THE NEW EUROPE
thoughts found utterance. For one moment, when General Boulanger seemed to be mounting the seat of power, they believed that their hour had come; but the hope was speedily broken in the débâcle of the Boulangist movement. The tide then seemed to turn against them. After Boulanger, Panama; after Panama, Dreyfus; and their confidence in France as a deliverer began to be shaken. The great anti-clerical struggle to which the Dreyfus case gave birth showed them how deeply the French people were preoccupied with their own domestic affairs, and did more than anything else to throw Alsace and Lorraine on their own resources. Finally, for all concerned, the increasing contrast in military power between France and Germany seemed to postpone indefinitely all hope of deliverance.
Meanwhile, these negative influences were aided in their work of removing la revanche from the arena of practical politics by others of a positive character. Industrial development raised economic questions and created new political needs; the advance of Socialism brought a formidable rival to French nationalism into the field of politics in the Reichsland; Catholics in large numbers, especially during the anti-clerical struggle in France, gravitated towards the Centre Party; and the growth of other parties created diversions and divisions which tended to impair the strength of the French spirit. Despite all this, the Reichsland remained aloof from the rest of the Empire. France had done her work of assimilation too well, her ideals were too attractive, her democracy too congenial to Alsace-Lorraine, to be uprooted by force. Co-operation with the more democratic German parties might be said to have begun to wean the two provinces from their ideal of political incorporation in France. but it had also proved that their French character could not be destroyed. Before the war broke out, Alsace and Lorraine had clearly showed that their original refusal to enter the German Empire could only be overcome by the grant of autonomy, and that autonomy itself was a pis-aller. France remained the ideal.
The war has torn up the Treaty of Frankfurt, and victory will bring back her lost provinces to France. All the ingenious plans of neutralisation, federalisation with Belgium and Switzerland, and the like, fall to the ground by the fact of a French victory which will simply restore the status quo
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