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Arguing about Empire: The Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda Crisis, 1898

We are very happy to announce a new online collaboration with our colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Exeter in the UK. Not Even Past and Exeter’s Imperial & Global Forum, edited by Marc Palen (UT PhD 2011) will be cross-posting articles, sharing podcasts, and sponsoring discussions of historical publications and events. We are launching our joint initiative this month with a blog based on a new book by two Exeter historians, Arguing About Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France.

By Martin Thomas and Richard Toye

“At the present moment it is impossible to open a newspaper without finding an account of war, disturbance, the fear of war, diplomatic changes achieved or in prospect, in every quarter of the world,” noted an advertisement in The Times on May 20, 1898. “Under these circumstances it is absolutely essential for anyone who desires to follow the course of events to possess a thoroughly good atlas.” One of the selling points of the atlas in question – that published by The Times itself – was that it would allow its owner to follow “most minute details of the campaign on the Atbara, Fashoda, Uganda, the Italian-Abyssinian conflict &c.” The name Atbara would already have been quite familiar to readers, as the British had recently had a battle triumph there as part of the ongoing reconquest of the Sudan.

Fashoda, underlined in red, lay on the eastern margins of the Sudanese province of Bahr el-Ghazal. As this 1897 map indicates, the French Foreign Ministry, too, needed help in identifying Marchand’s location. (Source: MAE, 123CPCOM15: Commandant Marchand, 1895-98.)

Fashoda, much further up the Nile, remained, for the time, more obscure. Newspaper readers might have been dimly aware that an expedition led by the French explorer Jean-Baptiste Marchand was attempting to reach the place via the Congo, but his fate remained a mystery. Within a few months, however, Captain Marchand and his successful effort to establish himself at Fashoda would be the hottest political topic, the subject of multitudes of speeches and articles on both sides of the English Channel as the British and French Empires collided, or at least scraped each other’s hulls. It never did come to “war,” but there was certainly sufficient “disturbance, fear of war and diplomatic changes achieved or in prospect” to justify a Times reader purchasing an atlas, perhaps even the half-morocco version, “very handsome, gilt edges,” that retailed at 26 shillings.

The clash at Fashoda was both a seminal moment in Anglo-French relations and a revealing one with respect to imperial language. In addition to rhetoric’s role in stoking up tensions, there are further angles to be considered. Falling at the height of the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish Army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, endured a protracted retrial after being wrongly convicted of spying for Germany, British official readings of the Fashoda crisis were also conditioned by the growing conviction that the worst aspects of French political culture – an overweening state, an irresponsible military leadership, and an intrusive Catholic Church – were too apparent for comfort.

Viewed from the British perspective, dignity, above all, was at stake. The French were obsessed with the prospect of their own impending humiliation; whereas the British, from a position of strength, showed verbal concern for French amour propre, even while their own actions seemed guaranteed to dent it severely.

French Poodle to British Bulldog: “Well if I can’t have the bone I’ll be satisified if you’ll give me one of the scraps.” J. M. Staniforth, Evening Express (Wales).

What the rhetoricians of both countries had in common was their willingness to discuss the fate of the disputed area exclusively as a problem in their own relations, without the slightest reference to the possible wishes of the indigenous population. This is unsurprising, but there was more to the diplomatic grandstanding than appeared at first sight. It was the Dreyfus case that best illustrated how embittered French politics had become.

Dreyfus’s cause divided French society along several fault lines: institutional, ideological, religious, and juridical. By 1898 the issue was less about the officer’s innocence and more about the discredit (or humiliation) that would befall the Army and, to a lesser degree, the Catholic Church (notably imperialist institutions), were the original conspiracy against him revealed. So much so that the writer Emile Zola was twice convicted of libel over the course of the year after his fiery open letters in the new print voice of Radical-Socialism, L’Aurore in early 1898 compelled the Dreyfus case to be reopened,

Twelve months before Dreyfus was shipped back from Devil’s Island to be retried a safe distance from Paris at Rennes, Zola’s convictions confirmed that justice ran a poor second to elite self-interest.

High Command cover-ups, the ingrained anti-Semitism of the Catholic bishopric, and the grisly prison suicide on August 31 of Colonel Hubert Joseph Henry, the real traitor behind the original spying offense, brought French political culture to a new low. From the ashes would spring a new human rights lobby, the League of the Rights of Man (Ligue des droits de l’homme). Meanwhile, the Dreyfusard press, led since 1897 by the indomitable, if obsessive, L’Aurore, wrote feverishly of alleged coup plots to which Marchand, once he returned from Africa, might or might not be enlisted.

Charles Léandre, Caricature of Henri Brisson, Le Rire, November 5, 1898. Here caricatured as a Freemason.

At the start of November, Henri Brisson’s fledgling government finally decided to back down. A furious Marchand, who had arrived in Paris to report in person, was ordered to return and evacuate the mission. The right-wing press, fixated over the previous week on the likely composition of the new government and its consequent approach to the Dreyfus case, resumed its veneration of Marchand. La Croix went furthest, offering a pen portrait of Marchand’s entire family as an exemplar of nationalist rectitude. The inspiring, if sugary, narrative was, of course, a none-too-oblique way of criticizing the alleged patriotic deficiencies of the republican establishment and siding with the army as the institutional embodiment of an eternal (and by no means republican) France.

Something of a contrived crisis – or, at least, an avoidable one – Fashoda was also a Franco-British battle of words in which competing claims of imperial destiny, legal rights, ethical superiority, and gentility preserved in the face of provocation belied the local reality of yet more African territory seized by force. If the Sudanese were the forgotten victims in all this, the Fashoda crisis was patently unequal in Franco-British aspects as well.

“Come Professor. You’ve had a nice little scientific trip! I’ve smashed the dervishes — luckily for you — and now I recommend you to pack up your flags and go home!” John Tenniel, Punch, Oct. 8, 1898.

On the imperial periphery, Marchand’s Mission was outnumbered and over-extended next to Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian expeditionary force. In London a self-confident Conservative government was able to exploit the internal fissures within French coalition administrations wrestling with the unending scandal of the Dreyfus case. Hence the imperative need for Ministers to be seen to be standing up in Marchand’s defense. In terms of political rhetoric, then, the French side of the Fashoda crisis was conditioned by official efforts to narrow the country’s deep internal divisions in the same way that the Republic’s opponents in politics, in the press, and on the streets sought to widen them.

Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France

Read more about European Empires in the nineteenth century:

Edward Berenson, Heroes of Empire: Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Empire (2012). A vivid and captivating study, which locates fin de siècle constructions of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotic duty within the context of imperialist chauvinism.

William Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (2006). The go-to resource for insights into the concerns – and the colonial blind-spots – of France’s primary human rights lobby from the late nineteenth century onward.

Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (2009). A landmark book that dissects the presumptive distinctions, and actual connections, between liberal thinking and support for imperial conquests in the long nineteenth century.

Michael Rosen, The Disappearance of Emile Zola: Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case (2017). A beautifully written account of Emile Zola’s brief “exile” in Britain at the height of the Dreyfus Case; as much a story of the cultural misperceptions between Britain and France at the dawn of the twentieth century as an account of France’s leading Dreyfusard intellectual.

Bertrand Taithe, The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa (2009). A deeply disturbing but essential account of the so-called Voulet-Chanoine mission, an appallingly cruel Frenchh imperial venture into West-Central Africa that, in all its butchery and madness formed the dystopian counterpart to Fashoda’s Sudan incursion.

Podcast: In Our Time: The Dreyfus Affair: Host Melvyn Bragg speaks with historians Robert Gildea, Ruth Harris, and Robert Tombs.

Top Image: Louis Dalrymple, Puck, October 26, 1898.

All images in public domain unless otherwise indicated.

Independence for Scotland? An Historical Perspective on the Scottish Referendum

By George Christian

On September 18 Scottish voters will decide whether Scotland should withdraw from the United Kingdom and set up shop as a sovereign nation-state. If voters approve the referendum, the ruling Scottish National Party will be tasked with negotiating the country’s withdrawal from the 1707 Treaty of Union (the one that established the UK in the first place), proposing a new constitution for independent Scotland, and dealing with myriad economic and foreign policy issues for which the UK Parliament is currently responsible.

Voter surveys have consistently shown that about half of likely voters oppose the referendum, while support for the referendum has generally hovered around 40%. Nevertheless, up or down ballots are notoriously difficult to forecast, particularly when the question has passionate minority support, as independence most certainly does. In any event, the vote marks an important historical moment in the past millennium of Anglo-Scottish relations. And however things turn out, it is likely not be the last word on the subject.

When considered in its historical context, we might view this fall’s independence referendum as part of an ongoing series of adjustments, some by coercion and others by negotiation (often under the threat of coercion), of the relationship between the two countries. Of course, this assertion begs the question of how “Scotland” should be defined as an entity capable of meaningful acts of self-representation in the first instance. Opinions range widely on this question, which encompasses both Scotland’s juridical status and Scottish “national identity.” Taking the long view (and ignoring for these purposes the very real historical differences between Highland and Lowland Scotland), Scotland has existed as an ancient Irish colony, an independent kingdom, a Norman colony, a feudal vassal state of England, a North British province of the UK, and, most recently, a sub-state within the UK with a devolved parliament exercising restricted sovereign authority within its own borders.

Scottish Exemplification (official copy) of the Treaty of Union of 1707

The extensive historiography of Scottish “identity” further complicates the question. On one end of the spectrum, a few Scottish historians have argued that Scotland is little more than an internal labor colony of capitalist England, perhaps not as badly treated as Ireland, but shackled more or less unwillingly to a larger, richer, and more powerful neighbor just the same. On the opposite end, some English historians, if they have anything to say about Scotland at all, treat Scottish identity as a nineteenth-century “invention” or post-hoc construction designed to assuage wounded Scottish national feelings by the assertion of some kind of aesthetic nationalism (created in no small part by literary figures such as Robert Burns and Walter Scott).

William Wallace Statue at Edinburgh castle

William Wallace at Edinburgh castle

In the vast middle of the spectrum, historical characterizations range from claiming for Scotland a distinctive form of European sub-nationalism within the British state to treating Scotland as a full partner in the British imperial enterprise. Whether historians take the Scottish, English, or “British” line, their work cannot be read in the vacuum of historical “objectivity.” Nationalist history runs just as strongly in Scotland as it does elsewhere. This observation takes nothing away from the exceptional economic and social histories that Scottish historians have produced in the last 25 years to remedy the appalling absence of Scotland from most accounts of English history. At the same time, these histories have complicated as much as they have clarified questions of Scottish nationhood and identity.

More specifically with respect to the Scottish independence question, Scotland and England have for more than a thousand years battled one another to achieve the best political, economic, and security advantage that each could wrest from the other. In most instances the more powerful southerners have prevailed to a greater or lesser extent. But I think that history indicates a marked instability in this balance of power, and that the fact Scottish voters have independence in their hands, following hard upon devolution, marks a shift for the time being in favor of North Britain.

To demonstrate this suggestion, I think it is possible to break down the history of Anglo-Scottish relations into more or less distinct periods in which the balance of power has favored one or the other side of the Tweed. This approach, while provisional, has the merit of detaching the question from nationalist narratives on both sides and viewing Scotland and England as having legitimate and important interests in relation to one another that, at various times in history, have required mediation. Such mediation has sometimes resulted in a closer union between Scotland and England, but at other times has produced a devolution of power.

In broad terms, I identify three more or less distinct periods of significant Scottish receptivity to English political and economic influence. Early periods of “union” tended to occur at historical conjunctions of stability in the Scottish monarchy and substantial dynastic links between Scotland and England, such as the post-Norman conquest era, when Scottish kings fostered close dynastic and familial ties with the Anglo-Norman court, and the regnal union of 1603. The formal union of 1707, by contrast, took place in the context of international crisis, military threat, and an uncertain succession, but endured largely because it eventually offered substantial economic benefits to a majority of Scots.

In each case, however, “devolution” has eroded union when English political interests have diverged significantly from those of the Scots: Edward I’s feudal power play culminating in the Scottish Wars of Independence; Scottish separatism in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, the deposition of the Stuart monarchy, and economic rivalry of the 1690s; and, in our own time, growing Scottish dismay with English conservative politicians and their offensive (to Scots) policies. Like Bruce’s victory over the English Bannockburn (1314), which produced a short-lived period of independence but no stable, long-term resolution of Anglo-Scottish relations, the independence referendum represents a noteworthy event that appears to decide a question without answering it.

If we can accept this rough and ready model of historical ebb and flow in Anglo-Scottish relations, what might the future hold? The possibilities are intriguing. As I see it, here are some of the potential outcomes of the referendum event:

A second Scottish Revolution? The referendum succeeds, a fully sovereign Scotland separates from UK, and joins the EU as its 29^th member state. (In the event, it would be interesting to see how quickly Wales tried to follow suit. The UK is not the only European state facing significant constitutional change. The Catalan parliament is expected to enact legislation calling for a referendum on independence later this fall, though it is likely that Spain’s Constitutional Court will nullify the ballot.)
The Third Devolution continued? The referendum fails in reasonably close vote, leaving SNP unfazed in its dominant political position and in a strong position to urge another independence vote in the future while negotiating more devolved powers (which the British government appears prepared to concede even if the referendum fails).
The Fourth Union? This scenario looks similar to the Third Devolution, but here devolution becomes part of a larger movement to establish a “federation” of British states (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) involving a substantial revision of the constitutional relationships between the British nations.
The Fourth Union II? The referendum fails in a landslide, discrediting the SNP and precipitating its fall from power and restoring the traditional UK party structure in Scotland. Scottish animus toward the ruling Tory/Lib Dem administration lessens when Labor eventually returns to power. The restoration of a Labour government stabilizes the status quo for the foreseeable future and indefinitely shelves moves toward further devolution or, for that matter, independence.

There is only one thing that history seems to rule out: a permanent status quo in which the current constitutional standing of England and Scotland ossifies so that memory runneth not to the contrary. Indeed, historical memory tends to run very deeply in Scotland, and while the independence referendum undoubtedly serves SNP’s domestic political interests in the short-term, one cannot deny the historical character of the emotional response among its most passionate advocates. Moreover, if voter surveys are accurate and a slim majority of Scottish voters decide that now is not the time to leave the nest, this does not mean that the relatively few Scots who hold the balance will not change their minds, especially if an unpopular Tory government pursues the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and persists in its policy assault on a social safety net dearly earned in Scotland by centuries of poverty and hard labor. These problems and others will not be conjured away by the independence referendum, whatever its result, and the historical significance of the September 18 vote remains to be seen by a future generation of historians of Britain.

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