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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
French writers on war and peace
Women writers on peace and war
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Germaine de Staël
From Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution
When Louis XVI and his ministers had left the hall, the Assembly voted war by acclamation. Some members took no share in the deliberations; but the galleries applauded with transport: the deputies threw their hats in the air, and that day, the first of the bloody struggle which has torn Europe during twenty-three years, that day did not, in most minds, produce the slightest disquietude. Yet, of the deputies who voted for this war, many fell by a violent death, and those who rejoiced at it the most were unconsciously pronouncing their own death sentence.
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