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Rh there was a disposition to revive the old sentiment of fraternity which had once united France with Italy. More important was the necessity felt by the Italians of improved commercial relations with the French. Crispi fell on the 4th of March 1896, after the news of the disaster to the Italian troops at Adowa, the war with Abyssinia being a disastrous legacy left by him. The previous year he had caused the withdrawal from Paris of the Italian ambassador Signor Ressmann, a friend of France, transferring thither Count Tornielli, who during his mission in London had made a speech, after the visit of the Italian fleet to Toulon, which qualified him to rank as a misogallo. But with the final disappearance of Crispi the relations of the two Latin neighbours became more natural. Commerce between them had diminished, and the business men of both countries, excepting certain protectionists, felt that the commercial rupture was mutually prejudicial. Friendly negotiations were initiated on both sides, and almost the last act of President Félix Faure before his sudden death—M. Delcassé being then foreign minister—was to promulgate, on the 2nd of February 1899, a new commercial arrangement between France and Italy which the French parliament had adopted. By that time M. Barrère was ambassador at the Quirinal and was engaged in promoting cordial relations between Italy and France, of which Count Tornielli in Paris had already become an ardent advocate. Italy remained a party to the Triple Alliance, which was renewed for a third period in 1902. But so changed had its significance become that in October 1903 the French Republic received for the first time an official visit from the sovereigns of Italy. This reconciliation of France and Italy was destined to have most important results outside the sphere of the Triple Alliance. The return visit which President Loubet paid to Victor Emmanuel III. in April 1904, it being the first time that a French chief of the state had gone to Rome since the pope had lost the temporal sovereignty, provoked a protest from the Vatican which caused the rupture of diplomatic relations between France and the Holy See, followed by the repudiation of the Concordat by an act passed in France, in 1905, separating the church from the state.

While the decadence of the Triple Alliance had this important effect on the domestic affairs of France, its inception had produced the Franco-Russian alliance, which took France out of its isolation in Europe, and became the pivot of its exterior policy. It has been noted that in the

years succeeding the Franco-Prussian War the tsar Alexander II. had shown a disposition to support France against German aggression, as though to make up for his neutrality during the war, which was so benevolent for Germany that his uncle William I. had ascribed to it a large share of the German victory. The assassination of Alexander II. by revolutionaries in 1881 made it difficult for the new autocrat to cultivate closer relations with a Republican government, although the Third Republic, under the influence of Gambetta, to whom its consolidation was chiefly due, had repudiated that proselytizing spirit, inherited from the great Revolution, which had disquieted the monarchies of Europe in 1848 and had provoked their hostility to the Second Republic. But the Triple Alliance which was concluded the year after the murder of the tsar indicated the possible expediency of an understanding between the two great powers of the West and the East, in response to the combination of the three central powers of Europe,—though Bismarck after his fall revealed that in 1884 a secret treaty was concluded between Germany and Russia, which was, however, said to have in view a war between England and Russia. Internal dissension on the subject of colonial policy in the far East, followed by the fall of Jules Ferry and the Boulangist agitation were some of the causes which prevented France from strengthening its position in Europe by seeking a formal understanding with Russia in the first part of the reign of Alexander III. But when the Boulangist movement came to an end, entirely from the incompetency of its leader, it behoved the government of the Republic to find a means of satisfying the strong patriotic sentiment revealed in the nation, which, directed by a capable and daring soldier, would have swept away the parliamentary republic and established a military dictatorship in its place. The Franco-Russian understanding provided that means, and Russia was ready for it, having become, by the termination in 1890 of the secret treaty with Germany, not less isolated in Europe than France. In July 1891, when the French fleet visited Kronstadt the incident caused such enthusiasm throughout the French nation that the exiled General Boulanger’s existence would have been forgotten, except among his dwindling personal followers, had he not put an end to it by suicide two months later at Brussels. The Franco-Russian understanding united all parties, not in love for one another but in the idea that France was thereby about to resume its place in Europe. The Catholic Royalists ceased to talk of the restitution of the temporal power of the pope in their joy at the deference of the government of the republic for the most autocratic monarchy of Christendom; the Boulangists, now called Nationalists, hoped that it would lead to the war of revenge with Germany, and that it might also be the means of humiliating England, as shown by their resentment at the visit of the French squadron to Portsmouth on its way home from Kronstadt. It is, however, extremely improbable that the understanding and subsequent alliance would have been effected had the Boulangist movement succeeded. For the last thing that the Russian government desired was war with Germany. What it needed and obtained was security against German aggression on its frontier and financial aid from France; so a French plebiscitary government, having for its aim the restitution of Alsace and Lorraine, would have found no support in Russia. As the German chancellor, Count von Caprivi, said in the Reichstag on the 27th of November 1891, a few weeks after a Russian loan had been subscribed in France nearly eight times over, the naval visit to Kronstadt had not brought war nearer by one single inch. Nevertheless when in 1893 the Russian fleet paid a somewhat tardy return visit to Toulon, where it was reviewed by President Carnot, a party of Russian officers who came to Paris was received by the population of the capital, which less than five years before had acclaimed General Boulanger, with raptures which could not have been exceeded had they brought back to France the territory lost in 1871. In November 1894, Alexander III. died, and in January 1895, M. Casimir-Périer resigned the presidency of the Republic, to which he had succeeded only six months before on the assassination of M. Carnot. So it was left to Nicholas II. and President Félix Faure to proclaim the existence of a formal alliance between France and Russia. It appears that in 1891 and 1892, at the time of the first public manifestations of friendship between France and Russia, in the words of M. Ribot, secret conventions were signed by him, being foreign minister, and M. de Freycinet, president of the council, which secured for France “the support of Russia for the maintenance of the equilibrium in Europe”; and on a later occasion the same statesman said that it was after the visit of the empress Frederick to Paris in 1891 that Alexander III. made to France certain offers which were accepted. The word “alliance” was not publicly used by any minister to connote the relations of France with Russia until the 10th of June 1895, when M. Hanotaux used the term with cautious vagueness amid the applause of the Chamber of Deputies. Yet not even when Nicholas II. came to France in October 1896 was the word “alliance” formally pronounced in any of the official speeches. But the reception given to the tsar and tsaritsa in Paris, where no European sovereign had come officially since William of Germany passed down the Champs Elysées as a conqueror, was of such a character that none could doubt that this was the consecration of the alliance. It was at last formally proclaimed by Nicholas II., on board a French man-of-war, on the occasion of the visit of the president of the Republic to Russia in August 1897. From that date until the formation of M. Briand’s cabinet in 1909, nine different ministries succeeded one another and five ministers of foreign affairs; but they all loyally supported the Franco-Russian alliance, although its popularity diminished in France long before the war between Russia and Japan, which deprived it of its efficacy in Europe. In 1901 Nicholas II. came again to France and was the guest of President