Jacques Bainville Quotes

For six years I have been writing...that the division of Europe into two camps armed to the teeth, one of which, the Triple Alliance, constantly resorts to intimidation, is bound to lead to the greatest European war since the revolutionary period. Well here it is.

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

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

May 7, 1919 has not erased the date of January 18, 1871.

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.

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

Having erased Sedan, we now must erase Waterloo. France cannot be a great continental power unless she is a Rheinish power... French political wisdom has never consisted in immoderate acquisitions. In the days of France's European hegemony, she always preferred influence and infiltration to indigestion.

Our vision of European affairs has been warped by our obsession with Bolshevism. Under the cover of this grande peur, Germany has reorganized herself. She has used the specter of Bolshevism to divert attention from her own affairs while at the same time ridding herself of this poison.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The more one studies, with the attention and sympathy one owes to noble undertakings, the rise of the Italian Dictator, the more we must hope that this great wave of national enthusiasm will not blind him, in the end, to those perils to which a revolution is particularly exposed, and Fascism is, first and foremost, a revolution. Those who want France to follow suit, will do well to think twice about it. The ‘Corporative Economy’ devised by Mussolini would be regarded as monstrous by our middle class and our traders, big and small. Before we think about copying a thing, we ought to know exactly what it is we are going to copy. The Gallic cock is not designed by nature to suck the dugs of the Roman wolf.