Juliette Adam has always been intensely sure of herself and her opinions.  She has the virile fighting spirit of a super-suffragette.  “Always out of rank,” as Gambetta described her, “Madame Integrale” has displayed throughout her political and literary work a contempt for compromise of every kind, which occasionally leads her into untenable positions and exaggerations.  Like her friend George Sand, she has ever been an inveterate optimist and in the clouds, and this defect of her very qualities has tended to make her proficient in the gentle art of making enemies.  Thus she broke with Anatole France for espousing the cause of Dreyfus, because, in spite of her keen sense of justice, she identified the Army with France and was instinctively opposed to Jews, because she regarded their “cosmopolitan” influence as incompatible with patriotism.  For her, all things and all men have been subordinate to the sacred cause, to her watch-word and battle-cry of Vive la France!  Nobly has she laboured for France, confident ever in the renaissance of la Grande Nation, and of her country’s final triumph.  And to-day her unswerving faith is justified, and her life work has been recognised and crowned with honour in her own land.

With one exception, all the articles collected in this book have been taken from Madame Adam’s “Letters on Foreign Politics” in La Nouvelle Revue.  Together they constitute a remarkable testimony to the political foresight and courage of la grande Francaise, and an equally remarkable analysis of the policy and character of Germany’s ruler.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Modesty is out of fashion nowadays:  what is wanted is the glorification of every kind of courage.  That being so, I hold myself entitled to claim a Military Cross, for my forty-five years of hand-to-hand fighting with Bismarck and with William the Second, and to be mentioned in despatches for the past.

JULIETTE ADAM.

CHAPTER I

1890

William II, the “Social Monarch”—­What lies beneath his declared pacifism—­His journey to Russia—­The German Press invites us to forget our defeat and become reconciled while Germany is adding to her army every day.

April 12, 1890. [1]

What an all-pervading nuisance is William!

To think of the burden that this one man has imposed upon the intelligence of humanity and the world’s Press!  The machiavelism of Bismarck was bad enough, with its constant demands on our vigilance, but this new omniscient German Emperor is worse; he reminds one of some infant prodigy, the pride of the family.  Yet his ways are anything but kingly; they resemble rather those of a shopkeeper.  He literally fills the earth with his circulars on the art of government, spreads before us the wealth of his intentions, and puffs his own magnanimity.  He struggles to get the widest possible market for his ideas:  ’tis a petty dealer in imperial sovereignty.