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new developments led to a changed outlook on foreignrelations. In the first place, the traditional policy of thesupport of Turkey against Russia was dropped. Franceremained financially and economically of great consequencein Turkey, but she had lost her political positionin Constantinople and did not attempt to regain it at theexpense of Russia. Secondly, the French colonial expansionof the eighties and nineties clashed with Britishexpansion in Africa, in south-east Asia, and in the Pacific.After 1878 Anglo-Russian hostility increased in the Nearand Middle East and was extended to the Far East.Opposition to England was common ground upon whichRussia and France could co-operate. Their mutualinterests nowhere conflicted. In the third place, graduallythe Polish question ceased to be the stumbling-blockit had been in the past. Poland retained the sympathyof France, especially of the left, but feelings became toneddown. Bitter experience had shown how difficult it wasto help the Poles in practice even when France was strongand Russia relatively weak and Prussia had not becomeGermany. Fortunately for the Third Republic, between1870 and 1914 there was no revolt in Poland and nointernational raising of the Polish question.In the eighties Russia moved much nearer to France.Panslav nationalism began to join hands with the newgroups that were making rapid headway in France withtheir eyes on 'the blue line of the Vosges' and theirthoughts turning to Russia as their helpmate. Alreadyin 1882 when the irrepressible general Skobelev, anardent nationalist and the popular hero of Russia, visitedParis, he was greeted in French newspapers as the apostleof the inevitable struggle between Teuton and Slav—" the enemy is Germany"—and of alliance betweenFrance and the Slavs. The inflammatory Deroulede,at the head of his Ligue des Patriotes, and closely linkedwith Boulanger, played up to Russian nationalist feelingand maintained particularly close relations with Katkovduring the Bulgarian crisis (1886-87).Hostility to Germany and to England was the commonground for this rapprochement. As has been already seenKatkov was heading the anti-German campaign in Russia429