In the nineteenth century, European attitudes, both among intellectuals and the public, shifted toward widespread support for imperialism, but the tensions between such views and long-standing values sometimes gave this support a tortuous and melancholy character. This was the case with two eminent liberal imperialists, both famous as champions of liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. Each rejected the other’s justifications for foreign expansion and described his own country’s policies in terms so negative that they might have served better to justify opposition, testifying that there was a destabilizing tension in the backing both gave to imperial expansion. One occasion on which harsh and direct criticism of empire was voiced was expressed was at the outbreak of the “Opium War” in 1839, a conflict whose complex origins belie the old myth that it was undertaken to stuff the dangerous drug down Indian throats. The chapter ends by examining reasons why this opposition was unable to hold back the imperial juggernaut and notes that a significant number of non-European anti-imperial activists found London and Paris hospitable places for their activities.

Chapter 12 reassesses the peace conceptions and reordering and security policies of Clemenceau and the other authors of the French programme for the Paris Peace Conference. It argues that while their key aim undoubtedly was to secure France against what they saw as the critical threat of renewed German aggression they came to pursue new, essentially transatlantic strategies to this end, which came to concentrate on efforts to establish, in cooperation with Britain and the United States, a new Atlantic alliance and security community. It illuminates the underlying assumptions and rationales of the ambitious French agenda, showing that it too was significantly reorientated between the armistice and Versailles. Finally, it explores how far Clemenceau, his main adviser André Tardieu and other French policymakers had drawn constructive lessons and consequences from the catastrophe of the war – and how far their aims and strategies, which focused on containing and initially isolating postwar Germany, indeed opened up realistic perspectives of securing peace and creating a durable Atlantic and global order.

It is no surprise that Fauré has never been associated with orientalism or exotic musics. Aside from a few paragraphs by Sylvain Caron, no one has ventured to write a study of Fauré and orientalism.1 Indeed, it almost seems as if the composer himself ordained this dissociation for his own legacy. His final two song cycles, Mirages, Op. 113, and L’horizon chimérique, Op. 118, bring the point home. The titles of both works evoke faraway geographies. But the first song of Mirages, “Cygne sur l’eau,” works in the opposite direction: the itinerary reaches inward.