caricaturist could thus describe the state of things in the "lost provinces." "An ardent nationalism is arising, and I do not refer to that nationalism summed up in the formula, 'Alsace-Lorraine aux Alsacien-Lorrains.' No, I refer to that blue, white, and red nationalism which not only harks back to the past, but is cultivating among the people of Msace- Lorraine the hope of a better future to such a degree that some of our Alsace-Lorraine youth regard the tricolour as their own flag." If the Triple Entente had done nothing else Europe would have good cause to be grateful to it for indefinitely postponing the realization of these ambitions.
For some time the value of the Franco-Russian alliance to the peace of Europe was obscured by events in the Far East. Meanwhile France, "left unmolested to pursue her African adventure, was being driven daily, almost hourly, along the fatal path leading to war with England." Germany did all in her power to favour French colonial expansion, a policy of which "the first result. would be to pit France against England under every clime and on every sea." Fashoda, brought the two Powers to a better appreciation of their real interests. "While they had been irritating one another by constant pinpricks, Germany had been looming more and more menacingly on the horizon." The paralysis of Russia brought the lesson home to the French Government, and the supposed impossibility of England and France coming to an honest and inclusive understanding upon all the points in dispute between them became an accomplished
fact. Mr. Fullerton quotes with just pride a telegram sent by him to the Times from Madrid—he was then one of its foreign correspondents—and published in the issue of February 2nd, 1903, rather more than a year before the con- clusion of the Anglo-French Agreement of 1904 :— "Towards the end of last summer [the summer of 1902] M. Delcasse, through his ambassador in London . . . presented to Lord Lansdowne, with a loyalty which would appear to have been appreciated by the British Government, certain complete, decisive, and businesslike proposals (' des propositions fermes ') which if accepted at the time would have had, if I may say so, not merely North African, but European consequences. . . . In compensation for French official recognition of the English occupation of Egypt France was to be allowed a free hand in dealing with Moroccan territories save on the North African coast line."
Occupied first by the affairs of South Africa and then by those of Venezuela, the British Government requested to be allowed to postpone the consideration of these proposals. But they were not forgotten. The definite understanding arrived at in 1904 gave complete effect to the French proposals of 1902.
Yet in Mr. Fullerton's opinion the Entente with France was not yet assured, and but for the German Emperor might never have been assured. In 1905 he practically forced the French Government to part with M. Delcasse. This tem- porary humiliation had an unexpected result in the revival of the French national spirit. "A period of what the French call reeueillement, of silent meditation that quickly 'became articulate, assuming the sanest forms of self-criticism, marked
the inevitable conversion of the French soul. . . . France was recovering the sense of her national integrity." The change
which began then has carried M. Poincare to the Presidential chair and made M. Delcass6 the Ambassador of France at St. Petersburg. But in the first instance this moral revolution was not wholly favourable to the maintenance of the Entente. "What every Frenchman wanted to know" was whether Englishmen had as keen a sense as the French had of the vital importance of maintaining the European equilibrium. Domestic cares and the 'noble hieratic ceremony of the Coronation" seemed to banish from the English mind the infinitely greater question of their relative position in the world. It was here that the German Emperor intervened with such wonderful effect. He sent a cruiser to Agadir. This was what was needed to rouse England from her political lethargy, and to make the Anglo-French Entente the governing fact in her foreign policy which it has since become and we may hope will long remain.
We have only touched on isolated points of Mr. Fullerton's book. But it is full of shrewd observations on a variety of matters, political and economic, and forms a most convenient introduction to the study of European affairs from 1870 onwards.
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