Anglo-French exchange of notes on Asia Minor

On 9 May 1916 the French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, sent the British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, a note in which the French government accepted the boundaries of the future Arab state or confederation of Arab states, as well as the boundaries of those parts of Syria in which French interests were to predominate. He attached to it the terms that had taken shape during the talks in London and Petrograd. The note opened the formal exchange of letters between Paris and London. Its text is regarded today as the official French version of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the British reply of 16 May as the English version.

The British chronology of the war records under this date that the governments of Britain and France concluded the “Sykes-Picot” agreement on the future partition of Asia Minor. This is a simplification. On 9 May only France made its declaration, and Britain confirmed it only a week later. The name “Asia Minor” is also misleading: it was the term used in British documents for the whole set of agreements on Asiatic Turkey, although the Anglo-French part concerned mainly Arab lands: Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Mesopotamia.

The last obstacle removed

The plan of partition had been ready since the winter. The Briton Mark Sykes and the Frenchman François Georges-Picot had agreed it at the beginning of 1916, but both sides had stipulated that nothing would be concluded without Russia’s consent, because the French zone reached far to the east, towards lands to which the Russians had claims of their own. The obstacle was removed only by the exchange of notes in Petrograd on 26 April, in which the Russian government accepted the plan in return for recognition of its gains in eastern Anatolia. The French ambassador in London could therefore give the plan the form of an official commitment.

To the note Cambon attached a map on which Sykes and Picot had put their signatures on 8 May. It was a map of eastern Asiatic Turkey, Syria and western Persia published by the Royal Geographical Society, on which the British and French zones were marked in colours and letters. The map and the note have survived in the British National Archives at Kew.

Why “Sykes-Picot”

Although the agreement bears the names of the two negotiators, it was formally concluded by Ambassador Cambon and Foreign Secretary Grey. Sykes, a Conservative MP and adviser to Lord Kitchener, and Picot, a former consul-general in Beirut, were the authors of the draft, but had no full powers to conclude agreements. The French historian Henry Laurens points out that it suited the British better to speak of the Sykes-Picot agreement than of a Grey-Cambon one, because a name taken from two officials played down the weight of a document that clashed with the promises made to the Arabs. Cambon, ambassador in London since 1898, was one of the architects of the Entente Cordiale and one of the most influential French diplomats. During the war he conducted the most important Allied negotiations in London, among them those on Italy’s entry into the war.

The exchange of notes took place in strict secrecy. Neither the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, with whom the British High Commissioner in Egypt had been corresponding since the autumn of 1915, nor Italy, which in the Treaty of London had secured a promise of a share in any partition of Turkey, was informed of it. Grey replied to Cambon a week later.