Jacques Bainville Quotes

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

[Now is the perfect opportunity to revive] the wise and prudent policy constantly followed by the French monarchy, which consisted in putting the German colossus to sleep, dividing it, enfeebling it, profiting from its religious quarrels, its territorial divisions, the rivalry among its princes, its lack of money, its backward civilization.

[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.

The Rhineland liberated from Prussia or eternal war. The choice is ours.

Where do we find the first example of the modern dictator? In England. And what is England? The "Mother of Parliaments". The country which adopted for itself, and distributed in facsimile throughout the world, the form of parliamentary government. Cromwell makes us wonder whether a dictator is not a necessary concomitant of revolutions, of the rise of democracies and of the establishment of the parliamentary system.

It is no mere caprice that has led us to connect a disordered currency with the emergence of despotic forms of government. The one precedes, and often begets, the other, because, for the vast majority of people, it is the most obvious symptom of national disintegration.
This, again, is one reason why dictatorships are not all assignable to a common cause. A dictatorship may be a defensive reaction against anarchy and ruin, and against the effects of democracy carried to its ultimate conclusion, that is to say, to socialism and communism. On the other hand, it offers to a democracy fired with equalitarian and anti-capitalist zeal, the means of overthrowing the forces arrayed against it, and of enthroning itself in their place.

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.

Dictatorships are like a good many other things in this world. They can be the best, or the worst, form of government.
There are some excellent dictatorships, and there are some hateful ones.

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

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