The Franco-Russian Alliance

JAN 04 1894 · 12:00

French fleet at Kronstadt, July 1891, the naval visit that prefigured the Franco-Russian Alliance. Place: St Petersburg and Paris; the convention signed at Krasnoe Selo Figures: Tsar Alexander III · President Sadi Carnot of France · Sergei Witte, Russian Finance Minister · General Boisdeffre and General Obruchev, drafters of the military convention Republic and Autocracy Bismarck's careful diplomacy after 1871 had rested on keeping France isolated and on maintaining the Reinsurance Treaty (1887) between Germany and Russia. When Wilhelm II dismisses Bismarck in March 1890 and refuses to renew the Reinsurance Treaty later that year, the strategic premise collapses. Russia, suddenly without a German connection and uneasy about the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, since 1882), turns to the only other Great Power similarly unattached. France, isolated since Sedan, lends Russia capital on enormous scale through the 1890s; Paris becomes the principal source of Russian sovereign borrowing. The French fleet visits Kronstadt in July 1891; Alexander III stands bareheaded as the Marseillaise is played, an act of considerable symbolic violence given that the Marseillaise is a republican anthem written against monarchies very like his own. A military convention is initialed in August 1892, ratified by exchange of letters between St Petersburg and Paris in early January 1894. Blocs Replace Concert The convention's terms are defensive and explicit. If France is attacked by Germany or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia will employ all available forces against Germany. If Russia is attacked by Germany or by Austria-Hungary supported by Germany, France will employ all available forces against Germany. The mobilizations of the two powers will be coordinated. The arrangement is renewable, and is in fact renewed throughout the next twenty years. The Franco-Russian Alliance does for the European system what Bismarck had feared. The flexible diplomacy of the Concert (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) gives way to a structure of opposing blocs. Britain, traditionally a balancer, signs the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, completing the Triple Entente. The two alliance systems mobilize automatically when the crisis comes. The pre-1914 historian Christopher Clark's argument (that the sleepwalkers of July 1914 follow timetables their alliance systems wrote for them) is the historical judgment on what the January 1894 ratification permits. The Balkan trigger (see [[balkan-wars-1912]]) finds the gun already cocked.