rapprochement to Germany might seem to be unnatural.  It was so.  In truth, her alliance with the Central Powers was based, not on good-will to them, but on resentment against France.  The Italian Nationalists saw in Austria the former oppressor, and still raised the cry of Italia irredenta for the recovery of the Italian districts of Tyrol, Istria, and Dalmatia.  In January 1880, we find Bismarck writing:  “Italy must not be numbered to-day among the peace-loving and conservative Powers, who must reckon with this fact. . . .  We have much more ground to fear that Italy will join our adversaries than to hope that she will unite with us, seeing that we have no more inducements to offer her[257].”

[Footnote 256:  Politische Geschichte der Gegenwart, for 1881, p. 176; quoted by Lowe, Life of Bismarck, vol. ii. p. 133.]

[Footnote 257:  Bismarck:  Some Secret Pages, etc., vol. iii. p. 291.]

This frame of mind changed after the French acquisition of Tunis.

     Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

should have been the feeling of MM.  Waddington and Ferry when Bismarck encouraged them to undertake that easiest but most expensive of conquests.  The nineteenth century offers, perhaps, no more successful example of Macchiavellian statecraft.  The estrangement of France and Italy postponed at any rate for a whole generation, possibly for the present age, that war of revenge in which up to the spring of 1881 the French might easily have gained the help of Italy.  Thenceforth they had to reckon on her hostility.  The irony of the situation was enhanced by the fact that the Tunis affair, with the recriminations to which it led, served to bring to power at Paris the very man who could best have marshalled the French people against Germany.

Gambetta was the incarnation of the spirit of revenge.  On more than one occasion he had abstained from taking high office in the shifting Ministries of the seventies; and it seems likely that by this calculating coyness he sought to keep his influence intact, not for the petty personal ends which have often been alleged, but rather with a view to the more effective embattling of all the national energies against Germany.  Good-will to England and to the Latin peoples, hostility to the Power which had torn Elsass-Lothringen from France—­such was the policy of Gambetta.  He had therefore protested, though in vain, against the expedition to Tunis; and now, on his accession to power (November 9, 1881), he found Italy sullenly defiant, while he and his Radical friends could expect no help from the new autocrat of all the Russias.  All hope of a war of revenge proved to be futile; and he himself fell from power on January 26, 1882[258].  The year to which he looked forward with high hopes proved to be singularly fatal to the foes of Germany.  The armed intervention of Britain in Egypt turned the thoughts of Frenchmen from the Rhine to the Nile.  Skobeleff, the arch enemy of all things Teutonic, passed away in the autumn; and its closing days witnessed the death of Gambetta at the hands of his mistress.