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A Century of War
Russian and anti-German’ alliance strategy. This shift was evident as early as the late 1890s, when the emerging alliance between France’s Gabriel Hanotaux and Russia’s Sergei Witte, together with an emerging industrial Germany, seemed imminent. FASHODA, WITTE, GREAT PROJECTS AND GREAT MISTAKES Indeed, fear of the emerging German economic challenge towards the end of the 1890s was so extreme among the leading circles of the British establishment that Britain made a drastic change in her decades-long Continental alliance strategy, in a bold effort to tilt European events back to her own advantage. A seminal event which crystallized this alliance shift was, oddly enough, an eyeball-to-eyeball military confrontation over Egypt, where historically both Britain and France had major interests through the Suez Canal Company. In 1898, French troops marching across the Sahara to the east, under Colonel Jean Marchand, encountered British forces under the command of General Kitchener at Fashoda on the Nile. A tense military showdown ensued, with each side ordering the other to withdraw, until finally, after consultation with Paris, Marchand withdrew. The Fashoda Crisis as it became known, ended in a de facto Anglo-French balance-of-power alliance against Germany, in which France foolishly ceded major opportunities to industrialize Africa. The decision to send the French Expeditionary Force under Marchand to Fashoda for a head-on military confrontation with Britain in Africa came from Colonial Minister Théophile Delcassé. Britain had steadily moved to what became a de facto military occupation of Egypt and the Suez Canal, despite French claims to the area going back to Napoleon. Since 1882, British troops had ‘temporarily’ occupied Egypt, and British civil servants ran the government in order to ‘protect’ French and British interests in the Suez Canal Company. Britain was stealing Egypt from under the eyes of France. Delcassé acted against the better interests of France and against the explicit policy design of French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux. Hanotaux, who was absent from government for a critical six months when the Fashoda folly was decided, had a conception of development and industrialization of France’s African colonies. A republican who was known as an Anglophobe, Hanotaux had a conception of an economically unified French Africa centered around development of
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