AHC/WI: No Entente Cordiale

The Entente Cordiale, signed in 1904 between Great Britain and France, was a series of agreements to settle issues between the two countries.

Challenge: With a POD after 1900, prevent the Entente Cordiale or analogues from happening.

What are the political and economic outcomes of this (non)event?

Greater bitterness between Britain and France following the Fashoda Incident and the Second Boer War would be the most likely thing to prevent the Entente Cordiale from being signed. Fashoda left a lot of bitterness within the French Army towards Perfidious Albion, much of which lingered through to the start of the First World war.

French policy at the time was more influenced by the individual personalities of foreign ministers rather than by government policy; the life expectancy of the average government in the Third Republic was six months but in many cases the foreign ministers remained and continued to serve in several successive cabinets.

The foreign minister crucial to ending the bitter rivalry with Britain and achieving the Entente Cordiale is Theophile Delcasse; without him as foreign minister from mid-1898 through until mid-1905 there would most likely not have been an entente. Have Delcasse fall victim to the fallout from Fashoda or the Dreyfuss affair and you can quite easily butterfly away the entente. The entente was after all an unlikely event, on a par with Nixon going to China; it turned French foreign and colonial policy for the previous hundred years on its head.

On the British side, Landsdown as foreign secretary is far less critical; the British governments were far more stable and developing a better relationship with France and Russia, or at least one of them, was a matter of greater national self interest.

As to the consequences of this, more to follow later.

Concerning the British side of the equation, Edward VII was in many ways critical in overcoming the hostility of the French public to a closer relationship with Britain, in 1903 he went on a state visit to Paris that enormously altered French attitudes towards the British; when he arrived in Paris it was to crowds shouting “Vivent les Boers!”, by the time he left they were shouting “Vive notre roi!” This trip was hugely beneficial to the Anglo-French rapprochement.*

However in 1900 while travelling through Belgium, the future King Edward VII was nearly assassinated by a Belgian sympathetic of the Boer cause. Jeab Baptiste Sipido fired four shots from a revolver at Edward from point blank range and missed the immense target of the comfortably proportioned royal with every shot! If Sipido had had calmer nerves and a steadier hand Britain’s best diplomatic tool would have been felled on a railway platform in Brussels long before he could overcome the hostility of the Europeans to Britain in the wake of the Boer War.

*For the Americans reading this, Edward’s trip was not his own initiative. It was undertaken at the request of Prime Minister Balfour and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Landsdown; British monarchs in the 20th century served their prime ministers, not the other way around.