France offered to 'merge' with UK in 1950s

Laura Clout / London Telegraph | January 15, 2007

Britain and France discussed a "union" in the 1950s and even talked about France joining the British Commonwealth, it emerged today.

Previously secret documents uncovered in the National Archives reveal how, on Sept 10, 1956, the French prime minister Guy Mollet came to London to discuss the possibility of a merger between the two countries with Sir Anthony Eden, then British prime minister.

A British Cabinet paper from that period reads: "When the French Prime Minister, Monsieur Mollet, was recently in London he raised with the Prime Minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France."

Mr Mollet was an Anglophile and at the time of his proposal France was in economic difficulties and faced the escalating Suez crisis.

His suggestion for a union was swiftly dismissed by the British, but he returned with a second radical plan: that France be allowed to join the Commonwealth.

The British premier met this proposal with surprisingly more enthusiasm, according to the BBC. A document dated Sept 28, 1956 records a conversation between Sir Anthony and his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook.

It says: "Sir Norman Brook asked to see me this morning and told me he had come up from the country consequent on a telephone conversation from the Prime Minister, who is in Wiltshire.

"The PM told him on the telephone that he thought in the light of his talks with the French:

"That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth;

"That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty;

"That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."

After Britain decided to pull out of Suez, all talk of union faded away. A year later France signed the Treaty of Rome with Germany and the other founding nations of the Common Market.

Mike Thomson, presenter of the BBC’s Document programme, writes on the BBC website that the revelatory papers "have lain virtually unnoticed since being released two decades ago".

No record of the proposals is thought to exist in French archives.

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