Events on April 8 in history

The French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland sign the Entente cordiale.

The Entente Cordiale (French pronunciation: [tt kdjal]; lit.'Cordial Agreement') comprised a series of agreements signed on 8 April 1904 between the United Kingdom and the French Republic which saw a significant improvement in Anglo-French relations. Beyond the immediate concerns of colonial demarcation addressed by the agreement, the signing of the Entente Cordiale marked the end of almost a thousand years of intermittent conflict between the two states and their predecessors, and replaced the modus vivendi that had existed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 with a more formal agreement. The Entente Cordiale represented the culmination of the policy of Thophile Delcass (France's foreign minister from 1898 to 1905), who believed that a Franco-British understanding would give France some security in Western Europe against any German system of alliances (see Triple Alliance (1882)). Credit for the success of the negotiation of the Entente Cordiale belongs chiefly to Paul Cambon (France's ambassador in London from 1898 to 1920) and to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne.

The most important feature of the agreement was the mutual recognition that Britain was in full control of Egypt and likewise France of Morocco, with the proviso that France's eventual dispositions for Morocco include reasonable allowance for Spain's interests there. At the same time, Britain ceded the Los Islands (off French Guinea) to France, defined the frontier of Nigeria in France's favour, and agreed to French control of the upper Gambia valley; while France renounced its exclusive right to certain fisheries off Newfoundland. Furthermore, French and British proposed zones of influence in Siam (Thailand), which was eventually decided not to be colonised, were outlined, with the eastern territories, adjacent to French Indochina, becoming a proposed French zone, and the western, adjacent to Burmese Tenasserim, a proposed British zone. Arrangements were also made to allay the rivalry between British and French colonists in the New Hebrides.

In signing of the Entente Cordiale both powers reduced the virtual isolation into which they had withdrawnFrance involuntarily, Britain complacentlywhile they had eyed each other over African affairs. Britain had no major-power ally apart from Japan (1902), which held little in European waters; France had none but the Russian Empire, soon to become militarily discredited in the Russo-Japanese War of 190405. The agreement upset the diplomacy of Germany, whose policy had long relied on Franco-British antagonism. A German attempt to check the French in Morocco in 1905 (the Tangier Incident, or First Moroccan Crisis), and thus to upset the Entente, served only to strengthen it. Military discussions between the French and the British general staffs were soon initiated. Franco-British solidarity was confirmed at the Algeciras Conference (1906) and reconfirmed in the Second Moroccan Crisis (1911).

The French Third Republic (French: Troisième République, sometimes written as La IIIe République) was the system of government adopted in France from 4 September 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War, until 10 July 1940, after the Fall of France during World War II led to the formation of the Vichy government.

The early days of the Third Republic were dominated by political disruptions caused by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, which the Republic continued to wage after the fall of Emperor Napoleon III in 1870. Harsh reparations exacted by the Prussians after the war resulted in the loss of the French regions of Alsace (keeping the Territoire de Belfort) and Lorraine (the northeastern part, i.e. present-day department of Moselle), social upheaval, and the establishment of the Paris Commune. The early governments of the Third Republic considered re-establishing the monarchy, but disagreement as to the nature of that monarchy and the rightful occupant of the throne could not be resolved. Consequently, the Third Republic, originally envisioned as a provisional government, instead became the permanent form of government of France.

The French Constitutional Laws of 1875 defined the composition of the Third Republic. It consisted of a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate to form the legislative branch of government and a president to serve as head of state. Calls for the re-establishment of the monarchy dominated the tenures of the first two presidents, Adolphe Thiers and Patrice de MacMahon, but growing support for the republican form of government among the French populace and a series of republican presidents in the 1880s gradually quashed prospects of a monarchical restoration.

The Third Republic established many French colonial possessions, including French Indochina, French Madagascar, French Polynesia, and large territories in West Africa during the Scramble for Africa, all of them acquired during the last two decades of the 19th century. The early years of the 20th century were dominated by the Democratic Republican Alliance, which was originally conceived as a centre-left political alliance, but over time became the main centre-right party. The period from the start of World War I to the late 1930s featured sharply polarized politics, between the Democratic Republican Alliance and the Radicals. The government fell less than a year after the outbreak of World War II, when Nazi forces occupied much of France, and was replaced by the rival governments of Charles de Gaulle's Free France (La France libre) and Philippe Pétain's French State (L'État français).

Adolphe Thiers called republicanism in the 1870s "the form of government that divides France least"; however, politics under the Third Republic were sharply polarized. On the left stood Reformist France, heir to the French Revolution. On the right stood conservative France, rooted in the peasantry, the Roman Catholic Church and the army. In spite of France's sharply divided electorate and persistent attempts to overthrow it, the Third Republic endured for seventy years, which as of 2022 makes it the longest lasting system of government in France since the collapse of the Ancien Régime in 1789; the current Fifth Republic would overtake that record on 11 August 2028.