Cordiale Agreement 1904

Through the Entente Cordiale, the two powers reduced the de facto isolation into which they had withdrawn – France unwittingly, Britain complacently – while they had looked at each other on African affairs. Britain, with the exception of Japan (1902), had no omnipotense sovereign and there was no point in war breaking out in European waters; France had none other than Russia, soon discredited in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. The agreement angered Germany, whose policy has long been to rely on Franco-British antagonism. A German attempt to control the French in Morocco in 1905 (Tangier incident or First Moroccan Crisis) and thus to thwart the Entente only served to strengthen it. Military talks between the French and British general staffs were soon launched. Franco-British solidarity was confirmed at the Algeciras Conference (1906) and confirmed again during the Second Moroccan Crisis (1911). [3] The defeat at Fashoda of course put the French in a position, but it also helped to revive the Entente, with the French recognizing that an alliance with Britain was necessary. Indeed, delcassé turned his attention to the formalization of the Entente and worked with British Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne and The French Ambassador to Britain, Paul Cambon, all of whom had worked behind the scenes to work out the intricacies of an agreement. Recognizing that the Entente would need public support if it survived, the heads of state, King Edward VII of England and French President Émile Loubet, organized official visits to Paris and London. These agreements were as follows: the Entente Cordiale was a series of agreements signed on 8 April 1904 between the United Kingdom and the French Third Republic. Beyond the immediate concerns of colonial expansion raised by the agreement, the signing of the Entente Cordiale marked the end of nearly a millennium of intermittent conflicts between the two nations and their predecessors and the formalization of the peaceful coexistence that had existed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The Entente Cordiale was then part of the Triple Entente between Britain, France and Russia with the Anglo-Russian Entente and the Franco-Russian alliance.

One of the motivating factors of the agreement was undoubtedly France`s desire to protect itself from possible aggression by its former rival, Germany, which, since its victory in the Franco-German War of 1870-71, had continued to strengthen and now possessed the most powerful land army in the world. Britain also strove to contain Germany, especially in the face of a revised and ambitious German naval program that, if successful, threatened to challenge Britain`s clear dominance at sea. * On April 8, 1904, a series of agreements was signed between England and France, known as the Entente Cordiale. . . .