standing army by calling up an additional
136,000 conscripts. This measure was designed
to bring the peacetime strength of the army to
nearly 800,000 men by the autumn of 1914.
Bethmann Hollweg scored one success. The
abrasive Weltpolitik overseas was downgraded.
Instead, Germany now pushed its interests in Asia
Minor and Mesopotamia and developed its new
friendship with Turkey. The projected Berlin-to-
Baghdad railway was to be the economic artery of
this, Germany’s new imperial commercial sphere.
The intrusion of German interests in the Middle
East was not unwelcome to Britain since Germany
would help to act as a buffer against Russian
expansion.
In the Balkans, where a second Balkan war had
broken out in 1913, Bethmann Hollweg and the
British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey,
worked together to localise the conflict and to
ensure a peaceful outcome. The kaiser’s confer-
ence of December 1912 had at least made it
much easier for Bethmann Hollweg to follow a
pacific policy in 1913 and he could show some
success for it, though not a weakening of Britain’s
support for France, his main objective. Neverthe-
less, the drift to war in Germany was unmistak-
able. Its leaders were accustoming themselves to
the idea of a war, persuaded by the seemingly
irrefutable logic of the military. In the end, in the
summer of 1914, Bethmann Hollweg too would
be carried forward with the kaiser over the brink.
REPUBLICAN FRANCE: FROM THE
‘BELLE EPOQUE’ TO WAR
The German Empire symbolised to contem-
poraries in 1900 discipline, union and progress;
France was generally seen as a country divided,
whose politicians’ antics could scarcely be taken
seriously, a society sinking into corruption and
impotence. The malevolence of that corruption
had been demonstrated in the highest reaches of
the army, the Church and politics by the Dreyfus
affair, the innocent Captain having been found in
1899 yet again guilty of espionage. The slander
against the Jews living in France achieved a
degree of viciousness not seen anywhere in a
civilised country. Only Russia could compete.
Yet, the better-off flocked to France. Paris was
acknowledged as perhaps the most beautiful city
in the world, certainly the artistic capital of
Europe. The Riviera was becoming the holiday
playground of European society.
Foreigners, of course, realised that there was
more to France than the surface glitter of Paris
and the Riviera. Few of them could understand
a country so varied, so divided and so individual-
istic. Governments changed so frequently that
in any other country such a state of affairs
would have meant the nation was close to chaos,
ungovernable. Yet, in everyday life, France was
a stable country with a strong currency, and well
ordered. Europe with monarchs and princes
looked askance at republican France with its
official trappings derived from the revolution
of 1789. Yet France was far more stable than
it seemed and by 1914 had achieved a quite
remarkable recovery as a great power.
Can we now discern more clearly how govern-
ment and society functioned in France, something
that mystified contemporaries?
The key to an understanding of this question is
that the majority of French people wished to deny
their governments and parliaments the opportuni-
ties to govern boldly, to introduce new policies
and change the course of French life. France was
deeply conservative. What most of the French
wanted was that nothing should be done that
would radically alter the existing state of affairs in
town and country or touch their property and sav-
ings. Thus the Republic became the symbol of
order, the best guarantee of the status quo against
those demanding great changes. The monarchist
right were now the ‘revolutionaries’, something
they had in common with the extreme left.
One explanation for this innate conservatism is
that France did not experience the impact of rapid22 SOCIAL CHANGE AND NATIONAL RIVALRY IN EUROPE, 1900–14
Population (millions)1880 1900 1910
France 37.4 38.4 39.2
Germany 45.2 56.4 64.9