Jacques Bainville Quotes

[The significance of the Nazi gains in the 1930 election lay] neither in Hitler nor in his one-hundred-seven deputies [but rather in] the facility with which the German people follow those who recommend violence.

Perhaps in a sense the man [Adolf Hitler] will always elude us, but this much is certain: it is on him that all the hopes of the Germany that was vanquished in 1918 are centred. Our socialists are all at sea about him. Every step forward that he took, they said his fall was imminent. He mirrors too faithfully certain aspects of his country, for that fall, even if it occurs, to be of much account. But the important thing is to know him, not to suffer ourselves to be misled by his rudimentary and inchoate ideas. Beneath a very elementary philosopher, there leaps to the eye a politician who knows what he wants and whose position makes him, however vehemently he may declare and believe himself the contrary, France's most formidable antagonist.

If Germany were to become Bolshevik we would be absolutely delighted. We wish it with all our heart. France has never been secure except when anarchy ruled in Germany... From a Bolshevished Germany, we would no longer have to fear what we underwent in 1870 and 1914.

Nothing is more false than the axiom that governments are belligerent and peoples are pacific.

One of the greatest mistakes that the Western world has committed, is to imagine that the colored peoples, in acceding to its type of civilization, would be drawing nearer to it.

In countries where, as in France, there is still an agricultural population and a majority of propriétaires, one need not fear social subversion.

You will understand and know the German Republic better when it elects Hindenburg president.

When Frenchmen were in good health, when their intelligence was sound and vigorous, the idea of tradition was no less foreign to them than was the idea of revolution. The notion of returning to the chansons de geste and Saint Louis's oak tree would have seemed as ridiculous to them as wearing their fathers' breeches and hats out of filial piety.

Monarchist or collectivist, Germany will not change its nature.

Title of an article in Action Française on the Treaty of Versailles (8 May 1919), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 137

In order to avoid being unsettled by Bolshevism and its substitutes, one must be conscious of the superiority of Western civilization.

A Peace Treaty too Lenient for the Harshness it Contains [Une Paix trop douce pour ce qu'elle a de dur].

The real Hitler did not exist before those years of hardship in Vienna, where he simultaneously discovered the dangers of Marxism and of Jewish World-Ascendancy. His real birth as a man of action dates from the day on which he discovered ethnology. It is in this department that a Frenchman is bound to find Mein Kampf singularly inadequate, singularly elementary. If we had to judge these fighting books by the same canons as we judge works of the mind, it is certain that the National Socialist Bible would not bear a moment's examination. The most puerile absurdities mingle with the most dubious scientific hypotheses, all couched in language whose pedantry, though it take one's breath away, probably contributed in large measure to the book's success with German readers.

Do people really think that everything will be finished when we evacuate the Rhineland? On the contrary, it is certain that everything will begin, that the territorial demands will follow.

When one has millions and millions of yellow and black subjects what a strange idea it is to proclaim the principle of popular self-determination.