France and Britain considered 1950s merger into one country

[Blackleaf]

In the 1950s, an Anglophile Frenchman wanted Britain and France to join together as one country and the Queen becoming France's Head of State. When Britain declined the offer, France then wanted to join the Commonwealth.

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France and UK considered 1950s 'merger'



[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Staff and agencies[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Monday January 15, 2007[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Guardian Unlimited[/FONT]

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Britain's then-prime minister Sir Anthony Eden discussed a 'union' deal with his French counterpart.[/FONT]



Britain and France talked about a "union" in the 1950s, even discussing the possibility of the Queen becoming the French head of state, it was reported today.

On September 10 1956, Guy Mollet, the then French prime minister, came to London to discuss the possibility of a merger between the two countries with his British counterpart, Sir Anthony Eden, according to declassified papers from the National Archives, uncovered by the BBC.

A British cabinet paper from the period 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."

At the time of the proposal, France was in economic difficulties and faced the escalating Suez crisis. Britain had been a staunch French ally during the two world wars.

When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.

A document dated September 28 1956 records a conversation between the prime minister and his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, saying:

"The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

· That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth

· That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty

· That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."


However, this proposal was also eventually rejected and, a year later, France signed the Treaty of Rome with Germany and the other founding nations of the European common market.

"I tell you the truth - when I read that I am quite astonished," the French Nationalist MP, Jacques Myard, told the BBC today.

"I had a good opinion of Mr Mollet before. I think I am going to revise that opinion. I am just amazed at reading this, because since the days I was learning history as a student I have never heard of this. It is not in the textbooks."

No French record of the proposal appears to exist, and it is unclear whether there were any proposals for the name of the new union.

A spokesman for the French embassy said most people had been surprised by the revelation. "We are looking at our national archives," he said. "We cannot comment at this stage."

The idea of a link-up between countries was not unique. Between 1958 and 1961, Egypt and Syria merged to become the United Arab Republic in an initial move to establish a pan-Arab state.

The union broke up following a coup in Syria, but Egypt continued to call itself the United Arab Republic until 1971.

The BBC's Document programme will broadcast an edition on the proposed merger, called An Unlikely Marriage, at 8pm tonight on Radio 4.

guardian.co.uk

 

[hermanntrude]

bah.

we ruled half of france before. gave it back, didnt want it

please dont tell me that's not the truth. I know, i just like to deceive myself

 

[Blackleaf]

England once ruled half of France, though, during the Hundred Years War. That's when we burned Joan of Arc.

 

[L Gilbert]

You guys wouldn't want France now. It's too much fun to see them dancing the funky chicken from all the unemployment, apathy, etc.

 

[csanopal]

You guys wouldn't want France now. It's too much fun to see them dancing the funky chicken from all the unemployment, apathy, etc.

I can't even imagine two peoples so vastly different from each other being in one nation together.Look at us here in Canada and the hassles we go through with Quebec.

If England and France joined together, five minutes after the union a French seperatist group would emerge:happy11:

 

[Numure]

bah.

we ruled half of france before. gave it back, didnt want it

please dont tell me that's not the truth. I know, i just like to deceive myself

Not that english culture has been formed from it's French ruling class, and that England was ru;ed for hundreds of years by a Family (Even during the 100 year war, the Normans (Frenchies) we're ruling England.

 

[hermanntrude]

i told u NOT to say that. Self deceipt is what makes me happy

 

[darleneonfire]

I can't even imagine two peoples so vastly different from each other being in one nation together.Look at us here in Canada and the hassles we go through with Quebec.

If England and France joined together, five minutes after the union a French seperatist group would emerge:happy11:

Now that is a TRUE statement!!!!

 

[hermanntrude]

and an english "i'm rather indignant about it all but won't do anything" group

 

[Blackleaf]

FRENCH JEALOUS OF ROYAL FAMILY


Denis MacShane, the Francophile former Europe minister, said it was a fine example of the "tortured romance" between the 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 he was seeking to copycat that as France was under terrible pressure."

The documents have lain in the National Archives almost unnoticed since they were declassified two decades ago.

Sir John Holmes, Britain's Ambassador to Paris, believes that deep in the French psyche there is a little knot of regret that it never came to pass (union between the two countries with a monarchy).

"Stories about the British Royal Family are avidly read in France," he said. "The film The Queen is incredibly popular.

"So there's a sort of hankering after the stability and continuity which the monarch represents for us and the French don't have."

telegraph.co.uk
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Royaume-Uni (United Kingdom)



16/01/2007

Imagine how life might have changed in the Britain of 1956 if the union with France proposed by her prime minister, Guy Mollet, had gone through.

A choice of clarets might have been on offer at the Wavy Line grocer, but for how long could you have relied on the pot being warmed at Fuller's tearooms? Goodbye to cheerless Sundays and to driving on the left; hello to liver trouble and mistresses. Fewer grands projets might have been completed, and the Channel Tunnel have been left unbuilt.

Would Gordon Brown have come to maturity yearning to defend l'Union? Or would la question de Lothian Ouest eventually have infuriated the burghers of Calais and beyond?

As it turned out, there was crisis petrol rationing in France before the year's end, and de Gaulle brought in a new constitution in 1958. A romantic Franco-British Union would have been a brief encounter.

telegraph.co.uk

 

[Daz_Hockey]

Not that english culture has been formed from it's French ruling class, and that England was ru;ed for hundreds of years by a Family (Even during the 100 year war, the Normans (Frenchies) we're ruling England.

Numure, the Norman's were actually Germans, as German as the current Saxons were. The French would like to claim that they were the last great invaders of England, but, happily, they wer not.

Norman = Norseman

NOT Frenchman

 

[hermanntrude]

interesting daz. I always suspected the french didnt have it in them. whereas the norsemen were probably tough viking-type men with balls of titanium. it explains everything.

 

[L Gilbert]

Yeah. If the Vikings had ever amalgamated they would have been a formidable foe of the Romans. I know that's been said of the Celts, too. The Romans called the Celts the "Feritas". Can't remember fersher but I think it's translated as the "Furies". It was the Celts who figured out what to do about the Roman "turtles". *wince*

 

[Blackleaf]

The TimesJanuary 16, 2007

That would have been une catastrophe

Libby Purves

That God we didn't unite with France. Two countries that detest each other joining together? It's like an April Fool's Day joke.
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Much was made yesterday of Radio 4s enchanting scoop: a document showing that in 1956 the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, asked British Prime Minister Anthony Eden for formal union between the UK and France. When Eden blushingly turned him down (“Why, M Mollet! this is so sudden!”) the importunate Frenchman offered to join the Commonwealth and thought “there need be no difficulty over France accepting the headship of Her Majesty”.

On being told this by the BBC reporter, a professor of history at the Sorbonne went into an outbreak of stuttering hysteria — “Preposterous! . . .” It didn’t happen. A year later France chummed up with Germany instead for the long march to the present-day EU.

I daresay that on waking to this news, most of us checked the calendar to see if April had arrived. Only P-Y Gerbeau, that Anglophile enthusiast, pointed at Churchill’s 1940 proposal for “A solemn Act of Union” between France and Britain with joint defence, foreign, financial and economic policies. But those were the grim days of the Fall of France. The revival of the idea in 1956 — when Nancy Mitford’s English-rose heroines and improbably irresistible Frenchmen were basking in la différence and Britain had happily returned to boiled cabbage and Ealing comedies — is a bit of a stunner. It gives rise to fascinating daydreams.

Could it have lasted, a United Kingdom stretching from Shetland to the Mediterranean? How would we have influenced one another, culturally and psychologically? What about language? Religion? Education? America? What sort of governments would a half-French electorate have helped us to choose? Would the British Left have been strengthened? Would we have taught them binge drinking, or would they have taught our young to sip (like wimps)? Would Englishwomen be thinner, Frenchwomen fatter?

Would we have high taxes and superb maternity care, or would there be a gigantic flabby NHS, bankrupting hospitals from Stromness to St-Jean-de-Luz? Would the suppository really have caught on in Birmingham? Would there by now be a militant French Separatist movement, or indeed a British one, and how would this affect the smaller separatisms of Scotland and the Basques? Would government have been less inclined to post-imperial guilt and anxious multiculturalism, and more like the brutally pragmatic French, who ban hijabs and interrogate terrorist suspects without a lawyer? Would our cities still have evolved with sink estates next to affluent streets, or would we have adopted the French way of confining the alienated poor in grim satellite suburbs?

Large questions and small ones cluster in, all equally beguiling. The entanglement of our history from the Norman Conquest to the Flanders war graves makes our differences piquant.

Fashionable Parisians dress their dogs in le Burberry coats, English dreamers long for Provence.

My own sense of difference began more than 40 years ago when, for three years, I was pitched into a French school. After a few weeks of language lessons with an elderly nun I became a French schoolgirl. Aged 10, we were issued a litre of beer between eight of us at lunch; I experienced white gloves, pinafores, curtseying and bourgeois children’s tea-parties with third-person invitations and creamed mushroom sandwiches. A 1960s playdate was part of social training: when I owned a Petit Biologiste set and a craze for natural history, a stiff invitation arrived saying “Véronique invite Elisabeth pour le gouter, et pour disséquer un ver de terre”.

Years later, reading Charlotte Brontë’s Villette about a 19th-century school in France, I immediately recognised the culture of “surveillance” in France and the contrast with the English dependence on internalised self-discipline and being “put on one’s honour”. To this day I note the after-effects of “surveillance” whenever I see how French schoolchildren behave in museums when their minders aren’t looking.

There are better things to notice too, and not just the food and the flourish and the curly string in patisseries. France has a fierce respect for brainy argument and a scorn for empty small-talk. Interviewing French politicians is unnerving: with all the intellectual arrogance of the Grandes Écoles they throw your questions back at you rather than droning out prepared statements with a panicky grin. And yet, decade for decade, it is hard to claim that France has been any better governed than Britain.

But it talks better and thinks harder: When my French publisher discovered that I could just about cope with speaking in French, I got summoned to broadcast debates, on one occasion the terrifying TV discussion show Bouillon de Culture. There was a worker priest, a French soap star, a psychiatrist and me. I realised within minutes that the sweet, soppy British way of doing these things — everyone having their turn to speak, civil attempts at consensus, no “elitist” intellectualism to frighten the listener, nobody being rude to beautiful actresses — is footling baby-talk in comparison.

To be brutal, the host Bernard Pivot made Melvyn Bragg look like a smiling Teletubby. The next morning I was on a local reggae station with a scruffball host and expected a softer ride; I did not get it. Where an English DJ would have warmed up with inconsequential personal chat, this one dived straight into my “concept” and started arguing. It was as stimulating as a cold shower. It happens every time I am lured, against better judgment, into public argument in French. How different would our union have made us both? Would we have coped as compatriots? Even for a week? On this occasion, at least, I suspect Eden knew what he was doing. Phew.

thetimesonline.co.uk

 

[Numure]

Numure, the Norman's were actually Germans, as German as the current Saxons were. The French would like to claim that they were the last great invaders of England, but, happily, they wer not.

Norman = Norseman

NOT Frenchman

http://www.mondes-normands.caen.fr/angleterre/histoires/index_histoires.htm

The land was given to Scandinavians, not Germans. But sedded to the latin way of life after a few decades.