Building the Entente Cordiale

Kempshall, Chris

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-89465-2_2

Chris Kempshall²

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Abstract

In this chapter, Kempshall examines relations between Britain and France from the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars until the outbreak of the First World War. He examines the importance of events such as Fashoda, the Dreyfus Affair, and the Boer War in complicating relations between Britain and France in the nineteenth century. However, through analysis of the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, Kempshall shows how Britain and France came to be joined in a military alliance to confront the growing threat of Germany. This chapter then concludes with a further study of the role of the army in both Britain and France, how different notions of citizenship divided the men of these two countries, and how the British lacked an understanding of French identity in Europe.

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Notes

1.
As cited by: Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 80.
2.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Anderson’s definition has been described as being both ‘invaluable’ and ‘loose’ by the likes of Colley: Linda Colley, Britons; Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Vintage Press, 1996), p. 5. Some of these issues are likely sourced from deficiencies in particular methods of study, with Evans suggesting that diplomatic historians in particular were, in the end, unable ‘to come up with a balanced, informed and convincing account of the history of individual modern European states’: Richard J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 123. Additionally, there are numerous frames of reference for measuring national characteristics, and they did not always sit comfortably alongside each other. In their book regarding representations of national characters, Beller and Leerssen list over 60 ‘relevant concepts, related disciplines’ spread over nearly 200 pages: Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, eds., Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters (New York: Rodopi, 2007).
3.
Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 8–44.
4.
Jack S. Levy, pp. 11–14.
5.
F. R. Bridge and Roger Bullen, The Great Powers and the European States Systems 1814–1914 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), p. 2.
6.
Bridge and Bullen, p. 2.
7.
Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748–1815 (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), Chapter 3.
8.
Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy (London: William Heinemann, 2006), pp. 256–67.
9.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), Chapter 5.
10.
Kennedy, pp. 198–202.
11.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 260.
12.
There is some dispute over when, exactly, Prussia/Germany should be considered to have gained Great Power status. The Congress of Vienna is often given as a clearly implicit view of who was a Great Power at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and Prussia was a major part of the negotiations. Levy argues that Prussia should be considered a Great Power from 1740 onwards: Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975, p. 40. Bridge and Bullen seem equally convinced of Prussia’s Great Power status: Bridge and Bullen, The Great Powers and the European States Systems 1814–1914. It is Kennedy who outlines some of the issues regarding Prussia’s relative position in Europe: Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 160–2 and 182–90. However, there is little doubting that, following the Franco-Prussian War and the resulting unification, German represented a Great Power at the end of the nineteenth century.
13.
William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (London: Little, Brown, 2009), p. 54.
14.
Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars: The Ford Lectures in the University of Oxford 1971 (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972), pp. 31–2.
15.
Howard, p. 32.
16.
Howard, p. 33.
17.
Howard, p. 34.
18.
Howard, p. 37.
19.
James Wood, ‘Anglo-American Liberal Militarism and the Idea of the Citizen Soldier’, International Journal 62, no. 2 (2007).
20.
Howard, p. 45.
21.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 11th ed. (London: Dodsley, 1791).
22.
Roger Knight, Britain against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory 1793–1815, Penguin History (London: Penguin Books, 2014), pp. 22–3.
23.
Knight, pp. 386–7.
24.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 280.
25.
Tombs and Tombs, pp. 280–1. This sort of fraternisation bears many of the hallmarks of activities that would occur between the respective enemies during the First World War, and will be examined in time.
26.
Tombs and Tombs, p. 285.
27.
Tombs and Tombs, p. 285.
28.
Tombs and Tombs, pp. 287–8.
29.
For details on the background of the Crimean War see: Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Allen Lane, 2010), Chapters 1–4; Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854–1856 (London: Abacus, 2000), Prologue; and Julian Spilsbury, The Thin Red Line (London: Cassell, 2006), Chapter. 1.
30.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 359.
31.
Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade, p. 409.
32.
Figes, p. 177.
33.
Figes, p. 177.
34.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 359.
35.
Spilsbury, The Thin Red Line, p. 232.
36.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, pp. 310–11.
37.
It was not a movement on the same scale as that of Britons to France but, regardless, there was a definite increase in French tourism, with estimates of ‘1450 in 1815; 3700 in 1835; and 4290 in 1847’. Much of this can be understood by the improvements in cross-Channel travel and the decrease in ticket prices, making the journey far less time-consuming and expensive than it had been in previous decades Tombs and Tombs, p. 329.
38.
Tombs and Tombs, p. 328.
39.
Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
40.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 379.
41.
Tombs and Tombs, p. 379.
42.
Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871, p. 188.
43.
Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 82.
44.
Horne, pp. 162–6.
45.
Following this bombardment, ‘the allegorical representations of France … for the first time ever are unambiguously heroic and pathetic, while the Germans begin to appear as heartless barbarians, foreshadowing the “Huns” of 1914–1918’. Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 382.
46.
Tombs and Tombs, p. 380.
47.
Horne, The Fall of Paris, p. 166.
48.
P. M. H. Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940: Entente and Estrangement (London  and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 9.
49.
Horne, The Fall of Paris, p. 248.
50.
Horne, p. 417.
51.
Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 52.
52.
Elizabeth Greenhalgh, The French Army and the First World War, Armies of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 8.
53.
T. G. Otte, ‘From “War-in-Sight” to Nearly War: Anglo–French Relations in the Age of High Imperialism, 1875–1898’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 17, no. 4 (December 2006): 696.
54.
Berliner Post, 8 April 1875 quoted by Otte, p. 696.
55.
Otte, p. 697.
56.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 425.
57.
Concerning the Dreyfuss affair: Emile Zola, L’Affaire Dreyfus (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969); Roger Mettam and Douglas Johnson, French History and Society (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 117–20; David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon (London: Penguin Books, 1990), Chapters 16 and 17; Leonard V. Smith, Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chapter 1; and Herbert Tint, The Decline of French Patriotism 1870–1940 (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1964), Chapter 5.
58.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 426.
59.
Tombs and Tombs, p. 426.
60.
For a general history of the Moroccan dispute see: Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, Chapters 2 and 3; and Paul Jacques Victor Rolo, Entente Cordiale; the Origins and Negotiation of the Anglo-French Agreements of 8 April 1904 (London: MacMillan and Co., 1969), Chapter. 7. The original plan had called for Parfait-Louis Monteil to make the expedition, but delays to this schedule and his eventual dispatch to the French Congo by Théophile Delcassé, then Minister of the Colonies, meant that Marchand would be sent in his stead.
61.
Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale a Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy 1898–1905 (London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s press, 1968), p. 41.
62.
Otte, ‘From “War-in-Sight” to Nearly War’, p. 700.
63.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 9.
64.
Edward Berenson, ‘Fashoda, Dreyfus, and the Myth of Jean-Baptiste Marchand’, Yale French Studies, no. 111 (2007): 135–6.
65.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, pp. 426–7.
66.
Berenson, ‘Fashoda, Dreyfus, and the Myth of Jean-Baptiste Marchand’, p. 130.
67.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 429; Berenson, ‘Fashoda, Dreyfus, and the Myth of Jean-Baptiste Marchand’, p. 139.
68.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, pp. 9–10.
69.
Berenson, ‘Fashoda, Dreyfus, and the Myth of Jean-Baptiste Marchand’.
70.
Berenson.
71.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 430.
72.
Otte, ‘From “War-in-Sight” to Nearly War’, pp. 707–8; and Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 10.
73.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, pp. 432–3.
74.
Tombs and Tombs, p. 432.
75.
Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale a Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy 1898–1905, p. 136.
76.
Andrew, pp. 148–9 and 158–61.
77.
Andrew, p. 162.
78.
Andrew, p. 136.
79.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 26.
80.
Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale a Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy 1898–1905, pp. 201–02; and John V. C. Nye, War, Wine and Taxes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
81.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 10.
82.
Bell, pp. 12–13.
83.
Robert Tombs, ‘Ennemis Héréditaires, Alliés Par Nécessité’, Revue Historique Des Armées 264, no. 3 (2011): 11–18.
84.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, pp. 439–40.
85.
Tombs and Tombs, pp. 440–41.
86.
Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power, Chapter 1. This point is at the heart of Jackson’s magnificent study of French planning and foreign-policy law making in the years around the First World War.
87.
Jackson, pp. 51–2.
88.
As quoted by Jackson, p. 64.
89.
Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale a Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy 1898–1905, pp. 202–3.
90.
Andrew, p. 204.
91.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 23.
92.
Bell, p. 30.
93.
Bell, p. 29.
94.
Bell, pp. 33–4.
95.
Bell, p. 36.
96.
John Gooch, Plans of War: The General Staff and British Military Strategy c. 1900–1916. (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2016), p. 278.
97.
This is discussed in greater detail in: David G. Morgan-Owen, The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880–1914 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017), Chapters 5 and 6.
98.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 46.
99.
Gooch, Plans of War, p. 280.
100.
Gordon Corrigan, Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the First World War (London: Cassell Military, 2004), p. 35.
101.
Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 62.
102.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, pp. 43–6.
103.
See Note 1.
104.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 46.
105.
Gooch, Plans of War, p. 291.
106.
Gooch, p. 283.
107.
Gooch, p. 282.
108.
Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, p. 35.
109.
Bell, p. 45.
110.
There is some confusion over the use of the initials WF for the plans regarding the deployment of the BEF to France. Though some took them to stand for ‘Wilson-Foch’ it was generally understood to mean ‘With France’. As discussed by: Chris Phillips, ‘Henry Wilson and the Role of Civil-Military Cooperation during the Planning of British Mobilisation for War, 1910–1914’, Ex Historia 5 (May 2013).
111.
Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–5.
112.
William Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914–18 (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 5–6.
113.
William Philpott, ‘Plus Qu’un « simple Soldat »: La France et La Perspective d’un Soutien Militaire Britannique Avant 1914’, Revue Historique Des Armées 264, no. 3 (2011): 32–40.
114.
Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914–1918, p. 6.
115.
Philpott, p. 6.
116.
General Staff, War Office, Handbook of the French Army (London: Imperial War Museum, Department of Printed Books in association with The Battery Press and Articles of War Ltd., 1995), pp. 1–16.
117.
‘Wilson-Foch Scheme: Expeditionary Force to France (1913)’ (War Office Records at National Archives, Kew; WO 106/49A/2, n.d.).
118.
‘Wilson-Foch Scheme: Expeditionary Force to France (1913)’.
119.
Franziska Heimburger, ‘Imagining Coalition Warfare? French and British Military Language Policy before 1914’, Francia 40 (2013): 398–400.
120.
Heimburger, p. 402. However, this did lead to an increase in officers registering as French-speaking. Heimburger speculates that, to an extent, this £23 could be seen as easy money for a man who had undertaken French language classes at school and would probably lead to them turning a profit.
121.
A number of British soldiers comment on encountering Ffench soldiers who, having worked in the British service industry, had good levels of language. The reverse does not appear to be true.
122.
Greenhalgh, The French Army, p. 25.
123.
Lord Herbert Kitchener, ‘Instructions for the General Officer Commanding the Expeditionary Force Proceeding to France’, 1914, War Office Records; WO 32/5590, National Archives, Kew.
124.
It is also worth noting that this message does not differ greatly from that inscribed within the pocket Bibles of Cromwell’s Ironsides in the seventeenth century: Hans Kohn, ‘The Genesis and Character of English National Identity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 1, no. 1 (1940): 69–94.
125.
This also seems reminiscent of the moves Wellington made to win over the French people at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
126.
Charles à Court Lieut.-Col Repington, The First World War 1914–1918, vol. 1 (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1920), p. 32; and Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition, pp. 8–9. Repington himself is a fascinating character in the background of the First World War. For more on him, see: A. J. Anthony Morris, Reporting the First World War: Charles Repington, The Times and the Great War, 1914–1918, Cambridge Military Histories (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
127.
Repington, The First World War 1914–1918, 1, pp. 20–1.
128.
Charles a Court Repington, ‘Lord Kitchener’s Plan’, The Times, 15 August 1914.
129.
Repington.
130.
Repington, The First World War 1914–1918, 1, p. 22.
131.
Repington, 1, pp. 22–3.
132.
Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 102–3.
133.
Charles Edward Trevelyan, The British Army in 1868 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1868), p. 7.
134.
Trevelyan, pp. 8–11.
135.
Brian Bond, ‘Recruiting the Victorian Army 1870–1892’, Victorian Studies 5, no. 4 (1962): 331–38.
136.
Albert V. Tucker, ‘Army and Society in England 1870–1900: A Reassessment of the Cardwell Reforms’, Journal of British Studies 2, no. 2 (1963): 110–41.
137.
Bond, ‘Recruiting the Victorian Army 1870–1892’.
138.
Smith, Audoin-Rouzeau, and Becker, France and the Great War, 1914–1918, p. 16.
139.
Smith, Audoin-Rouzeau, and Becker, p. 19; and Etienne Dennery, ‘Democracy and the French Army’, Military Affairs 5, no. 4 (1941): 233–40.
140.
As Beckett, Bowman, and Connelly explain, the Secretary of State for War was not seen as a key position in the pre-War government and many of the occupants of the role had brought ‘little intellectual dynamism to the post’. Ian F. W. Beckett, Timothy Bowman, and Mark Connelly, The British Army and the First World War, Armies of the Great War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 8.
141.
C. B. Otley, ‘Militarism and the Social Affiliation of the British Army Elite’, in Armed Forces and Society: Sociological Essays, ed. J Doorn (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 86–7.
142.
Otley, pp. 88–105.
143.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 54.
144.
Huntington, p. 46.
145.
Huntington, pp. 46–7.
146.
Huntington, p. 47.
147.
Beckett, Bowman, and Connelly, The British Army and the First World War, pp. 7–8. Whilst these measures were billed under the heading of reorganisation, as Connelly, Beckett, and Bowman note; Haldane’s primary motivation was financial in a bid to bring down the cost of the armed forces.
148.
Beckett, Bowman, and Connelly, pp. 8–12.
149.
Beckett, Bowman, and Connelly, pp. 9–10.
150.
Beckett, Bowman, and Connelly, pp. 11–12.
151.
Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, p. 49.
152.
Huntington, p. 45.
153.
Huntington, p. 35.
154.
Alistair Horne, Friend or Foe: An Anglo-Saxon History of France (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 295, http://prism.talis.com/sussex-ac/items/1097745.
155.
Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (London: Belknap, 2005), pp. 7–8.
156.
Greenhalgh, The French Army, p. 11.
157.
Greenhalgh, p. 11.
158.
Greenhalgh, p. 12.
159.
Greenhalgh, p. 32.
160.
Charles Rearick, ‘Festivals in Modern France: The Experience of the Third Republic’, Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 3 (1977): 435–60.
161.
Colley, Britons; Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, pp. 330–2; and Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 22–3.
162.
Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 96.
163.
Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977).
164.
Weber, Chapter. 1.
165.
Denis M. Provencher and Luke L. Eilderts, ‘The Nation According to Lavisse: Teaching Masculinity and Male Citizenship in Third-Republic France’, French Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007): 31–57.
166.
Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (London: Yale University Press, 2006), http://prism.talis.com/sussex-ac/items/1097241.
167.
Howard F. Andrews, ‘A French View of Geography Teaching in Britain in 1871’, The Geographical Journal 152, no. 2 (1986): 225–31.
168.
For further information regarding Haselden, see; ‘William Kerridge Haselden’, n.d., http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/artists/william-kerridgehaselden/biography.
169.
The text below the cartoon in Fig. 1 explains: ‘We may have been unprepared for spies in England, but on the Continent they certainly were not. There was a period when, in Germany at least, an unoffending tourist had only to take a photograph in order to be arrested.’
170.
Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 352. Some of these new cartoon images were actually produced by French artists such as Gavarni, who worked for Punch.
171.
For further information on the Channel Tunnel discussions before the war, see Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940, pp. 51–3.
172.
Of additional interest here is that the actual visual personification of French soldiers by the British (or vice versa) was extremely uncommon in posters and propaganda during the war. Some publications (like Punch, for example) would draw French soldiers as will be discussed in relation to 1916; but there was rarely an ‘official’ image of the French Poilu or the English Tommy. There were some isolated exceptions, of course, but, by and large, both nations seemed to use the flag of their ally to symbolise the men without creating a consistent personification.

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Kempshall, C. (2018). Building the Entente Cordiale. In: British, French and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89465-2_2

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