Can you imagine republican France paying homage to Queen Elizabeth II and her foreign policy conditioned to the interests of the Commonwealth, in which she would be integrated? Well, apparently it was something that was raised in 1956, during a visit by the French Prime Minister to London, according to documents from the British National Archives recently declassified and made public by the BBC.
The world changed considerably after World War II. Territorially, of course, but also on other levels such as politics and economics. And that included national mindsets, which tended to give up some of their individuality to associate in larger entities. Thus, throughout what remained of the 1940s and the following decades, the UN (1945), NATO (1949), the COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which brought together the countries of the socialist bloc since 1949) emerged. ), the Warsaw Pact, etc.
Most of these alliances were military or economic, but at the end of the 1950s supranational groupings began to be considered and some were even put into practice, albeit briefly. This was the case, for example, of the United Arab Republic, formed by Egypt and Syria in 1958 as a first step in what was to be a great pan-Arab state, the United Arab States, to which Yemen joined shortly after. The project ended in 1961 with the Syrian coup, but Egypt kept the name of the United Arab Republic for ten years.
What is surprising is the Franco-British case because it was kept secret and, in fact, it does not seem that it went beyond a mere idea discussed unofficially among its leaders, without development and, probably, without actually taking it seriously. The international context should have played its role in the proposal. France's economy was going through a difficult period, aggravated by its departure from Asia in 1954 after the Indochina War and the explosive situation in Algeria, where the FNL had started the war of independence.
Things worsened with the so-called Suez Crisis, caused by the nationalization in July 1956 of the canal by Egyptian President Nasser, who deprived the French and British of the usufruct of its exploitation until 1968, according to the legal contract. To compound international tension, the communist world had been in turmoil since Stalin's death three years earlier, with several countries keen to leave the Warsaw Pact. The Egyptian issue would lead to the Sinai War and the European issue to the intervention of Soviet tanks in Hungary, in both cases that October.
It is therefore understandable the concern French Prime Minister Guy Mollet had on September 10, when he traveled to London to meet his counterpart, Sir Anthony Eden. Apart from the fact that Mollet was a well-known Anglophile (and professor of English), both nations maintained a very good relationship due to the British effort in defending France in the war against Hitler (and before that, in the First World War) and because they were still allies by sharing common interests such as the aforementioned Suez Canal (which, in fact, they would try to solve with a joint military operation).
There is no -or has not been preserved- official documentation that collects a proposal of union between both countries or its details, if it had them. But the BBC has revealed secondary documents with references. One of them is dated September 28, that is, a month before the British and French armies began bombing Port Said to cover an amphibious landing while Israel, which feared an Egyptian attack, launched the withering Operation Kadesh and occupied Sinai.
Records a conversation Eden had with his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook. He says verbatim:
It should be pointed out that a similar proposal -in spirit, not formally- was made the following year in a broader supranational sphere and led to the signing of the Treaty of Rome in March 1957 by Federal Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, giving rise to what would become the European Common Market, a step forward compared to previous organizations such as the CECA (European Coal and Steel Community, 1951), the seed of the current European Union.
In any case, as can be seen, Mollet was not successful and the idea was parked until the aforementioned declassification of files, carried out in 2007; the BBC broadcast the document in a program titled, with some humor, An unlikely marriage (An unlikely marriage ) while the French embassy issued a surprise statement and referred to an impossible search in the national archives of their country.
By the way, Charles Pasqua, then Minister of the Interior, said that if Mollet had made the request officially he would have been charged with treason (even though he had fought in the Resistance).
Many will wonder, not without a certain sarcasm, what name the entity resulting from that unheard-of union would have adopted; Mark Thomson, the BBC News journalist who published it, used the humorous term Frangleterre .
The truth is that it was not so unheard of, since there had already been a similar approach before, and above all at the British request. It was Winston Churchill who proposed to Charles De Gaulle the possibility of merging their respective countries. It is true that he did it in a dramatic context, after the withdrawal from Dunkirk that left France occupied by German troops.
Thus, in mid-June 1940, after the withdrawal of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) from Dunkirk in the dramatic Operation Dynamo , the premiere Briton issued an astonishing Declaration of Union , presumably temporary until victory is achieved:
However, mistrust was stronger. Several Gallic politicians rejected him fearing a covert annexation and a hero of the previous war, Marshal Pétain, was of the opinion that to merge with Great Britain was to do it with a corpse, such was his perspective on the future of the neighboring country in the face of the unstoppable Germany.
Shortly after, Pétain himself signed an armistice and was at the head of a puppet government settling the issue. He didn't have as much of an eye as he thought.