VI. France and the Making of the Entente Cordiale

Abstract

The significance of the Entente Cordiale has often been disguised both by its own emotive title and by the subsequent development of Anglo-French relations. Vincent Auriol claimed on its fiftieth anniversary that ‘the convention of 8 April 1904 embodied the agreement of our two peoples on the necessity of safeguarding the spiritual values of which we were the common trustees’. Eden's interpretation on the same occasion was more prosaic and more accurate. ‘At the time when it was concluded’, he told the Commons, ‘the Entente Cordiale did not represent some great surge of public opinion on either side of the Channel. It was in fact an instrument of political policy at the time, calculated to attempt to remove the differences which had long complicated Anglo-French relations in Egypt and Morocco.’ The solution to these differences which was suggested to the English government by the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, in July 1903, and which formed the basis of the agreement signed nine months later, was the barter of Egypt for Morocco. In all that has been written on the Entente Cordiale neither the origin of this barter nor the steps by which it became the foundation for the diplomatic reconciliation of France and England have ever been explained.