The Failure of Intervention

Abstract

FEW episodes in the diplomatic history of the early twentieth century have remained so obscure as the schemes for continental intervention in the Boer War. This is especially true of the part played by France. Delcassé’s motive for favouring intervention was, however, far from new. His aim was to achieve at last the object which had — in the truest sense of the word — obsessed him for almost twenty years: to end the English occupation of Egypt. Since the Fashoda crisis his policy had been to avoid, at all costs, anything which might recognise the English occupation, and to await a new opportunity to reopen the Egyptian question. In October 1899 he believed that that opportunity had come.