The Entente Cordiale

Abstract

EVEN at the beginning of 1903 there were still occasional reminders of the animosity towards England which had been widespread in France at the beginning of the Boer War. On 23 January, for example, Reuter reported that successful English exhibitors at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 had still not received their medals: ‘Unfortunately, the engraver to whom the work was entrusted was an ardent pro-Boer, and every time he saw on the lists an English looking name, he coolly put his pen through it’. For the most part, however, the passions that had prevailed at the turn of the century had by now largely subsided. During Chamberlain’s much-publicised visit to South Africa early in 1903, Lavino, the new Times correspondent in Paris, reported that ‘it would be vain to seek in any of the more respectable newspapers a trace of that vituperation without which his very name was but two years ago seldom pronounced on the continent’. This, Lavino believed, was ‘a significant sign of the times, inasmuch as it corresponds with a tendency on the part of many French politicians to return to a more reasonable and just estimate of the old ally of their country’.¹ In England the mood of public opinion had changed even more than in France.