The German gunboat Panther enters Agadir

On 1 July 1911 the German gunboat Panther dropped anchor in the roadstead of Agadir, a port on the Atlantic coast of southern Morocco. On the same day the German ambassadors in London, Paris and Madrid informed the governments that the ship was to protect German firms and their employees from unrest among the local tribes. Nobody took this pretext seriously. Agadir was a port closed to foreign trade, and Germany had sent the ship to force France into talks about compensation for Morocco. The Second Moroccan Crisis broke out, and all summer long it threatened war.

France in Fez

The Act of Algeciras of 1906 formally guaranteed the Sultan’s independence, but France was taking control of the country step by step, and in 1909 Germany recognised its special political interests in a separate agreement in exchange for respect for German economic interests. In the spring of 1911 tribes in revolt against Sultan Abd al-Hafid surrounded Fez. France sent a column of troops on the pretext of protecting Europeans, and in the second half of May it reached the city without fighting. In June the Spanish occupied Larache (PL) and Alcazar (Ksar el-Kebir). In Berlin it was held that France and Spain were themselves breaking the Act of Algeciras.

The idea of sending a ship came from the State Secretary of the German Foreign Office, Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter. When in June the French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon, held talks with the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and on 21 June with Kiderlen at Bad Kissingen, Kiderlen made it clear that in return for concessions in Morocco Germany wanted compensation in the French Congo. Paris was slow to reply. On 26 June Kiderlen obtained the consent of Wilhelm II at Kiel, and the next day the Admiralty received its orders.

The notification

The German memorandum delivered on 1 July stated that German commercial houses in and around Agadir had been alarmed by “a certain ferment among the tribes” and had asked for protection of their lives and property. The government had therefore decided to send a warship, which would leave the port “as soon as the state of affairs in Morocco has returned to its former calm”. In London the ambassador, Paul Wolff Metternich, added on his own account that the advances of France and Spain had made the provisions of the Act of Algeciras illusory, and that Germany was ready to seek a definitive solution of the Moroccan question with them. The Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Arthur Nicolson, merely replied that Agadir was not an open port and that he was not aware of any Germans or other foreigners living there.

In Paris the ambassador, Wilhelm von Schoen, told the Foreign Minister, Justin de Selves, that German public opinion was very nervous about Morocco and that sending the ship was largely meant to calm it. De Selves replied that it would be hard to convince the French of the truth of the stated reason. Paris considered sending a ship of its own to Mogador and asked whether the British might do the same. At the Foreign Office it was noted that it was hardly conceivable that Germany would have taken such a step without considering the possibility of a war in which France and England would be ranged against her. A few days later the Panther was relieved at Agadir by the larger cruiser Berlin.

The crisis

In return for recognising a French protectorate over Morocco, Germany demanded almost the whole of the French Congo. Britain stood by France: on 21 July the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, after consulting the Prime Minister and Sir Edward Grey, warned at the Mansion House in London that if peace could be preserved only by allowing Britain to be treated, where her interests were vitally affected, “as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations”, then “peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure”. After months of negotiations Cambon and Kiderlen signed an agreement in Berlin on 4 November 1911 in which Germany undertook not to hinder France in Morocco. In return it received some 275,000 km² of the French Congo, joined to Kamerun. The German press regarded this as a defeat, and Anglo-French cooperation grew closer still.