Posted on 01/15/2007 5:13:28 PM PST by blam
The Queen, La Reine
By Caroline Davies
Last Updated: 2:29pm GMT 15/01/2007
Zut alors! Such is the antipathy today, it is hard today to imagine two nations less likely to form a union than Great Britain and France. Or, indeed, what of the prospect of our Queen as the first regal head of this avowedly republican country since the previous royal occupants of the post literally lost theirs.
Guy Mollet (l), Sir Anthony Eden, and Christian Pineau, the French foreign minister, meet in Paris
But documents housed at the National Archives at Kew show not only was this seriously considered by the French, but they also wanted to join the Commonwealth as well.
The course of modern history would have well and truly changed back in 1956 had the French prime minister Guy Mollet got his way when he arrived in London for talks with his British counterpart Anthony Eden.
A British Cabinet paper from the time reads: “When the French Prime Minister, Monsieur Mollet was recently in London, he raised with the Prime Minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France”.
Such a move, which today must send shivers down the spine of any self-regarding French man or woman, was not perhaps as outrageous as it first seems, though.
France was at the time facing severe economic difficulties, and also an escalating Suez crisis. It wanted the British firmly onside to help retake the canal from Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was funding separatists in rebellious French Algeria.
Eden rejected the idea. But, undeterred, M Mollett tried a different tactic. What if the French were to join the Commonwealth? He even admitted there would be “no difficulty over France accepting the headship of Her Majesty”.
Whether that was as France’s Head of State, like the many other Commonwealth countries who have her as Queen, or simply to accept her as head of the Commonwealth, is unclear. But both are likely. This proposal too was eventually rejected. And. as history shows, a year later France signed the Treaty of Rome with Germany and other founding nations of the Common Market.
Details of this unlikely scenario have been found in a document dated September 28 1956 which records a conversation between Sir Anthony and his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook. The documents have lain vitrually unnoticed in the archives for two decades until now.
Today Francophile former Europe minister Denis MacShane said it was a fine example of the “tortured romance” between the two nations that had existed “since William the Conqueror colonised Britain 1,000 years ago”.
“Churchill offered to the French to merge completely with Britain in 1940, which the French turned down. Guy Mollet was a teacher of English from Calais. I suspect that he was seeking to copycat that as France was under terrible pressure on Algeria and Suez was looming,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sir John Holmes, the British Ambassador in Paris, believes that the French may still regret it never came to pass. “Stories about royal families, particularly the British Royal Family, are avidly read in the new magazines in France,” he told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“The current film called The Queen is incredibly popular in France. So there’s a sort of hankering after the kind of stability and continuity with the monarch represents for us and the French don’t have”.
The story behind the documents “A Marriage Cordial” is broadcast on Radio 4 at 8pm tonight.
Sounds like blather to justify the expense of a royal family to me.
And yet France still spends more on its Royal Palaces then the UK does.
***"possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France”. ***
Why would England want more moslems? They have enough problems with the ones they have.
"send shivers down the spine of any self-regarding French man or woman"
How can a creature without a vertabrae have shivers down its spine? Unless the french have a notochord... but I was certain they were from the phylum cnidaria.
That's not exactly how it went down. It was more along the lines of "dissolve France into us".
Churchill was seeking, in effect, to win the 100 Years War while France was going down under the German boot.
The equivalent would have been for the US to tell the British in 1940-41: "We'd love to do Lend Lease with you, please just give us Canada and we will proceed."
Not very nice. And Churchill's proposal wasn't really in the spirit of allies. It was in the spirit of Empire.
De Gaulle never forgave Churchill for the proposal either.
Their ones are nicer, it has to be said...
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