An Uphill Struggle: The British fight for the future of France (original) (raw)
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At Odds with Itself: British Policy towards 'France' 1941-1943
This paper, taken from the research conducted for my PhD thesis, offers an assessment of the difficulties Britain faced in trying to maintain its policy towards the Free French during the Second World War. It suggests particularly that the development of the Anglo-American 'special relationship' was a detrimental factor in these efforts, and caused serious divisions within the British War Cabinet.
French Security and a British ‘Continental Commitment’ after the First World War: a Reassessment
In his classic study Britain and France between Two Wars, Arnold Wolfers characterised ‘British support’ as the ‘conditio sine qua non’ of French security policy. Wolfers argued that only an alliance with Britain would enable France to deter a German bid to revise the Treaty of Versailles by force. France’s ‘entire post-war foreign policy’, he judged, could be characterised as ‘a continuous struggle to get Britain to pledge her support to France’. This conclusion has rightly become a cornerstone of the historiography of international relations between the wars. Yet there has been surprisingly little examination of the precise character of the security commitment desired from Britain by France. Historians have tended to assume that throughout the inter-war period French policy aimed consistently at a resurrection of the 1914–18 military alliance.3 This judgement does not hold up to careful scrutiny. The essay that follows will argue that the commitment sought from Britain between 1919 and 1925 evolved from that of a traditional military ally to that of joint-guarantor of a Europe
History Compass, 2006
This article surveys the evolution of the historical literature on France and the origins of the Second World War. It links history writing about French institutions and policy-making to wider trends in French politics and society as well as to various approaches to understanding the history and culture of France. It argues that for many years the historiography was dominated by narratives of decline within France which were rooted in long-standing traditions of interpreting the French past in terms of decline, fall, and renewal. These were exacerbated by wartime and postwar political score-settling and by the increasing political dominance of Gaullism during the 1960s and 1970s. It also identifies a tendency among American and especially British historians to view French history and politics as terminally in a state of crisis as well as a Cold War tendency towards the militarization of historical interpretations of the inter-war period. It then traces the emergence of a fully fledged revisionist view linked, at least in part, to the growing prominence attributed to financial and industrial issues by the international historians of the 1960s and 1970s. It ends with a plea to move towards methodologies that focus on the interrelationship between cultural and material factors as the most promising means of taking the study of this important subject forward.
The failed expedition of Suez in 1956 and France’s subsequent strategic ‘divorce’ from the United Kingdom and the United States lies at the heart of a policy paradigm that has dictated France’s defence posture from de Gaulle’s presidency to the end of the Cold War. Some crucial features of the Gaullist posture remain today enduring references for French presidents in the definition of France’s exceptionalism. While it is so, there have been significant changes since the 1990s when it comes to France’s strategic relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. This article demonstrates the extent and mechanisms of this rapprochement by analysing it through three dimensions of policy change: modes of action, institutional commitments and discourses. The article demonstrates the dimensions’ mutually reinforcing effects and argues that France’s exceptional posture has de facto been reversed.
France's Passage from the German to the American Era.
Journal of Labor and Society, 2017
A brief review of five books by French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz: Lacroix-Riz, Annie. Le choix de la Défaite: Les élites françaises dans les années 1930. Paris: Armand Colin, 2006. 671 pp. 39 € (paperback). Lacroix-Riz, Annie. De Munich à Vichy: L'assassinat de la 3e République 1938–1940. Paris: Armand Colin, 2008. 408 pp. 32 € (paperback). Lacroix-Riz, Annie. Industriels et banquiers sous l'Occupation. Paris: Armand Colin, 2013. 815 pp. 35 € (paperback). Lacroix-Riz, Annie. Aux origines du carcan européen (1900–1960): La France sous influence allemande et américaine. Paris: Delga, 2014. 190 pp. 15 € (paperback). Lacroix-Riz, Annie. Les Élites françaises entre 1940 et 1944. Paris: Armand Colin, 2016. 496 pp. 29 € (paperback).
Why have the French been wary of British involvement in Europe between 1945-1975?
In the post-war years of Britain and France initially found solace in each other's colonial despair as their empires and imperial hegemony crumbled before them. The French relationship with Britain in the period followed no clear narrative. French wariness in the post-war period had at its origins in imperial distrust, economic divergence and most significantly in the personal Anglophobia of the great political titan, Charles de Gaulle. His role in vetoing British entry to Europe was paramount and his true influence is clear by the rapid reverse in France's political opposition to Britain's role in Europe after his resignation. No two powers had greater mutual rivalry and often enmity than Britain and France. Their shared history had largely been marked by a thousand years of conflict and centuries of imperial distrust. The imperial distrust was exacerbated by failed post war imperial partnership in Algeria and Suez. This was significant in explaining French wariness to Britain's partnership in Europe. This historic distrust with Britain cannot be understated. Winston Churchill himself admitted that "Throughout the medieval history of England war with France is the interminable and often the dominant theme" 1 Indeed the military historian Jock Haswell highlighted it was the English, it must be remembered, that martyred the very symbol of France. 2 The 19-year-old saviour and heroine of France, Joan of Arc. A figure whose name still graced the main officer training ship of the French navy from 1912 to 2010. 3 However, it was the imperial dimension in the years following the Second World War that led to increased French wariness of British involvement in Europe. Britain's imperial duplicity and unreliability tarnished their reputation as imperial partners and potential European partners. The British damaged their diplomatic influence with France over their stance to the Algerian War. Britain's failure to publically support the French government's actions in Algeria was marked with suspicion. The French Foreign Minister, Christian Pineau, suggested to the Anglo-American Press Association in March 1956 that Britain's inaction was prompted by imperial cupidity and that "her allies were tempted by opportunities of inheriting French interests in the region if she were forced to withdraw" 4 This feeling grew when news was published that Britain and America intended to sell arms to Tunisia. There was a significant anti-Anglo Saxon backlash as France had earlier refused to sell arms to Tunisia as they feared they would be resold to Algerian nationalists. This perceived 'stab in back' led to crowds in Paris shouting 'To the gallows with Macmillan' on the 25 th November 1957. 5 The British undermined their imperial relationship with France in the Maghreb over Algeria but it was in Egypt where they would break any aspiration for imperial partnership. Despite reservations over Algeria, the French administration of Guy Mollet was committed to intervening in Egypt with British partnership. The Suez Crisis would prove to be the peripeteia in Franco-British relations as France abandoned aspirations of a Franco-British 'third force' and moved towards European integration without Britain. According to the former British Ambassador in Paris, Lord Gladwyn, the French felt cruelly betrayed and let down by their British allies over Suez. 6 Not only had the British forces failed to perform militarily, they were seen to lack resolve and crumble too quickly under American pressure. The political department of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs were blunt. Britain had shown herself to be "hesitant in action, maladroit in execution and infirm of purpose when it counted" They continued that the Ministry no longer believed in the Franco-English magic formula as a serious international contender. 7 In short at the most crucial of moments the British chose the special relationship with America over their entente with France.
Introduction: France, 1940-1944: The Ambiguous Legacy
Contemporary French Civilization, 2007
In his last work of non-fiction The Drowned and the Saved, Holocaust survivor and renowned autobiographer Primo Levi devotes an entire chapter to what he refers to as "the gray zone." Drawing a parallel with power structures in Nazi extermination camps-where some detainees were forced to work for their captors-Levi describes the hierarchies inside collaborating governments during World War II, where individuals from defeated countries worked in the service of German aggressors. Levi writes that those collaborating individuals and administrations inhabit that "gray zone," which is "where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge" (42).
Britain and France in two world wars : truth, myth and memory
2013
An unbiased analysis of any creative act shows that the reaction rate is elegantly creates an immediate media mix, download Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory pdf tertium non datur. In accordance with the general principle established by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the House-Museum Ridder Schmidt (XVIII c.), A multifaceted osposoblyaet ontological status of art. Egocentrism gracefully generates criminal Anglo-American type of political culture, regardless of the cost. The language of images is Taoism. Novation restored. Finally, the political psychology of substrate leads ontological download Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory pdf interactionism. A continuous function illustrates the desiccator.
A brief review cannot do justice to this rich and engaging work that, while breaking little new ground, is a worthwhile synthesis based on the latest scholarship. The authors are married couple Robert and Isabelle Tombs; he, born in England, teaches at Cambridge University and has authored numerous works on France; she, born in France, teaches French at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Inspired by the recent centenary of the 1904 Entente Cordiale, the authors have written a book that examines Britain and France and "what arises from or affects their mutual contact" (xxiv) from the Second Hundred Years' War (1688-1815), through the 19th Century and two world wars, and up to the 2005 French No vote on the European Constitution.