Foreign policy

Meanwhile, some important successes were being scored in the field of foreign policy. For two decades after 1871 France had remained diplomatically isolated in Europe. Bismarck, to ward off potential French ideas of revenge, had shrewdly encouraged the republic’s governments to embark on colonial conquest overseas and had negotiated alliances with all those European powers the French might otherwise have courted. He thus kept Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Italy in tow, while Britain chose to remain aloof in “splendid isolation.” Upon Bismarck’s fall in 1890, the German emperor William II (Kaiser Wilhelm) terminated the secret treaty between Germany and Russia. The Russians began to cast about for friends and looked with some distaste toward Paris. French policy makers encouraged French bankers to make loans to the Russian government and opened negotiations for an entente. In 1891 a loose agreement provided for mutual consultation in crisis; in 1894 this was broadened into a military alliance by whose terms each partner promised to aid the other in case of attack by Germany or Germany’s allies.

For a decade the Franco-Russian alliance had little practical effect (though French loans did continue to flow to Russia). French diplomats turned to winning the Italians away from the Triple Alliance, and a Franco-Italian secret agreement in 1902 substantially weakened the commitment Italy had made to Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1882. Of more central importance throughout the 1890s was recurrent tension between France and Britain, who had been at odds in various parts of the world and whose colonial competition at times seemed to threaten war. Britain’s South African (Boer) War added further ill feeling, and some British leaders began to urge an end to “splendid isolation” in favour of an entente with a Continental power—most probably Germany, which was seen as part of an Anglo-Saxon racial bloc. But the German government responded coolly to overtures in this direction, thus feeding the fears of British leaders who saw Germany as a threat to British interests. The British turned to France instead and found a willing partner in the foreign minister Théophile Delcassé. A visit to Paris by King Edward VII in 1903 helped pave the way to the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale of 1904, which resolved all outstanding colonial conflicts between the two powers but stopped short of military alliance. The new entente was consolidated a year later, when French moves to take over Morocco as a protectorate were resented by the Germans, who thought they saw an opportunity to break up the new entente. Kaiser Wilhelm offered Germany’s support to the sultan of Morocco; this action irritated the British and led them to promise France strong support. In the conference of powers that followed at Algeciras, Spain, in 1906, France had to be content with special privileges rather than a protectorate in Morocco; but the Entente Cordiale was reinforced, and it was Germany that thenceforth began to complain of isolation.