ABSTRACT
From the 1880s to the outbreak of the First World War the French Foreign Ministry underwent a number of changes that were to affect not only its organization, but also the type of permanent official it employed and inevitably its politics. The result of this was greater pressure on French foreign policy by permanent officials in Paris to adopt a more aggressively nationalistic stance, particularly in dealings with Germany, which often ran contrary to the express wishes of its political masters. The long-term consequence of this was the struggle between official and unofficial foreign policy, between friendship and friction with Germany during the period 1907 to 1911 which culminated in the confused and contradictory negotiations during the Agadir crisis in 1911, and which in the long run contributed to making any serious détente with Germany unrealistic before 1914. It is not the intention of this chapter to discuss how the central administration at the Quai d’Orsay sought to infuse French foreign policy with a more nationalistic flavour,1 but to discover why the French Foreign Ministry became more nationalistic from the 1880s to 1914.
