E-text prepared by Al Haines
From the French of Juliette Adam
by J. O. P. Bland
New York
E. P. Dutton & Company
1918
Printed in Great Britain
More fortunate than the majority of the prophets who cannot speaksmooth things, Madame Adam has lived to find honour in her own country:La grande Française has come into her own. God willing, she shouldlive to see that revanche for which, through good and evil report,she has laboured unceasingly these forty-five years, to see thearrogant Prussian humbled to the dust and Alsace-Lorraine restored toFrance. 1917, she firmly believes will revenge and reverse the tragedyof 1871. More fortunate than the great British soldier who spent hisveteran days in warning his countrymen of the ordeal to come, MadameAdam, now in her eighty-first year, may yet hope to see the banners ofthe Allies crowned with victory, the black wreaths on the statue ofStrasburg in the Place de la Concorde changed to garlands of rejoicing.
There have been dark days in these forty-five years, times when, evento 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 hisvisit to Germany, Gambetta abandoned the idea of la revanche. It wasso in 1891, when she realised that the influence of Paul Déroulède'sLigue des Patriotes had ceased to be a living force in public opinion,when France had become impregnated with false doctrines ofinternational pacifism and homeless cosmopolitanism, when (as she wroteat the time) there were left of the faithful to wear the forget-me-notof Alsace-Lorraine only "a few mothers, a few widows, a few oldsoldiers, and your humble servant." But never, even in the darkest ofdark days, was the flame of her ardent patriotism dimmed. After herbreach with Gambetta, determined not to be defeated by the Government'sabandonment of a vigorous anti-German policy of preparation, shefounded the Nouvelle Revue, to wage war with her brain and penagainst Bismarck and the ruler of Germany. The objects with which shecreated that brilliant magazine, as explained by herself to Mr.Gladstone in 1879, were threefold—"to oppose Bismarck, to demand therestoration of Alsace-Lorraine, and to lift from the minds of youngFrench writers the shadow of depression cast on them by nationaldefeat." The fortnightly "Letters on Foreign Politics" which shecontributed regularly to the Nouvelle Revue, for twenty years werenot only persistently and violently anti-Teuton: they became a powerfulforce in educating public opinion in France to the necessity for aneffective alliance with Russia, and to the cause of nationalism, in theBalkans, in Egypt, and wherever the liberties of the smaller nationswere endangered by the earth-hunger of the great. She disliked andfeared the policy of colonial expansion inaugurated by Gambetta andpursued by Jules Ferry, because she felt that it must weaken France inpreparing for the great and final struggle with Teutonism which sheknew to be inevitable. Thus, when Ferry requested her to cease fromattacking Germany, she defied him, assuring him that nothing less thanimprisonment would stop her, and that no honour could be greater thanto be imprisoned for attacking Bismarck.
Juliette Adam has always been intensely sure of herself and heropinions. She has the virile fighting spirit of a super-suffragette."Always out of rank," as Gambetta described her, "Madame Intégrale" hasdisplayed throughout her political and literary work a contempt forcomp