When Britain and France Almost Merged into One Country (2017) | Hacker News Reader

When Britain and France Almost Merged into One Country (2017)

theatlantic.com

142 pointssmacktoward100 comments

I thought they meant when the King of England was an actual frenchman and French was the upper-class language of the UK.

There were many more claims too, if Henry V had lived longer it might have happened then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_claims_to_the_French_t...

Indeed. When I saw the headline I thought it was about the Middle Ages. :)

1066?

Lucky for us that Britain and France didn't get along or the US War of Independence would not have succeeded.

There would have been other allies most probably if it were not for France.

Well you would have had to have a similar revolution to the French revolution and not sure if any other countries are good candidates.

More to the point if George III had wanted to recover the lost colonies as much as he was anti catholic - the war of 1812 might well gone very differently.

The French Revolution post dates the American one and without French support the American Revolution would have failed. The French monarchy spent so much money supporting the Americans it basically bankrupted them and without naval support the Royal Navy would have had a much easier time moving troops.

> The expanded French fleet, in combination with the Spanish, outnumbered the British one and was able to temporarily gain sufficient command of the Atlantic to prevent Lord Cornwallis and a large British army, besieged by George Washington and 5,800 French regulars at Yorktown on the Chesapeake Bay in 1781, from being evacuated or reinforced by sea, forcing Cornwallis to surrender. This was the decisive battle of the war that ended with the Peace of Paris in 1783. Washington himself handsomely acknowledged the significance of the French contribution in a letter to Admiral De Grasse in which he said, “You will have observed that whatever efforts are made by the land armies, the navy must have the casting vote in the present contest” (Lloyd 1965, p. 174). The Canadian historian W. J. Eccles (1987, p. 153) is even more explicit: “French initiative, French tactics, French ships, French guns and men achieved that unexpected and decisive victory. The Americans could not have done it on their own.”

...

> The war also had very severe consequences for France’s much more disorderly fiscal system, where the finance minister Calonne and his predecessor Necker together borrowed over 900 million livres in the decade from 1777 to 1787 (Doyle 1988, pp. 43– 52). The situation was so bad that Calonne informed Louis XVI that no fiscal remedies could be found without a complete overhaul of the society and administrative system of the ancien régime, leading to the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789 and the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Power and Plenty, Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke

Citation needed. France was both powerful and generous, name a potential ally that could have provided anywhere near the level of support.

Talking about an alternate history where Britain and France got along opens up any number of possibilities, to the point that it's not really worth speculating on.

Sorry, but I think that's a flippant and lazy reply. The reality is that no other major power had a navy that could rival Britain and France. The Dutch and Spanish might have still helped America, but without French opposition the British navy would have wiped them out.

Foreign and military policy doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can't just wave a wand, change one thing, and expect most of history to play out the same.

Navies are big, expensive things to build and maintain, and as such, they are usually designed and planned around various assumptions of potential future war scenarios. Were Britain and France friendly, or even in a union such as the Angevin Empire, their resulting navy would likely be much smaller than the combined sizes of their historical navy, since it would be pointless to maintain a navy of that size if no feasible set of combatants could challenge it.

It is also worth pointing out that large countries that manage to steamroll their opposition and establish an unparalleled hegemony tend to result in the creation of other countries that can challenge their ascendancy: the Mongol Empire creating the Russian Empire in this way is perhaps the best example.

France and British alliance would be less dominant than NATO, which is >80% of the global military spending. https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2019/02/european....

Also, the original question was specific - was France the only credible major power to assist US? It is silly to answer it by speculating backwards, about events that may or may not have happened centuries prior to it.

Sincere question here - was it really that lucky? Other colonies that didn't separate seem to have a similar (occasionally even higher) standard of living than the US.

Were a lot of really good things caused by the independence of the US? Just off hand, it seems like slavery likely would have ended much sooner and the rise of fascism in Europe could have been greatly abated with a non-independent US. Of course, it's impossible to know what would have been, but it makes me wonder.

The US would not have developed as fast if it had continued to be a British colony. A major cause of the War of Independence was that when Britain took control of the Ohio after the French and Indian War, the crown claimed the right to all negotiations with the Indian tribes and prevented the colonists from buying and/or seizing Indian land in the Ohio River Valley. Recall that Washington had been to the headwaters of the Ohio. He and others were well aware of the rich lands west of the Appalachian chain. Also, many of the financiers of the war were also land speculators before and after the war. The officers of the war formed the Society of the Cincinnati, and many of them were granted land west of the Appalachians.

The net result was the rapid expansion westward from 1790 through the 1800s. This expansion and development of the lands, forests and mines was aided by rapid immigration from many countries in Europe, not just the British Isles. As a British Colony, the US would not have been as available to other Europeans, and development would have been slower.

Possibly slavery would have ended more quickly, but Britain also supported the South, rather than the North. The South's cotton fed the British textile factories. After the Civil War, Britain went on to develop cotton plantations in Egypt as a replacement source.

> As a British Colony, the US would not have been as available to other Europeans, and development would have been slower.

Do you have a source for this? My understanding is that in 1775, the British colonies of America were the fastest growing and most populous of the British empire. So if the war happened, why would this not continue to be the case?

They would have continued to grow rapidly, but almost certainly not as rapidly as they actually did. Also it's unlikely they would have expanded their territory as quickly for the reasons already given. The desire for territorial expansion was a major driver for independence. It's also hard to imagine the Louisiana Purchase occurring under the British crown.

Seems to indicate the native Indians would have had suffered much less? Maybe it would be less developed, but I am getting the impression the US history would have less suffering?

They just would have been colonized by the French or Spanish instead. Smallpox and other infectious diseases would have still been as vicious and deadly. At best some of the more warlike tribes such as the Comanche would have been able to hold effective control of the Great Plains.

Have a look at British rule in India. You will understand the full horrors of colonialism.

One of the reasons the British decided to cut their losses in America was that they had more important opportunities in India, where they were consolidating power after their victory over the French at Plassey.

I think the difference is that the Indians were subjected to colonization, whereas the American rebels were themselves the colonists.

It would be more similar to a rebellion of the British governors/Raj in India against the Crown, which very plausibly would have led to even worse and more prolonged abuse of the native people in India.

Britain was only as eager to renounce slavery because they had no colonies that profited from it after American independence. Also, the rise of fascism in Europe was abated pretty effectively with an independent US anyway.

> "was abated pretty effectively"

Ah yes, all of Europe occupied by fascists and a war with 60 million dead, nothing to worry about.

Do you also consider the black plague "a minor public health issue, promptly addressed?"

What makes you think it would have gone any better if American independence never happened?

First off, British America would have never had the same amount of territory that the US ultimately had; Napoleon would have never sold the Louisiana territory to Great Britain, the Southwest would still be part of Mexico, and at best the Pacific Northwest would have been part of Canada. British America would basically stop at the Appalachians, with Louisiana probably reverting back to the Spanish and becoming either part of a greater Mexico or existing as its own quasi-post-colonial dominion. So while America could be the breadbasket of the Allies in our timeline, that would have been impossible without American independence.

Secondly, Britain would have never allowed America to industrialize to the degree that we did, because they wouldn't want that kind of competition for their domestic industry. So not only are we no longer the breadbasket of democracy, but we're not even the arsenal of democracy anymore.

Thirdly, you're looking at a scenario where in the First World War, Americans would be drafted and shipped overseas to die pointlessly in the trenches or in failed offensives like Gallipoli. And you think this would make Americans more likely to accept future British demands to be drafted and sent overseas to die in another pointless European war? Since in this scenario British America never even reaches the West Coast, there's absolutely no chance of a Pearl Harbor, either, meaning Americans have absolutely no stake in the Second World War.

In other words, British America would be a much weaker country than the United States, with less land, fewer natural resources, less industrialization, less manpower, and much less will to fight. They would have been available two years earlier, but Britain and France just sort of sat around doing fuck-all between September 1939 and May 1940 anyway, and it's not clear that the addition of a small number of Americans to the BEF would have saved France. And it's even worse than that. Without the United States the Pacific theatre would collapse, with Japan likely holding uncontested access to the natural resources of the region and probably even capable of successfully invading Australia. In real life, Britain basically gave up on everything east of Burma. It was the United States who had the resources to engage the Japanese at Guadalcanal, effectively checking their advance and making their position in New Guinea untenable. In such a scenario, Japan would likely be able to more effectively project naval power into the Indian Ocean and concentrate their forces on the China-Burma-India theatre.

Finally, compared to the rise of communism in Europe, fascism was abated pretty decisively, with probably fewer overall deaths and in a much shorter period of time.

They are all related.

From Niall Ferguson's- The Square and the Tower

"The Times noted in 1863, the history of the Saxe-Coburgs showed ‘how much one success leads to another in Princely life’. Augusta of Saxe-Coburg’s grandchildren included not only both Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, but also Ferdinand, who married the Queen of Portugal, and Leopold’s son, namesake and heir to the Belgian throne.

The Saxe-Coburgs were further linked by marriage to the Orléans family and the Habsburgs. Moreover, Victoria and Albert’s eldest child was not the only one to marry royally: all but one of their nine children did. Thus, besides Frederick William of Prussia, Queen Victoria’s sons-in-law included Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein and Henry of Battenberg, whose brother Alexander became prince of Bulgaria, while her daughters-in-law included Princess Alexandra of Denmark and Princess Marie, daughter of Tsar Alexander II and sister of Tsar Alexander III. By the time the future Nicholas II arrived in London for his first visit to England, in 1893, a family reunion had come to resemble an international summit:

'We drew into Charing Cross. There we were met by: Uncle Bertie [the future Edward VII], Aunt Alix [Alexandra of Denmark], Georgie [the future George V], Louise, Victoria and Maud [his sisters, the last of whom would marry Prince Carl of Denmark, later Haakon VII of Norway] … Two hours later Apapa [Christian IX of Denmark], Amama and Uncle Valdemar [of Denmark] arrived. It is wonderful to have so many of our family gathered together … At 4.30 I went to see Aunt Marie [wife of Alfred, duke of Saxe-Coburg] at Clarence House and had tea in the garden with her, Uncle Alfred, and Ducky [their daughter, Victoria Melita].3

When this last married Ernest Louis, heir to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt the following year, the guests included an emperor and empress, a future emperor and empress, a queen, a future king and queen, seven princes, ten princesses, two dukes, two duchesses and a marquess. They were all related"

"In 1894, Queen Victoria was pleased to be addressed as ‘Granny’ by the future Tsar Nicholas II, after his betrothal to yet another of her granddaughters, Alix of Hesse.6 With ‘Willy’ (her grandson William II of Germany) corresponding cheerfully with his cousins ‘Nicky’ and ‘George’,7 it seemed for a time as if the vision that had inspired Leopold I had been realized: from Athens to Berlin, from Bucharest to Copenhagen, from Darmstadt to London, from Madrid to Oslo, from Stockholm to Sofia and even in St Petersburg, the Saxe-Coburgs ruled."

To say that it's the Saxe-Coburgs who rule all of Europe is... charitable. You could claim it's the other way around, after all, pretty much every single European monarch and royal house is somewhere in the British order of succession.

(Norway #73, Yugoslavia #103, Sweden #283, Denmark #321, Greece #565, Spain #699, The Netherlands #1160, Belgium #1345, Luxembourg #1687, Liechtenstein #1916, Romania #4146, etc... There's even a Napoleon in there. And a million German princes.)

It's so interesting to consider the deep, Norman French character of the British Monarchy. From the immense impact of French on English vocabulary, to the French mottos of the British Crown ("Dieu et Mon Droit") and the Order of the Garter...to the fact that British monarchs claimed themselves kings of Frances FOR CENTURIES: https://www.wikiwand.com/simple/English_claims_to_the_French...

It's even more recent than the norman french from a 1000 years ago. The standard english accent ( King's English ) was intentionally "effeminized" to mimic the french language in the 1800s ( when french was viewed as lingua franca and "cultured"). It's one of the reasons why Standard American accent and Standard British accent diverged. The standard american accent was the way the brits used to speak.

The "Standard American accent" is just vaguely midwestern, and it's not how the British used to speak. There is some support for it being closer than some modern British accents, e.g., they are both rhotic.

By “standard American accent” I think he meant Southern accent.

He meant what he said, thinking about the accent you get on contemporary tv and in today's cinema. He's wrong, but the view that American English is a better guide to Early Modern English pronunciation than British pronunciation is widespread.

I think there's many holes in the theory, based on a much-too-simple view, but there probably had been some enlightenment to be derived from the theory up till about seventy years ago (I don't mean the old American stage accent - the mid-Atlantic accent - I mean the normal American accent on the street). If you started with RP and then added standard AmE to that, you probably would have felt you made lots of progress to your understanding of EMnE - Americans retain lots of r's and their "a" had probably a more conservative distribution in some sense. Their accent is more strongly influenced by non-rhotic English than rhotic parts of Britain, though.

Nowadays, their "o" has innovated and "a" has innovated in many respects too. Americans have kept reducing distinctions before r, so that they say "shirly" instead of "surely" and no distinction is made between long and short vowels before /r/. The length distinction has weakened further, so that the claim often seen "English doesn't have long-short vowels, but tense-lax vowels", though not accurate, is less unfair now than it would have been a century ago. The rounded vowels have caught up with, and in many cases overtaken, the drift forward started earlier in England. (I'm pretty sure America is planning to outdo Greek with the number of sounds that merge as /i/.)

No language stands still, especially not in a highly mobile empire. Colonial lag applies to the periphery, but America is now surely the centre of English development.

I would expect accents from New England to be closest to the original British accent, with more western accents being more strongly influenced by the many other cultures that came to the US.

The claim behind this is fairly narrowly specific. Namely the distinction in pronunciation between "pass", "bath", "laugh" is sometimes attributed to French influence, since French also saw a lengthening of some sounds before at least -s. The s has since been removed, and the length distinction is weak in metropolitan France. Some example words and earlier English borrowings are castle — château, paste — pâte.

It is unlikely to be correct. The environments, though related, are non-identical. The vowel systems were radically different - English had some long vowels and some short vowels. French had only one length. English actually had a bit of a whole in its vowel system at that location - long vowel and short vowels everywhere except for the area round "trap", "Goth", when there were two short vowels and, recently, no long vowels (since "name" had moved forwards and kept moving forwards till it was caught into the vortex of merging sounds that created the modern pronunciation of words like day, they, weigh, break - once all pronounced differently).

At the exact same time, English was witnessing various other changes. The vowel in "Goth" was low at the time, and lengthened too. The vowel in "water", "what" (lengthend and) retracted. The vowel in "bar" failed to change when the vowel in "bat" moved forwards. Some of the changes were motivated at filling the hole introduced by the merger of "name" with "rain".

Indeed, this means it actually happened _prior_ to the American split, since these changes are present in America too. And it is, partially, represented in American English ("father" if taken narrowly, or the fact that many Americans who distinguish "cot" and "caught" say "caugh", "long", "dog" as "cawff", "lawng", "dawg" — and indeed, if you believe one credible hypothesis, the fact that so many Americans have merged "cot" and "caught" because there was too much variation between those sounds).

In both America and English, there was options. America ended up standardising on lengthened Goth, shortened path. England, to the extent that it standardised, did so on shortened Goth, lengthened path. But these happened at around the same time from roots planted prior to the linguistic separation of the two countries.

So you can see it seems the English change was wholly internally motivated. The only possible exception is that another major source of the broad a - in words like "dance" and and "enchanted" - was indeed an attempt to mimic the French nasal vowels. Ever since these words were adopted in the middle ages, some people had said them as "daunce" and "enchaunted" and "laundry" and "haunted" and "aunt" and some people had said them as a "dance" and "enchanted" and "landry" and "hanted" and "ant". In those days, "au" was pronunced like in German - maybe how you say "how". And you can see that the spellings don't have any particular preference in coming from one pronunciation scheme or the other. The standard English accent derives from the pronunciations that did not always feed the spelling, and the standard American accent derives from pronunciations that di not always feed the spelling. The only reason it's slightly obscure is that the sound spelt "au" sometimes became "ah" and sometimes became the modern English "aw" sound. In "calm", it became "ah". In "walk", it became "aw". So the standard British choice was "daunce", "enchaunted", spelt as "dance", "enchanted", and pronounced with the variant of "calm". The only bit of copying the French came centuries before the American colonies.

The true history of the Early Modern English low vowels remains to be written. But that's as fair a summary of it as you'll find on the social medias.

The Americans deliberately copied the French meaning of "billion", and then the French, seeing the Americans were using it, threw it away and stole the British meaning of "billion". The British held onto their tradition for a while, but they have no strong desire to align with the French, so it was really only a matter of time till, in the last generations, they adopted the American meaning.

The language is an interesting one. I just started writing a file to make French and English cognates more obvious by making a graph of words in the involved languages (Latin, Old French, French, Middle English and English). The end goal is to make the relationships between them a bit more explicit, for learners of French that already know English.

Or, "How William The Bastard became William The Conqueror"

A more interesting transformation is William of Orange leading "the Dutch invasion of Great Britain" vs "The Glorious Revolution" as we now call it.

Well I mean, it's some invasion when it starts because Parliament sends you a letter saying "Hey come invade us, and we'll give you the crown". I mean, who's in charge? Is a country just its prince?

From the Dutch perspective, it doesn't exactly feel like we invaded and conquered England. It was more like our Stadhouder emigrating to another country.

The big victory over England that we remember was the victory at Chatham[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_the_Medway

That didn't exactly bring union, despite Norman French being the language of the ruling elite for hundreds of years. That actual Frenchman (William the Conqueror) had a son (Henry I) whose plans for succession tipped us into The Anarchy that was, in part, the Norman French wars of succession and part 15 year civil war.

Not a very unified union. :)

Especially the "Angevin Empire"[0], when Kings of England also ruled large portions of Kingdom of France.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angevin_Empire

The deal fell apart at the end of June, and by July the Brits bombed out the French navy (killing 1300) as the French refused to turn it over to the British.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-K%C3%A9bir

Yes! It would not have lasted long.

> a British naval attack on French Navy ships at the naval base at Mers El Kébir on the coast of French Algeria. The bombardment killed 1,297 French servicemen, sank a battleship and damaged five other ships, for a British loss of five aircraft shot down and two crewmen killed.

It's also theoretically possible that they could be a single country, if Henry V had not died at a very young age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V_of_England

Rather than look for union with a devastated continent, Britain’s destiny lay West, in a special relationship with the United States.

This seems obvious to us now, but at the time it was anything but.

It's worth noting the historical context here. After WW1, the US and Britian were seen as rivals, and there was a naval arms between the two. It's unfortunate that there isn't a lot of history written about this, but you can see the shadows of it in things that don't make sense otherwise.

For example, the Wikipedia page for 1922 Washington Naval Treaty[1] says: The risk of war with the United States was increasingly regarded as merely theoretical, as there were very few policy differences between the two Anglophone powers, and as late as 1929 Foreign Affairs was still writing articles like The Threat of Anglo-American Naval Rivalry.

But of course nothing came of this rivalry. In the 1920s and '30s Britian and the US were the two great economic and military powers, but there was nothing for them to fight over (except perhaps the Anglo-Japanese alliance[3], but the British gave that up pretty easily)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty#Capita...

[2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1929-0...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Japanese_Alliance

The idea came up again in 1956, during the Suez crisis, though with an alternative option of joining the Commonwealth: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/15/france.eu

That would have been a particularly interesting alternative timeline, as right after Eden rejected both of Mollet's proposals France looked firmly to Europe, signed the Treaty of Rome and we know where that led...

A Franco-British Union is (probably) unlikely to have continued with the moves to progress the Coal and Steel Community toward the Treaty of Rome. The alternative play of course would have been a far more Europhile UK within the Franco-British Union.

Had this happened, it makes you wonder if this UK-France union would have similar issues to what is experienced in Quebec, Canada and to the non-French speaking Canada.

Curious to understand more about this. Can you point me to some material/links if it's okay please?

A good place to start is probably Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_sovereignty_movement

I would caution, however, that there aren't any big issues on a day to day basis. It is more of a simmering undercurrent of separatist sentiment that waxes and wanes with time.

Edit: one might compare it to the "problems" experienced by Scotland within the UK.

Well, with the rUK at 48 million and France at 42 million, I guess they would have been much more equal. Probably England and France would have had about the same number of seats in Parliament. It probably would eased the Quebec situation quite a bit. But once they wanted to go their separate ways, I think it would have happened fairly smoothly.

They should have pitched a Franco-British football team. Might have sealed the deal.

Yugoslavia probably would have won a World Cup by now. It’s a shame.

They would first needed to have made a brutish football team (I.e unite the English, Welsh and Scottish ones)

> the origins of European integration—and the reasons why Britain ultimately pulled away

Anyone who was around for the UK's going into the then-called CEE (sporting all of 6 members) in the 70s will find little surprise at the current drama ...

(There were some Frenchmen worried it was an US submarine ...)

I always think of this "Yes, Minister" scene, which aired... gosh, 38 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYuoWyk8iU&t=1m08s

Eh, I thought it's about the Hundred Years' War where the kings of England claimed the throne of French and succeeded in taking half of France including Paris at one time.

Shameless self plug - I wrote about this and a few more interesting tidbits here - https://medium.com/trench-full-of-dead-men

> the Governments of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union

The claimed goal was to end future nationalism, but such a "indissoluble union" would in the long term lead to such nationalism.

We shouldn't exclude the possibility of a frexit and then a new union.

Er, yes, we probably should; both are implausible.

Macron admitted in 2018 that the French would probably have voted to leave the EU in a UK-style referendum.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/21/emmanuel-macro...

Most people who become national leaders are not as foolish as Cameron. And a lot has changed since then. And without a ditch to separate them from their fellows across the way, it's likely that any attempt to Frexit would result in the EU being destroyed and then recreated. People live in the border zones - they're not just distant marches.

They would have been stronger to fight evil empires

> Marshal Pétain, 84 years old and the great hero of World War I, believed it was his duty to save France from total destruction and accept an armistice with Germany. Britain was doomed, he said, and union would be “fusion with a corpse.” Another minister concluded: “Better be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means.” Reynaud later wrote in his memoirs, “Those who rose in indignation at the idea of union with our ally were the same individuals who were getting ready to bow and scrape to Hitler.”

Wow. I knew that England and France have historically disliked each other, but preferring to be a Nazi province?

History has not been kind to Pétain, and deservedly so.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Apparently I'm the odd one out that had never heard of this guy.

Every country had its characters like Pétain, the Dutch had their own share of them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_collaborators_w... see here for a whole slew of Dutch), it was the same in almost every country the Nazi's attacked and even some where it did not.

Indeed, and one of them, Norway's Vidkun Quisling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling), was so notorious his name become synonymous with betraying your country. To this day, in multiple countries, all you have to say to indicate that you think someone would be happy to trade loyalty for power is to call them a quisling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quisling).

Relevant: https://www.norwegianamerican.com/norsk/the-coining-of-quisl...

Unfortunately the caption is omitted, but is at least retold just below the middle of the article: 'It depicts Quisling arriving to audience before Hitler. His right arm raised in the Nazi salute, he announces “I’m quisling!” to which the doorman asks: “And your name?”'

The original caption was just (if I remember correctly):

- I’m quisling! - And your name?

The cartoon was printed in Sweden, in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, which was edited by Torgny Segerstedt, one of too few outspoken anti-nazis among Swedish editors.

It only makes any kind of sense in the context of the times.

France in the '30s had been run by a left-wing coalition, the Popular Front (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Front_(France)), which had put things like the rights of workers and a move away from laissez faire capitalism front and center. The head of that coalition was a Jewish socialist, Léon Blum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Blum).

That in turn had led to a kind of mass freak-out among the French right, who were terrified that Blum and the Popular Front were the harbingers of a Russian-style Communist revolution. (They weren't, of course, but then as now the hard right can't hear a dog bark without thinking it's the first shot of a Communist revolution.) Even in 1936, when Blum came to power, there were people on the right saying things like "better Hitler than Léon Blum" (http://worldatwar.net/biography/b/blum/).

So when the Nazis blew the old government away, there were a lot of people on the French right who saw their country's defeat by right-wing foreigners as an opportunity to restore the old order -- things like favoring aristocracy over democracy, reserving lots of power for the Catholic church, driving Jews and immigrants out of society, and so forth. These people coalesced around Pétain, and their ideology became the ideology of Vichy's Révolution nationale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9volution_nationale). (One of the results of which was that Blum was hauled off to a German concentration camp.)

Errm, if I'm understanding that Wiki article right, one of the key factions in the Popular Front was a French communist party that was literally the local affiliate of Russian communism, complete with the usual support for Stalinism. Which wasn't terribly uncommon - part of the reason World War II happened the way it did was that Stalinist communism was a real, genuine threat in much of Europe, and of course much more than that in eastern Europe.

Not to defend him, but Nazi Germany in 1940 wasn't seen the same as it is now. For instance there were no extermination camps yet.

Judging by some of the comments here, I perceive a general lack of understanding about how history works 8) The human experience (barring some amusing drug related experiments) generally has things happen first and those things become history.

Now, those things are related in some way from past to future and the relation might be fact (ie "true"), false news, wibble or bollocks. That is actually a closed set there - wibble covers an infinite number of cases and so does bollocks.

So here's some wibble.

According to "1000 years of annoying the French" which is a book written by a Francophile Brit about the relationship between France and the UK, the Normandy evacuation is/was seen as abandonment and near treachery by the French. That's a point of view I can understand (Brit here) when you look through other people's eyes at that event and try to see it as they would.

All sources I have ever read about the relationship between Charles de Gaulle and Churchill detail a fraught but necessary arrangement. Also, that Churchill was (rabidly) in favour of a united Europe and CdG was not.

Where is the source(s) for this article?

Normandy evacuation? Dunkirk is nowhere near Normandy. It's close to the border with Belgium.

I don't know what their source is, but I remember reading about it in one of Charles de Gaulle's book.

There’s hyperlinks linking to sources throughout the article.

The article was somewhat misrepresentative of the real nature of the Union proposal, in that it was by far mostly a French initiative, motivated by wartime/panic diplomacy geared to keep some French forces in the fight.

I'm an English Canadian living in Quebec, who has lived in France and the UK ... and the very name 'Franco-British Union' has to make any reasonable person laugh out loud ...

Right from the outset, the very first argument would be: "Why not British-Franco Union?" !

It's really interesting to see how contemptuously ignorant a certain class of intellectuals can be when the decide to magnanimously ignore the obvious issues of integrating vastly different systems (wartime pragmatism not withstanding of course - desperate times call for desperate measures).

France is super secular, they hate monarchies, while the UK has a 1000 year old Monarchy, a State Religion, no constitution and arguably the oldest Parliamentary body in the world. A House of Lords and peerage system. And that's just the very start of the conversation.

Here in Quebec we argue over the language used on stop signs, and every other thing. Watching French and English diplomats trying to actually manage the real details of such a union would be funnier and more surreal than a Monty Python film.

Yes, we all have a lot in common, but there's a lot that's different as well, which why we have different administrative and cultural regions around the world in the first place.

Well, the administrative regions we have are mostly the result of a previous invasion. And the cultural regions are based on the movement of people permitted by the previous invasions, and the requirements of the current invaders. France is a unified whole mostly as a fiction. Sometimes those fictions come apart at the seams - as in Scotland and Catalonia. Other times, an alternative administration can really smooth things out - as in contemporary China, France and Germany (deliberately subdivided to prevent the seams from ripping by building patches rather than merely stitching things together).

Britain-France would've had lots of scope. Past monarchs, local loyalties, language differences. If the administration wanted to, they could've succeeded.

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