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He approved military staff talks with France in 1905, thereby suggesting, but not promising, that if war broke out Britain would favor France over Germany. In 1911, when there was a second Franco-German clash over Morocco, Grey tried to moderate the French while supporting Germany in its demand for compensation.
The French and British were outnumbered in contesting the German offensive through Belgium into France. [15] [16] The Germans recognized that a long war was not in their interest as the resources of France, Great Britain, and Russia were far greater than their own. To win the war with France quickly would even the odds.
French infantry pushing through enemy barbed wire, 1915. During World War I, France was one of the Triple Entente powers allied against the Central Powers.Although fighting occurred worldwide, the bulk of the French Army's operations occurred in Belgium, Luxembourg, France and Alsace-Lorraine along what came to be known as the Western Front, which consisted mainly of trench warfare.
Before World War II, the events of 1914–1918 were generally known as the Great War or simply the World War. [1] In August 1914, the magazine The Independent wrote "This is the Great War. It names itself". [2] In October 1914, the Canadian magazine Maclean's similarly wrote, "Some wars name themselves. This is the Great War."
France's informal alignment with Britain and its formal alliance with Russia against Germany and Austria eventually led Russia and Britain to enter World War I as France's allies. [ 26 ] [ 27 ] Britain abandoned its policy of splendid isolation in the 1900s, after it had been isolated during the Second Boer War .
The Battle of the Somme (French: Bataille de la Somme; German: Schlacht an der Somme), also known as the Somme offensive, was a major battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British Empire and the French Third Republic against the German Empire.
In the 17th century, the religious violence that had beset France a century earlier began to tear the empire apart. At first France sat on the sidelines, but under Cardinal Richelieu it saw an opportunity to advance its own interests at the expense of the Habsburgs. Despite France's staunch Catholicism, it intervened on the side of the Protestants.
The Battle of Mulhouse (German: Mülhausen), also called the Battle of Alsace (French: Bataille d'Alsace), which began on 7 August 1914, was the opening attack of the First World War by the French Army against the German Empire.