”The Governments of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union and unyielding resolution in their common defence of justice and freedom, against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves.”
~ British offer of Anglo-French Union, June 16, 1940
[Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Volume 365. House of Commons Official Report Eleventh Volume of Session 1939-40, (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1940), columns 701-702.]
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I first heard of this astonishing plan to politically unify Britain and France in WWII – to make French citizens British and British citizens French – in a television documentary broadcast on SBS – Churchill’s Bodyguard (2005)✻. The thought that these two Anciens rivaux of Europe nearly became one country seems, from this vantage point looking backwards, a simply incredulous thing to contemplate❂.
⍗ WSC (Source: PA)
The catalyst for the June 1940 proposal to fuse the two European allies was France’s military debacle: Nazi Germany launched a massive offensive into France in May and French forces offered scant resistance as the German Wehrmacht steamrolled on towards Paris with alarming speed. In late May the British Expeditionary Forces were evacuated from France, however the British left some 90,000 French troops in Dunkirk, abandoned to the fate of the conquering German army.
Before the crisis in the UK: Laying the groundwork for a federation
In the late 1930s, with threats to European stability and democracy emerging from both the Right and the Left, federalist ideas and sentiments started to gain currency within the UK. There was a thriving literature on the subject…liberal and socialist thinkers like William Beveridge, Lord Lothian and Lionel Curtis, were disseminating federalist ideas which were supported by many prominent politicians from both sides and by members of the Anglican Church. Andrea Bosco has drawn attention to the activism of a grass-roots movement known as the Federal Union which functioned as “a catalyst for (Federalist) ideas and behaviours“, generating popular backing in GB for the federal idea. French political economist Jean Monnet, as chair of the Anglo-French Coordinating Committee based in London, had the most developed perspective of the “Pan-Europeans”. Monnet took some of his inspiration from the vibrant British federalist movement and even discussed federalism with the then UK prime minster, Neville Chamberlain (more of Monnet later). Before the war a bill✫ was drafted at Chatham House◘ anticipating the Franco-British Union (henceforth FBU) [‘Britain’s forgotten attempt to build a European Union’, (Andrea Bosco), (London School of Economics & Political Science), 20-Jan-2017, www.blogs.lse.ac.uk].
M. Monnet ⍗
Proponents of FBU: the British
British PM Churchill, though harbouring doubts about the viability of the proposed union, was in the vanguard of the initiative. Churchill and the all-party UK war cabinet were desperate to stop the French capitulating to Hitler (failing that the PM deemed it imperative that the French fleet not fall into Nazi hands) [Shlaim, A. (1974). Prelude to Downfall: The British Offer of Union to France, June 1940. Journal of Contemporary History, 9(3), 27-63. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/260024].
The British offer of union, described by Shlaim as a deus ex machina, came when it did, as an attempt to mend the deteriorating relations between GB and France. Westminster, by making a “spectacular gesture of solidarity” with the beleaguered French, was hoping to silence the criticism within France of British motives. It was also intended to shore up the position of French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who was the key political figure on the French side most in favour of the Union. By making common cause with France, the British were trying to raise French morale to stay in the fight against Germany and to discourage the Nazis. At the same time, by securing FBU with France, it hoped to entice to its side the “weak neutrals” of the Continent, away from the pull of the Third Reich. It would be wrong to assume everyone associated with the government in Britain was on board with Churchill’s scheme to fast-track an Anglo-French union…top Whitehall civil servant Sir Orme Sargent for instance felt the UK public was not ready for a union with France and urged it be delayed to after the war [ibid.].
Proponents of FBU: the French
Reynaud was the political face of the pro-FBU cause within the French ranks, but behind the scenes the concept was largely the brainchild of the aforementioned Jean Monnet. After the war Monnet’s untiring efforts at unification saw him identified as the “father of European integration”. In early 1940 as the war began to encroach closer and closer to France, Monnet was preoccupied with finding a way of avoiding the excesses of nationalism and militarism plaguing Europe. FBU was intended to be the “prototype of complete union” (Shlaim)…Monnet saw the surrender of national sovereignty by France and GB as the first step on the road to greater Europe’s supranational integration⌺. The incorporation of the two countries and economies was a starting point for the ultimate political unification of Europe. Monnet’s relentless advocacy of the merits of a “United States of Europe” postwar, helped to bear fruit with the creation of the Common Market and the European Community. 
Although, for the British participants in the drama, eventual European unification was not the rationale for making FBU happen, there were some on the English side of the channel who endorsed M Monnet’s integrationist ambitions, such as Professor Arnold Toynbee and Sir Arthur Salter. Even Churchill’s private secretary at the time was eyeing off the prospect of new openings and a shifting role for the UK – even going so far as to affirm that a union with France could be a “bridge to Europe and even World Federation” [‘When Britain and France Almost Merged Into One Country’, (Dominic Tierney), The Atlantic, 08-Aug-2017, www.theatlantic.com].
The consensus in the British block did not endorse Monnet’s visionary role for FBU, the hard-nose pragmatist view of Westminster was that, at that time of extreme and extraordinary peril, the union was purely one of expediency. The British offer was, in Avi Shlaim’s words, “no more than a last and desperate effort to keep France in the war against the common enemy” [ibid.] – a short-term objective only.
French military leader General de Gaulle (despite like Churchill harbouring some reservations about the concept) threw his weight behind FBU, believing it represented “a grand move to change history” [ibid.]. The linchpin for the Union’s success or otherwise came to hinge on secret talks between Churchill for the British and de Gaulle for the French. It was indeed an irony that on this occasion the “two patriotic statesmen, the symbols of independence and nationalism” (of their respective nations) were in synch with each other in seeking a supranational entity (Shlaim).
Like PM Reynaud, de Gaulle (still at this stage a junior minister in the French government) advocated FBU as the sole way forward because he wanted to fight on against the German invasion forces. Unfortunately for them (and the stricken French republic), the military high command and the majority of the French cabinet had other ideas. In the second part of this blog, we will look at how the events of June 1940 planned out and discover the fate of FBU and it’s postwar reverberations for Britain and France and for contemporary Europe as a whole.
Richard (the Lionheart) Plantagenet
Postscript: Incredible or incroyable as the prospect of an Anglo-French union in 1940 might seem, it would not have been without precedent. The Norman and Plantagenet monarchs in England in the 11th through 13th centuries ruled what was an Anglo-French state.
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✻ based on the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s long-time bodyguard, Walter H Thompson
❂ although the idea of an Anglo-French Union didn’t simply emerge out of thin air in 1940. The military alliance between the two countries in the face of the menace of an encroaching fascism in Europe had been taking shape since 1936…which in turn had built on the 1904 Entente cordiale, agreements which formally ended centuries of on-again, off-again Franco-English conflict [Mathews, J. (1941). The Anglo-French Alliance and the War. The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 21(4), 351-359. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42865013; ‘Franco-British Union’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✫ Act of Perpetual Association between the UK and France
◘ a London “think tank” known officially as the Royal Institute of International Affairs
⌺ M Monnet was an unapologetic Anglophile, having lived and worked in London for part of his career he admired the British welfare system and had a sincere appreciation of GB’s assistance to France in two world wars
We booked into Rydges Hotel in Queenstown✲, New Zealand’s capital of adventure tourism. Whitewater rafting, bungy jumping and Jet Shotovers beckoned, but as our hotel was handily situated in proximity to the wharf on picture perfect Lake Wakatipu, something more sedate – a leisurely boat trip across its glistening waters – was what took our immediate fancy.
From the Queenstown wharf we caught the vintage twin screw steamboat TSS Earnslaw❁…the journey was a complete step back in time…a slow and leisurely ride across Lake Wakatipu with the boat chugging along at a 1924 pace. No one on board much minded the pedestrian progress we were making. The only downside to the trip was trying to avoid inhaling the vessel’s toxic nasties, trying to survive the vile fumes of black smoke emitted from the steamer’s coal-fired boilers pervading the air inside the Earnslaw.
My highest highlight of the tour however was the demonstration of rounding up and penning a drove of sheep. This was made memorable by the antics of the leathery-faced old shepherd guy and his “Abbott and animal Costello” routine with the farm’s working border collie. The old farmer was a real joker, entertaining us with his dry commentary which bore more than a touch of the John Clarke quippery – and the same flat deadpan delivery. To start the show, he barked out instructions to the collie to tear madly all over the top paddock fetching the grazing sheep. After terrorising and cajoling the sheep into one cowering bunch, the dog efficiently corralled them into the enclosure at the south end. Then, with mission accomplished, the farmer, with comic timing and mock annoyance, remarked of the still heavily panting dog, “I don’t know why he’s so tired! I’m the one who does all the work”!
The one-liners didn’t stop when the farmer donned his “shearing kit”, the blue and red overalls of his defleecing trade, to do some serious bladework. With a couple of hand-picked Romneys, he demonstrated (with accompanying audio) how to give a sheep the “Full Monty” crew cut! I’m not sure if the sizeable cohort of Japanese tourists on hand were sufficiently au fait with ‘Kiwised’ English to get the gist of the demonstrator’s jokey spiel and all the nuances of his wry humorous asides, but they generally seemed to sense the comic implications of the situation and enthusiastically laughed accordingly.
The other stand-out feature of the visit, the afternoon tea, was held in the Colonel’s Homestead, an elegant turreted terracotta red and white building set against the impressive backdrop of the towering Walter Peak. The high tea worked a treat with very generous servings of scones and pikelets and the obligatory jam and cream, all washed down with a nice cuppa. Afterwards, a leisurely lakeside stroll through the homestead’s très picturesque English-style gardens set the seal on a great day’s outing.
Time passed at the right pace on the return journey in the Earnslaw to Rydges – the tour operator organised a traditional sing-a-long to the accompaniment of the boat’s period-piece piano. We were given a complimentary “NZ Song Book” and encouraged to join in. The songs were every bit as vintage as the 1912 vessel and only a bit cringeworthy, but hey it was all part of setting an authentic mood for a momentary step back into yesteryear.
