One hundred years ago, on 1 May 1903, King Edward VII arrived in Paris on the last stop of a European tour. It had already sparked some controversy: His Majesty’s Protestant subjects were not happy that he had dropped in at the Vatican to see the 93-year-old Pope, Leo XIII. What came next, however, was to be far more radical, and would have unimaginably deep consequences.
Not even the King’s most senior ministers had more than an inkling at the time of what he was up to. Irritated by his nephew the Kaiser, and depressed at the surge of German power in Europe, the King had come to Paris to bury the idea that France was Britain’s traditional enemy. He was determined to sow the seeds of an alliance between the two nations; what would come to be known as the Entente Cordiale was conceived during his visit.
A century later, when relations between Britain and France are probably worse than at any time since Waterloo, the old Entente is strained. But feelings between the two nations were little better when King Edward made his initiative. His first official biographer, Sir Sidney Lee, reported that the crowds that turned out to witness the King’s arrival in Paris were merely ‘sullenly respectful’. One of the King’s private secretaries, Fritz Ponsonby, drew the monarch’s attention to some booing from the bystanders. ‘The French don’t like us,’ he observed. ‘Why should they?’ the King replied.
However, during his stay the King used every opportunity to plead for a new friendship between the two nations and their peoples. Without recourse to a spin doctor, he managed in under three days to turn public opinion around and to present himself as France’s best friend in the world.
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