Although Germany has commemorated her victories for the last twenty-five years, and will doubtless continue to commemorate them for the next six months and then for evermore, it seems that we are to be compelled, in deference to “superior orders” revealed at the Council of Ministers, to postpone the official consecration of a monument intended to prove our devotion to our mutilated country, and our incurable grief at the defeat of Sedan.  It seems that we have not the right, a free people, to give to sorely oppressed Alsace-Lorraine (which never ceases to give proofs of her fidelity to France) a proof in our turn, that we remember the disaster which has separated us, that we lament this disaster, and hope one day to repair, if not to avenge it.  Our pride is being systematically humiliated in every direction!  The nature and consequences of victory have indeed been cruelly modified, if one must submit to the law of the conqueror after having been delivered from him for twenty-five years.  The glorious resistance of the past thus becomes an ignominious surrender and makes us shed tears of shame, even more bitter than those which we shed over our saddest memories.

Gentlemen of the Government of France, I would ask you to read the German newspapers; go to Berlin, go wherever you like in Germany or in Alsace-Lorraine, and you will find there hundreds and hundreds of monuments which have been inaugurated by the Imperial German Government.  For these, the smallest event, ancient or modern, affords sufficient pretext. [14]

In all things and in every direction we yield today to the authority of a monarch who emphasises our defeat more severely than those who actually conquered us.  Our strict national duty towards him who did not overcome us with his own sword, was to hold ourselves firmly upright before him and to protect our brethren, victims of the war.  Alas! we have been obedient to Bismarck, and we shall be submissive to William II.  But why, and to what end?  Had we met the liar and cheat with honesty, had we remained calm in presence of this nerve-ridden individual, we should have been able to recover, morally at first and then actually, all the advantages that Prussia gained by her victory.

The Imperial victim of restlessness, whose nerves are so unhealthily and furiously shaken when he goes abroad, has a craving for disturbing the nerves of others; this in itself makes him the most dangerous of advisers.  William II never allows to himself or to others any relaxation of the brain; like all spirits in torment, he must needs find, forthwith, to the very minute, a counter-effect to every thing that confronts him.  With him, even a sudden calm contains the threat of a storm, excitement lurks beneath his moods of quietness.  The bastard peace which he has authorised Turkey to conclude, conceals a new revolution in Crete:  such is his will.  No sooner is there evidence of an improvement in our relations with Italy, than he invites King Humbert to be present at the German military manoeuvres, in order to create dissension between the two countries.  And so it is in everything.  He makes it his business to inspire weariness and vexation of spirit, to destroy those hopes and feelings which restore vitality to the soul of a people.  He is for ever stretching out a hand that would fain control by itself the rotation of the globe, and he sets it all awry.