Security and Sovereignty in French Foreign Policy

Abstract

Francs, with the theories of 1789 and the practice of the French Revolution, the idea of national sovereignty was first fully fledged, and it is in France that it has in recent time been most vigorously challenged. This development is primarily to be explained in terms not of the history of ideas, but rather of the material change in the position of France in the world. Up to the nineteenth century she was the European state with by far the largest population under a single government. In days when military strength depended mainly on available man-power, she was necessarily the greatest military power of Europe, only to be kept in check by coalitions of other powers or by internal weakness and divisions. This situation changed in the course of the nineteenth century, when the population of France rose only gradually, while that of other countries was multiplying rapidly. Neither France nor Europe properly appreciated the military effects of the alteration in the balance of population until after the Franco-Prussian War. Its effects were then to be intensified by the creation of a united Germany and by the progress of industrialisation, which gave Germany greater material as well as human resources to draw upon than France. The growth of the French Empire during the nineteenth century helped to limit the effects of this situation but could not alter it. The consequence was that France had either to drop out of the ranks of the Great Powers, or else look for some other source of strength to redress the balance.