ABSTRACT
The Omdurman campaign is inextricably linked to the Fashoda crisis. That crisis, which brought France and Britain to the brink of war in November 1898, is a landmark in French histories of the relations between the two countries. The view from that vantage point has long conditioned the perspective of Franco-British relations before and after the crisis. Its defining position is heightened as part of a litany of incidents said to characterise Franco-British rivalry and conflict from Waterloo to Mers-el-Kebir and with it justification for latent Anglophobia. l The incident's legendary and symbolic status was demonstrated and reinforced under the Anglophobic Vichy regime which saw the publication of several hagiographies of Commandant Marchand, the doughty leader of the French expedition, who confronted Kitchener at Fashoda at the end of 1898.2 From that defining moment it followed, in teleological fashion, that relations before and after the incident must have been bad and that French elites and public opinion must have generally perceived Britain in a negative light. Yet for the period after the Fashoda incident that was not the case. Tension quickly subsided and in the following four months the French and British governments had signed an agreement in London 'dans un esprit de bonne entente mutuelle' specifying their respective possessions and spheres of influence in the Nile valley and West Mrica to supplement that of 14 June 1898 signed in Paris. 3 Fashoda appears more of an aberration in the relations between the two countries, or at least the preoccupation of an Anglophobic minority of chauvinistic politicians and colonialists. This impression is confirmed by relations which led up to the Fashoda incident, an example of which was French reactions to the Omdurman campaign, the prelude to Kitchener's clash with the Marchand expedition.
