_La Revanche_ in this academic sense was the banner of the _Ligue des Patriotes_, presided over by Paul Déroulède, of the _Action Française_, a Royalist society founded by Alphonse Daudet’s son Léon, in collaboration with that gifted writer Charles Maurras. But none of these people were practical politicians; and none of them, as we cannot repeat too often, advocated an immediate aggressive war for the reconquest of the lost provinces. They desired above all things that the brethren from whom they had been parted under such heartrending conditions should not feel themselves forgotten. And it was for the sake of these exiles that the _revanchards_ protested against Gambetta’s counsel, _pensons y toujours n’en parlons jamais_. They spoke of them constantly, they spoke of them loudly—too constantly, and too loudly, perhaps; for they certainly failed to inspire the majority of their compatriots with that consuming desire for reunion which burnt in their own hearts. To keep this idea alive, Mme. Adam has written and laboured for forty-five years. With this object, as we shall see, she founded a fortnightly magazine, _La Nouvelle Revue_. In an article in this review, dated September 1881, replying to an accusation made by the German Press that France was likely to appeal to force, Mme. Adam writes: “We have never ceased to ask M. Gambetta to remind our brethren separated from us that we have never renounced the hope of reunion with them.” Then she adds diplomatically: “Nothing in this affirmation need alarm Germany’s military hegemony. Nevertheless, it is well for her to know that, though far from dreaming of a rash war, we shall never be guilty of the crime of forgetting.” The wave of patriotic and nationalist fervour, which, as the result of the Tangier (1905) and Agadir (1911) incidents, swept over France during the ten years which preceded this war, indicated no desire for aggression even on the part of the most rabid _revanchard_. It was purely for a defensive war that France was preparing when in 1913, in reply to Germany’s threatening military measures, she increased to three years the term of military service, which in 1905 had been reduced to two. By that time any idea of _la Revanche_ as a practical measure had vanished from the majority of French minds.[288] It was not on her eastern frontier so much as in her vast colonial empire that France now saw herself threatened by Germany. Mme. Adam, still passionately clinging to the forlorn hope of _la Revanche_, had in her old age come to find herself practically alone except for a little group of literary idealists. Her adherence to this idea, which had been renounced by the majority of her nation, explains her political and religious evolution during the last thirty years.