the documents proving Izvolsky's connivance in the original annexation deal. Izvolsky backed down at once. Reviled by Russian pan-Slavists for "betraying" the Serbs, who felt Bosnia should be theirs, the embittered Izvolsky was eventually dismissed from office. Historiography has traditionally laid most blame for the annexation crisis at Aehrenthal's door. The historian Christopher Clark however, in his 2012 study of the causes of the First World War The Sleepwalkers, has challenged this view: "the evidence suggests that the crisis took the course it did because Izvolsky lied in the most extravagant fashion in order to save his job and reputation. The Russian foreign minister had made two serious errors of judgement [firstly] that London would support his demand for the opening of the Turkish Straits to Russian warships - [and] he grossly underestimated the impact of the annexation on Russian nationalist opinion - [when] - he got wind of the press response in St Petersburg, he realized his error, panicked, and began to construct himself as Aehrenthal's dupe." The years following the annexation crisis, with an atmosphere of increased 'chauvinist popular emotion' and with a sense of humiliation in a sphere of vital interest, saw the Russians launch a substantial programme of military investment. Later life Upon becoming ambassador in Paris in 1910, Izvolsky devoted his energies to strengthening Russia's anti-German alliance with both the Third French Republic and the British Empire and encouraging Russian rearmament. When World War I broke out, he is reputed to have remarked, C'est ma guerre! ("This is my war!"). After the February Revolution, Izvolsky resigned but remained in Paris, where he was succeeded by Vasily Maklakov. He advocated for Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and wrote a book of memoirs before his last illness. Shortly before his death, Isvolsky sat up and, greatly to their shock, he told his two children, "If I die, I do not wish to be buried in the Russian Orthodox Church. Let your mother's Protestant pastor read the funeral prayers." His daughter, though shocked, later attributed her father's words to, "the long-repressed bitterness he had felt, at seeing the abject subservience of the Orthodox Hierarchy to the Tsar, and the corrupting influence of Rasputin." Alexander Isvolsky died at Biarritz on November 16, 1919. In keeping with his wishes, a funeral service was read over his body by a Protestant minister. His children, however, also arranged for a