Through all the organised approach to Self-Sufficiency and Economic
Rehabilitation, France has not lost sight of her grudge against the
Germans. Indeed, no phase of her business life to-day is more
picturesque than the campaign now in full swing not only against
Teutonic trade, but against any resumption of commercial relation with
the hated enemy across the Rhine. Right here you get a striking
difference between English and French methods. While Britain takes out
some of her enmity against German trade in eloquent conversation, France
has gone about it in a practical way, shot through with all the colour
and imagination that only the French could employ upon such procedure.

Preliminary to this campaign was a characteristic episode. Almost with
the flareup of war, the French mind turned sentimentally to those
fateful early Seventies when Germany in the flush of her great victory
seized the fruits of that triumph. Some of those fruits were embodied
in the famous Treaty of Frankfort in which the Teuton clamped the mailed
fist down on every favoured French trade relation.

The war automatically annulled this treaty, and although the nation was
in the first throes of a struggle that threatened existence, it
celebrated the revocation in characteristic fashion. Millions of copies
of the Frankfort Treaty were printed and sold on the streets of Paris
and elsewhere. The excited Frenchman rushed up and down brandishing his
copy and saying: "Now we will ram this treaty down the throat of the
Boche!"

This emotional prelude was now followed by a definite crusade for the
elimination of German goods. Anti-German societies were formed all over
the country. Backing these up are dozens of other formidable