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

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

Given 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)

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

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๏.

Dominic 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].

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

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✻ 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