Our vision of European affairs has been warped by our obsession with Bolshevism. Under the cover of this grande peur, Germany has reorganized herself… - Jacques Bainville

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.

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.

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.