The author analyzes the role of France in Europe and its relations with the United States in the 1920s. The traditional feelings of the U.S. about France have changed in a striking manner. The debts controversy has generated some irritation in the U.S. For the first time in history, the American masses have been brought into direct contact with the French masses. When the armistice and the peace negotiations came, France had to resist the European conceptions related to the American model of a European federation of states. What gives a last chance to the imperial idea is the fact the all the European nations are not equally compact and have unequal forces of resistance. In the U.S., the unifying power means peace; in Europe, it still means destruction. France can not be expected to retain all alone an abiding sense of European partnership.
