France Faces Germany

Extract

As weak as France may be among the Great Powers the world is still interested in our reactions, our desires, our resentments, our hopes, sometimes even in our plans in the way one politely questions old ladies who have recently held positions of the first importance. Regarding what Jules Romains used to call before the war the “French-German couple”—a couple which hardly knows more than the sadistic and masochistic forms of love—the simple geographical situation of the two countries justifies, better than any vain politeness, the more or less anxious curiosity of our foreign friends. Among the immediate neighbors of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia are too closely bound today to Russia to consider their policy independently of the general problem which the immediate or future plans of the new Russia present. Denmark, Holland, and Belgium can timidly demand modest “frontier rectifications”; for none of these involves territories of importance to the economic or political equilibrium of Germany. Besides, it seems, rightly or wrongly, that these little nations have definitely chosen the road of the “Western bloc” while France tries with an unequal success to navigate alone among the broad currents which clash in the world ocean.