ABSTRACT
French suspicions of Germany, though they wavered slightly in the mid-1920s and from one circle of Frenchmen to another, remained more or less constant throughout the period. Demographically, the number of French citizens was a third less than that of Germany, an alarming disparity in an age which had just learned to count army divisions by the hundred and armed combatants by the million. The same call for discretion should be heeded when it comes to assessing the role of the general staff in French foreign policy, for it would be as much of an exaggeration to see that policy as one designed by the generals as it would be to portray it as one designed by the British. This chapter has tried, on the one hand, to explain French attachment to the idea of a British alliance, without having recourse to the vocabulary of malaise, drift and defeatism.
