The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (26 page)

6. After 1900, a new and unexpected friendship – the Entente Cordiale – grew between France and Great Britain as a common fear of growing German power encouraged them to overcome their ancient hatreds. In a highly successful visit to Paris in 1903 Edward VII helped to win over French public opinion. Here Edward and President Loubet wear each other’s national dress under a caption saying England and France forever! Along the sides plaques bearing the names of their great past battles of Waterloo and Crecy, are decorated with olive branches while the banner at the top reads Peace, Honour, Victory.

The plan was for a small force led by Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand to march stealthily eastward from the French colony of Gabon on the west coast of Africa, with the French leaders of the expedition posing where necessary as travellers merely interested in exploring the possibilities for trade, and stake claim to Fashoda before the British got wind of what was happening. The French seemed to have thought that they might find local allies, perhaps even the victorious Mahdi and his army in Sudan. That in turn might trigger an international conference to settle boundaries along the Upper Nile and reopen the question of control over Egypt. Unfortunately, from the French perspective, things went badly wrong. To begin with the expedition was delayed for various reasons and did not finally set out until March 1897. Second, the French colonial lobby and sympathetic newspapers had been quite openly discussing its prospects and obligingly providing maps well before it started so that the British had plenty of time to respond. Even before Marchand set out from Brazzaville, the British government warned that a French move towards the Nile would be seen as an unfriendly act.
¹
Third, Emperor Menelik of the independent African state of Ethiopia, who had agreed that the French could send expeditions westwards through his country to reinforce Marchand at Fashoda, avoided keeping his promise and instead sent the unwitting French off on huge detours.
²

For a year and a half Marchand and seven other French officers, along with 120 Senegalese soldiers, struggled across Africa. Accompanied by porters, often pressed into service along the way, the expedition carried an enormous quantity of supplies including 10 tons of rice, 5 tons of corned beef, 1 ton of coffee, and 1,300 litres of red wine as well as champagne to celebrate its anticipated success. It also brought along quantities of ammunition, a small river steamer (which the porters had to carry in pieces, at one point through 120 miles of bush), as well as presents for the locals – who generally fled at the approach of the strangers – such as 16 tons of coloured beads and 70,000 metres of coloured cloth. In addition there was a mechanical piano, a French flag and vegetable seeds.
³

By the time the Marchand expedition drew near to Fashoda and the Nile in the late summer of 1898, the British had a clear idea of where it was headed and what its purpose was. While the French were establishing themselves in Fashoda, Britain already had an army moving south from Egypt under the command of General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who was under orders to retake the Sudan. (The young Winston Churchill came along as a war correspondent.) On 2 September the British and Egyptian forces overwhelmingly defeated the Mahdi’s army at Omdurman outside Khartoum. Kitchener then opened sealed orders which he had been sent from London to discover that he was to move south down the Nile to Fashoda and persuade the French to withdraw. On 18 September he arrived at Fashoda with five gunboats and a large enough force to outnumber the French comfortably.

At Fashoda itself, relations were perfectly amicable. The British were impressed by the way the French had made themselves comfortable with their flower gardens and their vegetables, especially the haricots verts. The French were delighted to get recent newspapers from home although horrified to learn about the Dreyfus affair which was now dividing France: ‘An hour after we opened the French newspapers [we] were trembling and weeping,’ said one of the expedition. Kitchener gave Marchand a whisky and soda. (‘One of the greatest sacrifices I ever made for my country’, the Frenchman later said, ‘was to drink that horrible smoky alcohol.’) The French provided warm champagne in return. Both parties politely but firmly claimed the surrounding territory and both refused to withdraw.
⁴

Word of the stand-off sped northwards by steamship and telegraph. The reactions in Paris and London were much less temperate than on the ground. For Britain and France, of course, their confrontation at Fashoda was weighted down with memories of a long and turbulent shared history. Hastings, Agincourt, Crécy, Trafalgar, Waterloo, William the Conqueror, Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, Napoleon, all ran together into a picture on the east side of the Channel of perfidious Albion and on the other of treacherous France. And Fashoda was also about the long struggle for world dominance since the sixteenth century. From the St Lawrence River to the fields of Bengal, British and French forces had fought for empire. The old rivalry had been freshened by much more recent competition: over Egypt, of course, but also elsewhere in the
decaying Ottoman Empire. The two countries clashed too in Asia – where the French Empire in Indochina and the British one in India were bumping up against each other in the still independent nation of Siam – in West Africa, and in the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, which the French had seized over British protests in 1896. In the autumn of 1898 during the Fashoda crisis, French newspapers had headlines ‘No Surrender to England’, while their British counterparts warned that they would stand for no more tricks from the French. ‘Yielding now’, said the
Daily Mail
, ‘we should only have to face more preposterous demands tomorrow.’
⁵

Behind the scenes in both countries there was much coming and going in government offices, and war plans were drawn up just in case they were needed. The British weighed the merits of an attack on the French naval base of Brest and put their Mediterranean Fleet on alert. From Paris, Thomas Barclay, a prominent British journalist and businessman, heard rumours that mayors in ports along the Channel had been ordered to requisition local churches for hospitals. He also wrote an article for the local English-language paper on what might happen to British nationals in France if war broke out. The British ambassador warned that there might be a military coup against the French government, which was already tottering; if the soldiers took over they might well welcome a war with Britain to unite the country.

Queen Victoria told Salisbury ‘a war for so miserable and small an object is what I could hardly bring myself to consent to’ and urged him to find a way to compromise with the French. Salisbury calculated that the French did not want a war and he was right.
⁶
At the start of November the French agreed to withdraw Marchand and his force from Fashoda (the official reason given was for the sake of their health). Marchand refused the offer of a passage on a British steamer and the expedition marched on eastwards, reaching Djibouti on the Indian Ocean six months later. (Fashoda is still poor but today its population is much bigger thanks to the refugees created by the Sudan’s civil wars and by famine.)

When the Boer War broke out the following year French public opinion cheered the South African republics on. The 1900 graduating class at the military academy at St Cyr called itself the Transvaal year.
⁷
The British ambassador in Paris reported gloomily to Salisbury that
French public opinion was taking great pleasure in Britain’s troubles. ‘Your Lordship will, I am sure, enter into the feelings which the painful situation cannot but cause to the Representative of the Queen in a country which appears to have gone mad with jealousy, spite, and resentment.’
⁸
Félix Faure, the French President, told a Russian diplomat that Britain not Germany was his country’s chief enemy, and again there was talk on both sides of the Channel about the possibility of war.
⁹

The Fashoda crisis and its aftermath left behind bitterness on both sides, but it also had a salutary effect. Like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the prospect of outright war frightened the protagonists and cooler heads began to think of ways to avoid such dangerous confrontations in the future. In Britain, those such as Chamberlain and Balfour who wanted to move away from isolation had no strong preferences as to possible allies. Like their great predecessor Lord Palmerston, they believed that Britain had no permanent allies or enemies but only permanent interests. As Chamberlain said, ‘If his idea of a natural alliance with Germany must be renounced, it would be no impossibility for England to arrive at an understanding with Russia or with France.’
¹⁰
Baron Eckardstein, the German diplomat whose memoirs are entertaining but unreliable, may have been telling the truth when he claimed to have overheard a conversation at the start of 1902 between Chamberlain and the new French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon. ‘While we were smoking and drinking coffee, after dinner, I suddenly saw Chamberlain and Cambon go off into the billiard room. I watched them there and noted that they talked together for exactly 28 minutes in the most animated manner. I could not of course catch what they said and only heard two words “Morocco” and “Egypt”.’
¹¹

The difficulties in contemplating a friendship between two enemies of such long standing as Britain and France were considerably greater on the French side. If the British were feeling uneasy about their position in the world, the French were acutely aware of their own decline and their present vulnerability. That tended to make them more rather than less resentful and heightened their suspicions of Britain. Memories of past glories and past humiliations can also be a heavy burden; for the French they included the glorious long reign of Louis XIV when France dominated Europe and when French civilisation from philosophy to fashion was the model for the entire continent. More recently, as
the monuments, the paintings, the books, the Rues Napoleons in virtually every French city and town reminded the French, Napoleon and his armies had conquered almost the whole of Europe. While Waterloo had brought an end to his empire, France had continued to be a great power with the capacity to influence the world’s affairs. Another Napoleon, nephew of the first, and another battle had brought a dramatic change.

In 1870 Emperor Napoleon III had led France to a devastating defeat at Sedan at the hands of Prussia and its allied German states. And, as the French noted bitterly, not a single other nation had come to France’s aid, yet another black mark against Britain. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, as France struggled to create a new workable regime, and French fought French, Bismarck had imposed a heavy peace: France had to accept an occupation until it paid a large indemnity (larger, it has been argued, than the one Germany eventually paid France after the Great War) and it lost the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine on its eastern borders. In a final humiliating touch, the Prussian king was made emperor of the Germans in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. ‘Europe’, as one British journalist famously said, ‘had lost a mistress and gained a master.’ In Brussels, a Russian diplomat took a longer-term view: ‘It seems to me that on 2 September [when the French army surrendered at Sedan] the first stone was laid for a future Franco-Russian alliance.’
¹²

In the succeeding years, until his downfall in 1890, Bismarck did his best to ensure that France was incapable of taking revenge. He played the game of diplomacy as only he could, making this alliance then that, tilting towards one power or another, promising, cajoling or threatening, but all to keep Germany at the centre of international relations and France isolated and friendless. Russia, which was also threatened by the rise of a powerful Germany at the heart of Europe, and which like France had a long border with the new country, could have been an ally for France but Bismarck cleverly appealed to the conservatism of Russia’s rulers to draw Russia into a tripartite alliance, the Dreikaiserbund, with the third conservative power of Austria-Hungary. And when rivalries between Russia and Austria-Hungary threatened to disrupt that alliance, he negotiated a secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887, the one that Germany was carelessly going to fail to renew in 1890.

Bismarck also held out promises to France, of increased commercial links with Germany for example. French and German banks worked together to lend money to Latin America or to the Ottoman Empire. Trade between the two countries increased to the point where there was even talk of a customs union. (That was going to have to wait a few more decades.) Bismarck also gave German support for France’s acquisition of colonies in West Africa or the Far East in what became French Indochina. He backed French moves into what had been Ottoman territory in North Africa. Germany supported France as well when it established a protectorate, as one of the more veiled forms of imperialism was known, over Tunisia in 1881 and watched benignly while the French extended their influence into Morocco. With any luck, so Bismarck calculated, French empire building might well bring France into conflict with Britain and Italy; at the least it would stop France from making friends with either. And if the French were looking abroad, they were less likely to brood resentfully about their defeat by Germany and the loss of their two provinces.

In Paris, in the Place de la Concorde, the statue for Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, was draped in black mourning as a reminder of that loss. It was commemorated in songs, novels, paintings and, on the battlefields themselves, with annual ceremonies. French textbooks told students that the Treaty of Frankfurt which ended the Franco-Prussian War was ‘a truce, not a peace; which is why since 1871, all Europe lives permanently under arms’.
¹³
To call someone or something ‘Prussian’ in France was a deadly insult. It was horrible for French patriots that Alsace and the southern part of Lorraine – of particular significance as the birthplace of Joan of Arc – were now Elsass and Lothringen and the new border was marked by sentry posts and fortresses. Each year the graduating class of the French army’s cavalry school visited the border where it ran through the Vosges mountains so that they could examine the slope down which they would charge when war broke out again between France and Germany.
¹⁴
Twenty-six years after France’s defeat Paul Cambon walked around Versailles with his brother Jules, also a diplomat, and was acutely reminded of France’s disgrace at the hands of Germany, ‘like a burn that doesn’t heal’.
¹⁵