The German Panther at Agadir

Panther at the Moroccan port of Agadir on July 1st, 1911, provoked a crisis in diplomatic relations between France, Britain and Germany, symptomatic of the steady deterioration in trust between the European great powers in the years before the outbreak of the First World War. It also led to the signature of the Convention of Fez in March 1912 by which France assumed a formal protectorate over the Sultanate of Morocco and thus acquired the third and final piece of her North African empire. The short-term implications were therefore of interest to all the governments of the great powers, who were quick to grasp the opportunity to use this relatively minor incident to establish claims of priority of interest, influence and compensation.

In the context of late nineteenth-century Africa, Morocco was an anomaly: Muslim, ruled by a succession of independent dynasties after the end of Ummayyed rule in 850 and always outside the Ottoman empire, it also had few obvious natural resources which would have attracted earlier and more active European interest. Spain had two enclaves on the northern coast, Melilla, acquired in 1496, and Ceuta, inherited by Philip II in 1580 with the crown of Portugal but had been unable to consolidate them into a single unit. She also had a foothold in territory in the south of Morocco, but the legitimacy and extent of her title was vague and certainly not acknowledged by the Sultan. England had acquired Tangier from Portugal as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza from her marriage to Charles II in 1662, but, deemed too expensive to administer, it was given back to Morocco in 1684. Nevertheless, the British retained a dominant role in Morocco’s external trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still had a share of about 48 per cent by value in 1900. A commercial treaty with the Sultan in 1856 that aimed to reduce tariff levels applied in theory to all European traders, but the long-established relations between Britain and Morocco naturally gave the British advantages that were more than purely economic; the British consul at Tangier was the first European to be accredited to that office. There is nothing to suggest that Britain sought to exploit this position, however, other than to urge gradual administrative reform. The maintenance of the ‘open door’ for traders of all countries and the preservation of the political status quo, affirmed internationally by the Madrid Conference of 1880 were sufficient to ensure that her interests were met.

The French interest in Morocco was more ambiguous. On the one hand, the Third Republic after 1871 had no explicit colonial policy: the memory of Napoleon III’s failed expedition to Mexico (1862-67) was too recent, and the government’s principal foreign policy objective was the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany after the war of 1870-71. Occasional  attempts by ministers to adopt a more ambitious colonial policy were unpopular, and failure would almost certainly lead to the fall of the government, as happened to the ministry of Jules Ferry after the French defeat in Tonkin at the hands of the Chinese in 1885.

On the other hand, Morocco  shared a border with Algeria, conquered by France in 1830. French naval forces had bombarded the ports of Tangier and Essaouira in 1844 to discourage the Sultan from supporting Algerian resistance to French rule. The final French victory at the Battle of Isly in 1847 had established a formal Morocco-

Algeria border but just south of the coast the line remained ill-defined, an open invitation to local French administrators to make unofficial ‘adjustments’ to take the border up to the River Moulouya some way to the west. Furthermore, after the British effectively assumed control of Egypt in 1879, both the French government and its people became intensely suspicious of British foreign policies, determined that French interests should not be overridden again. British and French interests collided frequently and the French government encouraged expeditions to the Niger basin and the Bight of Benin to establish some kind of prior claim. In the context of rivalry with Britain, therefore, the acquisition of territory was an acceptable foreign policy and even imperial Germany was seen as a useful ally: for example, France made common cause with Bismarck against British interests at the Berlin Congo Conference of 1884-85.

For its part, Germany’s interest in colonies during Bismarck’s time was minimal. There was a firm belief that they should be the concern of private enterprise and Bismarck deliberately declined the opportunity to take over French interests in Cochin China in 1871, preferring instead the more tangible gain of Alsace-Lorraine. German trading companies such as Die Deutsche Afrikanische Gesellschaft (1876) and Das Deutsche Kolonialverein (1882) were founded by Hamburg and Bremen merchants intent on protecting markets already won. At the turn of the century, Morocco was one of many countries where German trade was expanding rapidly, and probably capturing market share. Nevertheless, even by 1910 Germany had little more than about 10 per cent of Morocco’s external trade by value, and there is no evidence that there was ever any intent of acquiring territory or settling there. In 1904 it is estimated that there were about 200 Germans resident in Morocco, including experts invited to train Moroccans in the use of German manufactured equipment.

European interests in Morocco were therefore relatively small and trade was at first conducted without significant rivalry between the powers. However, from about 1880 the Sultan’s government needed greater access to European funds and skills, and competition to provide this increasingly led to friction. The British were the first to offer loan facilities to Morocco (to provide the Sultan with resources to pay an indemnity to Spain after military defeat in 1860): the loan was funded by British banks and not guaranteed by Her Majesty’s Government. Its repayment required the generation of customs duties, the main source of government revenue, which could only be achieved through the continued expansion of external trade; this in turn required the improvement of infrastructure (ports, railways and telegraph services, etc.) and a greater call on European expertise.

The granting to traders of exemptions from taxes and from the application of Sharia law was not controversial when the numbers involved were small, but became so when the number of European residents and, just as importantly, their locally-recruited staffs, increased and expected the same dispensation.

The rapid growth in the numbers of people outside the Sultan’s jurisdiction was perceived by Moroccans as a dilution of the authority derived  from the dynasty’s descent from the Prophet himself. If that was compromised by the policies of modernization, those policies must be opposed. For centuries there had been tension between the Sultan’s court and peoples living in the mountains, and between his advisers and those out of favour; the main purpose of the Sultan’s army had been to put down local unrest. But the modernization of infrastructure also brought the opportunity to introduce up-to-date military equipment and techniques which European companies and governments were quick to offer: France provided the first military mission in 1877, though Britain and Germany both supplied advisers and equipment from around the same time.

Yet while paying lip-service to preserving the political status quo and of maintaining open access for traders of all countries in Morocco, the European governments were all suspicious of each other’s intentions towards what was regarded as a state  close to collapse, and alert to any one nation stealing a march on the rest. The first move to upset this uneasy balance came from the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé (1852-1923) who indentified Morocco as the best (and lowest risk) opportunity for the recovery of France’s diplomatic prestige after the climbdown to the British at Fashoda in 1898. His passive endorsement of the occupation in 1900 of the Touat Oasis (well inside Morocco) by units of the Armée d’Afrique and his encouragement of the Sultan to award contracts for financial and technical assistance exclusively to French companies were clear statements of a more assertive policy.British reactions to this change in French policy were muted. Britain remained Morocco’s largest trading partner and the governments of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour did not consider that France’s new status in Morocco would be a serious threat to British interests. They also recognized that to acknowledge France’s ‘superior rights’ there might finally resolve the question of French claims in Egypt. An Anglo-French agreement followed giving substance to these points in 1904. In the same year France and Spain signed agreements recognizing the latter’s rights in any subsequent partition.

However, the Franco-British and Franco-Spanish agreements left the interests of Germany out of account. This was no doubt partly a result of simple diplomatic high-handedness, but France would certainly have been reluctant to concede that Germany had legitimate interests in the Mediterranean. Moreover, the French government did not want to give Germany any opportunity to discuss Alsace-Lorraine: she may have been ready to come to closure with Britain over Egypt but the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine was not an issue that could be ignored or negotiated away. The German government responded, with some justification, that the Moroccan question was not one to be settled bilaterally: Kaiser Wilhelm II paid a brief visit to Tangier in March 1905: a very public statement both that Germany’s status as a great power should not be overlooked in questions of international diplomacy, and that Sultan Abd-el Aziz (r.1894-1908) himself found the idea of French exclusive rights in his country unacceptable. Sufficient alarm was aroused by the Kaiser’s visit for an international conference to be convened at Algeciras in 1906, which effectively halted France’s ‘peaceful penetration’ of Morocco and preserved the principle of the ‘open door’. Germany had no territorial ambitions in Morocco but, in the wider context, had established her right to be a party to the partition of any of the moribund empires. This was an important principle to establish as, in addition to Morocco, the much larger Ottoman and the Portuguese African empires were both thought to be close to dissolution.

In the immediate aftermath of Algeciras, Franco-German relations in Morocco were harmonious and in February 1909 an accord was signed which in some ways mirrored the Anglo-French agreement: German companies were to continue to have the right to trade and to participate in infrastructure and financial projects and the French authorities would take responsibility for ensuring order and security. The distinction between economic and political issues at first seemed to work: on the whole, companies were content that the provision of a stable context in which to conduct business should fall to the French, while German interests received a proportionate share in the flotation of an inter-national loan in 1910 and in public works initiated by the Société Marocaine des Travaux Publics. But the distinction proved to be illusory and Germany’s assumption that the accord would allow her companies to participate freely and fairly in public sector projects overlooked the extent to which French political activity would intrude in the economic sphere. Security arguments were frequently deployed by the French to justify military intervention, and officers in the Armée d’Afrique were quick to exploit minor border incidents under the so-called ‘Lyautey Doctrine’ (after Marshal Hubert Lyautey, 1854-1934), which advocated deep penetration of Moroccan territory in order to provide both advance protection and a more established departure point for further occupation. Marines from the cruiser Galilée landed at Casablanca in August 1907 to handle reported unrest, and after this there were never fewer than 4,000 French troops in Morocco, and in 1910 alone there were five incidents resulting in armed intervention. A military presence of such size inevitably carried strong political influence and, in the context of Morocco, that political influence was critical in the disposition of contracts and concessions.

Hence, well before the crisis of 1911, much thought had been given in Germany to the linked questions of how to prevent France securing de jure control over Morocco and, if that could not be achieved, of how to strike a bargain which would acknowledge that Germany had ‘allowed’ such control to be taken. The thinking was in Franco-German terms only: the Moroccan government would not be party to any such bargain, although the new Sultan Abd-el Hafid (r.1908-12) had already once sought French protection (from domestic difficulties) in 1910. Other European powers were not to be consulted either: Britain was regarded as a satisfied power, and had indeed stepped back from active involvement in Moroccan politics, while the interests of Spain were thought to be manageable.

Some confrontation with France was therefore expected by the Germans; but the exact timing of the Agadir crisis was dictated by two developments. First, in December 1910, a French proposal for the construction of a railway in the east of Morocco was seen by Germany to exclude the possibility of German involvement. Second, the French reaction to another security incident in January 1911 was considered to have been excessive. A French army officer, who had been interfering without authority in a cattle-rustling incident in an area outside French control, was murdered, leading the local French military command to demand reparations from the Sultan’s government and reinforcements to back up their threat of a punitive march on Fez. The instincts of the Briand government in Paris were cautious, but its fall in April 1911 and the consequent hiatus in authority allowed the French commanders in Morocco and Algiers to authorize the march anyway, without reinforcements.

This unilateral action increased the security risks to Europeans in Fez and other cities, but it also upset the delicate balance of European interests in Morocco that had survived for six years. Reaction to the French initiative was mixed: Britain and Russia did not wish to get involved and, although pointed questions were asked about French intentions after the occupation of Fez in May 1911, they preferred to leave the matter to France and Morocco to sort out between themselves. Spain took the opportunity to attempt to increase its  own territory in the north by landing troops on the Atlantic coast between Rabat and Tangier.

The German government saw the march on Fez as the opportunity to extract concessions from France but were not at first certain what these should be – perhaps the port of Essaouira, in the context of a French-controlled Morocco, perhaps some commercial gains in China.  German officials let it be known that the march on Fez effectively brought to an end the accord of 1909: the march amounted to the establishment of a protectorate, which had not been agreed as a legitimate French move. France was expecting some diplomatic reaction from Germany and had prepared a sort of ‘it’s none of your business’ reply. She had not expected Germany’s response to be the arrival of the gunboat Panther at Agadir on July 1st, 1911.

German justification for 'der Panthersprung’ was similar to that employed by France for the occupation of Fez, namely, the need to protect German citizens at a time of deteriorating security. This explanation held little water, however, as there was only one German in the vicinity of Agadir and he had been instructed to present himself for rescue at the time of the Panther’s arrival. But the choice of Agadir was shrewd, as it was both remote and not obviously important either to German or to French economic interests; the presence of a German ship there could therefore be interpreted as non-threatening. It was a symbolic gesture on the part of the German government, but one that was also real enough to force France to recognize the principle of reciprocity – gains for France in Morocco should be matched by concessions to Germany elsewhere.

Other powers did not see matters  in the same light. Britain regarded the idea of a non-threatening naval gesture as a contradiction in terms. The Royal Navy was already nervous about the rapid growth of the German fleet and there is some evidence to suggest that the gunboat’s mission was connected to the passage of a Navy Bill through the Reichstag. By itself the Panther was certainly too small to be a serious threat, but it was not known for certain that it was by itself: such a statement of intent, if left unanswered, could see Germany established in southern Morocco, even developing an Atlantic port. Above all, Britain was as sensitive as Germany to any suggestion that sovereign states could be disposed of by a bilateral agreement, and government ministers were explicit, and almost aggressive, in their insistence on Britain’s right to be consulted.

France, meanwhile, did not recognize the ideas of reciprocity or compensation at all. She saw her own intervention in the internal affairs of Morocco as consistent with the  terms of both the Algeciras Conference of 1906 and the Franco-German accord of 1909, and no reason to offer Germany anything. In this light, her reaction to the arrival of the Panther was moderate and accommodating. A naval response was certainly considered (the French gunboat Surprise was at Casablanca) and  there was talk in parliament and the press about war. But every moment of friction between France and Germany since 1871 had provoked such reactions and, in 1911, the government’s judgement was that France was not ready for a full-scale conflict. Discreet pressure was put on French mining companies to increase surveying operations in the south of Morocco, but the priority for the new prime minister, Joseph Caillaux (elected on July 2nd, 1911), was to establish dialogue with the German government to discover its intentions.

These were obscure. Neither Germany nor France wanted another international conference and, although Britain was content to stand aside, France first had to assure her that any agreement with Germany would not ignore British or Spanish interests. Despite this, negotiations between France and Germany began as early as July 27th, 1911, when Germany placed on the table a demand for Gabon and the French Congo. This was not a complete surprise, as a similar demand had been proposed in 1908 and it was known that the German colonial movement had ambitions to establish a Mittelafrika combining Kamerun, German East Africa (Tanganyika, Burundi, Rwanda), South West Africa, Angola and as much of the Congo Basin as was obtainable either from France or Belgium.

Despite Germany’s extreme opening bid, there was enough common ground for negotiations to continue until November 1911. France was reluctant to concede too much, as one of her own colonial objectives had been to create firm links between her possessions in West Africa and those in Equatorial Africa. But geography played a part in the assessment of the value of such links and it was quickly realized that the colony of Chad was more dependent on links with West Africa and Dakar than with the river valleys of the Congo Basin and Brazzaville. The final dispositions allowed Germany to add considerably to the territory of Kamerun. The Panther was quietly withdrawn and Germany recognized France’s ‘priority of influence’ in Morocco; this helped clear the path for the conclusion with the Sultan in February 1912 of the Convention of Fez and the establishment of a French protectorate.

The Agadir crisis was resolved without a European war, and both France and Germany had secured short-term objectives. Nevertheless although the matter was not an electoral issue in either country, neither power had gained all it wanted and neither had resolved longer-standing issues of mistrust. The crisis increased tension between France and Germany and reinforced the Anglo-French entente. In the next three years the creation of further diplomatic uncertainty and misunderstanding of each other’s motives would become critical.

Nigel Falls read history at Cambridge and worked at the Bank of England before retirement.