The Incroyable Political Union of 1940, Part 2: Choosing Peace Without Honour and the Seeds of the Brits’ “Doing it My Way”

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
International Relations, Military history, Regional History

At a critical junction in the escalating crisis in France, Churchill and de Gaulle met at the Carlton Club in London on 16 June 1940. With an acute recognition of just how close and tangible French annihilation by the Nazi war machine was, the two men from each side of the English Channel agreed that union of the two countries was the necessary way forward. The agreed plan was for de Gaulle to take the British offer for an “indissoluble union” back to the French Council of Ministers (henceforth FCOM) for approval.

⬇️ Charles de Gaulle

F39801CA-02D0-4EC3-8601-AF56D98AF3E4Given the broken morale of the French army, an out-weaponised “spent force” utterly helpless to stop the Nazi Germany military machine from overrunning the country, surely the cabinet, as distasteful as the notion of a merger with Britain might sound to many patriotic French men and women, would endorse the proposal for a Franco-British Union (henceforth FBU) as the only viable, rational move available?

General Weygand – ‘minister’ for the opposition

The senior military officers back in France however were working to a different agenda. The opposition to an alliance between France and Britain was led by General Maxime Weygand. Weygand, the senior military man in France, used his influential position with members of the cabinet to intervene into the political sphere. Going beyond the limits of his (military) authority✻, Weygand made a concerted effort to undermine the case for union spearheaded by the premier Paul Reynaud.

Général d’armée 

Weygand engaged in bullying, abusing and threatening of the undecided politicians until they acquiesced and rolled over into the camp of those favouring a separate armistice with Hitler [Philip C. F. Bankwitz. (1959). Maxime Weygand and the Fall of France: A Study in Civil-Military Relations. The Journal of Modern History, 31(3), 225-242. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1875584].

⬇️ The powerbroker (Weygand)

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Weygand V Reynaud

Weygand resorted to various dirty tricks to overcome Reynaud’s efforts to get FCOM to accept Churchill’s offer, such as wiretapping the French premier’s phone which allowed the general to know what Reynaud was scheming with the deliberating ministers and stay one step ahead of him. Weygand also resorted to brandishing the spectre of a communist takeover if France didn’t sue for peace with Germany [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].

Tactically Weygand has it all over Reynaud in their head-to-head contest to sway the minds of the ministers. He exploited French fears and mistrust of forming an alliance with the English. Weygand could also count on the support of the  vice-premier, the influential Marshal Pétain, to help defeat Reynaud’s plans. The Third Republic’s president (Albert Lebrun) was another unhelpful factor in the crisis’ equation – a stronger figurehead may have provided firm support to the government’s alliance objective, but Lebrun’s weak and ineffectual recourse was to merely try to appease all sides of the political crisis [ibid.].

Premier Reynaud for his part made a number of tactical errors that contributed to the failure of his objective. His omission in not  inviting the British PM to the key FCOM meeting, denied the wavering ministers the opportunity to hear Churchill put the British pro-union case directly to them and let them gauge how genuine he was about FBU. While Weygand was actively busy rallying ministers to his side, Reynaud prevaricated way too long without taking decisive action◈ (ie, pushing FCOM at the earliest instance to reject the armistice path). Lacking the resolve to act, he tried to “manoeuvre and temporise” rather than tackle the issue (and Weygand) head on [ibid.]. The longer the cabinet crisis went on, the more the situation tilted towards the pro-armistice party.

An accumulation of Gallic doubts

As the military situation worsened daily in June 1940, the ministry found more and more reasons to reject the FBU route. De Gaulle detected an “extremely acute Anglophobe feeling” within the armistice collaborators, a feeling heightened by the French public’s anger at the fallout of the Dunkirk operation (viz the British abandonment of a large number of French POWs).

British motives were increasingly questioned by the French ministers …national pride was at sake for some like former PM Camille Chautemps who feared that agreeing to FBU would relegate France to the status of a British dominion, it was thought that the  scheme was a ruse to allow Britain to get its hands on France’s colonial empire [ibid.]. There was a sense among the armistice party that if France made an early request for armistice with Germany, it would enhance the republic’s chances of receiving favourable terms. The mindset was typified in the ominous words of minister of state Ybarnégaray: “…better be a Nazi province; at least we know what that means”※[ibid.].

There was also a belief within the proponents of armistice, fostered by the French military hierarchy, that Britain itself was doomed, that the island’s demise at the onslaught of the Nazi juggernaut was inevitable…as Pétain put it, union with the UK would be committing France to “fusion with a corpse”. Another key advocate of armistice and German collaboration, Pierre Laval, (later vice-premier of the Vichy state) “fear-mongered” freely – disseminating the speculation that when the eventual peace negotiations came (after the defeat of FBU), it was France that  would have to pay for the war! [ibid.].

⬇️ Marshal Pétain boards the Hitler train

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The burden of  swelling ‘defeatism’

As each day passed and with France’s military defence now non-existent, a wave of defeatism descended over the French people and the government. With the pro-armistice camp holding the dominant hand, minister Chautemps’ proposal that FCOM request a separate peace with Germany was effortlessly passed. The despairing Reynaud, sensing that further efforts for FBU were futile and also concerned at the prospect of a divided republic, fell on his sword, resigning immediately. Marshal Pétain hastily assumed the reins of government, thus beginning four years of Vichy proxy rule of France on behalf of Herr Hitler [ibid.].

Footnote: The road to Brexit?

When FBU failed to crystallise in 1940, Britain was left with the full realisation that it had to go it alone against Germany. To survive against such odds the UK looked west to the USA, not to Europe. Churchill and his government thereafter channeled its diplomatic energies towards enticing America into joining Britain’s war against Nazism๏.

8A0177FE-5CB6-43B2-8781-575F55B756D9Dominic Tierney has drawn a connecting line from the recent Brexit phenomena back to the events of 1940, a commonality of the impulse to go solo. Tierney sees the ‘Brexiteers’, those conservative proponents intent on exiting from Europe, as invoking the “spirit of Dunkirk” [‘When Britain and France Almost Merged Into One Country’, (Dominic Tierney), The Atlantic, 08-Aug-2017, www.theatlantic.com].

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PostScript: an alternate history of the “Anglo-French Confederation”

The unfulfilled ‘destiny’ of FBU is a boon to the “what if?” school of history buffs who revel in imaginative reconstructions of past seminal events✥. Theoretical questions abound about FBU had it become a reality…eg, how would the new super-state reconcile the British monarchy with the French republic? Where would real power lie within FBU? How would the Napoleonic legal code mesh with the very different Anglo-Saxon legal system? What would the entity’s ‘indissoluble’ union (Churchill’s very problematic term) really mean in the long run? And so on and so on [‘What if Britain and France unified in 1940?’ (David Boyle), in Prime Minister Corbyn and other things that never happened, edited by Duncan Brack & Iain Dale, (2016)].

The notion of FBU, though stillborn in 1940, did raise its head yet again years later – see the following blog in this series The Franco-British Union Redux …Mach II

╺╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╺

✻ to the point of directly and flagrantly disobeying the government’s directives, such as refusing point-blank to relocate to North Africa if a French government in exile was to be re-established there [Barkwitz, op.cit.]

◈ and the element of surprise had been lost for the FBU camp with the army tapping Reynaud’s conversations

※ in his postwar memoirs Reynaud soberly wrote: “Those who rose in indignation at the idea of union with our ally, were getting ready to bow and scrape to Hitler”

๏ later Churchill and Attlee governments both distanced themselves from the suggestion that they revisit the idea of union with France [Shlaim, op.cit.]. And the Eden government during the Suez Canal crisis flatly rebuffed a request from France for the two countries to ally

✥ the bona fide aficionado of “alt-history” salivates over the prospect of “what if happened” scenarios. There has been something of a tradition of detective novels hypothesising on different historical events, eg, Robert Harris’ Fatherland which rewrites the postwar world based on the premise that Hitler did not die and the Third Reich won the Second World War

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The Incroyable Political Union of 1940, Part 1: Questions of Pragmatic Necessity and the Remoulding of a Future Europe

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Comparative politics, International Relations, Military history, Regional History

”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.]

ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ

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)4C91AFBC-517F-4C91-9490-61B1BB8DEB93 

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.D9043121-5D58-4A3E-89A3-9CB5F240A301

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 ⍗

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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. 763A822C-5DD3-4314-A12A-F53D7B66581B

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

Rugby à quinze: The Vichy French Regime’s Game of Choice

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Military history, Sport, Sports history
Vichy emphasis on youth sport (Coll: Mémorial de la Shoah/CDJC)

⇑ Pro rugby
The Nazi-installed, collaborationist Vichy ‘puppet’ regime assumed power in France in 1940—jettisoning the liberté, égalité et fraternité of the democrats and socialists —and adopting in its place the new national motto of travail, famille et patrie (“work, family and fatherland”) as the official philosophy. The new government was quick to focus on sport as a platform for implementing its policies and goals. Taking a leaf from the Corporative State approach of fascist Italy (Carta della sport), Vichy envisaged sport and PhysEd as integral to the “moral education” of the French, an “instrument for constraining and indoctrinating the population in general and youth in particular”. A good illustration of its importance can be seen in the regime’s dissemination of propaganda posters extolling the virtues of physical education (from the start Vichy law made it compulsory for schoolchildren to complete seven hours of PhysEd a week)[1].

The Rugby Wars
The Vichy regime had been in existence for only a matter of months when it banned the sport of rugby league, in France known as rugby à treize, (at the same time taking no action against the amateur rugby code, rugby à quinze). The Vichy French minister for sport, family and youth announced in August 1940 that because rugby league was (according to the government) a ‘corruptor’ of French youth, it would (in his words) simply be “deleted from French sport”. The Vichy regime justified this action by claiming that it wanted to bring an end to professional sport in France, which the regime argued had a deleterious effect on French society and morale, dubiously linking the professionalism of sport to the pathetically feeble and dispirited French military showing in face of the onslaught of the German Nazi war machine. Marshal Pétain and the Vichy leadership associated rugby league with its large working class following in the south with the pre-war Popular Front Socialist government of Leon Blum[2].

Vichy also made efforts to curb professionalism in some other sports, eg, tennis and wrestling were restored to strictly amateur status. The uncompromisingly draconian approach taken to semi-professional rugby league✱ by Vichy however contrasts with its more restrained intervention in the fully professional sports of association football, boxing and cycling (see PostScript for the treatment of football)[3].

f=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-1.jpg”> FFR: Haut coq[/capt
From two rugby codes one …
In December 1940 Vichy chief of state Pétain decreed that rugby à treize would ‘merge’ with rugby à quinze (the fifteen man-a-side rugby union game). In effect, rather than a merger, the thirteen man code of rugby ceased to exist, its funds (around 900,000 francs), its players, its stadiums, even its playing gear, were all expropriated and given to the Fédération Française de Rugby (FFR). This benevolence in favour of French rugby union was not simply the happenstance of good luck on the FFR’s part. The FFR had been at efforts to establish a cosy relationship with the Vichy regime from its inception and had actively lobbied for the elimination of its rival rugby code. This was facilitated by the regime’s choices of commissioner of sport, men with active links to the FFR: Jean Borotra, a former Wimbledon tennis champion who had extensive connexions with the French rugby establishment, and Colonel Joseph Pascot, a prominent rugby international for France in the 1920s[4]. Before I address why the FFR was hellbent on taking down the French Rugby League, I will outline some background relating to the two codes in the period leading up to the war.

http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-2.jpg”> Jeu de Treize[/caption
Varying fortunes of the two rugby codes
Attempts to kick-start rugby à treize as early as 1921-22 with a planned rugby league exhibition match in Paris between the touring Australian Kangaroos and Great Britain’s Lions was vetoed by the influential FFR. In the early 1930s the established sport of rugby à quinze in France experienced a setback at international level. Because of the French national team’s tendency towards violent play and the widely held perception that the FFR was making secret payments to its (amateur) players, France was kicked out of the Five Nations tournament (with the British home countries and Ireland) in 1931. The ostracised FFR responded by setting up its own European competition outside of the IRFB (world rugby board) comprising rugby lesser lights-cum-minnows like Italy, Czechoslovakia and Germany. Rugby à quinze was on the back foot. In 1932 the FFR banned a union international player named Jean Galia who was suspected (albeit with fairly sketchy evidence) of being covertly a professional⊡…Galia went on start up the breakaway code of rugby league in the south-west of France✧, initially called néo rugby by the French. By season 1934-35 there was a 14-team semi-pro domestic comp underway[5].

Through the thirties French rugby league made progress culminating in victory in the European championship in 1938-39 (on route defeating both England and Wales). Rugby à treize’s crowds were growing, it was a hit with many French spectators⊛ who were drawn to its more open, free-flowing and swashbuckling style of game, which seemed to match the French temperament better than the somewhat stop-start rugby union game. In 1939 three of the top rugby union clubs in the country defected to rugby à treize…the FFR were fully aware of the threat posed to its sport by rugby league. At this point the Vichy regime intervened dramatically to salvage rugby à quinze’s and the FFR’s traditional advantage[6].

The game that dare not speak its name!
Eventually, in late 1944, the ban on the Ligue de rugby à treize (French Rugby League) was lifted but three years later the code was split into two bodies: the Fédération française de jeu à treize (governing the amateur RL game) and a Ligue de rugby à XIII (governing the semi-professional game)[7]. Although the sport of rugby league was once again allowed to be played, the League bodies were barred from using the word ‘rugby’ to describe the code, having instead to refer to it as Jeu à Treize (Game of Thirteen). This prohibition lasted remarkably until 1991!

World champions: rise and decline
Since its reinstatement rugby league has struggled to establish a foothold in France – despite experiencing some stellar moments in the early to mid 1950s, especially under the leadership of France’s most famous rugby XIII player, the mercurial, cigarette-smoking (during matches!!!) Puig-Aubert[8], Les Chanticleers defeated the powerful Australian side in three consecutive test series. By 1952 having won the European Championships twice and beaten Australia, France could justifiably claim to be unofficial world champs. Despite France’s rugby XIII game reaching this peak rugby à quinze and FFR remains the hegemonic rugby code and body in France, and have by far the lion’s share of coverage in the French media. Today, international results suggest the sport is still in the doldrums, however the rise of the (sole) French club side Catalans Dragons in the English Super League competition, culminating in victory in the 2018 Challenge Cup, (analogous to English football’s FA Cup) is a bright glimmer on the rugby league horizon in France.

PostScript: Vichy’s take on the ‘World Game’
Football (soccer) did not get off entirely unscathed from the pervasive tentacles of the Vichy regime. It was allowed to keep its professional status but it suffered significant modifications. Vichy restructured the French football competition to eliminate or discourage the development of “local derby” rivalries (matches between clubs in the same or neighbouring towns). Professional players were made to take up a second trade and teams were compelled to field four amateur players in games. Matches were reduced from 90 to 80 minutes duration. After the eclipse of Vichy in 1944 things reverted to the old system but the upheaval suffered over the previous four years left French football in a state of flux and chaos for a number of years post-war[9].

Footnote: To this day the FFR (French Rugby) has neither issued an apology to Fédération française de jeu à treize for its role in what happened, nor moved to recompense rugby à treize (French Rugby League) for lost finances and the expropriation of its property and equipment over three-quarters of a century ago.

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✱ badminton was also outlawed but in its case because it was deemed by the authorities to be “un-French”!
⊡ FFR’s banning of Galia was intended to show the British rugby authorities that it was serious about cleaning up France’s ‘shamateurism’ [Lichfield]
✧ the south-west was and remains the heartland of rugby à treize – all of the clubs in France’s Elite One competition except one are located there, the exception Avignon is in the south-central/south-east region
⊛ followers and fans of rugby à treize were called treizistes

[1] Christophe Pécout, Le sport dans la France du gouvernement de Vichy (1940-1944)’, www.hssh.journals.yorku.co; ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie … and Sport’, (Mémorial de la Shaoh Musée), www.sportmemorialdelashaoh.org
[2] Vichy also associated it with Free French leader Charles De Gaulle and naturally enough with the United Kingdom, ‘Badge of dishonour: French rugby’s shameful secret’ (John Lichfield), The Independent, 06-Sept-2007, www.independent.co.uk; ‘Rugby league in France’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wiki.org
[3] Lichfield, op.cit.
[4] ‘When Vichy abolished rugby league’, (Mick O’Hare), The New European, 21-Nov-2017, www.theneweuropean.co.uk
[5] Lichfield, op.cit.
[6] ibid.
[7] ‘gentlemen agreement of 10th July 1947’, quoted in ‘Rugby league in France’, op.cit.
[8] the French leadership off the field was provided by Paul Barriere, postwar president of Jeu à Treize who guided French rugby league through the turbulent period and laid the groundwork for the inaugural Rugby League World Cup in France in 1954, ‘Why this trophy for winning the World Cup?’, (Steve Waddingham), Courier and Mail (Qld), 15-Jun-2008, www.couriermail.com.au
[9] ‘Inside History: How Vichy Changed French Football’, (David Gold), Inside Futbol, 06-Feb-2011, www.insidefutbol.com

France versus Monaco – a “Road hump” in Bilateral Relations of the Early 1960s

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, National politics, Popular Culture, Regional History
Monaco 🇲🇨 millionaires’ playground on the western Mediterranean

The tiny hereditary principality of Monaco on the French Riviera/Côte d’Azur has long-held a reputation for being a playground of the rich and famous (thanks to its high cost of living and its tax laws)✱, in addition to being a micro-state with a high-profile royal family (The Grimaldis) whose capacity to attract publicity is grotesquely way out of proportion to the entity’s minuscule size and insignificant political importance. Monaco is also famous for its industries – gambling⊞ , banking and tax avoidance. It is this last area of finance that was the crux of a brief 1960s confrontational episode in the country’s historical relations with its larger regional neighbours.

Hercule Harbour, Monaco

In October 1962 the French government of Charles De Gaulle imposed a blockage of Monaco’s main port. The prospect of an advanced Western European power threatening a tiny territorial enclave – possessing a microscopic gendarmerie and no army or navy – with force must have struck outsiders as a farcical situation…in reality the blockade stayed in place ever so briefly although it was not officially lifted until Easter 1963. The Franco-Monégaseque ‘Crisis’ was completely in the shadow of the terrifyingly real crisis occurring in Cuba at the same time, the international missile crisis standoff between the global Cold Warriors, USA and the Soviet Union [Fabien Hassan, ‘Lessons from history – The Monaco crisis from 1962-1963 and the emancipation of tax havens’Finance Watch, 27-Apr-2015, www.finance-watch.org].

The royal palace on “The Rock”

The nub of the conflict
Monaco’s historical practice of not imposing any direct income tax on its residents (including those migrating to the Principality from France) and having minimal taxes on business had a deleterious outcome for France – a significant loss of revenue for the French coffers. In this regard De Gaulle had a legitimate gripe against Monaco for letting wealthy French persons evade their tax obligations to the Tricolore Republic…this was especially galling to the French President as it was France that footed the entire bill for tiny Monaco’s national defence (plus forking out some other financial outlays as part of the two nations’ special relationship). At the time the French media was stridently doing its utmost to drum up national disaffection with the Monaco situation⊛.

⍍ Grace Kelly’s 1955 Hitchcock film made on location in the French Riviera that led to that momentous meeting between America’s “patrician pure-bred” star actress and Monaco’s bachelor monarch – and a subsequent change of careers and destinies!

Too much American influence in a French ‘pond’?
De Gaulle was also apparently concerned about the growing influence of Americans over Prince Rainier’s governance of Monaco…in so doing they were stepping on the toes of France, Monaco being clearly within the French sphere of influence (it also reflected De Gaulle’s wider antipathy to the ‘Americanisation’ of Europe!), a concern he harboured even before Rainier’s marriage to US film star Grace Kelly! Prior to that, Rainier had already engaged Americans as some of his closest advisers to assist him in his day-to-day duties and personal affairs✥. The 1962 political tensions between the two countries can be traced back to events in 1959, namely the Prince’s decision to suspend the Constitution (interpreted by France as a Monégaseque move towards securing US support) [Hassan, ibid.].

1950s Sister ‘coup’: Usurping Rainier
Apparently not long after Rainier ascended the throne (1949), his older sister, the Paris-born Princess Antoinette, tried to exploit a Monégaseque economic crisis at the time due to a series of reckless state loans…the Princess’ intrigues involved trying, unsuccessfully, to convince Monaco’s oligarchs that they should replace her (then) unmarried and childless brother with her legitimated son Christian as prince (with herself as regent until he came of age) [‘Monaco’s Machiavellian Princesses’, 27-Apr-2013, www.royalfoibels.com]. In the 2014 film, Grace of Monaco, to heighten the dramatic narrative of the movie, the episode of Antoinette’s attempted coup d’être (1950) is clumsily and inaccurately interwoven into the story of the 1962-63 crisis [Alex Von Tunzelmann, ‘Grace of Monaco – historically accurate? you’ve got some de Gaulle’, The Guardian, 4-Jun-2014, www.theguardian.com].

The tourist-friendly Grimaldi palace

Crisis averted…through compromise
In the end a compromise was negotiated with France so that French citizens living in Monaco for less than five years were now to be taxed – at French rates, and Monegasque businesses doing more than 25% of their business outside the Principality had to pay corporate taxes for the first time, with all the revenues going back to the Treasury in Paris. The Franco-Monégaseque compromise, with some revisions from time to time, is still in effect today [Hassan, op.cit.]

Footnote: historical roots and etymological nomenclature curio
The name ‘Monaco’ derives from monos (single, alone) and oikos (house), conveying the meaning, a people “living apart” or in a “single habitation”. Monaco’s origins were as a Greek colony founded in 6th century BCE although the first inhabitants were Ligurians, an ancient Indo-European tribe – Monaco was absorbed into the Roman Empire, later invading Saracens gained control of the territory. Eventually it fell under the control of the seafaring Genoese. After one of these, François Grimaldi, disguised as a Franciscan monk, established a hold over “The Rock” in 1297, the independent status of Monaco has been periodically punctuated by the intervention of outside forces – viz. taken by France for a period in the 14th century and then retaken from 1789-1814, under Spanish protection briefly in the 16th century, and then under French protection for most other intervals of time since the Middle Ages.

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Monaco Palace ‘sideshow?’

PostScript: Personal impressions … less than overwhelming
When I visited Monaco in 2009 I was taken with just how French it was…hardly surprising given that the French Republic surrounds the tiny monarchy and French residents heavily outnumber the Monégaseque!❂ We were touring the south of France in summer and staying at Cannes, just a short drive down the road from the pocket-sized Principality. We had an early dinner at a great spot overlooking the harbour before popping into Monte Carlo to do the obligatory tourist thing of visiting the Casino (boring, bereft of atmosphere…major anticlimactic letdown that turned out to be!). Then on to the Grimaldi royal palace on “The Rock”. The take-away message I took from the royal seat of power was that it was rather akin to visiting the palatial residence of a comic-opera royal family, something along the lines of the fictional Ruritania or the Grand Duchy of Fenwick. I think the Lilliputian nature of Monaco, the sheer lack of size of the Principality adds to this notion. Monaco is less than two square kilometres, which is on the slim side for an average Sydney suburb, infinitesimally minute for a national entity – only Vatican City is smaller! One other thing that struck me on arrival at the Palace entrance and whilst strolling around its grounds, was the relative lack of security in existence (like there just wasn’t anything that important to safeguard!). The incongruous presence of odd vehicles and vessels from some sort of expeditionary enterprise within the grounds, suggesting a museum-like setting, did not reinforce an impression of a serious regal residence, say, as at Buckingham Palace. But the dubious significance of the Monégasque Principality aside, aesthetically, Palais du Prince, whilst not exactly Versailles in scale or opulence, nonetheless comprised several fine, stately buildings. The big chunk of rock the Palace sits on is a good place to take in wide views of the harbour, La Condamine with its flotilla of moored millionaires’ yachts, and of Monte Carlo across the Hericule. Tour over, we headed out of the grounds, through the tunnel to the coach taking us back to our Cannes hotel, feeling as if we hadn’t really ever left France, but had just visited a uniquely peculiar part with a slightly ‘Fantasyland’ feel about it!

The Mouse That Roared – a 1959 British satire about a fictional speck of a micro-state called ‘Grand Fenwick’ which declares war on the USA

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✱ a 2014 study revealed that 30% of Monaco’s population (around 38,000) were millionaires [‘One in a Three in a Millionaire in a Monaco: Study’, www.ndtv.com]
⊞ associated with Monte Carlo Casino, a fame reinforced by James Bond movies, but Monacoan gambling was long controlled by Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis before his eviction by Rainier
⊛ the French press, going somewhat overboard, even called for the AS Monaco football club to be kicked out of the French championship [Hassan, op.cit].
✥ An American clerical oblate, one Father Tucker, was front and centre in the body of royal advisers at the palace…one of his very specialised roles reportedly was to select suitable, available Catholic girls for the very eligible bachelor prince, ‘Who is Father Francis Tucker in “Grace of Monaco”? This Priest Played an Interesting Role in History, Bustle, 26-May-2015, www.bustle.com
❂ only around 22% of the Principality’s population are native Monégaseques, about 47% are French or of French descent and 18%, give or take, are Italian, [‘Countries and their Cultures Forum – Monaco, www.everyculture.com/Ma-Ni/Monaco.html]