The chief results of the Russo-Japanese War were to paralyse Russia, thereby emasculating the Dual Alliance and leaving France as much exposed to German threats as she was before its conclusion; also to exalt the Triple Alliance and enable its members (Germany, Austria, and Italy) successively to adopt the forward policy which marked the years 1905, 1908, 1911, and 1914.  The Russo-Japanese War therefore inaugurated a new era in European History.  Up to that time the Triple Alliance had been a defensive league, except when the exuberant impulses of Kaiser William forced it into provocative courses; and then the provocations generally stopped at telegrams and orations.  But in and after 1905 the Triple Alliance forsook the watchwords of Bismarck, Andrassy and Crispi.  Expansion at the cost of rivals became the dominant aim.

We must now return to affairs in France which predisposed her to come to friendly terms, first with Italy, then with Great Britain.  Her internal history in the years 1895-1906 turns largely on the Dreyfus affair.  In 1895, he, a Jewish officer in the French army, was accused and convicted of selling military secrets to Germany.  But suspicions were aroused that he was the victim of anti-Semites or the scapegoat of the real offenders; and finally, thanks to the championship of Zola, his condemnation was proved to have been due to a forgery (July 1906).  Meanwhile society had been rent in twain, and confidence in the army and in the administration of justice was seriously impaired.  A furious anti-militarist agitation began, which had important consequences.  Already in May 1900, the Premier, Waldeck-Rousseau, appointed as Minister of War General Andre, who sympathised with these views and dangerously relaxed discipline.  The Combes Ministry, which succeeded in June 1902, embittered the strife between the clerical and anti-clerical sections by measures such as the separation of Church and State and the expulsion of the Religious Orders.  In consequence France was almost helpless in the first years of the century, a fact which explains her readiness to clasp the hand of England in 1904 and, in 1905, after the military collapse of Russia in the Far East, to give way before the threats of Germany[510].

[Footnote 510:  Even in 1908 reckless strikes occurred, and there were no fewer than 11,223 cases of insubordination in the army.  Professor Gustave Herve left the University in order to direct a paper, La Guerre sociale, which advocated a war of classes.]

The weakness of France predisposed Italy to forget the wrong done by French statesmen in seizing Tunis twenty years before.  That wrong (as we saw on pp. 328, 329) drove Italy into the arms of Germany and Austria.  But now Crispi and other pro-German authors of the Triple Alliance had passed away; and that compact, founded on passing passion against France rather than community of interest or sentiment with the Central Empires, had sensibly weakened.  Time