Morocco and the Boer War

Abstract

ANGLO-FRENCH relations have never since been as bad as at the beginning of the Boer War. France was swept by sympathy for the Boer cause. In the year 1900 Boer dress had a notable influence on the collections of the fashion houses; one Paris couturier successfully launched a lady’s grey felt hat, turned up at the side à la Boer. Arriving at Marseille in the summer of 1900 on their way to the Paris Exhibition, a party of Madagascans was mistaken for Boers and given an enthusiastic reception by the Marseillais.¹ In November President Kruger himself arrived at Marseille to begin a European tour and was greeted with wild enthusiasm. The Cannes chamber of commerce, alarmed by the dramatic decline in the numbers of English tourists, had begged Delcassé to prevent Kruger’s visit: ‘The Mediterranean coast of France, which is largely dependent for its livelihood on English visitors, is threatened by a new commercial crisis much worse than last year’s and perhaps by disaster’.² Among the English tourists who failed to make their annual visit to the Riviera was Queen Victoria, who ‘heroically substituted a visit to Ireland’, her first for many years.³ Even the Francophile Prince of Wales was outraged by a series of scurrilous cartoons of his mother in a Paris magazine.