Pact of London

On 5 September 1914 in London representatives of Britain, France and Russia signed a short declaration in which the three governments undertook not to conclude a separate peace with the Central Powers. This document, known as the Declaration of London or the Pact of London, turned the Entente into a formal wartime alliance. Some works give the date as 4 September, but the published text is dated 5 September.

Not to be confused with other “London” documents

The name easily leads to confusion. The pact of 1914 has nothing to do with the Declaration of London of 1909, the international agreement on the law of naval warfare, contraband and blockade, which the British government announced in August 1914 it would apply during the war with its own modifications. Nor is it the Treaty of London of 26 April 1915, the secret agreement under which Italy entered the war on the side of the Entente in return for promises of territorial gains.

From understanding to alliance

Before the war the Entente was not a full alliance. France and Russia had been bound since the 1890s by a military alliance, but Britain’s agreements with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907 dealt mainly with colonial matters and contained no military commitments. In August 1914 the three powers found themselves at war on the same side, but each separately. Formally nothing prevented any of them from making a separate peace if the war went badly.

And the war was going badly. At the beginning of September the Germans stood before Paris, the French government had left for Bordeaux, and the Russian army had been defeated at Tannenberg. At such a moment the Allies wanted to reassure one another that no one would withdraw from the fight. The declaration was signed in London by the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, the French ambassador Paul Cambon and the Russian ambassador, Count Alexander Benckendorff.

Terms

The declaration was very short. The governments of Britain, France and Russia mutually undertook not to conclude peace separately during the present war. They also agreed that when the time came for peace talks, none of the Allies would put forward peace terms without the prior agreement of the others.

What followed

Other states later acceded to the declaration. Japan joined it in October 1915, and Italy at the end of November that year, having already undertaken to do so in the secret Treaty of London. The agreement became the basis of Allied cooperation until the end of the war.

The pact was broken only by Russia. After the October Revolution the Bolshevik government opened talks with Germany, and on 3 March 1918 it signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, concluding a separate peace. The Western Allies regarded this as betrayal, which became one of the reasons for their intervention in Russia during the Civil War.