WI: The Fashoda Incident lead to war between Britain and France

Royal Navy would blockade Brest and Toulon.

British troops would attack in West Africa, maybe Indochina. They would probably pick off French Pacific Islands and maybe treaty ports in China. But I don't see and invasion of France or the UK in the cards.

If the French could break out of Toulon, they'd go after Malta and the Canal. In fact control of Suez would probably be central to both Empires.
 
Royal Navy would blockade Brest and Toulon.

British troops would attack in West Africa, maybe Indochina. They would probably pick off French Pacific Islands and maybe treaty ports in China. But I don't see and invasion of France or the UK in the cards.

If the French could break out of Toulon, they'd go after Malta and the Canal. In fact control of Suez would probably be central to both Empires.
Why no front in Europe? Also what might the state of each countries colonies be at the end of this war? Might some change hands or gain independence? Also I might add that the 2nd Boar War started 13 months after the hight of this incident so the French might likely aid the Boars if it still starts.
 
The Fashoda incident is actually pretty hard to progress to a war, and there's surprisingly few timelines that actually attempt to show what might have happened. I did something using it in "Fight and Be Right" (see my sig), so you may want to have a read; essentially, there's would be a Nile campaign, which the British would win, a lot of colonial skirmishing, and considerable degrees of French commerce-raiding, which I suspect they'd be surprisingly effective at. Eventually France would cave in after the British use their massive naval superiority to pick off French possessions one by one, despite a few embarassments on the part of the Royal Navy.

There's no way the French could win- which is partly why they didn't push for war IOTL, of course. Even when you throw in the Russians on the French side, and use that to open fronts in Afghanistan and Korea, the British are still going to come out on top.

Like I say, you might find reading the section on "the War of the Dual Alliance" in Fight and Be Right helpful. I think it covers your questions fairly comprehensively.
 
I have always thought that the "French won't fight because they would loose" argument is very weak. Kitchener was very diplomatic with the French expedition, allowing them to use his telegraph to seek instruction from Paris. His firm but not overly aggressive stance dispelled a lot of the original tension. France was allowed a way out that permitted them to save face.

If you have some one more aggressive or less of a diplomat, like Archie Hunter, confronting the French a shooting incident is perfectly plausible. If the French expedition is fired on, if there are fatalities or French "trespassers" are returned to Cairo in chains then French national pride may make a war much more likely.

We tend to forget just how jingoistic the press and indeed the populace could get in the second half of the 19th centenury about colonial "incidents" and matters of national pride.
 
The Fashoda incident is actually pretty hard to progress to a war, and there's surprisingly few timelines that actually attempt to show what might have happened. I did something using it in "Fight and Be Right" (see my sig), so you may want to have a read; essentially, there's would be a Nile campaign, which the British would win, a lot of colonial skirmishing, and considerable degrees of French commerce-raiding, which I suspect they'd be surprisingly effective at. Eventually France would cave in after the British use their massive naval superiority to pick off French possessions one by one, despite a few embarassments on the part of the Royal Navy.

There's no way the French could win- which is partly why they didn't push for war IOTL, of course. Even when you throw in the Russians on the French side, and use that to open fronts in Afghanistan and Korea, the British are still going to come out on top.

Like I say, you might find reading the section on "the War of the Dual Alliance" in Fight and Be Right helpful. I think it covers your questions fairly comprehensively.
Thank you, I will take a look at it. Your material seems to be rather extensive though. Where should I start to understand your changes involving the Fashoda incident? Also could you give me a breaf summery of your TL's plot involving the incident?
 
I have always thought that the "French won't fight because they would loose" argument is very weak. Kitchener was very diplomatic with the French expedition, allowing them to use his telegraph to seek instruction from Paris. His firm but not overly aggressive stance dispelled a lot of the original tension. France was allowed a way out that permitted them to save face.

Surely though the whole crisis, particularly its resolution, was characterised by French weakness? The only concession made by the British was to allow Marchand to lower his flag peacefully and with ceremony; there was no question of the French retaining the Bahr-al-Ghazal, let alone an outlet onto the Nile.

From the very beginning, when it became apparent that Marchand was on the Nile, the mood in the French Government was one of dawning horror, not of triumph. Déclassé’s priority from the beginning was not to ‘win’ the crisis but to get out with as little loss of face as possible. At no point did he contemplate conflict; as he wrote in his diary, "If there was war it will be a naval war, which we are absolutely incapable of carrying on, even with Russian help... They have the troops. We have the arguments." Once the Russian Foreign Minister privately advised the French to abandon Fashoda, there was no realistic option for Déclassé other than capitulation.

It’s instructive in this sense that the British were entirely unyielding regarding the issues surrounding Fashoda. Privately he was telling Queen Victoria that "A war for so miserable and small an object is something I could hardly consent to", but that was not his public stance, where he was polite but refused to budge an inch. There was no point in bellicosity, because Salisbury knew that he had no need. If he had genuine concerns about French penetration to the Nile, he would have issued an ultimatum, but he knew that this prospect terrified the French. Foreign Office archives even showed that Déclassé was begging Salisbury “do not drive me into a corner”. For all that Marchand later boasted that he could have wiped out the British troops guarding Fashoda in ten minutes, and was quite possibly right, he could not hope to defeat Kitchener’s larger force in a prolonged campaign, and nobody had any illusions about the preponderance of British naval power.

There’s also the continuing political chaos of the Dreyfuss Affair in France to consider. Quite aside from its effect in preoccupying both the French public and politicians, it made pretty manifest that France was in no position to fight. The muted French public reaction to Marchand’s withdrawal was testament to that as well.

I’d argue that the relative amicability of the crisis, and the speed with which Anglo-French relations improved afterwards, demonstrate quite well how poor the French position was. If the British had genuinely considered Marchand a threat, the crisis would have taken a very different tone and a more ominous course. This isn’t to say that war over Fashoda is impossible- but I think it’s a lot more difficult than people suppose. I’ve set out my reasoning on how to get it into conflict below.


We tend to forget just how jingoistic the press and indeed the populace could get in the second half of the 19th centenury about colonial "incidents" and matters of national pride.

True, but then again Fashoda provoked a relatively temperate reaction in both the British and French press at the time- the French papers only kicked off after the immediate crisis had passed and it was safe to do so. The lack of “but by jingo if we do…” in the British press is striking; while the editorials were completely inflexible on the British claim to the Nile, they were pretty moderate in tone. The Evening News was typical;

If a householder finds a man in his back garden, he does not go to arbitration about the matter or enter into elaborate arguments to show that he, the householder, is the owner of that garden. He simply orders the trespasser out.

It’s not exactly blood curdling, and it’s also worth noting how relatively gracious the papers were towards the French when the crisis was resolved. There was surprisingly little gloating; as the correspondent of Le Matin wrote (as best as I can translate…), “The mass of public opinion never ceases to be calm, regarding France, with no bitterness or any feeling of hostility


Thank you, I will take a look at it. Your material seems to be rather extensive though. Where should I start to understand your changes involving the Fashoda incident? Also could you give me a brief summery of your TL's plot involving the incident?

There is a lot to read there! You may want to just read from about half way through Chapter 22 – the ebook is here.

My view of Fashoda is that as constituted OTL, the crisis is very difficult to get to war, but some sort of conflict over the Upper Nile is possible. For a start you need to change the main players to make them more confrontational. To achieve this, I got an aggressive colonially-focused French Government by collapsing the Third Republic in the 1880s, leading to a regime headed by General Boulanger. Even he doesn't really want war, but is eventually forced into it by his own rhetoric. I also aligned France and Russia much more closely a good deal earlier. On the British side, foreign policy expert Lord Salisbury is replaced by the far spikier Lord Randolph Churchill, who is also very close to Joseph Chamberlain, who OTL was one of the hawks on the issue.

I also took the view that Marchand, and that the French position more generally, is too weak IOTL to make a war plausible. So I ensured that the French grabbed what IOTL is Uganda, bolstering their position in the south, and also beefed up Russian meddling in Abyssinia, which was surprisingly extensive IOTL but never led to anything. IOTL, the French tried to set up an Abyssinian expedition coming from the East to link up with Marchand ; I had this effort be rather more successful, and the crisis begin when British troops who have just occupied Khartoum find a large army of Abyssinians, with Russian and French advisors, moving to take the city for themselves.

Finally, I manufactured a second crisis in Siam to crystallise British fears of encirclement and Franco-Russian plotting. The resulting war pits Britain and Italy against France and Russia, and should hopefully be reasonably instructive about the way an Anglo-French war would play out in the period- although it’s worth bearing in mind that I shifted the scales in the favour of the French as much as I could without being implausible and they still lose.
 
There is a lot to read there! You may want to just read from about half way through Chapter 22 – the ebook is here.

My view of Fashoda is that as constituted OTL, the crisis is very difficult to get to war, but some sort of conflict over the Upper Nile is possible. For a start you need to change the main players to make them more confrontational. To achieve this, I got an aggressive colonially-focused French Government by collapsing the Third Republic in the 1880s, leading to a regime headed by General Boulanger. Even he doesn't really want war, but is eventually forced into it by his own rhetoric. I also aligned France and Russia much more closely a good deal earlier. On the British side, foreign policy expert Lord Salisbury is replaced by the far spikier Lord Randolph Churchill, who is also very close to Joseph Chamberlain, who OTL was one of the hawks on the issue.

I also took the view that Marchand, and that the French position more generally, is too weak IOTL to make a war plausible. So I ensured that the French grabbed what IOTL is Uganda, bolstering their position in the south, and also beefed up Russian meddling in Abyssinia, which was surprisingly extensive IOTL but never led to anything. IOTL, the French tried to set up an Abyssinian expedition coming from the East to link up with Marchand ; I had this effort be rather more successful, and the crisis begin when British troops who have just occupied Khartoum find a large army of Abyssinians, with Russian and French advisors, moving to take the city for themselves.

Finally, I manufactured a second crisis in Siam to crystallise British fears of encirclement and Franco-Russian plotting. The resulting war pits Britain and Italy against France and Russia, and should hopefully be reasonably instructive about the way an Anglo-French war would play out in the period- although it’s worth bearing in mind that I shifted the scales in the favour of the French as much as I could without being implausible and they still lose.

*sniff* That . . . sounds . . . glorious! *bursts into tiers of joy*

I'll look at it right away. Could you also tell me were to start reading to find out how you collapsed the 3rd Republic and how it leads to closer relations with Russia? And are there any maps that show how the war changes colonial claims?

I find it interesting that you have France able to take Uganda. I'll have to look at how you did that. I recently worked out a POD to make OTL's German East Africa a French colony by killing off Karl Peters and having French diplomats gain the allainces he did in OTL.
 
I'll look at it right away. Could you also tell me were to start reading to find out how you collapsed the 3rd Republic and how it leads to closer relations with Russia? And are there any maps that show how the war changes colonial claims?

Chapter 9 deals with the collapse of the Third Republic- it was wobbling very badly IOTL, so all I did was to add an extra colonial embarrassment on top of it all; Boulanger was very keen on good relations with Russia and the Tsar was more inclined to deal with him than the bourgeois politicans of the Third Republic, so a dual entente is actually not too difficult. There are plenty of maps, both in the thread and in the ebook.


I find it interesting that you have France able to take Uganda. I'll have to look at how you did that. I recently worked out a POD to make OTL's German East Africa a French colony by killing off Karl Peters and having French diplomats gain the allainces he did in OTL.

The end of Chapter 8 deals with Buganda- essentially IOTL there was a Protestant/Catholic civil war in the kingdom, and it pans out differently ITTL. It's not a massive spoiler to say that French rule doesn't last that long.
 
EdT:

I havn't finishe your TL yet but I've been looking over you map and I have couple questions. Why is western Australia seperate from the rest? Also is the Congo Free state under the control of the USA? The design within there boarder are quite similar if not.
 
I havn't finishe your TL yet but I've been looking over you map and I have couple questions. Why is western Australia seperate from the rest?

It's covered about halfway through the thing, but essentially Westralian seperation from the rest of Australia is the result of an earlier drive to Confederation. This means the plebiscite ratifying the agreement happens at a point when the gold miners, who were the main political supporters of Confederation IOTL, hadn't come west. As a result the No campaign wins, and so Western Australia remains a Crown Colony, much to the irritation of Britain.


Also is the Congo Free state under the control of the USA? The design within there boarder are quite similar if not.

Wait and see! There are certainly a lot of American links- as to why, it's the result of events during the Anglo-French war and the resulting peace conference.
 
It's true that neither the French nor the British governments actually wanted war in 1898. Salisbury, like Kitchener, was keen to find a way to allow a graceful French retreat, and Delcasse knew that a war would be disastrous for France's trade and colonial empire.

But that doesn't mean a war couldn't have been plausible, given that both populace's were *highly* bellicose throughout the entire crisis. Consider that neither the U.S. or Spanish governments were keen on war over Cuba that very same year. But once the Maine exploded and the American yellow press got to work, McKinley's hand was forced. Granted, McKinley was a weaker executive than Salisbury; but even Salisbury had limits in his ability to resist popular jingoist pressure, as he would soon discover in South Africa and China.

And it may be French leadership that is the real variable. Assuming a POD after Marchand's departure, substitute a more impulsive and fiery leader for Kitchener in the Sudan campaign. If the British end up simply annihilating Marchand's garrison, and press reports in France make this out to be a terrible atrocity, Delcasse's efforts may come for naught as Brisson's government was too weak to resist that kind of popular outrage.

* * *

One interesting what-if in such a war is the war plans of Jackie Fisher, then commander of the West Indies Station, to land on Devil's Island to abscond with Alfred Dreyfuss in order to repatriate him back to France, sowing discord among the French military by his sudden appearance back home.
 
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