The Schemes of the Kaiser
Adam, Juliette
English
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THE SCHEMES OF THE KAISER
From the French of Juliette Adam
by J. O. P. Bland
New York
E. P. Dutton & Company
1918
Printed in Great Britain
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
More fortunate than the majority of the prophets who cannot speak
smooth things, Madame Adam has lived to find honour in her own country:
_La grande Française_ has come into her own. God willing, she should
live to see that _revanche_ for which, through good and evil report,
she has laboured unceasingly these forty-five years, to see the
arrogant Prussian humbled to the dust and Alsace-Lorraine restored to
France. 1917, she firmly believes will revenge and reverse the tragedy
of 1871. More fortunate than the great British soldier who spent his
veteran days in warning his countrymen of the ordeal to come, Madame
Adam, now in her eighty-first year, may yet hope to see the banners of
the Allies crowned with victory, the black wreaths on the statue of
Strasburg in the Place de la Concorde changed to garlands of rejoicing.
There have been dark days in these forty-five years, times when, even
to herself, the struggle for _la patrie_ seemed almost a forlorn hope.
It was so at the time of the Berlin Congress in 1878, when, after his
visit to Germany, Gambetta abandoned the idea of _la revanche_. It was
so in 1891, when she realised that the influence of Paul Déroulède's
Ligue des Patriotes had ceased to be a living force in public opinion,
when France had become impregnated with false doctrines of
international pacifism and homeless cosmopolitanism, when (as she wrote
at the time) there were left of the faithful to wear the forget-me-not
of Alsace-Lorraine only "a few mothers, a few widows, a few old
soldiers, and your humble servant." But never, even in the darkest of
dark days, was the flame of her ardent patriotism dimmed. After her
breach with Gambetta, determined not to be defeated by the Government's
abandonment of a vigorous anti-German policy of preparation, she
founded the _Nouvelle Revue_, to wage war with her brain and pen
against Bismarck and the ruler of Germany. The objects with which she
created that brilliant magazine, as explained by herself to Mr.
Gladstone in 1879, were threefold--"to oppose Bismarck, to demand the
restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, and to lift from the minds of young
French writers the shadow of depression cast on them by national
defeat." The fortnightly "Letters on Foreign Politics" which she
contributed regularly to the _Nouvelle Revue_, for twenty years were
not only persistently and violently anti-Teuton: they became a powerful
force in educating public opinion in France to the necessity for an
effective alliance with Russia, and to the cause of nationalism, in the
Balkans, in Egypt, and wherever the liberties of the smaller nations
were endangered by the earth-hunger of the great. She disliked and
feared the policy of colonial expansion inaugurated by Gambetta and
pursued by Jules Ferry, because she felt that it must weaken France in
preparing for the great and final struggle with Teutonism which she
knew to be inevitable. Thus, when Ferry requested her to cease from
attacking Germany, she defied him, assuring him that nothing less than
imprisonment would stop her, and that no honour could be greater than
to be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck.
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 Intégrale" 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
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