3 Strangers

‘My dear archdeacon … what is the use of always fighting?’, Trollope’s Mrs Grantly asks her husband.1 British and French leaders posed the same question. A Franco–British Europe looked a safe bet after 1945.

Full-bloodied alliance seemed a natural coda to wartime cooperation. Aid for the French resistance counteracted toxic memories of Dunkirk and Mers-el-Kebir. In Kessel’s The Army of Shadows (1944), the hero returns from a short visit to London, ‘because I’ve been … I’m in danger of becoming the object of a cult … When everything seemed lost, England was the only source of hope and warmth’.4 Resister and Fourth Republic minister Christian Pineau almost choked with ‘emotion and exaltation’ on hearing that he would soon be flown to London.5 ‘Our two peoples’, affirmed a Free French representative, formed ‘in spite of everything a single civilization’.6 As well as tuning to Radio Londres – the BBC French service – thousands of French people from all walks of life risked denunciation and imprisonment by writing to express their gratitude to Britain for keeping the cause of freedom alive.

Goodwill overflowed. Jubilant crowds welcomed Britain’s ambassador Alfred Duff Cooper in September 1944. Escorted by forty-eight Spitfires, his arrival ahead of formal allied recognition of the Provisional Government underscored the specialness of the connection. Pro-British sympathies survived semi-starvation under German occupation and Royal Air Force bombing raids. ‘Everywhere … people seemed pleased to see us, saluting and waving,’ noted Duff Cooper.8 The embassy – one of the few heated buildings during the coldest winter on record – hosted nightly free drinks parties. There was a snag. Alcohol and warmth lured collaborators and Vichyites as well as Anglophiles, provoking criticism. ‘You understand, my dear’, went the current mot, ‘it was either Fresnes [Paris prison] or the British embassy’.9 Sentiment stayed steady, despite a Franco–British military face-off in Syria in May 1945. A French poll registered 79 per cent support for a broad military and political partnership. In May 1947 the capital’s Communist Red Belt gratified Churchill with a ‘spontaneous and overwhelming’ reception when he received the Republic’s prestigious medaille militaire.10 The visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh the following year provoked a ‘unanimous surge of enthusiasm and interest’.11 The warm-heartedness of Londoners overwhelmed president Vincent Auriol during a state visit in March 1950: ‘people broke through the barriers and knocked on the windows of the car, smiling, laughing and gesticulating.’12

Elites bonded. ‘Several of us dined together and afterwards … read Racine out loud’, wrote a British liaison officer with the Free French; ‘we read the play [Phedre] straight through at a sitting’.13 At the newly-minted Council of Europe at Strasbourg in August 1949 Conservative leader Harold Macmillan met a ‘new kind of Frenchman … keen, amusing, deeply religious, and patriotic men … very different from the old French politicians … I like foreigners; I like listening to their speeches’.

Why, then, so little to show? The Treaty of Dunkirk of 4 March 1947, a fifty-year defensive pact, arrived without bells and whistles and was quickly subsumed into the five-power Brussels Treaty of March 1948, then into the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1950. Partnership never materialized. Narratives indict the usual suspects – clashing great power ambitions, France’s perceived weakness and unreliability, and the danger of a communist take-over. The explanation, I contend, ignores the elephant in the room – next door neighbours were comparative strangers.

‘I know of no other two peoples which are so impenetrable to each other,’ wrote sociologist Andre Siegfried.15 Though drilled in Franco–British wars from Joan of Arc to Napoleon Bonaparte, the peoples hardly knew each other. Austerity – especially the Attlee government’s miserly sterling allowances in the early post-war years – restricted travel. Many middle-class families hardly knew the continent – Attlee’s wife, Vi, first visited Paris in 1956. Town twinning, student exchanges and cuisine were slow to make an impact. Long delays in film releases and book translations curbed interaction. Seminal works like Sartre’s L’Etre et le Neant (1943) and historian H.R. Kedward’s Resistance in Vichy France (1978) waited over a decade for French and English editions. The ingredients of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) were hard to find at the time even in London. When cheap holiday packages appeared in the 1960s Britons headed for Spain, and did not buy into the French property market until the 1970s.

Belief in national characteristics created stereotypes. France represented the exotic. The French looked, dressed and behaved differently – hugging and kissing in public, forever shaking hands. A British visitor encountered veteran socialist Leon Blum ‘in a curious garb, which I couldn’t make out, I didn’t like to look too closely, for it was open at the neck and his feet were bare … later I realized he was in pyjamas and dressing gown, in fact was not dressed at noon!’16 Art historian Kenneth Clark, member of the Grand Conseil of the Louvre, observed his colleagues: ‘They came very late, gossiped with each other, interrupted, got up and wandered about in a manner unthinkable among the Trustees of the British Museum, who sit round as solemn as owls.’17 ‘The first thing we did when we got out of bed in the morning’, recalled a British teenager boarding at the Lycee Hoche in 1947, ‘was to shake hands with one another all of us, standing around in our pyjamas’.18 A party of young Britons went to Paris for the first time in 1952, ‘thrilled at everything we saw … even the pervasive smell of drains and the lavatories that were just a hole in the floor were transfigured by their romantic foreignness.’19 Instructions warned British D-Day invasion troops against ‘a fairly widespread belief among people in Britain that the French are a particularly gay, frivolous people with no morals and few principles’.20 British cinema reinforced the image of a country where anything goes.

Decision-makers took ‘national characteristics’ for granted: phlegmatic, pragmatic Britons vs. excitable, overly logical Latins. In 1956 Britain denied French prime minister Guy Mollet’s request for union – claiming that differences of race, religion and outlook were too great. In the early Cold War the United States funded research by anthropologist Margaret Mead to identify and compare national characters. In the 1990s a trinity of luminaries – Lord Dacre, Norman Stone and Timothy Garton Ash – listed the defining characteristics of the ‘German national character’ as ‘angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex [and] sentimentality’.21 Opposing post-1945 military cooperation with France, Whitehall instanced ‘inherent defects in the French character’ – a ‘natural garrulous tendency’, together with carelessness, and a ‘certain decline in moral standards’.22 The Franco–British commanders in the Suez operation gave the lie to stereotypes. They might have stepped straight out of a Blackadder script: a cool, calm and cerebral French deputy vs. an ‘extremely excitable, gesticulating’ British land commander deploying a swagger stick ‘to make golf strokes with the flower vases and ash trays’.23

Language blocked easy interactions. In wartime London Free French officers seemed to know only two words, ‘bloody English’ – improvising to explain a difficulty, ‘Il y avait d’abord un tout petit balls-up’.24 Fourth Republic foreign ministers Bidault and Schuman had no English. A handful of senior British ministers spoke competent French. Churchill liked making speeches in the language because he knew so little and did not ‘notice nor mind his own mistakes’.25 Bevin had no French. At the signing of the Dunkirk treaty the delayed arrival of an official carrying the necessary papers left the foreign secretary and Bidault twiddling thumbs in awkward silence.

The ambivalence of leaders contrasted sharply with the warm spontaneity of popular responses. The cocktail of British condescension and French sensitivity proved toxic. ‘We are a suspicious and a very sensitive people … we suspect the worst of others’, confided a French insider.28 The French had a big chip on their shoulder. ‘I’m like France,’ announces a character in Paul Claudel’s play Le Pain dur, ‘nobody understands me’.29 Defeat and occupation stoked self-pity. London’s defiance of Hitler bred resentment. ‘In the space of five years’, noted Sartre, ‘we have acquired a formidable inferiority complex’.30 President Vincent Auriol considered the nation was being made to pay twice for 1940: ‘Abroad, people are not always kind to us … blaming us for having been occupied, but if we gave way in 1940 it was because we were alone in the face of an army that took five years to destroy … occasionally we deserve from our great and powerful allies, if not the respect to which misfortune has a right, at least a little more sympathy and understanding.’31 In 1959 British and French diplomats, shocked by the backbiting and distrust, agreed the main problem was a continuing inferiority complex because Britain resisted Hitler, and De Gaulle never forgot his difficulties in London – at one time so hard up that he borrowed money from Churchill’s liaison officer, General Spears.

The insensitivity of British leaders sowed suspicion. Minor but delicate issues booby-trapped rapprochement: the depiction of French knights on the eve of Agincourt in Lawrence Olivier’s 1944 film Henry V dismayed the French.

Alliance in two world wars left minefields of resentment and misunderstanding. An Attlee government discussion on defence touched a raw nerve. An aide mentioned French complaints about London’s slowness to do more for the defence of western Europe. ‘What the hell right have they got to criticize us?’ shouted prime minister Attlee: ‘Tell them to go and clear up their own bloody stable. They haven’t any decent generals.’ De Lattre was dynamic, interjected a minion. ‘Dynamic is he?’, barked Attlee, ‘I know what you mean. Just like General Nivelle [First World War French commander] gets us all killed’.33 Historian Marc Bloch did not mince words about the Dunkirk evacuation and the behaviour of British troops – the Tommy, ‘by nature, a looter and a lecher’.34 Barely a month after offering political union in June 1940 Churchill ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. British and Vichy forces clashed in Dakar, Syria and Madagascar. Both countries felt short-changed by events, and more than one generation carried the scars. A schoolboy in the 1960s confessed to hating the English because they killed his uncle in 1940 when the Royal Navy attacked the French fleet.

British hauteur trapped the French in a no-win situation – damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Anglophilia and anglophobia both incurred displeasure. Visiting Paris, the Queen Mother ‘kept on exclaiming what a bore’ French premier Mollet was for saying how much he liked the English.35 London considered the French fair game for cynical put-downs: Gaillard (prime minister 1957–8) ‘probably not a man of high principle or lofty moral stature’; Pinay (prime minister 1952–3) – ‘charming manners, honourable and straight – rather naïve’.36

Churchill’s slighting of French leaders at the Anglo–Franco–American Bermuda conference of December 1953 was a lesson in how to lose friends and influence. Rather than read briefing papers during the flight the prime minister psyched himself up on C.S. Forester’s historical novel ‘Death to the French’. ‘The French’, he declared, ‘are going to be very difficult. They will want everything and give nothing’. No Marseillaise greeted prime minister Joseph Laniel and foreign minister Bidault on arrival. Laniel had to squeeze into the car for foreign ministers while Churchill and American president Dwight D. Eisenhower travelled separately. Churchill shocked Ike’s press secretary by the ‘complete and utter disdain’ with which he behaved towards an ally – giving the president a drink and snubbing the French leaders. Feeling obliged to offer Laniel a lift home on his plane but not wanting to socialize, Churchill contrived to have the prime minister sent straight to bed on the advice of his own doctor Lord Moran. Heavily sedated, Laniel slept through Churchill’s in-flight dinner party.37

Despite a curmudgeonly Churchill, the British and French found friendship, and romance: novelist Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski, de Gaulle’s chef de cabinet; author Louise de Vilmorin, Duff Cooper’s mistress, became a family friend and back channel to de Gaulle; Treasury planning chief Edwin Plowden and Jean Monnet enjoyed a life-time friendship; historian Alistair Horne’s friendship with diplomat and writer Francis Hure nurtured a lasting love affair with French history. Labour politician Roy Jenkins befriended French diplomats in London – the better to pursue their wives – even taking a holiday house in the Pyrenees to be close to one couple.

The politicians kept their distance. The Atlantic Charter of 1941 proclaimed Anglo–American values, but no singular British vision challenged Hitler’s New Order. Influencers such as The Times leader writer and historian E.H. Carr – ‘the ablest and best-qualified man who has been near the paper for years’ – dished up banalities, calling for a new Europe to be achieved through cooperation, not conquest. Privately, Carr talked of an approach ‘not through the medium of ideas, but through the concrete medium of economic planning … we should avoid like the plague all ready made schemes for political organizations’.38

Churchill won the prize for vacuity. His rambling ‘Morning Thoughts’ paper of January 1943 – presented to the Turks after the Allied summit at Casablanca and later copied to Roosevelt and Stalin – proposed an ‘instrument of European government’ embodying the ‘spirit but not … subject to the weakness of the former League of Nations’. Smaller European states would be herded into ‘confederations’: Scandinavia, Danubian and Balkan. ‘Morning Thoughts’ showed Winston at his worst. ‘The prime minister,’ remarked a staffer, ‘after obstructing any discussion of such plans brings them out in a paper of his own and hands it to the Turks who are not even fighting for us’.39 Churchill’s aides used an unsafe cypher so Hitler probably got a copy too. The ill-conceived paper prompted an FO spoof, ‘Early Morning Thoughts’, calling for the fusion of the USA, Britain and Commonwealth-Empire, together with ‘the restoration of the ancient glories of Europe, and the construction of a cordon sanitaire extending from the North Cape to Mukden’.40 By 1944–5 Churchill’s confederations had become a Western bloc of European states intended to provide Britain with a platform should great power cooperation break down – ironically a suggestion first put forward by Stalin in December 1941. Churchill and Eden fought tooth and nail at Allied summits for the restoration of an independent France, but kept European projects on the back burner for fear of upsetting Roosevelt and Stalin.

‘We have to accept our full share of responsibility for the future of Europe’, urged Eden in November 1942; ‘If we fail to do that, we shall have fought this war to no purpose’.41 Ministers ignored exiled European leaders in their midst. ‘I have never spoken on these matters … They have not been encouraged in their various timid advances and they may soon return to their lands … but then shall we not have missed an exceptional opportunity?’, confessed Eden in July 1944.42 Churchill banned any discussion of a Western group linking France, Belgium and the Netherlands. In April 1944 Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian foreign minister in exile, warned London against endangering ‘the immense prestige’ won in western Europe, suggesting an economic bloc of France and Benelux under Anglo–Soviet protection. Embarrassed officials could only say they ‘had had no time to study’ Spaak’s proposal.43 De Gaulle’s presence in London, together with leaders of European governments in exile, offered an unrivalled opportunity to reinvent the Entente and share ideas on the continent’s future. Agreeing a broad consensus on first principles could have defanged cross-channel conflict and signposted a new Europe.

Sick of the shilly-shallying, Duff Cooper, Britain’s representative to the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers, proposed alliance with France as a first step towards a federation of West European and Mediterranean powers. Anglo–American interests, he contended, diverged too much for successful cooperation. Britain should pursue a traditional balance of power approach by forming a West European bloc. A federation underpinned by colonial empire would be a guarantee against Germany and the Soviet Union. Eden baulked at the envoy’s intervention, insisting that the country’s post-war position should be grounded in the United Nations and an Anglo–Soviet alliance against Germany. Churchill objected to the subject being discussed at all – Germany’s defeat would be soon enough: ‘there is nothing in these countries but hopeless weakness’.44

Colleagues were more supportive. Harold Macmillan, resident minister in Algiers, complimented Duff Cooper on expressing ‘very clearly and very succinctly the sort of foreign policy which we need, at present … HMG are groping in the dark’. Dominions Secretary Lord Camborne described Eden’s response as ‘utterly futile’. The Russians were unlikely to oppose a Western bloc and the Americans would ‘mildly dislike anything that increased our importance. But we mustn’t allow ourselves to be bullied into the position of a second class power’.45 The first clues to FO thinking emerged belatedly in a ‘Stocktaking’ paper of July 1945. It talked patronizingly of ‘enrolling’ France and lesser European states as ‘collaborators’ with Britain in Big Three cooperation. Such support would ‘compel our two big partners to treat us as an equal’. Britain had to build itself up as ‘the great European Power’, cooperation with France would establish London and Paris ‘as the leaders of all the Western European Powers’.46

Exclusion from Allied conclaves and the threat of extinction as an independent power focused French minds. ‘France had ceased to count’, announced Field Marshal Jan Smuts, prime minister of South Africa, in November 1943.47 Smuts anticipated European states joining the British Commonwealth in an Anglo–American–Soviet condominium. In London, Algiers and German occupied Paris French officials debated their country’s future. Ideas ranged from a federal United States of Europe to regional unions, including a Latin union. Though the proposals could not be fleshed out without Allied participation, several conclusions emerged.

Powerlessness. ‘With a population of 40 million and few resources’, wrote Herve Alphand, director of economic affairs on the French national committee in Algiers, ‘France cannot be considered a great power in the world which is emerging. It’s as true for England as for us’.48 Alphand’s insight was exceptional. Most of his colleagues perceived weakness as temporary. Marxist philosopher and civil servant Alexandre Kojève grasped the inability of the European nation state to function independently in a superpower era. But his response to the geopolitical revolution – the merging of Latin Catholic states into a French-led Latin empire – lacked credibility.49 Second conclusion: Anglo–French union à la Churchill 1940 had no appeal. Novelist Maurice Druon, then a young officer with the Free French in London, called for a revival of Churchill’s offer, but political commentator Raymond Aron, after initially urging a full strength Franco–British alliance, backpedalled because the disparity of power between the couple would be perceived ‘as a subtle form of abdication … joining Great Britain … would mean entering an Anglo-Saxon universe’.50 Third conclusion: Monnet’s proposal for a ‘completely unified Europe, composed of equal states – Germany could be divided … European heavy industry under international control, no more custom duties’ had few fans.51 The idea of a West European or Benelux union, underpinned by French or international control of the Ruhr, won broad support. The fourth conclusion expressed agreement on the way forward: recovery of rank, aided by British and Russian alliances, American friendship and economic union with Belgium and Holland.

The Entente was a casualty of the Anglo–American alliance. Wired into a special relationship, British elites lacked an incentive to get to know the French better. The rich web of transatlantic exchanges had no cross-channel equivalent. The war strengthened Atlantic ties: middle-class families sent their children to the safety of American host families, fostering life-long friendships; thousands of GI brides crossed the Atlantic; US food parcels eked out British rations. At Oxford University in the 1950s Americans formed the largest group of foreign students. A US diplomat and former Rhodes scholar posted to London found he knew ‘about half of the Labour Cabinet’ from Oxford days. Informal and frank consultation on most issues characterized London–Washington exchanges – ‘whenever Wilson met with Johnson’ (President Lyndon B. Johnson) the London embassy secured a copy of the premier’s report to Cabinet ‘long before we received any report from Washington’.52

No networking events like today’s annual Franco–British colloque joined up cross-channel elites. In 1950 a Labour Party pamphlet on European unity privileged the Commonwealth over Europe because so many had families and friends in the White Dominions but few in Europe. A smidgen of Franco–British associations could not compete with programmes like the Ditchley Foundation, Pilgrim Trust, Fulbright, Marshall and Rhodes scholarships. The UK had stronger links with Germany than with France. The annual Anglo–German Konigswinter conference established in 1950 had no Franco–British counterpart. The Franco–British Council of 1972, a spin-off from the Heath government’s 1970–2 entry negotiations into Europe, arrived too late.

Given the language hurdle and the dearth of European networks, Britons looked westward. Students took American summer camp jobs, then bought $99 Greyhound bus tickets for route 66 and beyond. Conservative politician William Waldegrave won a scholarship to Harvard University which ‘offered … a seriousness of approach to political philosophy and the teaching of practical politics’ unmatched elsewhere.53 Labour leader Denis Healey holidayed in France and Italy, but recharged intellectually in Boston, New York and Washington DC. Civil servants chose Harvard for sabbatical leaves, not Sciences Po.

Was the Entente a lost cause? Not so. Both the Attlee and Churchill governments of 1945–55 could have rebuilt the relationship. Rather than explore ways to strengthen the Entente, London dispensed royal visits as treats and tranquilizers. Bidault, angered by British airs and graces, refused to meet Princess Elizabeth. In 1956 prime minister Mollet asked for union and got the Queen. The FO sugared rejection of union with a recommendation for a state visit ‘in view of the immense popularity of the Royal Family in France’. The invitation ‘nearly got ballsed up because no one remembered to consult President Coty’.54 Paris pulled out all the stops for the visit in April 1957. Cheering Parisians offered distraction from the fractured post-Suez relationship. No sooner had the Queen confessed at a gala dinner in the Louvre that she had never seen Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa than two attendants brought the painting to her. Le Monde mischievously hailed the royal circus as proof of ‘the vitality of the entente’.

Apart from an Anglo–French economic committee which rarely met, official contacts lacked an institutional infrastructure. In the late 1950s Whitehall attempted to convince the Americans of the need for permanent working groups, but showed no desire to pair off with the French. President Auriol expressed interest in regular summits – to no effect. French officials preparing for Franco–German cooperation recommended monthly meetings of foreign ministers and advisers – ‘a common policy had more chance of developing from the habit of living and thinking together’.55 Exactly what the Entente lacked.

Stinginess strangled cultural contacts. A savage halving of the British Council’s French budget torpedoed a March 1948 agreement for educational and cultural cooperation. The Collège Franco–Britannique, part of the Cite universitaire in Paris, became dilapidated because of inadequate funding and falling UK student recruitment. The newly established St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford failed to meet the wishes of founder Antonin Besse for a special emphasis on Anglo–French relations. The sole French presence in the British academic world, the Maison française at Oxford, created in 1946, was quite different from today’s research hub. Archaeologist Claude Schaeffer wanted a place where French and British scholars could live and study together. The university’s veto on a new college or teaching institution left the Maison struggling to survive. Dependent on French foreign ministry funding and with only a trickle of British students, it functioned more as an outpost for French culture than a meeting point.

Academic fashion and prejudice skewed evaluations of France. American economic historians led by David Landes asked why France did not fit the economic model of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western Europe. Landes’s contention that French culture and values retarded economic development gained wide currency. As a result, the speed of the Fourth Republic’s economic take-off in the 1950s caught international observers off guard. A purist academy frowned on the study of contemporary history and politics because government archives remained classified. Unlike American colleagues who craved involvement, British political scientists distanced themselves from practitioners and lay public alike – partly to protect ‘neutrality’, partly because of Whitehall’s insistence on in-house expertise. Oxford University had no history special subject later than the making of the Anglo–French entente of 1904. Many general histories stopped in 1939 leaving lay readers dependent on newspapers and personal memories. The first British studies of the Fourth Republic appeared in the mid–1950s. The low standard of British school texts on European integration published in the 1960s testified to the neglect of contemporary history. In 1959 Henri Michel, a specialist on the Second World War, circulated historians and political scientists in British universities, inviting them to a conference in Liège on European resistance. Only one responded. The bias against recent history influenced appointments: ‘In the ten years between 1951 and 1960 the number of new academic appointments in Britain … to which persons whose main work lay in the field of contemporary history were appointed … could be counted on the fingers of one hand.’56

French historians – with few exceptions – did not welcome foreign colleagues working on France. They assumed they knew their own history best. ‘When I first worked alongside US State Department and French historians in the early 1950s on the series Documents on German Foreign Policy’, recalled a British researcher, ‘the leading French scholars, [Pierre] Renouvin, [Maurice] Baumont … would only with the utmost reluctance and in the deepest privacy accept that any work on France by a product of education systems other than their own was of any interest whatever’.57

War and austerity stymied the rebuilding of scholarly connections. Colloquia were few and far between. British historians of France waited until the 1980s before banding together to create the Society for the Study of French History and the journal French History. ‘Writing about the history of France,’ claimed Alistair Horne, has ‘the elements of a love affair with an irresistible woman.’58 French historians found British studies resistible. Eminent early twentieth-century historians of Britain – Elie Halevy, Paul Mantoux and Andre Siegfried – had no immediate disciples. François Bedarida and François Crouzet started their careers in the 1950s researching Victorian Britain.

The most influential study of Britain’s post-war economy – Andrew Schonfield’s British Economic Policy Since the War – exemplified an institutionalized talking down of France.59 Schonfield, foreign editor of The Financial Times, contrasted Britain’s post-Suez ‘critical self-examination’ with the ‘elementary’ review in France. The Fourth Republic served as a warning ‘of what happens to a nation which … clings to positions of international prestige, regardless of the fact that the essential structure of its national life is crumbling all around it … the political decisions imply a heroic readiness for financial sacrifice, which simply is not there – because no one will admit … France no longer has a natural position of pre-eminence in the world’. French people ‘for all the vaunted shrewdness and realism … in their daily lives’, had retreated ‘into a world of illusion’. Fortunately, Britain had not lapsed into ‘a typically French state of resentment and sulks’. Suez, asserted Schonfield, had stimulated ‘fresh thinking on previously accepted assumptions about the UK’s position in the world’.

Viewed from London an unknown France appeared mired in permanent crisis. UK coverage of news and issues was sparse. Former Guardian journalist Alexander Werth complained that ‘apart from the dainty and whimsical “Letters from Paris” in our better-class journals – full of French words in italics, and dealing chiefly with the artistic’, the literature offered little sustenance.60 Slowly British academics began to take an interest. Trailblazing political scientist Philip Williams observed that Britons ‘have never had much respect for the political capacity of their nearest neighbor … official and ministerial circles too often share the view of the man in the street that the French are congenitally incapable of governing themselves properly … there is so little understanding of the deep differences between the British and French outlook on politics’.61 The commentariat recycled the image of a diseased polity – hardly noticing French elections. When de Gaulle’s prime minister Georges Pompidou visited London for talks in July 1966 he was barely known and the BBC had difficulty finding someone to talk about him.

The runaway success of Werth’s France 1940–1955 – three editions and a French translation in just over a year – confirmed the strength of British curiosity. Overfocused, however, on day-to-day politics Werth imparted little sense of underlying trends. In a preface former prime minister Pierre Mendès France chided Werth for his ‘pessimistic view of our future’. In contrast, Swiss historian and journalist Herbert Lüthy, one of the few to recognize the successes of the Fourth Republic, congratulated French diplomacy on ‘an audacious attempt’ to take ‘American foreign policy in tow’. Lüthy identified ‘a deep sense of renewed vigour’ as modernization and population growth gained traction.62

How well did the diplomats size up the French? Labour politician George Brown denounced the Paris embassy for being ‘totally out of touch with what was really going on … when I used to visit there I seemed to arrive just as they were trying to get the dust-sheets off the furniture … Embassy didn’t seem to know anybody outside the normal channels of the Quai d’Orsay’.63 He blamed staff for not anticipating the general’s return to power in 1958. Separating smoke and substance in a moving target isn’t easy. Britain’s Paris embassy mostly did a good job, but London-based officials were slow to pick up on the speed of economic take-off, and even slower to realize the implications for Britain and Europe. The embassy flagged economic recovery, but HQ wanted only bad news. The favourite pastime was running down French leaders – arguing that trying to change French politicians would have as much effect as the campaign of premier Mendès France to persuade the French to drink milk instead of wine.

Ambassador Oliver Harvey fought his corner, insisting that French political crises ‘should not be taken too tragically’ and had ‘little real effect on the workings of the French state’.64 A disgruntled HQ requested a comprehensive assessment, attacking over-optimistic embassy references to ‘the great and unexpected strides’ made on all fronts. How could a nation, asked London mandarins, ‘which nine short years ago had sunk so low … have undergone a rebirth so utterly transforming? … French public life remains corrupt and self-seeking’. Permanent secretary William Strang believed that ‘the slaughter of the First World War and the occupation during the Second have broken France’s spirit’. London bypassed the embassy and circulated its own appraisal – ‘In building on France are we not building on sand?’ After conceding ‘a great change for the better – agriculture, industry and finance have largely recovered [from the war] the political situation is relatively healthy’ but, continued the report, ‘there remain still grave causes to doubt France’s capacity to play her proper role in the defence of western Europe … political instability is endemic … there is a widespread lack of moral fibre in the country’.

Could the diplomats have done more for rapprochement? There was no stable of white knights. Multilateralism eroded the position of resident envoys, and their influence waned quickly after 1945. Early post-war representatives in London and Paris – Duff Cooper, Harvey and Massigli – wanted to re-energize the Entente. But the days of panjandrums like Stratford de Redcliffe in Constantinople and Francis Bertie in Paris were long gone. In 1956 Britain and France excluded their ambassadors from Suez decision-making. By the 1960s some analysts considered resident ambassadors an anachronism.

Other factors compounded the loss of diplomatic clout. Nudging retirement by the late 1950s both Jean Chauvel in London and Gladwyn Jebb in Paris were disinclined to rock the boat. Prudence tempered Chauvel’s anglophile sympathies. The sacking of his predecessor and kindred spirit Massigli from the secretary generalship demonstrated the perils of Fourth Republic politics. De Gaulle’s return to power in 1958 imposed extreme caution. As secretary general from 1944 Chauvel had endured a difficult relationship with the head of the provisional government. Similarly, in Paris Jebb toed the official line and made no special pleas for a strengthened Entente. Arrogance and prolixity curbed his effectiveness. Telegrams from Paris began ‘The Prime Minister must insist’. Long-winded, convoluted dispatches left the reader struggling for the sense. Paying tribute to French personalities at a farewell dinner in his honour, Jebb singled out ex-premier Pierre Mendès France – ignoring foreign minister Couve de Murville sitting nearby. This and other gaffes clouded his departure.65 The suggestion that in summer 1960 Jebb significantly shaped Macmillan’s thinking on EEC membership is unconvincing.66 In retirement he bombarded ministers with accounts of interviews with de Gaulle which largely retailed his own views. No. 10 switched off: ‘The PM wishes neither to see Lord Gladwyn nor to read his report.’67

Chauvel’s successor in London, Geoffroy de Courcel (1962–72), was the general’s faithful sidekick, more Gaullist than de Gaulle. Totally his master’s voice he accompanied the general to London in June 1940, and served as Elysee secretary general from 1958 to 1962. Apart from putting the embassy on the capital’s gastronomic map, the envoy had little to show for a decade-long posting. He avoided, observed an obituarist, ‘giving even the slightest impression that he could be influenced by any British attitude that ran counter to de Gaulle’s policy or that the French embassy could ever be used as a place from which a discreet influence could be exerted in Paris … his support for non-political Anglo–French initiatives, such as those of the Franco–British Society, though friendly, did not always seem as enthusiastic as it might have been’.68 Courcel’s negativism as ambassador, then as Quai secretary general, annoyed British officials. ‘Courcel found it necessary to find something to complain about whenever one saw him’, noted British colleague Nicholas Henderson. As Quai secretary general from 1972 Courcel became a standing joke – smoothing over awkward moments between British and French leaders. ‘Courcel put him thoroughly on edge, so when he wanted a peaceful evening, he just refused to see him at all’, confided foreign minister Michel Jobert to Heath.69

Politicians squandered the talents of Paris ambassadors, Pierson Dixon (1960–5) and Patrick Reilly (1965–8). Dixon’s rapport with de Gaulle earned him an impossible balancing act – running the embassy while negotiating the UK’s membership bid in Brussels in 1961–3. Reilly, best remembered for vetoing Soviet spy Kim Philby’s appointment as head of MI6, lasted barely three years in Paris before being fired. He blamed a London-based whispering campaign for undermining him. Foreign secretary George Brown bullied the envoy and his wife appallingly.

A smart think tank might have reset the relationship but Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) was unfit for purpose. Funded in part by the FO and American foundations, it drew media fire for perceived amateurishness, snobbishness and lack of impact. The summary of a study group discussion on French policy in March 1955 conveys the level of analysis: ‘Mendès-France was a hopeless politician, but was a good leader if someone did the organizing for him. There might be a new coalition of the Left. All had different schemes for constitutional reform; none were likely to go through … The Gaullist movement seemed to have collapsed … The army might revive in the next few years.’70 Liaising with its Paris counterpart, the Centre d’Etudes de Politique etrangère, Chatham House organized an Anglo–French relations study group. After meetings in Oxford and Paris in 1957, the British think tank withdrew, pleading lack of money. ‘We in Chatham House’, explained director C.M. Woodhouse, ‘have only been able to take part … because the initiative was taken, and some funds were found, by Professor Beloff in Oxford … we were never in a position nor is it likely that we shall be to act as hosts in London’. In twenty years it commissioned only one substantial publication on Anglo–French relations.71

A dying Churchill administration was incapable of bold new initiatives towards France. In 1954 an unenthusiastic Eden presided over the Entente’s muted fiftieth birthday celebrations. Gladwyn Jebb, newly appointed ambassador to France, sought guidance. ‘Long conversations’ with permanent secretary Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick ‘did not disclose what he believed should be the general objectives of our policy towards the French’. After consulting prime minister Churchill, the envoy concluded, ‘his main function was to go out and prevent the French from being so tiresome’.72 The ambassador – rarely backward in coming forward – had no suggestions of his own. How had things come to such a pass? The ambassador was part of the problem. He personified the superciliousness separating the Franco–British couple. On one occasion, he ‘swept’ into the FO private secretary’s room, ‘looked around and commented to his companion “No, there’s no one here”’ – ignoring a colleague sitting there.73 Early in 1956 Eden excoriated the French as ‘our enemies in the Middle East’.74 The Paris embassy reminded him that ministers shared responsibility for the mesentente because they kept the French at a distance and offered only pretend consultation. Government had no clear idea what it wanted from France and Europe. Premier and foreign secretary seemed satisfied acting as offshore policemen – keeping the Germans in order and saving France from the consequences of her follies. Was a real entente possible? The FO consistently exaggerated the obstacles to a closer relationship – the British and French ‘like each other about as well as cat and dog’.75 The career of German ex-paratrooper Bert Trautmann demonstrated how quickly attitudes can soften. Twice awarded the iron cross for bravery, he overcame great hostility and played for Manchester City from 1949. In 1955 the Attlees took a German maid with them on holiday – ‘a very nice girl who has done something to mitigate my prejudice against that people’.76 UK governments neglected a groundswell of cross-channel goodwill. The welcomes received by the Queen in Paris and de Gaulle in London confirmed a fund of friendship.

De Gaulle’s expressions of friendship for Britain reflected changes in French perceptions. The Paris embassy in July 1966 reported ‘undoubtedly much popular support now … for British entry into the EEC’. Anglophile sentiment strengthened, diluting the old ambivalence – respect for the British lion coupled with resentment at poor relation status. The depth of pro-British feeling surprised professional observers. Commemorations in 1966 of the Norman Conquest and the anniversaries of the Battle of the Somme and D-Day ‘evoked much goodwill for Britain’, reported the Paris embassy. Between 1964 and 1966 public support for Britain’s EEC membership rose from 41 per cent (October 1964) to 48 per cent (December 1966). The ‘swinging sixties’ softened stereotypes and provoked a desire to get to know the other. Rapid change diluted prejudice, especially among young people. Economic modernization changed the power relationship and renewed French confidence – in 1963 France’s GDP overtook Britain’s.77

Fascination triumphed as London set the pace in fashion, entertainment and avant garde lifestyle. Beatles, Minis, mini-skirts, tweed jackets, and Vidal Sassoon hairstyles became Parisian chic. ‘Whereas in England one feels that the diplomatic war in which we have been engaged for some five years now with the French Government has left its mark and created a good deal of hostility’, ambassador Christopher Soames informed the Queen, ‘here on the other hand one gets an impression of people having a bad conscience over the anti-British attitudes of their government … Even the most fervent Gaullists are anxious to say how deeply they resent the General’s attitude to Britain … The reception which Mary and I got in Lille from crowds gathered in the streets … was, to us, quite remarkable and most warming’. Marketing an alliance as passport to the Community would not have over-taxed the skills of Downing Street spin doctors. Indeed, premier Harold Wilson claimed, there was ‘virtually unanimous public support, in Parliament and in the country’, for resuming friendly relations with France.78