I heard on the NBC Nightly News tonight that the British Archives ‘declassified’ certain documents that indicate back in the 50’s, the French Government offered (or at least petitioned to discuss) that France and the UK merge into one nation–in essence an annexation into one mega-Anglo-Frankish country.
At one point, I remember Brian Williams saying that “. . . France offered to acknowledge the Queen of England. Upon hearing of this new information, one researcher reportedly fell faint onto his feet!”
Does anyone have a cite for this one? This one seems a little too farfetched, but then again, not too far from fiction.
Tripler
Wow, the Merovingian in The Matrix must be confused on accents now!
From what I read, it sounds like the proponents of the plan hoped that consolidating the world’s last two major colonial powers could preserve some vestige of the pre-war world order.
Scoop? Churchill mentioned his willingness to merge with France in the dark summer of '39. It is one of those ideas proposed from time to time by ruling-class people.
England’s claim to rule France lasted until George III, so by that basis, Queen Elizabeth II could be construed to be the rightful Queen of France, anyway. Even aside from that, the current Jacobite pretender claims the title of King of France.
Primarily, it’s from conquest: Henry V conquered most of France and was named heir to Charles VI of France. He also married Catherine, who was in line for the French throne. Henry died a little before Charles, but England still claimed France. The French disagreed.
In addition, after Henry’s death, Catherine married Owen Tudor, whose grandson Henry became Henry VII. So the English kings after Henry VII could trace a lineage through her.
Mary Queen of Scots was a direct descendant of Henry VII, so had the connection through Catherine. Her son James became James VI, but his father was an English noble with no connection to the throne of France.
Kings and Queens of the United Kingdom considered themselves rulers of France until George III surrendered the claim.
It is not at all obvious that what was being proposed was ever a full union, although there is the ambiguity that the documents give more details about the second, watered-down set of proposals than about the first. Moreover, as the officials were fully aware, membership of the Commonwealth was then - and still is - not the same as acknowledging the Queen as head of state. Any other practical implications would probably have been rather less than the current ‘union’ between the UK and France as members of the EU.
That it was missed isn’t really that surprising. It was just one file among thousands of others. The class of the Dominion Office archives in which it was filed (DO 35) contains 10,914 items, each of which would have to be ordered up individually. And there are 228 other Dominion Office classes. And there are other departments with even larger archives, such as the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office, in which it could have been filed. Its description in the catalogue is actually reasonably informative, but that catalogue is notoriously difficult to browse and hitting on it using the search facility would have taken a great deal of luck and/or throw up lots of other, irrelevant results as well. For historians to find this sort of stuff is much more difficult, time-consuming and downright boring than you might think. Of course, if the proposal had been taken really seriously, it would have left a much more obvious archival trail.
All kinds of ideas get floated about. This particular one was made moot by, among other things, the tous azimut defense policy de Gaulle pushed for in the fifties, capped by France’s 1968 withdrawl from NATO.
How would language have worked in the merged UK/France state? Would English be the language of bureaucracy? Would the new state be bilingual, or would English be dominant?
France and the UK were about to invade Egypt and re-take the Suez Canal in the fall of 1956, and knew they would face American opposition. The French proposal sounds like a desperate attempt to yoke the two countries together and make sure that the Brits wouldn’t back out, with the claptrap about joining the Commonwealth and recognizing the Queen as bribes.
In the end, it went down as the French feared: the two countries seized the canal, the United States squawked and threatened to pull support for the British pound, and Britain caved and turned the canal over to UN peacekeepers. The French thereafter went their own way in foreign and defense policy.
Queen Elizabeth II would have a good claim to the throne of France except for the matter of Salic law applying in France. (See the discussion of this matter at the start of Shakespeare’s play Henry V, and see also events in the recent movie Marie Antoinette). In countries governed by Salic law, daughters cannot inherit the throne, or pass the throne to their descendants. Salic law also applied in Hanover, and that’s why Quen Victoria did not become Queen of Hanover at the same time as she became Quuen of the UK.
