French should appeal to the world not as a nation of defiled innocence, he argued, but rather as a nation that had fallen from the heights of power and therefore was well suited, indeed obliged, to warn the states now scaling those heights of the inevitable consequences. “Every nation that adopts military glory and power as its motto, as we once did, will make the mistakes we made.”52 Warning the victors of the perils of triumph was nothing new; it had often seemed, as in the American South, an effective means of transforming defeat into moral superiority.
