<P> The state had a smaller role in France than in Germany before the First World War . French income levels were higher than German income levels despite France having less natural resources, while taxation and government spending was lower in France than in Germany . </P> <P> France lagged behind Bismarckian Germany, as well as Great Britain, in developing a welfare state with public health, unemployment insurance and national old age pension plans . There was an accident insurance law for workers in 1898, and in 1910, France created a national pension plan . Unlike Germany or Britain, the programs were much smaller--for example, pensions were a voluntary plan . Historian Timothy Smith finds French fears of national public assistance programs were grounded in a widespread disdain for the English Poor Law . Tuberculosis was the most dreaded disease of the day, especially striking young people in their 20s . Germany set up vigorous measures of public hygiene and public sanatoria, but France let private physicians handle the problem . The French medical profession guarded its prerogatives, and public health activists were not as well organized or as influential as in Germany, Britain or the United States . For example, there was a long battle over a public health law which began in the 1880s as a campaign to reorganize the nation's health services, to require the registration of infectious diseases, to mandate quarantines, and to improve the deficient health and housing legislation of 1850 . </P> <P> However, the reformers met opposition from bureaucrats, politicians, and physicians . Because it was so threatening to so many interests, the proposal was debated and postponed for 20 years before becoming law in 1902 . Implementation finally came when the government realized that contagious diseases had a national security impact in weakening military recruits, and keeping the population growth rate well below Germany's . Another theory is the low rate of French population growth, relative to Germany, was due to a lower French birth rate perhaps due to the provision under French Revolutionary law that land must be divided up among all the sons (or a large compensation paid)--- this led peasants to not want more than one son . There is no evidence to suggest than French life expectancy was lower than that of Germany . </P> <P> The Dreyfus affair was a major political scandal that convulsed France from 1894 until its resolution in 1906, and then had reverberations for decades more . The conduct of the affair has become a modern and universal symbol of injustice . It remains one of the most striking examples of a complex miscarriage of justice in which a central role was played by the press and public opinion . At issue was blatant anti-Semitism as practiced by the French Army and defended by conservatives and catholic traditionalists against secular centre - left, left and republican forces, including most Jews . In the end, the latter triumphed . </P>

Which of the following was not a primary cause of world war i apex