“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.”

— Jacques Bainville

Action Française (1 December 1918), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 129.

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French historian and journalist 1879–1936

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