The Triple Entente (from French entente "good will") was the name given to the alliance between France, Britain, and Russia after the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente on August 31, 1907. The alliance of the three powers, supplemented by agreements with Portugal and Japan, constituted a powerful counterweight to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. (Italy had concluded an additional secret agreement with France, effectively nullifying their alliance with Germany.)
Historians continue to debate the importance of the alliance system in igniting the Great War. At the start of World War I in 1914, all three members of the Triple Entente entered it as Allies against Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Famous quotes containing the words triple and/or entente:
“The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet’s fool.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)