Prime Ministers Of France

"The Germans may take Paris, but that will not prevent me from going on with the war. We will fight on the Loire, we will fight on the Garronne, we will fight even in the Pyrenees. And if at last we are driven off the Pyrenees, we will continue the war at sea."

"[If the Socialists want peace] so do I, but it is not by bleating of peace that we can silence Prussian militarism. A moment ago M. Constant complained of my silence about foreign policy. My foreign policy and my domestic policy are all one. Internal policy, I wage war; foreign policy, I still wage war; I still wage war. Russia betrays us; I continue the war: unfortunate Rumania is forced to capitulate; I continue the war, and I will continue it down to the last quarter of an hour."

"Mistakes have been made; do not think of them except to rectify them. Alas, there have also been crimes, crimes against France which call for a prompt punishment. We promise you, we promise the country, that justice will be done according to the law. ... Weakness would be complicity. We will avoid weakness, as we will avoid violence. All the guilty before courts-martial. The soldier in the court-room, united with the soldier in battle. No more pacifist campaigns, no more German intrigues. Neither treason, nor semi-treason: the war. Nothing but the war. Our armies will not be caught between fire from two sides. Justice will be done. The country will know that it is defended."

"The difficulty between us and Germany is this: that Germany believes that the logic of her victory means domination, while we do not believe that the logic of our defeat is serfdom [vassalité]."

"In the distance huge trees were still blazing, around us was a waste of ashes and of half-consumed boughs, and the falling rain seemed only to quicken the dying conflagration. In some of the great green boles were fearful gaping wounds through which the sap was oozing, while some tall trees still stretched to heaven their triumphant crown of foliage above a trunk all charred that would never sprout again. The Brazilians contemplate spectacles such as this with a wholly indifferent eye, and, indeed, even with satisfaction, for they see in the ruin only a promise of future harvests. To me the scene possessed only the horror of a slaughter-house."

"I think war is inevitable. We must do nothing to provoke it, but we must be ready for it; helped by Russia and England, doubtless by Spain also and perhaps by Italy as well, we may be able to win. In any case it will be a life and death affair: if we are beaten we will be crushed."

"No, my friend, Germany will not declare war on us [at this moment]. But in my opinion the European situation is such that a great armed conflict is inevitable at some time which I cannot foresee, and our duty is to prepare for the worst."

"It was I who gave the title "J'accuse" to Zola's letter."

"Whether we like it or not, whether it pleases us or shocks us, the French Revolution is a bloc ... a bloc from which nothing can be separated, because historical truth does not permit it. ... the Revolution is not finished, it is still continuing, we are actors in it, the same men are still in conflict with the same enemies. The struggle will go on, until the final day of victory, and until that day we will not allow you to throw mud at the Revolution."

"Now that one of its principal clauses had lapsed along with the Guarantee Pact, what was to happen to the Treaty as a whole, so closely correlated in all its parts? The country that had made the greatest sacrifices for the least return found herself, without even the ghost of an explanation, grievously wronged by the withdrawal of the clause that had been our military guarantee of security. Could we let this pass without protest, when it was a matter of life and death for France? ... The Treaty had fallen to the ground, since its mainstay, which had been provided by America in conjunction with England, had been taken away. We had given up the Rhineland because an offer had been made us to replace the German sentry on the Rhine by an English and an American soldier, side by side with the French soldier."

"Who need wonder in these circumstances that the Germans tried, without loss of time, to evade the most important of their obligations? The history of the last ten years is a series of surrenders on the part of the Allies, of successes for Germany."

"Above all, do not be so ingenuous as to believe that you will disarm, by methods of persuasion, the Powers who see you strengthening against every eventuality your means of defence, which might turn into means of aggression."

"It took defeat to bring Germany to words of quasi-peace, soon belied by a renewal of implacable activity. It is the same policy of cunning and pretence that she used, with so much success, against Napoleon. Without troubling overmuch to make any secret of it, the vanquished are devoting their best efforts to concentrating and ordering their energies, whereas the victors, divided, are drowning themselves in a deluge of verbose invocations to a metaphysics of peace, adapted to all kinds of immediate self-interest. Who then can shut his eyes to the impending menace of a return to the policy of domination by arms, the revenge for the Treaty of Versailles by a stiffening of the will-power on the part of the beaten aggressor?"

"Über Alles—there we have Germany, who professes to improve mankind by her ‘Kultur’ of iniquity; Russia writhes in the throes of internal decomposition, and Austria, who once fought to be free of the German monster, would to-day like to resume the old Bismarckian chain. The danger lies in the crowds who offer themselves for servitude in order that they may be permitted, in their turn, to tyrannize over the conquered nations. In this respect Germany's watchword is only the puerile hallucination of a return to primitive dominations, and allows no one to feign a misapprehension over which neither the aggressor nor the victim could be deceived. We have only to submit to the implacable law of the strongest, and join the ranks of the conquered territories, to enjoy the servitude with which our masters are only too ready to favour us. To be victims or tyrants, that is the only thing left to us."

"Can we then be excused for not accepting, without other guarantees than “faith sworn and forsworn,” these relations of good neighbourhood with the nation that proclaims itself the masterpiece of humanity? For has anyone in any authority ever tried to deny or tone down these bold and cynical words? Ask the mobs, whose first cry on every occasion is “Deutschland über Alles”. This is what our public men rely upon in recommending to us a peace of trust with a Germany animated by the sentiments her spokesmen have just disclosed."

"Whether we wish it or not, it is not the International Parliament of Geneva, subtle epitome of all the Parliaments of this world, with no executive powers, that will determine the peace of the future."

"From the German point of view the monstrous problem thus set must inevitably be solved by the apotheosis of the German peoples. In the meantime, far from ‘German culture’ seeming disposed to reform itself, we hear it proclaiming louder than ever a universal right to supreme domination, which confers on it the right of life and death over the nations, to be asserted and enforced by all possible means. Ought we not all to feel menaced in our very vitals by this mad doctrine of universal Germanic supremacy over England, France, America, and every other country?"

"And what is this “Germanic civilization,” this monstrous explosion of the will to power, which threatens openly to do away entirely with the diversities established by many evolutions, to set in their place the implacable mastery of a race whose lordly part would be to substitute itself, by force of arms, for all national developments? We need only read Bernhardi's famous pamphlet Unsere Zukunft, in which it is alleged that Germany sums up within herself, as the historian Treitschke asserts, the greatest manifestation of human supremacy, and finds herself condemned, by her very greatness, either to absorb all nations in herself or to return to nothingness."

"The [Anglo-American] Guarantee Pact thus assumed the position of the keystone of European peace, far above all theories. Its rejection, for that very reason, amounted to an indirect invitation for the thwarted aggressor to try again."

"As for myself, what more can I say? I am bitterly censured for having refused to give my country a strategic frontier. How can I take seriously those who, both great and small, reproach me with this, since they know that I could not—apart from any question of the rights of peoples—annex the Rhineland without breaking off our alliance, WHICH NO ONE DARED TO SUGGEST TO ME?"

"The real task—and an absolutely new one—was the attempt to make definitely a Europe founded on right. In spite of some people's lack of understanding, to have attempted this will be the glory of the Treaty of Versailles. It is for future Governments to work at this task by some method other than that of eternally giving in. The realization of a Europe founded upon right was the greatest victory of all, the victory that neither Napoleon nor Foch wished to gain, and which required something more than successful strokes of strategy."

"And if our recent victory had merely been one of territorial conquests that were fated to call us out to the battlefield again to meet attempts to take revenge for our revenge, our success of the moment would have been as fruitless as every success before it. What was more to be desired in the interests of Europe striving for civilization was a victor capable of controlling himself so as to replace armed might by right in the fluid equilibrium of a peace capable of enduring."

"Always watching their opportunity to hit back in every sphere, our defeated enemies demand reckonings from their conquerors, who fear nothing so much as not to give them complete satisfaction. I set down this fact in order to clear my own conscience, and especially because it is high time for the French nation to take a firmer grip on itself and to substitute a policy of determination for this confusion born of timidity, through which the threat of a compact mass of barbarism is kept hanging over our heads."

"Breakers of their sworn faith, the Germans seriously offer us their signature on a “scrap of paper” as a guarantee, with the unalterable intention of later taking up again the work of assimilation by force where they have left off. They destroy towns, ravage the fields, and let loose among men evils by the side of which the most cruel exploits of the greatest devastators grow pale and trivial. We take them by the throat, and they promise to make reparation. But, as they do not make reparation, America, who has made a separate peace after growing incredibly rich through the War, claims for her treasury the contributions earmarked for restoring French soil to a productive state."

"I will tell how the formula for the military consolidation of the victory of the three Allied and Associated nations was accepted on the proposal of England, only to be rejected without explanation by the American Senate, then quietly dropped by England, and left in oblivion by the French Government itself, without a word of protest. Not a word was uttered to recall that we had given our best blood, and that, after seeking for security in a better frontier, we had given up this strategical guarantee in exchange for the promise of Anglo-American military aid, which had been offered us as an exchange, and which was taken from us without compensation. Defeat substituted for victory, that was what we accepted without finding a single word to assert our right to our Continental life by the establishment of guarantees within the new order created by a most costly victory."

"A peace of justice, a Europe founded upon right, the creator of independent states whose military power is augmented by all the moral energies generated by the necessity for asserting themselves in all spheres of international life—will not this create a body of forces superior to anything that could come from a powerfully organized frontier?"

"Bismarck went so far as to boast of a forgery. The Ems telegram was a crime of no less magnitude than the outrage on Belgium. The cynicism of the scrap of paper will be counted against Germany as long as human history lasts. That stain, like Lady Macbeth's, can never be effaced."

"The idea of force is deeply rooted in man, as in the whole universe. Law is controlled and ordered force."

"Anyone who retains as much education as the average boy can pick up in a continuation elementary school can understand that General Foch's chief preoccupations were not concerned with the generalizations of universal justice embodied in war or peace. Had he opened the annals of our past at whatsoever page he might choose, he would have found that our life throughout history, bandied about between battles and truces in the unending oscillation of all things, is at any moment but preparing for or stabilizing a new transient form of society for the momentary advantage of the strongest."

"What will remain of the greatest effort of the human civilizations for an enlargement of universal civilization I shall not attempt to foresee, after ten years of talk in which victors and vanquished have gone on the same tack to shatter, one by one, every guarantee of success."

"Fate has decided. The Conference has spoken. It has been obeyed. Why could it not have kept a strong hand over the execution of the Treaty? But I will not anticipate. Overflowing with German braggadocio, von Brockdorff-Rantzau later on told us that we hated Germany, because we had dared to defend ourselves against her aggression, but our European countries, and those organized on European lines, need only go back to their familiar slipshod management of everyday life for the vanquished foe to dare to rear his head arrogantly as if he were the victor, to look in the face the crimes he had acknowledged, and to venture, owing to the general discouragement, to demand a reckoning from those who had put an end to his wrongdoing."

"[T]he keynote of the Treaty of Versailles is the liberation of the peoples, the independence of nationalities, whereas the keynote of the policy of Marshal Foch and M. Poincaré was the occupation of a territory by force of arms against the will of its inhabitants."

"They talk of effecting a reconciliation between us and Germany: nothing would give me greater pleasure. But the German nation is unscrupulous, and the French like nothing so much as to forget. If one goes forward at every moment, while the other gives himself up to the enervating delights of going back, no two people will ever meet full face. As I have said, I was concerned with other things than the troopers’ tales of a victorious soldier dissatisfied with the share of victory assigned to him. As much as, and more than any other I should desire, if it were possible, never in any shape or guise to fall back into the bloody adventures of military conquests that are still a temptation haunting the feverish imaginations of the German peoples."

"To ensure the execution of the Treaty [of Versailles] all we lacked later on was a statesman of some strength of purpose."

"The quantum of a hypothetical German civilization would not take us very far, because she is to-day still too close to barbarism."

"Peace or war, we are in the midst of a relentless struggle for power. Woe to the weak! Turn your back on the purveyors of soothing syrup!"

"Germany...was unfortunate enough to allow herself (in spite of her skill at dissimulation) to be betrayed into an excess of candour by her characteristic tendency to go to extremes. Deutschland über alles. Germany above everything! That, and nothing less, is what she asks, and when once her demand is satisfied she will let you enjoy a peace under the yoke. Not only does she make no secret of her aim, but the intolerable arrogance of the German aristocracy, the servile good nature of the intellectual and the scholar, the gross vanity of the most competent leaders in industry, and the widespread influence of a violent popular poetry conspire to shatter throughout the world all the time-honoured traditions of individual, as well as international, dignity."

"What after all is this war, prepared, undertaken, and waged by the German people, who flung aside every scruple of conscience to let it loose, hoping for a peace of enslavement under the yoke of a militarism destructive of all human dignity? It is simply the continuance, the recrudescence, of those never-ending acts of violence by which the first savage tribes carried out their depredations with all the resources of barbarism. The means improve with the ages. The ends remain the same."

"[W]hen at Versailles Brockdorff-Rantzau addressed me in the language of the bearer of a challenge, I was forced to realize that the German revolution was mere window-dressing, and that, with the aggressor of 1914 not a whit cured of his insane folly, we should continue without respite to be subjected, in a new setting, to the same attack from the same enemy."

"For the catastrophe of 1914 the Germans are responsible. Only a professional liar would deny this."

"I belonged to the generation that saw the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and never could I be consoled for that loss. And I here recall, with pardonable pride, that in 1908 I stood up against Germany in the Casablanca crisis, and that the Government of William II, after demanding apologies from us, was forced by my calm resistance to be satisfied with mere arbitration, as in any other dispute."

"There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function."

"Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee."

"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

"All that I know I learned after I was thirty."

"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."

"My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then."

"La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires."

"Oh, to be seventy again!"

"I have come to the conclusion that force is right. Why is this chicken here? (pointing to his plate). Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!"