The general trend of France’s European policy was repugnant to Italy.  She looked on it as a well-laid scheme to assume a predominant role on the Continent.  That, she believed, was the ultimate purpose of the veto on the union of Austria and Germany, of the military arrangements with Britain and the United States, and of much else that was obnoxious to Italy.  Austria was to be reconstituted according to the federative plans of the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to be made stronger than before as a counterpoise to Italy, and to be at the beck and call of France.  Thus the friend, ally, sister of yesterday became the potential enemy of to-morrow.  That was the refrain of most of the Italian journals, and none intoned it more fervently than those which had been foremost in bringing their country into the war.  One of these, a Conservative organ of Lombardy, wrote:  “Until yesterday, we might have considered that two paths lay open before us, that of an alliance with France and that of an independent policy.  But we can think so no longer.  To offer our friendship to-day to the people who have already chosen their own road and established their solidarity with our enemies of yesterday and to-morrow would not be to strike out a policy, but to decide on an unseemly surrender.  It would be tantamount to reproducing in an aggravated form the situation we occupied in the alliance with Germany.  Once again we should be engaged in a partnership of which one of the partners was in reality our enemy.  France taking the place of Germany, and Jugoslavia that of Austria, the situation of the old Triple Alliance would be not merely reproduced, but made worse in the reproduction, because the Triplice at least guaranteed us against a conflict which we had grounds for apprehending, whereas the new alliance would tie our hands for the sake of a little Balkan state which, single-handed, we are well able to keep in its place.

“We have had enough of a policy which has hitherto saddled us with all the burdens of the alliance without bestowing on us any advantage—­which has constrained us to favor all the peoples whose expansion dovetailed with French schemes and to combat or neglect those others whose consolidation corresponded to our interests—­which has led us to support a great Poland and a great Bohemia and to combat the Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Spain, to whose destinies the French, but not we, were indifferent."[238] A press organ of Bologna denounced the atrocious and ignominious sacrifice “which her allies imposed on Italy by means of economic blackmailing and violence with a whip in one hand and a chunk of bread in the other."[239]