ABSTRACT
There is no single interpretation of the Entente Cordiale. At different times and to different people it has meant quite different things. President René Coty 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’. It was to something like this interpretation of the Entente that Winston Churchill appealed in 1940 when he made his famous offer to France of an Anglo-French Union. There were few statesmen on either side of the Channel in 1904 who shared so romantic a view. The convention of 8 April 1904 amounted, on paper, simply to a settlement of colonial disputes. ‘In a word,’ said the French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, at the beginning of the negotiations, ‘we give you Egypt in exchange for Morocco.’
