A Tale of Two Cities

‘What’s it all about?’ quipped a taxi driver to philosopher Bertrand Russell – ‘and do you know, he couldn’t tell me’. This book asks what became of Churchill’s promise in 1944 of an ‘unshakable, constant and effective’ cross-Channel pact.

The impetus for writing originated in a study of the origins of the Second World War. Hitler’s empire building in the 1930s thrived on Anglo–French disarray. After 1919 Britain and France shared, and disputed and lost control of Europe. After holding up in the First World War the Entente Cordiale looked the worse for wear by the 1920s. A timely makeover could have prevented the war of 1939. The second conflict reconfigured global politics and opened a nuclear age, enthroning the new behemoths, the United States and the Soviet Union. For over four decades.Moscow and Washington determined the high politics of Europe. Almost forgotten now are the initiatives to reinvent the Entente as a hinge for a Franco–British Europe. The defeat of Germany and its allies left Britain and France the natural leaders of Western Europe. Alliance with France, trumpeted Churchill, was a ‘fundamental principle’ of British policy. French ministers pushed for bilateral economic planning; foreign secretary Ernest Bevin extolled joint exploitation of African empires to ensure independence from the United States.

I advance a three-pronged argument. First, partnership offered a second career for redundant imperial powers. Yes, the two neighbours were an odd couple but not so odd as to rule out alliance. Obstacles were surmountable – Franco–German and Anglo–American collaboration overcame substantial hurdles. The synergy of teaming up could have fast tracked London and Paris, making the continent’s voice heard in Cold War conclaves and nurturing a different kind of European community. Churchill offered France union in 1940 and the idea stayed in the French playbook – prime minister Guy Mollet resurrected it in 1956. More’s the pity. The 1960s offered a second bite of the cherry, a window to reposition Western Europe in world politics that would not reopen until the 1990s. As nuclear states and UN Security Council members, Britain and France in tandem might have accomplished what neither could achieve alone – a more independent Europe, partner rather than client of the United States, with the potential to broker East–West detente.

Second, UK movers and shakers spurned the pooling of resources, alleging conflicting national characters and interests, the priority of an Anglo–American alliance, France’s economic and political weakness, and its large Communist party. The pair went their own ways. Surprisingly, despite defeat, occupation and bitter colonial wars, France repackaged itself quickly and successfully. I ask why. Political cultures made a difference. A leaner, casual French style, juiced by modernization and a sense of universal mission, triumphed over a buttoned-up, rule-bound British mode. The architect of modernization, wild card Jean Monnet, epitomized the contrasting approaches. In 1949 he hosted British mandarins at his country house in a bid to promote a Franco–British Europe based on integrated national economic plans.

Third, I argue that de Gaulle, contrary to legend, sought agreement over Europe.

Mainstream narratives have ‘misunderestimated’ – to use a Bushism – the prospects for Franco–British leadership in Europe. Historians, like international travellers, sometimes miss key developments. Changing trains in the Latvian capital Riga in the 1930s, novelist Graham Greene missed a revolution. The foundation myth of the European Union as a triumph of light and reason squeezed out other scenarios. Cross-channel initiatives left few prints. American–Soviet management of Europe’s high politics, coupled with the rise of the legendary ‘special relationship’, eclipsed earlier dreams of a London–Paris duopoly. Last, but not least, different visions of Europe competed. As late as 1948 French leaders envisioned a neutral ‘third force’ continent brokering peace terms between the titans; Bevin too talked of a third force – in alliance with the United States. Economic integration supplied another bone of contention. Britain’s cautious inter-governmental approach vied with continental sympathy for a supranational solution. The Attlee government rejected France’s path-breaking Schuman Plan for a European coal and steel authority, partly because it distrusted France, and partly to protect the Anglo–American alliance, but chiefly to promote UK leadership.

A French historian downplayed the entente’s dark side. ‘Since 1815, apart from a few clashes between the British and the forces of the Vichy government’, wrote François Crouzet, ‘the sound of battle has died away’, leaving ‘a true symbiosis between England and France’.4 Minimizing the minefields does not help the argument. Crouzet ignored twentieth-century black spots – interwar mesentente, confrontation in Syria and Lebanon 1941–6, and stand-offs over European construction. That said, the ‘special relationship’ was no lovefest. The UK’s subaltern position in the Pax Americana bred resentment and friction. A case can be made for ‘a basic incompatibility of outlook’ underlying relations ‘from the war onward’.5 In 1971 prime minister Edward Heath assured French president Georges Pompidou, ‘there could be no satisfactory partnership’ between Britain and the United States when one of them ‘was barely a quarter the size of the other’.6

What were the options in 1945? War weary and bankrupt neighbours confronted an identical quandary: how to recharge quickly in a fast-moving, upended world. Reactions to the predicament mattered as much as the predicament itself. Magnificently unprepared for the long retreat from empire, political moguls assumed the only show in town was great powerdom. No one questioned whether the assumption made sense in terms of the international order. ‘Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic’, recalled the Attlee government’s chief economic adviser, ‘was absurdly optimistic in 1945 about the prospects of recovery’.7 Economist John Maynard Keynes talked of ‘temporary’ retirement as a first-class power.8 The survival of the furniture of rank – armies, empire, moral prestige and a seat at the top table with the superpowers – concealed the price of victory. In 1946 London could still summon Abdullah, ruler of Transjordan, and tell him his country was to be independent and he was to be king.

Historians have lambasted the Attlee government for clinging to grandeur at the expense of the economy and welfare state.

Power, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, quickly dissolved – ’tis here, ’tis gone. The superpowers occupied centre stage. ‘There is no solution to our problems over which we ourselves exercise much freedom of choice’, confessed one of Attlee’s ministers.9 Hopes of restoring rank faded. Enfeoffed in the American empire Britain and France resorted to make-believe. ‘The French are very anxious to go on pretending to be a Great Power,’ noted foreign secretary Harold Macmillan in 1955. ‘They know that we are doing the same. But they tell us that it’s no good. The world is bound to be dominated by the new barbarians, in the West and the East.’10 Was there method in the madness? Political scientist David M. McCourt contends that Britain and France as ‘residual great powers’ consistently played international roles disproportionate to economic and military resources – ‘punching above their weight’.11 Insistence on great power privilege, McCourt argues, succeeded because it met the expectations of significant others: the United States, major allies, international and domestic constituencies. As America’s prefects, London and Paris wielded influence over and above their intrinsic power.

The thesis underwhelms because the terms ‘residual great power’ and ‘disproportionate influence’ are undefined. ‘Punching above their weight’ – when, where and how? The essence of a great power is the ability to make others do what one wants.

Double harness would have given Britain and France street cred in American and Russian eyes. Post-war reconstruction created uniquely favourable conditions for innovation. An American academic described Europe as a ‘living laboratory’.15 Before he died fighting with Bulgarian partisans in 1944, Major Frank Thompson, brother of historian Edward Thompson, professed faith in a united continent, ‘for a United States of Europe I could feel a patriotism far transcending my love for England’.16 George Orwell advocated a socialist United States of Europe to include parts of North Africa. Dismayed by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities, Labour prime minister Clement Attlee urged ‘very far-reaching changes in the relationships between states’ and a new international order ruling out war as an instrument of state policy.17 Italian foreign minister Alcide De Gasperi called for a new federal Europe. An FO baron asked, ‘Why should not Europe begin to regard itself as an entity with common interests, by which I mean the breaking down of economic barriers … not … the destruction of national traditions’.18

A new global architecture founded on the Atlantic Charter of 1941 offered traction in a reconfigured world. European regional institutions followed: Brussels Treaty Organization, OEEC, Council of Europe and ECSC. The multilateralism of the revamped international order fostered an interdependence unrealized before 1939. Fledgling institutions forged a collaborative culture, hardwiring habits of cooperation. Yet Franco–British collaboration stalled. Obsolete great power ambitions echoed a Victorian narrative of greatness. The geopolitical revolution demanded a new plot – a reimagining of the nation state. Instead, a narrow focus on regaining ‘rank’ turned cooperation into a quick fix to speed national recovery.

Over sanguine perceptions of UK economic strength and global ranking put the damper on joint enterprise. In 1945–6 economic and geopolitical fallout appeared reversible, making joint planning seem unnecessary. The realization, however, of the irreversibility of change supplied arguments against partnership in a Cold War climate. A much weaker ally with a large Communist party might turn into a millstone. Going it alone seemed to work best. In The Future of Socialism (1956) Labour Party intellectual Tony Crosland enthused over Britain’s pole position in Western Europe, and descried sunny Socialist uplands. In the same year the country scored a first with the opening of Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear power station. Blue Streak, a medium-range ballistic missile, was slated to replace an ageing V-bomber nuclear strike force. A superior British way promised high dividends.

As well as shying away from cooperation London underestimated the French state’s powers of renewal. The couple responded differently to crisis and change. From the late 1950s France sprinted ahead while Britain decelerated. In 1945 fire-breathing dragons seemed poised to devour the hexagon. Amazingly, a stricken polity escaped Communist revolution, military coups and civil war, outfoxing a stable and stronger ally. By the mid–1960s European Community members accepted ‘Paris as the capital of Europe’.19 How was it done? Were French diplomats smarter than everyone else? ‘Brilliant creatures,’ gushed a senior UK ambassador, ‘their minds operate with a rapidity and lucidity that is the envy of their colleagues’.20

True, the French relished the diplomatic game. During the UK’s second membership bid of 1966–7 Britain’s ambassador to Paris underscored the finesse with which the French provoked ‘doubts and uncertainties among the Five about the consequences of British entry while carefully avoiding any suggestion that they themselves are, in principle, opposed to it’.21 Style had substance. A modernization cocktail, laced with renewal ideas from wartime resistance, Vichy and the 1930s, rebooted an apparently woebegone state. ‘Hope never stopped running’, testified wartime diarist Jean Guehenno.22 Elites proclaimed a messianic mission. ‘France will recover a radiance and an influence of the first rank’, declared philosopher and political scientist Raymond Aron, creating ‘a political and spiritual centre around which will gather the smaller nations … The French idea is to protect what is human … when all conspire to deliver society to the inhumanity of enslaved masses and the pyramids of steel.’23

De Gaulle delivered the cavalry. Sixty years on, the name carries a whiff of Noah’s Ark – and perhaps a false memory of him insisting on British cuisine being raised to French standards before UK entry into Europe. ‘The only figure in the western world with greatness in him’, acknowledged a British ambassador.24 As a Harvard academic in the 1960s, Kissinger was one of the few Anglo-Saxon commentators with a good word for the general. The future secretary of state likened the French president to Bismarck, praising his originality in recognizing that at a time of superpower detente there was ‘little risk and considerable potential gain in political independence’.25 The general’s decision in 1958 to override domestic opposition and stay in the newly launched EEC positioned France as top dog in Western Europe. Surging economic performance gave the Fifth Republic a decided edge over the UK. The general’s successors enjoyed cocking a snook at slowcoach rosbifs. Opening the Paris–Lille TGV link to the Channel tunnel in May 1993, President François Mitterand declared, ‘passengers will race … across the plains of northern France, rush through the tunnel on a fast track and then be able to daydream at very low speed, admiring the English countryside.’26

While France rebounded, Britain wrestled with a hangover that felt like an endless Pennine tunnel. Greeting King Hussein of Jordan at Victoria Station in July 1966, home secretary Roy Jenkins reflected, ‘as the rain poured down around the assembled splendour I could not avoid the thought that this looked like the last act in a dreary imperial charade’.27 Gloom skewed perceptions of Europe and the world. Suez, a sputtering economy and declinism all fed the black dog. Delayed realization of war’s degrading effects – voiced in novelist Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948), and the legacy of the culture of crisis from the interwar years, heightened unease.28 A seemingly endless polemic about decline never gelled into a fruitful conversation about the country’s prospects. A megadose of introspection gave international change an air of irreversibility. The controversy became self-fulfilling. An effect became a cause, reinforcing the original cause.

What did voters think? Politicians never invited feedback. The gap between government and opinion forms a central theme of this analysis. The reluctance of Conservative and Labour administrations in the 1960s to mobilize public support for their EEC membership bids spawned Euroscepticism and ultimately Brexit. The so-called ‘advanced democracies’ tolerated large democratic deficits. The obsessively secretive, elitist nature of decision-making impacted severely on insiders and outsiders: restricting information, curtailing debate, narrowing options and sowing distrust. Marxist historian E.P. Thompson sought to rescue the working people he wrote about ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.29 Older narratives assumed a rooted indifference towards foreign affairs – with Munich and Suez as exceptions. This is a fallacy. Polls in the 1960s recorded sizeable majorities for EEC membership, despite exiguous official publicity. Trained to regard foreign affairs as a spectator sport, ordinary citizens allowed No. 10 and Whitehall to call the shots. Non-governmental networks exerted minimal influence and the sticks did not get a look in. True, on many issues voters perforce knew little, but it would be wrong to conclude they did not care.

The opaque, oligarchical nature of decision-making deliberately kept citizens in the dark. The establishment preferred a passive populace. News management stifled discussion, rationing releases of hard information in the public domain. Until broadcaster Robin Day pioneered the first gloves-off interview with a British prime minister in 1958, interviews went rather like this:

Q: Sir, would you say that your visit to Timbuktu had been worthwhile? A: Oh, yes, I would definitely say my visit had been worthwhile. Yes, certainly. Q: Ah, good, well, could you say what topics you discussed, sir? A: No, I’m afraid I couldn’t do that. These talks were of a highly confidential nature, you understand, and you wouldn’t expect me to reveal anything that might prejudice our future relations. Q: No, of course not, sir. Well, sir, you must be very tired after your talks and your journey – may I ask, sir, are you going to take it easy for a while now – a holiday, perhaps?

A: Ah, if only one could. But you know a minister in Her Majesty’s Government can never take it easy, never rest, not really, you know. They’re waiting for me now.30

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day catches the reverential tone. Stevens, butler at Darlington Hall, stamping ground of appeasers in the thirties, sets out on a motoring trip to the West country. His car breaks down, forcing him to spend the night at a nearby inn. Looking and sounding like a gentleman he is at first taken for an MP. ‘“Oh no,” I said with a laugh. … “In fact, I tended to concern myself with international affairs …” a sense of awe seemed to descend on them …’ the hushed silence remained for several more seconds’.31 ‘Hushed silence’ speaks to ‘the Whig imperialist’ tradition of the British state which treated foreign affairs, in Bevin’s words, ‘as if they were something over the heads of everybody’.32 Only initiates entered the holy of holies. The paternalism of the British and French states excluded democratic republicanism with its emphasis on ‘self-government by free and active citizens through open discussion and debate’.33 Britons vented frustrations in letters to newspapers – the French press rarely published letters to the editor. Dissent and alienation propelled extra-parliamentary protest movements, notably CND and Paris May 1968.

Unlike France, Britain bungled self-marketing. Penny-pinching administrations disinvested in soft power, neglecting Europe and failing to find a distinctive voice. Drastic cuts in the 1950s closed many British Council centres. A generously funded secret FO Cold War propaganda unit, the Information Research Department, in cahoots with the CIA and other American agencies, churned out anti-Communist propaganda. British values hardly got a look in. In contrast, de Gaulle, posing as a European champion, stole a march on London, capturing the moral high ground. ‘He talks of Europe, and means France’, complained premier Harold Macmillan.34 The French preached ‘Europe’ as their brainchild, claiming to be kosher Europeans with the right to separate the sheep from the goats. Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway ‘were not true European nations’ like France and Germany.35 Impugning Britain’s European credentials stretched the truth – French elites had mixed feelings on integration and strong prejudices about fellow Europeans. The general patronizingly lumped ‘the poor Germans’ with ‘the poor Belgians and the poor Dutch’.36 A Gaullist minister arrogantly dismissed Community partners: ‘We’ll have no trouble with that lot’.37

Information belongs to the jewel box of power. French soft power exploited two motifs: the reclame of ‘every man has two countries – his own and France’, and the myth of a resisting France. State projection of a unique cultural identity formed the backbone of the international policies of the Fourth and Fifth Republics. Elites identified their values with universal values. Medievalist Marc Bloch, co-founder of the influential Annales school of history, considered a ‘Frenchman’ and a ‘civilized man’ to be identical.38 Traumatized by Vichy and the German occupation, the French found common cause in humanistic values and a shared belief in a global mission. Shrewd self-promotion kept up appearances. In 1948 in the midst of colonial war in Indo-China, Communist threats at home, food rationing and politicians carrying begging bowls to Washington, the government commemorated the centenary of the 1848 revolutions with a lavishly hosted international conference in Paris. ‘In England’, recalled a participant, ‘we were having one of our financial crises and were not allowed any foreign currency. Fortunately French hospitality was lavish enough’.39

Pivotal to my argument are the shortcomings of UK leaders and government machines. In the 1960s the country went through foreign secretaries like a dose of salts – six in a decade. Politicians behaved like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, bustling about in a shack poised precariously on the edge of a cliff. Was the nation’s slide as inexorable as it seemed then and since? Though some diminution was unavoidable, why such a helter-skelter? The Second World War cast long shadows but did not determine the massive haemorrhaging. France, Germany and Italy reinvented themselves. French elites made a better fist of recovery than British counterparts. For sure, Britannia had a poor hand, but why so poorly played?

The effects of stress and sickness on decision-making are easily overlooked because they are difficult to quantify. Six years of war and a huge growth of government drained leaders. Overtired, overwrought and overpromoted ministers strained to make sense of the nation’s haemorrhaging. The job, observed foreign secretary Eden on returning to office in 1951, ‘had killed Bevin and destroyed Morrison’.40 Stress and alcohol reduced French foreign minister Georges Bidault to incoherence. As power leached away, the timely reappraisal of ends and means could have widened and refreshed policy options. Seasoned insiders condemned the obsoletism of the FO machine. An aversion to planning stymied strategic thinking. A senior mandarin responded to the idea of regular policy reviews, ‘That way lies Bedlam’. Bedlam arrived anyway.

The Titfield Thunderbolt, a 1953 Ealing comedy, captured the amateurish, muddling-through character of British life. Villagers improvise to keep their railway branch line open by borrowing an old steam engine from a local museum. What worked on screen failed in Whitehall. The vast expansion of post-war government and the new international settlement overwhelmed a knackered Victorian policy engine. The gearing of policy-making to the handling of problems as they arose, warned a contemporary analyst, ‘rather than to the definition of goals’, had become ‘a considerable source of weakness’.41

Late twentieth-century histories prized integration as an Aladdin’s lamp for a new Europe. An updated 1066 and All That – the classic 1930 parody of school texts – would have included integration on its list of 103 ‘Good Things’. The reconciliation of former foes after the most destructive war in history had a dark side, though. When young Germans in the 1950s tried to tear down the border gates at the Kehl/Strasbourg bridge over the Rhine they got hit over the head by French guards and bundled into police vans. Unity proved a mixed blessing. In novelist Henry James’s short story ‘Europe’, the idea of the continent holds a family together and destroys it. ‘The paradox’, as historian Perry Anderson observed, ‘is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent’.42 The Cold War duopoly reduced Europeans to bit players. The torch passed to the United States, making it ‘the last truly sovereign European nation-state’.43 America preached unity as glue for its informal empire, leaving senior vassals little choice but to support integration. French and British leaders deluded themselves that winning the leadership stakes in Western Europe would ensure a global platform. In fact, both countries needed each other: ‘France could keep Britain out of Europe but … Britain could stop France organizing Europe.’44 Joined-up, they might have made Western Europe a much better fit for the welfare and aspirations of citizens.

In February 1969 a despondent de Gaulle sought to break the stalemate. In conversation with Britain’s ambassador Sir Christopher Soames he floated the idea of secret bilateral talks on Europe’s future. The prime minister and foreign secretary squashed the overture. Cabinet colleagues viewed the invitation more sympathetically, condemning ‘the infantilism of Harold and Michael Stewart, priggish children who showed moral disapproval of the de Gaulle overture … they didn’t see it as permitting a breakthrough in Anglo-French relations … another proof of Harold’s ineptitude in foreign and external affairs’.45 Events overtook the affair: de Gaulle’s resignation following defeat in the referendum of April 1969, and the Heath government’s renewal of entry talks in June 1970.

Genuine bid for rapprochement? It’s too easy to dismiss the Soames affair as a storm in a teacup. The envoy believed his government deliberately torpedoed an important offer.46 Did it matter? After all, the general resigned within weeks. Very much so. It was the president who made the April referendum a resigning issue. His successor Georges Pompidou had no interest in recreating the Entente. A friendly response to the initiative could have silenced the general’s black dog, and persuaded him to stay on. ‘The beginning of a beautiful friendship’? Who knows? Like Rick and Louis in Casablanca, enemies can be reconciled.