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"It used to be argued that 1914 was a classic instance of a war begun through accident and error: that no statesmen wanted it but all were overborne by events. This view is now untenable. Certainly in late July the frantic telegram traffic became overwhelming, but governments were clear enough about what they were doing. A general conflict was the optimal outcome for none of them, but they preferred it to what seemed worse alternatives. Although Berlin and St Petersburg indeed miscalculated, all sides were willing to risk war rather than back down. The war developed from a Balkan confrontation in which neither Austria-Hungary nor Russia would yield and neither Germany nor France would restrain them. Once conflict spread from eastern to western Europe, Britain too was willing to intervene rather than see Belgium invaded and France beaten. In Vienna, Conrad had long urged war against Serbia, but Franz Joseph, Berchtold, and Tisza moved to military action only gradually, believing alternative choices were bankrupt, and only after considering how force would be used. In contrast they were recklessly insouciant about war with Russia, accepting it was likely but assuming that with German aid they could win. The Germans risked war against Russia and Britain with little idea of how to defeat either (and with what their general staff knew was a defective plan against France)." David Stevenson   "We are in a state of legitimate defense. Necessity knows no law. Our troops have occupied Luxembourg and have perhaps already penetrated into Belgium. This is against the law of nations. France, it is true, has declared to Brussels that it is determined to respect the neutrality of Belgium as long as its adversary respects it, but we know that France was ready to invade Belgium. France can afford to wait; we cannot. A French attack on our flank in the region of the lower Rhine might have been fatal. It is for that reason that we have been compelled to ignore the just protests of the governments of Luxembourg and Belgium. The injustice which we thus commit we will repair as soon as our military object has been attained. Anybody who is threatened as we are threatened and is fighting for its highest possessions can have only one thought to how he is to hack his way through." Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg   "One would think that if climate change genuinely threatens the extinction of human civilization, as Gore and others repeatedly tell us, all options would be on the table and their tradeoffs weighed seriously. Nuclear power is in use already, with highly favorable results from a greenhouse-gas emissions standpoint. It is not a coincidence that the industrialized nation with the lowest greenhouse-gas intensity (the amount of greenhouse gas emitted to dollar of economic output) is France, which generates about 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power (compared to about 20 percent in the United States). According to the International Energy Agency, the United States generates 0.55 kilograms of carbon dioxide for each dollar of economic output; the comparable figure for France is 0.29 kilograms–about half as much. If the United States had the same greenhouse-gas intensity as France, global greenhouse-gas emissions would be nearly 10 percent lower." Steven Hayward   "The London Corresponding Society wrote an adulatory letter to Bonaparte declaring their devotion to France and thanking him that 'peace reigns on earth, and this is the work of Frenchmen.' Charles James Fox owned that 'the Triumph of the French government over the English does in fact afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise.' Tourists streamed across the Channel to see what post-Revolutionary France was like: they found ruined churches and chateaux, and lots of soldiers. Politicians (eighty-two MPs and thirty-one peers) went in the hope of sizing up the charismatic Bonaparte. Dissenters identified him as God's latest instrument, in the words of one radical MP, 'the Great Man of the People of France, the Liberator of Europe.' Intellectuals admired him as a macho version of themselves. Fox found him rather a bore, yet praised him in the Commons as 'the most stupendous monument of human wisdom.'" Robert Tombs   "French elites came to see a nation not simply as a natural community, but as a spiritual one, bound together by shared values, shared laws, and by a host of what we would now call shared cultural practices, including the same language. And they therefore came to the surprising and politically potent conclusion that France itself was not, in fact, a nation. The abbé Sieyès, known for his uncompromising assertion of national sovereignty in the year 1789, also spoke, in the same year, of the need to make 'all the parts of France into a single body, and all the peoples who divide it into a single Nation.' An anonymous journalist commented at the same time, even more strikingly, 'the French perceive quite well that they are not a nation; they want to become one.' After 1789, the leading French revolutionaries nearly all embraced this view of things, and set forth as a principal goal of the Revolution the construction of a nation: the transformation of the many different peoples of France into a single nation united by common values, common practices and a common language (for in 1789, what is today called standard French was still spoken as a first language by a relatively small minority of the population)." David Bell   "Immediate issues may be the stimulus but are seldom the profoundest causes of war. Men are not all of a piece. In 1914, even the mild intellectual, Stefan Zweig, confessed that his greatest happiness would be to ride as an officer against a civilized enemy, particularly France, 'the France that one must chastise because one loves her.' One doubts if individual crusaders brooded very deeply about spice-markets, pilgrim-traffic, infidel blasphemy, Christ's tomb." Peter Vansittart   "The situation of the estimable Voltaire could not be more different than the current critics of Islam; he lived at the border of France and Switzerland, so he could quickly flee if French authorities sought to arrest him. Along with other philosophes he never dreamed he could be killed either by the state or angry Catholics anywhere. Detained, censored or exiled, yes. Murdered, no. Voltaire had no security detail—unlike Rushdie and Hirsi Ali. For critics of religious dogmatism in 18th-century France, the possibility of getting killed was zero. For critics of Islam in the 21st-century world, the possibility of injury or death is real—as the critics know." Russell Jacoby   "The appeasers distrusted France, blamed her for the punitive Versailles clauses, felt Germany had been wronged, and were determined to make restitution. Lord Lothian declared that it was Britain's moral obligation to support the Germans in their struggle to 'escape from encirclement' (the encircling powers, presumably, being France, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg) 'to a position of balance.' He neglected to add that any shift in the status quo would mean the liquidation of legitimate governments. At Versailles the 1914-1918 holocaust had been blamed on the Germans. Now the fashionable scapegoat was Germany's ancient enemy. 'Lady Astor,' The Week reported, 'is obsessed with a vivid personal dislike of the French.' As late as November 7, 1936, a member of the cabinet told his ministerial colleagues that Francophobia was increasing in England because the French were an obstacle to Britain 'getting on terms with the dictator powers.'" William Manchester   "France was and is famously centralized, but for many centuries England had been effectively centralized in fiscal and contract law. France, in other words, was centralized in the wrong way, with intendants from Paris and officials in the provinces interfering with the dignity and liberty of innovators at every turn. The French state imposed quality standards on textiles, and gave subsidies to enterprises it approved of, licensed some companies and refused licenses to others, and anyway charged tariffs on movements of goods even into Paris (see the third act of La Bohème)." Deirdre McCloskey   "Jobs in France are like apartments in New York City: Those who provide them are subject to detailed regulation by a government that is very solicitous of their occupants. A French employer must pay his workers well and provide generous benefits, and it is almost as hard to fire those workers as it is to evict a New York tenant. New York's pro-tenant policies have produced very good deals for some people, but they have also made it very hard for newcomers to find a place to live. France's policies have produced nice work if you can get it. But many people, especially the young, can't get it." Paul Krugman   "Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, in his notorious war aims memorandum of 9 September 1914, which he had begun to draft as early as the middle of August, defined the 'general aim of the war' as 'security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time.' To this end, the document spelled out, 'France must be so weakened as to make her revival as a great power impossible for all time. Russia must be thrust back as far as possible from Germany's eastern frontier and her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples broken.' France was to lose her army, her coal and iron fields, her colonies and a 'coastal strip from Dunkirk to Boulogne,' Belgium to become a German vassal state with her ports in the hands of the German navy, and Poland and other satellite states under German control were to be established at Russia's expense in east-central Europe. The whole continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals and from Finland to Malta, would come under German economic domination, and in Africa a German colonial empire would stretch continuously from the west coast to the east to include the Belgian Congo." John Röhl   "With its economy intact, the Reich had not endured invasion. It had suffered no transfer of entire industrial plants to enemy territory, no devastation of agricultural land, no complete denuding of forests. Despite the loss of Lorraine's iron ore and its temporary loss of Saar coal, Germany remained Europe's industrial powerhouse. When the five-year constraints written into the Peace Treaty lapsed in 1925, Germany was heading for industrial hegemony in Europe. If to this we add the weaknesses of the successor states in eastern Europe following the collapse of the Habsburg and tsarist empires, and the weak state of France, Germany's position in geo-political and military terms was arguably stronger than it had been in August 1914. In the converse of what befell France, though it may have lost the war, it won the peace." Jürgen Tampke   "Even relative to the size of her army, Britain lost fewer men than France or Germany. But as Britain also mobilised fewer of her potential soldiers than her allies and enemies, when the degree of mobilisation is taken into account, her relative rate of loss falls even further. For every thousand of the total wartime population, roughly 16 Britons were killed in the war, compared to 30 in Germany, 34 in France and 57 in Serbia." Dan Todman   "Had the Germans in 1914, rather than invading Belgium and attempting to annihilate France, simply defended their impregnable frontier with France while moving east against Russia, they would have dispatched their Russian nemesis without provoking war with Britain. No British government would have wished to go—or, given public opinion, could have gone—to war with the Central Powers to maintain some distant and obscure borders in Eastern Europe." Benjamin Schwarz   "The German government repeatedly challenged the amount, asked for moratoriums or simply stated that it could not pay. In 1924 and again in 1929, the total sum owed was negotiated down. In 1933, when the Nazis took power, Hitler simply canceled reparations unilaterally. In the end, it has been calculated, Germany paid less in real terms than France did after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to '71 (and France paid off those obligations in just a few years)." Margaret MacMillan   "Men and women have been asked to sacrifice everything for victory; it is, therefore, they who should be the winners. For France in particular, where disaster and treason have disqualified most of the leaders and the privileged classes and where the great masses of the common people have, on the other hand, remained the most valiant and the most faithful, it would no longer be acceptable that the terrible trials leave in power the social and moral regime which was active against the nation. Fighting France intends that victory shall be for the benefit of everyone of her children. Strong in her restored national independence, security and grandeur, she desires that each Frenchman be assured and guaranteed liberty, security, and human dignity." Charles de Gaulle   "Three years after finishing their studies, three-quarters of French university graduates are living on their own; by contrast, three-quarters of their contemporaries without university degrees still live with their parents. And they're dying early. In January 2016, the national statistical institute Insée announced that life expectancy had fallen for both sexes in France for the first time since World War II, and it's the native French working class that is likely driving the decline. In fact, the French outsiders are looking a lot like the poor Americans Charles Murray described in Coming Apart, failing not just in income and longevity but also in family formation, mental health, and education. Their political alienation is striking. Fewer than 2 percent of legislators in France's National Assembly today come from the working class, as opposed to 20 percent just after World War II." Christopher Caldwell   "It is impossible not to observe that, in the spirit of this geometrical distribution, and arithmetical arrangement, these pretended citizens treat France exactly like a country of conquest. Acting as conquerors, they have imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh race. The policy of such barbarous victors, who contemn a subdued people, and insult their feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay, to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws and in manners; to confound all territorial limits; to produce a general poverty; to put up their properties to auction; to crush their princes, nobles, and pontiffs; to lay low every thing which had lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people, under the standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the manner in which those sincere friends to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other nations. They destroyed the bonds of their union, under colour of providing for the independence of each of their cities." Edmund Burke   "Britain, the U.S., France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium—countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones—have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the U.S., its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states." Johan Anderberg   "Right from the start, almost everything that mattered in Anglo-Saxon England was written in English: law, poetry, history, medical advice, especially law. Everywhere else in Europe, Latin was the language of learned men doing their business. Not in England. And nowhere else produced such an abundance of written law as England in the centuries before the Norman Conquest. As Nicholas Vincent points out in his study of Magna Carta, Anglo-Saxon England, though not Norman France, was 'a society already hard-wired with law.' Written codes of Anglo-Saxon law survive in numbers, perhaps from Ethelbert's day, more reliably from Alfred's. Elton was dazzled: Naturally, the laws being written down provide splendid information on the kind of society with which we are dealing. The first remarkable thing about them is the language in which they were originally composed. The kings and their advisers used the vernacular; unlike the rest of Western Europe they escaped the bureaucratic imposition of Latin. And even though the Norman conquerors rewrote the laws in Latin and conversed in French, English reemerged as the elite language in the course of the thirteenth century, in tandem with the development of the common law." Ferdinand Mount