Origins And Outbreak Of World War 1 Essay

The origins and outbreak of World War I directly relate to French actions leading up to the war. While France was not an overtly aggressive power, there were notable tensions between all the European countries at the time of the outbreak of the war. France was swept up in the fervor of the moment and committed to fighting a prolonged and violent war. While causes of the war were more immediate in the early 20th century, there had been tension since the late 19th century. It is important to connect the events that happened at the end of the 19th century to those that happened just before the war because the events in the 19th century had consequences that affected the ones in the 20th century including the outbreak of a general war across Europe. France was at the center of this and an unlikely alliance with Great Britain made the events and stories of World War I ones to remember. While France was not a main

It should be noted that the beginning of German and French tensions can be found in the territories of Alsace and Lorraine. Alsace was a resource-rich land with a population that had assimilated to French culture, but the Germans thought of Alsace as German land with a German population. Having beat the French in 1871, the Germans reclaimed Alsace and so the French now felt what the Germans had been feeling for the past two hundred years up until the Germans reclaimed Alsace. Lorraine was once a German territory, but unlike Alsace, its population was inherently French and only had a few traces of its German heritage unlike Alsace. While reclaiming these resource-rich lands was only small price to pay for the French whose humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War could have cost more, the French being a pride group of Europeans were more upset that they had lost their status as the main continental power of