By reason of the increased duration and stability of ministries, the personal influence of ministers in directing the foreign policy of France has in one sense become greater in the 20th century than in those earlier periods when France had first to recuperate its strength after the war and then to take its exterior policy from Germany. Moreover, not only have cabinets lasted longer, but the foreign minister has often been retained in a succession of them. Of the thirty years which in 1909 had elapsed since Marshal MacMahon retired and the republic was governed by republicans, in the first fifteen years from 1879 to 1894 fourteen different persons held the office of minister of foreign affairs, while six sufficed for the fifteen years succeeding the latter date. One must not, however, exaggerate the effect of this greater stability in office-holding upon continuity of policy, which was well maintained even in the days when there was on an average a new foreign minister every year. Indeed the most marked breach in the continuity of the foreign policy of France has been made in that later period of long terms of office, which, with the repudiation of the Concordat, has seen the withdrawal of the French protectorate over Roman Catholic missions in the East--though it is too soon to estimate the result. In another respect France has under the republic departed a long way from a tradition of the Quai d'Orsay. It no longer troubles itself on the subject of nationalities. Napoleon III., who had more French temperament than French blood in his constitution, was an idealist on this question, and one of the causes of his own downfall and the defeat of France was his sympathy in this direction with German unity. Since Sedan little has been done in France to further the doctrine of nationalities. A faint echo of it was heard during the Boer war, but French sympathy with the struggling Dutch republics of South Africa was based rather on anti-English sentiment than on any abstract theory. (J. E. C. B.)