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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.
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.
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 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.
The Allies or the Entente was an international military coalition of countries led by France, the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, Italy, and Japan against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria in World War I (1914–1918).
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.
By the spring of 1918, ten thousand U.S. soldiers a month were arriving in France. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 had taken Russia out of the war; Germany moved its armies west and launched a huge new offensive against France, hoping to end the war quickly before the Americans could change the balance of the war.
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.