by Jack Beatty
“The Capitulation of Sedan,” 1870, by Honoré Daumier. That helmet again. Here it crowns the worst defeat of French arms since Waterloo—the surrender of an army at Sedan. Bismarck was there to arrange the terms of humiliation with Napoleon III. From September 2, 1871, Sedantag (Sedan Day) was a national holiday in Germany.
It helped that the indigenous inhabitants fought in a poignantly dated style. For example, in April 1908, fifteen thousand horsemen from tribes in Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains massed before a blockhouse held by seventy-five French soldiers—French officers and black African enlisted men—supported by two 80 mm cannon. Before attacking, Moroccans sent this proposal to the French:
To the chief of the French “fraction” at Boudenib. May Beneficence be on those who humble themselves before merciful God and seek justice. Know that, since your arrival in the Sahara, you have badly treated weak Muslims. You have gone from conquest to conquest. Your dark soul fools you by making you rush to your destruction. You have made our country suffer intense harm, which tastes as galling to us as the bitter apple. The courageous and noble Muslim warriors approach you, armed for your destruction. If you are in force, come out from behind your walls for combat.
“Éducation.” British historians still defend British imperialism. It brought law and trains to India. Sorted out the tribes in Africa. There was less to be nostalgic about in French imperialism, an affair of soldiers and adventurers not of sons and heirs. Celine was right wing, but his Journey to the End of the Night (1932) is scalding on the moral regression of the French in West Africa, where he was stationed during the war. “Éducation” represents the left-wing view of what Europe’s “apostles of pity and progress” were up to in the tropics.
For the mujahideen, “Brave men fought openly, offered their breasts to bullets.” They assumed the French would come out and be massacred. But the French hadn’t fought that way since Charles Martel defeated an invading Muslim army at Tours in 732. The soldiers stayed behind their walls; the Moroccans charged and charged again. This went on for eighteen hours. No Frenchmen appear to have been killed. Many Moroccans were.27
In Morocco no single leader emerged for the tribes to unite behind, no Mahdi, who, after annihilating General Gordon and his Anglo-Egyptian army in Khartoum in 1885, kept the Europeans out of the Sudan for nearly fifteen years. Consequently, “Moroccan armed resistance was the least of [France’s] problems.”28
Certainly that was true compared to Morocco’s European complications. In vain had the French searched for the “French India” (“the last great prize to keep France even in the Anglo-Saxon world of the 20th century”) in Algeria, Mexico, Indochina, and West Africa. Now they sought it on the red-brick plains of Morocco. But the masters of the real India, the British, had got there ahead of them. Having opened Morocco to European exploitation in the 1850s, Britain had since run much of it as a “puppet state.” Professing to be friends of Moroccan independence, the British warned the sultan to beware: Morocco might suffer Algeria’s fate—annexation by France.29
Across Africa, agents of French imperialism, seeking “to arrive first wherever African territories were still unclaimed,” kept running into wily Englishmen in weathered pith helmets. French Anglophobia was aroused. In 1882, public fury forced the Freycinet government to resign when, under British diplomatic pressure, it curtailed France’s “influence” over Egypt. In 1894, the French invaded Madagascar “to teach the English a lesson.” Four years later, after a three-thousand-mile march from the mouth of the Congo River across the heart of Africa to the Nile, a French column of six officers and 120 men under Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand raised the Tricolor over Fashoda, a swampy village in the Sudan. The French hoped that a garrison “in the Egyptian hinterland would force London to come to terms with France’s ‘historic claims’ on the Nile.” They failed to reckon with General Kitchener.30
Fresh from slaughtering ten thousand of the Mahdi’s followers in two hours at the battle of Omdurman (“Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not”), Kitchener came down the Nile to Fashoda to dislodge the French. Employing psychological warfare, he presented the French officers with a bundle of newspapers; from these they first learned of the Dreyfus Affair convulsing French society and staining the French Army. They wept and, their government bowing before a British ultimatum, quit the Sudan.31
Over the retreat from Fashoda “the wild desire for vengeance” in France was greater than over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the Daily Telegraph reported. “Germany is the accidental enemy,” a Catholic paper editorialized, “while England is the eternal enemy.”32
After Fashoda, Anglo-French relations briefly warmed only to cool during the Boer War. As late as 1902–03, when shouts of “Vive Fashoda!” greeted King Edward VII as he alighted from his train at the Bois de Boulogne station, French intelligence agents were in Ireland mapping possible invasion sites and sounding out nationalist boyos “on the chances of success of a Franco-Russian landing in Ireland”!33
For her part, between 1895 and 1901, Britain “had proposed to Germany a partition of Turkey, a partition of Morocco, and ultimately an out-and-out alliance.” Spurned by Germany, and determined to end its policy of “splendid isolation,” Britain “rather reluctantly” turned to France.34
The Entente cordiale was “born without grandeur in the midst of bargains.” France promised England a free hand in Egypt—there would be no more Fashodas. England abandoned Morocco to France. The powers sealed the bargain with a pledge to support each other’s claims in these countries. Neither realized the implications of that sweetener until, on a stormy March 31, 1905, the German liner Hamburg appeared in the Bay of Tangiers. On the bridge stood a serious European complication, Kaiser Wilhelm II.35
The French sought their India to balance the lost provinces. Bismarck had encouraged them to pursue empire to divert them from the continent’s bitter vistas. But, when the kaiser’s call on Tangier created a crisis heavy with war, it seemed that “for the French as for Bismarck, their map of Africa was really a map of Europe” after all.36
Pleading the rough sea but really fearing assassination by Spanish anarchists, Wilhelm decided not to come ashore at Tangier. He had to be argued into it by the chargé d’affaires, acting for Chancellor von Bülow, who had pushed the mission on the reluctant monarch. As it was, landing the kaiser in the chop proved challenging: Two German sailors had to plunge into the water and carry him the last few yards to the quay. Through streets French nationals had festooned with blue, white, and red, and to the sound of beating drums and ululating women, Wilhelm was led on a white horse to the German legation. He mounted this strange animal, he complained to Bülow, despite his withered arm, and for the whole ride was “within an inch of a fatal fall.” His Wagnerian regalia—silver helmet, red gloves, hanging saber—contrasted with the white djellabas of the Moroccan officials waiting to greet him. After paying his respects to them and to the assembled foreign diplomats, he said something in German to the sultan’s uncle, who did not speak the language, and left as he had come. The next day the embassy announced the purpose of his visit: to demonstrate Germany’s support for Morocco’s independence.37
The diplomats in Paris and London had spread around the solatium, to use the argot of imperialism. Italy was bought off by recognizing her claims to Tripoli, Spain by secret promises of a succulent piece of northern Morocco if the sultanate should lose its independence. But where, Bülow complained, was Germany’s slice of “the Moroccan cake”? “To make matters worse,” he wrote his ambassador in Paris, “the settlement regarding Morocco has been reached without our being consulted.”38
The table of the world was almost picked clean when Germany arrived at the imperialist banquet. Bülow touched on this in the memo to his ambassador: “Considering the steadily declining number of countries in which free trade and unhindered economic activity are still possible, Morocco’s importance for us should not be underestimated.” The kaiser got to wear h
is admiral’s uniforms to the Zoo-Aquarium, but during his reign Germany had not translated its naval power into empire—colonies, coaling stations, bases. Weltpolitik had yielded a “paltry” two thousand square miles of territory, mostly islands and atolls in the South Pacific. Fewer than six thousand Germans had migrated to the colonies in Oceania, Africa, and China. And it was getting late; with the Americas off the table, there was not world enough left to take.39
“The Kaiser Woos Morocco” (Tangier, March 31) From Punch, 5 April 1905
Kaiser Wilhelm (as the Moor of Potsdam) sings:
“ ‘Unter Den Linden’—Always at Home,
‘Under the Lime-Light’ Wherever I Roam!”
In his 1916 pamphlet on imperialism, Lenin contended that the shrinking globe intensified rivalries among the powers for the few exploitable places, like mineral-rich Morocco, as yet unclaimed for civilization, accelerated the arms race, and led to “a war for the division of the world … an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder.”40
Whether or not Morocco was worth a war, for Pan-German opinion, which “demanded that the entire Atlantic coast with its hinterland should be seized,” it was worth a crisis. Pressured by the German right, lobbied by Krupp, which supplied arms to the sultan, and alarmed by calls in the French press for annexing Morocco, Bülow decided to act.41
With France’s ally, Russia, engulfed by war and revolution, Germany had rare leverage to humiliate France. Under threat of war, it forced her to refer the Morocco question to a conference of the powers who had signed the Treaty of Madrid in 1880 on the future of the sultanate. In his memoirs, Bülow said he intended merely “to confront [France] with the possibility of war” and, when she asked her new friend for help and England said it would not fight for Morocco, to break up the entente cordiale. Held at Algeciras, a port on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, between January and April 1906, the conference boomeranged on Bülow. Germany won the point that France was not the only power concerned in Morocco, and its economic rights there were vindicated. But the powers—Britain, Italy, Spain, Russia, and the United States—supported French claims to operate the state bank, administer the customs, police the Algerian-Moroccan border, and train Moroccan police in the ports. As bad, Germany was isolated at Algeciras, Austria-Hungary refusing to back its ally in an exotic dispute. Worse, far from destroying the entente, German bullying forged what Churchill termed “an exceedingly potent tie” between France and Britain, the military talks between their General Staffs that beginning in 1906 transformed the entente from a colonial barter into a continental alliance in all but name. The kaiser was right to resist braving storm-tossed waters to land in Tangier; the very elements warned him to stay out of Morocco.42
“Der kranke Mann von Morokko” (The Sick Man of Morocco) from Der Wahre Jacob, March 1906. A depiction of the powers dismembering Morocco at the Algerciras Conference of 1906.
Still, defying the elements a second time and spoiling Joseph Caillaux’s debut as premier, in July 1911 Germany dispatched a gunboat to Agadir, a port at the southern end of Morocco’s long Atlantic coast, precipitating another crisis over Morocco, one of the series of tocsins in the years before 1914 when death rattled impatiently in its chains.
The SMS Panther’s mission, Bethmann Hollweg told the Reichstag, was to protect “endangered” German subjects. “Roars of laughter” greeted this assertion. No one believed it. “Agadir was a closed port, and the nearest German was at Mogador. He was instructed to go to Agadir in order to be endangered.”43
Bethmann revealed the social-psychological motive of Agadir in a later comment to Paul Cambon, the French ambassador: “For forty years, France has pursued a grandiose policy. It has secured an immense empire for itself in the world. It is everywhere. During this time, an inactive Germany did not follow this example and today it needs its place in the sun.”44
SMS Panther at Agadir
The German secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1911, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, was hostage to a high-risk formula of success. Two years earlier, he had drafted the ultimatum that forced Russia to accede to Austria’s annexation of Bosnia, a humiliation that the tsar vowed he would remember. “I knew the Russians were not ready for war,” Kiderlen boasted to a Rumanian diplomat, “that they could not go to war in any case, and I wanted to make what capital I could out of this knowledge.” Bluff had worked with Russia; he would try it with France. He instructed the kaiser to regard the warships—originally a second ship was to anchor up the coast at Mogador—as “pawns.” If “France will offer us adequate compensation from her colonial possessions … we could then withdraw from the ports.” Kiderlen advised Cambon: “Bring us back something from Paris.”45
The Panthersprung—the leap of the Panther—was a reckless yet justified act. France, not Germany, initiated the Second Moroccan Crisis.
Though in the Act of Algeciras and a 1909 accord with Germany, France professed fealty to the independence of the sultanate, the colonial lobby agitated for France to dominate North Africa with the conquest of a few hundred thousand more square miles of sand and sky; and it was adept at orchestrating faits accomplis to get what it wanted. Reporting to Brussels, Belgium’s minister to Berlin conveyed Germany’s bill of complaint: “Every illusion that [Germany] ever entertained on the value of the Algeciras Act, which France passed with the firm conviction of never observing, must long since have vanished. She has not ceased for one moment to pursue her plans for annexation; either by seizing opportunities for provisional occupations, destined to last forever, or by extorting concessions which have placed the Sultan in a position of dependence on France.”46
Encouraging the sultan to borrow heavily, the French yoked Morocco to debt, “a time-honored tactic of predatory imperialism.” When the sultan tried to exact revenue from his subjects to service the debt, it sparked tribal revolts. Punitive expeditions, strengthened by French military advisers and artillery, proved equally counterproductive. The sultan sat on a gold-and-velvet throne, but his relish of torture—he fed the leader of one rebellion to a lion—pricked the European conscience, quick to indignation over “barbarism.” The brute needed civilizing. Morocco needed good (French) governance. Outrages against Europeans furnished pretexts for occupying Casablanca, Marrakech, and Rabat. For this, and for “killing thousands of his subjects,” France billed the sultan 2.4 million francs. His exactions increased. Unrest increased. The cycle of misrule spun toward French intervention.47
Joseph Caillaux was breakfasting at a London hotel when he opened the Times for April 23, 1911, and read that troops from France’s Armée d’Afrique were marching from Casablanca to relieve a rebel siege of Fez, the sultan’s capital, brought on when the French military mission there ordered the execution of two Moroccan deserters. “Pictures were painted with an African riot of color, of the atrocities committed, of the … perils of the Europeans shut up in Fez … ‘Civilization’ was in danger, barbarism had risen.” Stirred to action by such representations from the tiny but clamorous parti colonial, three cabinet ministers had approved the expedition while their colleagues were away on vacation.48
Caillaux was the finance minister. The Times story was the first he had heard of the march to Fez. He was “thunderstruck.” The rescue mission amounted to a repudiation of Algeciras. Occupation would follow rescue; a French protectorate would follow occupation.49
What would Germany do? The answer came on July 1—Agadir. By then, Monis had fallen and, when the musical chairs of Third Republic politics stopped, Caillaux was premier. What would he do?
France’s colonial minister, its diplomats in Morocco, and the French officer on the spot had manufactured a plausible emergency at Fez. The theater of imperialism specialized in such productions. “The whole story was a myth,” the Belgian consul in Tangier reported. The siege at Fez parted to admit the delivery of mail “fairly regularly.” The fighting was “more noisy than murderous.” A French diplomat told him that the city was safe from attack, the rebel
s lacking artillery.50
Still, dissension was rife behind the high brown ramparts; if the siege endured, mutineers inside might well have joined forces with rebels outside. And the Fez garrison was running low on ammunition. The Europeans in the city had reason to worry and someone to blame.
Colonel Mangin, one of the sultan’s military advisers, had put them in danger by leading most of the sultan’s force on a punitive expedition, “encouraging the [rebels] to besiege Fez,” according to a candid French officer. But by the time Caillaux took power it was too late to investigate the stage management of the siege. The sultan’s request for French troops to rescue his denuded command had been backdated “to make it appear as if it has preceded, rather than followed, the French movement,” but it was too late to check the paperwork.51
The siege had been lifted; the sultan had agreed to make Morocco a French protectorate; exercising its rights under a secret annex to the entente cordiale, Spain had grabbed up more of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. The independent country recognized at Algeciras had ceased to exist. Once more Germany had received no solatium. But the Panther was at Agadir, and in Berlin, Kiderlen was still waiting for Cambon to bring him back something from Paris.52
Caillaux dared not let France’s diplomats sort out the crisis. Of the new foreign minister, Justin de Selves, “it can safely be said that his only mark of distinction was his high-sounding name.” The French Foreign Ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, was a nest of Germanophobia; after Caillaux signed the agreement with Germany ending the crisis, its press spokesman told reporters with regret, “It was war that we needed.”53
To cover himself, Caillaux was especially careful to check the war box, asking the army’s commander in chief, Joseph Joffre: “General, they say Napoleon waged war only if he thought he had a 70-30 chance of winning. Have we a 70-30 chance?” Just appointed, Joffre could not be held responsible for his answer, “Non, monsieur le president.”54
