Europe Was Sitting on a Powder Keg, Giving Off Sparks – Revanchist France, and a Wary Britain
Steadily mounting tensions in Eastern Europe between Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one hand, and Russia, Serbia, and the region’s Slavs on the other, were matched by tensions on the Franco-German border. France had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 1871), and to buy peace had to pay a huge indemnity, and surrender the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.
France got over the indemnity, but not over the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. In the ensuing decades, a revanchist France rebuilt and reorganized her army, all the while nursing grievances against Germany and itching for a rematch. German diplomatic missteps gave France an opening in the 1890s to develop an alliance with Russia, and having secured a potentially powerful ally, French revanchism increased.
Having alienated France with the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine, then alienated Russia as well, the Germans set about alienating Britain. For centuries, Britain had followed a policy of aloofness from European continental entanglements. The British preferred to step in only to restore Europe’s balance of power when one side threatened to upset it, and in so doing become powerful enough to threaten Britain.
For centuries, that had meant siding against France, which became Britain’s hereditary enemy. Then Kaiser Wilhelm II sought to built a powerful naval fleet, as a statement of Germany’s rising power. However, such a fleet threatened not only British naval hegemony, but the security of Britain herself, which relied almost exclusively on the Royal Navy to keep enemies away from the British Isles. The German naval threat was powerful enough for Britain to reverse centuries of anti-French hostility, and morph from France’s hereditary enemy to her ally against Germany.