For the Soul of France

Everyone agreed that France faced a demographic crisis.

“So there exist fresh young brains and souls that this idiotic poison has already deranged? How very sad, and how ominous for the coming twentieth century!”

France’s malady is its need to speechify.”

pride. Your science is beautiful, and necessary, and invincible; but you accomplish little by enlightening the mind if you do not cure the eternal wound of the heart.

Carthago delenda est.

Another paradoxical courtier, Arthur Meyer, saw only white, the color of French royalty. His paper, Le Gaulois, which circulated like a house organ among Paris’s upper crust, offered sufficient proof of his anti-Semitism to earn him forgiveness for having been born Jewish.

Tu seras plus qu’un roi, tu seras plus qu’un Dieu Car tu seras la France, O Général Revanche!*

Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented. Bear this truth well in mind: Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as

One witness thought that the scene might have been not much different at the Colosseum in Rome when frenzied spectators climbed the Vestals’ tribune to demand the execution of a gladiator, little realizing that France herself was the doomed combatant.

Wilhelm refused, and the matter might have rested there had Bismarck not made the refusal sound contemptuous by mischievously editing a telegram from Wilhelm to Louis-Napoléon.