1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  France won’t ‘sleep with a corpse’

  Fortunately, de Gaulle wasn’t a Parisian (he was from Lille in the north), and didn’t agree with his defeatist colleagues. He even put his genetic Anglophobia to one side for a while to embrace an idea that would make modern-day French and British people shudder with horror.

  The French ambassador in London, André Corbin, and Britain’s top diplomat, Sir Robert Vansittart,* had dreamt up a crackpot plan to unite France and Britain as one nation.

  True, similar things had been tried by a whole host of British monarchs, but their plans had usually involved conquering France and simply taking it over. Napoleon had envisaged a similar scheme, but he had wanted to make Britain a wholly French territory, adopting his laws and introducing maisons de tolérance.

  In the past, each country had essentially wanted to rape and possess its neighbour. This 1940 plan was to be a consensual union, a merger. Everyone would have joint citizenship, and the governments would share power over their two countries and empires just like a political alliance between two parties. The two nations would be one.

  It was, of course, little more than a propaganda exercise, a way of enabling Hitler’s enemies to say that France hadn’t been conquered because its London-based territories were still free. Even so, de Gaulle immediately embraced the scheme and got on a plane to pitch it to his defeatist colleagues back in France.

  Their answer was predictable. Pétain said that Britain was finished. It was like suggesting union with a corpse. Besides, he was already making plans to sleep with the (all too alive) enemy.

  De Gaulle wisely returned straight to London, where Churchill – against the advice of his own Foreign Office – secured some BBC airtime and encouraged the Frenchman to give his own ‘the fight will go on’ speech.

  De Gaulle speaks and the world says, ‘Pardon?’

  It was on 18 June, the 125th anniversary of Waterloo, that the Général went on the radio and made his Appel du 18 juin. Despite its name, this was not a charity appeal. It was a call (appel) for France to resist Nazi occupation, a French version of Churchill’s speech, full of rhetorical questions, repetitions and exclamations.

  ‘Must all hope disappear?’ de Gaulle asked. ‘Is defeat final? No! Because France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! She has a vast empire to back her up. She can unite with the British Empire that rules the seas.’ Which had to be the first time in history that a Frenchman had ever been pleased to announce British naval superiority.

  He went on to recognize rather sportingly that this was a world war, not limited to France, and then got in a little plug for his ideas: ‘Although we have been blitzed by mechanical force, we will win using even greater mechanical force. This is the world’s destiny.’

  Soaring to a dramatic finale, he promised that ‘whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not, and will not, be extinguished’. It was a good ending, though he spoilt it by announcing that he’d speak again next day, which he didn’t.

  Nevertheless, de Gaulle had just given the most famous speech in French history – the name if not the text of l’Appel du 18 juin is known by every French schoolkid. The only problem was that almost no French listeners heard it. It was on English radio, practically unannounced, and given by a man whom no one in France had heard of. And unfortunately, the BBC thought the talk so unimportant that they didn’t record it.

  All of which might explain the muted response to the speech. De Gaulle had invited all the Frenchmen in the UK, both soldiers and civilians, to join him, but very few did. Of 10,000 French immigrants in Britain, only 300 volunteered, and of the 100,000-odd soldiers temporarily on British soil, only 7,000 stayed on to join de Gaulle. The others went back and were quickly made POWs.

  Worse, despite a flattering reference to America in the speech, President Roosevelt refused to recognize de Gaulle as a leader of France. Almost right up until 1940, the Americans held out hopes of working with Pétain and the defeatists and turning them against Hitler.

  Only Churchill stood by the Général, and made an official announcement to the effect that ‘His Majesty’s government recognizes General de Gaulle as leader of all free Frenchmen, wherever they may be.’

  It was an act of solidarity that de Gaulle would often forget in the years to come.

  Pineapple or banana?

  The insults and backstabbing that went on between de Gaulle, Roosevelt and Churchill were as bad as anything in a boy band’s dressing room.

  Although America didn’t enter the war until 1941, Churchill was constantly trying to show Roosevelt that the Allies were a cause worth supporting. Right from the start, he had one eye on the Nazis and another on America’s huge supplies of men and war machines.

  De Gaulle, though, was so obsessed with French interests and his own position as a future leader of the country that he often lost sight of the bigger picture. He saw only France and the need to discredit and destabilize Pétain’s government. This shortsightedness and misplaced patriotism caused almost every Brit or American who had any dealings with him to unleash a torrent of abuse about his arrogance, ingratitude, unreliability and – quite cruelly – about his appearance. Here are a few more famous quotes about le Général.

  Hugh Dalton, Churchill’s Minister of the Board of Trade, said that de Gaulle had ‘a head like a banana and hips like a woman’. Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office said the same thing except that he replaced the banana with a (more credible) pineapple.

  The novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner called the French leader ‘an embattled codfish. I wish he could be filleted and put quietly away in a refrigerator.’

  And to H. G. Wells he came across as ‘an artlessly sincere megalomaniac’.

  Even Churchill, a romantic Francophile who had fought in the trenches and loved France in much the same way as Edward VII had done, soon realized that de Gaulle couldn’t be trusted. Though in fact de Gaulle occasionally had good reason to act up, because Britain did some highly unpleasant things to the French …

  Britain sinks French hopes

  Mers-el-Kebir is a name that means nothing to most English-speakers, but just mentioning it to de Gaulle after 3 July 1940 would have been like saying ‘Joan of Arc’ while barbecuing a kebab.

  On that day, Churchill decided that the French navy could not be relied upon to keep its ships out of Nazi hands, and ordered that all French vessels docked in British-held ports anywhere in the world should be seized. Two hundred of them were boarded and effectively stolen from France.

  The main French war fleet was in Algeria, at the Mers-el-Kebir naval base near Oran. Some British ships went to invite its commander, Admiral Marcel Gensoul, to join the Brits (and de Gaulle, of course) in resisting the Nazis. An officer called Captain Holland delivered the invitation in person, and asked the Admiral in French to sail to Britain, America or the Caribbean, with a reduced crew so that his ships would not be at battle stations. Either that, or he might prefer to scuttle his fleet. It was a thinly veiled ultimatum, with a deadline of 6 p.m. for a reply.

  But the Admiral simply huffed that a mere captain had been sent to deliver the ultimatum, and decided to call the Brits’ bluff.

  This was a big mistake. Churchill was determined to show that war was war, and at 6 p.m. precisely, having got no reaction, the British guns opened up for nine minutes, disabling two French battleships, blowing up another, and killing over 1,250 French sailors.

  De Gaulle was predictably horrified. His Appel had been widely quoted in the (as yet) free French press, and recruits were trickling in. Now his supposed Allies had apparently declared war on France.

  Worse, when a deeply troubled Churchill announced events at Mers-el-Kebir to the House of Commons, MPs of all parties gave him a rousing cheer of support. Roosevelt, too, was quick to send a message of approval. In British and American eyes, it was clearly OK to bombard Frenchmen.

  It took de Gaulle almost a week to accept that victory against the Nazis was mo
re important than French pride, and he made a speech acknowledging that, had the ships not been sunk, Pétain would almost certainly have allowed Hitler to get his hands on them.

  By now, Pétain was the Général’s mortal enemy – literally. The Paris-based government handed France over to the Nazis on 10 July with an official armistice that divided the country in two. Hitler was to get the northern half, including all the Channel ports and most of the industrial resources, and Pétain was to take his puppet government to the spa town of Vichy, just the other side of the demarcation line between Occupied and Unoccupied France. One of Pétain’s first acts was to pronounce a death sentence in absentia on de Gaulle. The Général rose to the provocation by promising to set France free (although at the time he had an army of just 2,200 men and an even smaller navy), and by adopting as his flag of resistance the Croix de Lorraine, Joan of Arc’s anti-British battle standard. Churchill must have been delighted at the symbolism, and to show it, he was soon ordering another attack on a French colony.

  In September 1940, the Brits decided to grab Dakar in Senegal. It was in pro-Vichy hands, and was a potential Nazi submarine base that worried the Americans because it was just a short underwater cruise from their Caribbean back door.

  This time, de Gaulle decided to go along for the ride and try to prevent the British from bombarding French ships and troops. He was sure that his presence alone would persuade the Pétainist garrison to come over to his side. He also knew that the gold reserves of the Banque de France had been sent to Dakar, and would buy him enough weapons to free him from his slavish dependence on the Brits. An added prize would be that success here would put him on the map with America.

  The Général duly went to get fitted for a tropical outfit at a London clothes shop and, chatting merrily, told the shop assistant where he was going. His French troops based in Liverpool did exactly the same. Soon the security of the mission was totally blown, and a surviving fleet of Vichy ships broke out of the Med and set sail to defend Senegal.

  A despairing Churchill wanted to call it all off, but de Gaulle threatened to take his men and march overland to Senegal. So, deciding that it would be fun but not good for the war effort to let the loose-tongued Frenchmen die of thirst in the Sahara, the Brits eventually agreed to go ahead with the mission.

  True to form, it turned into a complete farce as soon as the British fleet moored off Dakar.

  Two Free French aeroplanes took off from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and flew in with a message from de Gaulle to the Vichy governor. But instead of heeding his new leader’s call to arms, the Governor simply had the messengers thrown in jail.

  Meanwhile, a small boat sailed into harbour with three emissaries who were fired upon, and only just escaped with their lives. Just along the coast, Free French troops landed, expecting to be hailed as liberators. They too were beaten off by the pro-Vichy garrison.

  A deflated de Gaulle decided that the time had come to pull out, but the very next day, the British ships were ordered by Churchill himself to begin bombarding the port. They damaged a submarine and a destroyer before sustaining hits themselves and opting to leave. In retaliation, Vichy French aeroplanes bombed the British base at Gibraltar. It was an out-and-out Anglo-French war, with each of the two countries hammering away at each other’s colonies, exactly the kind of spat Napoleon and Nelson used to enjoy.

  Getting into the spirit of things, the Vichy government began producing anti-British propaganda posters, one of which recalled the whole long history of conflict between the two nations. It proclaimed:

  Yesterday England shed French blood, Joan of Arc was burnt alive in Rouen, Napoleon was in his death throes in St Helena. Today, at Dunkirk, the sacrifice of our boats and soldiers allows the English troops to escape, England sheds French blood at Mers-el-Kébir. Tomorrow, what will they take from us?

  It was 1805 all over again – it was almost a shame that the Nazis were there to complicate things.

  The Dakar mission had been a disaster for Churchill, but de Gaulle was the biggest loser of all. Roosevelt decided that he was a nobody and opened an American consulate in Dakar to negotiate with the Vichy government about the potential U-boat threat. In effect, America was recognizing the legitimacy of the Pétain regime – de Gaulle’s biggest nightmare. It didn’t mean that Roosevelt was pro-Hitler. On the contrary, he was totally anti-Nazi, and came out in favour of Britain, announcing that he would supply them with weapons and be ‘the arsenal of democracy’. But it did show all too clearly what Roosevelt thought of the French: they could only be relied upon to squabble amongst themselves and distract attention from the real aims of the war.

  These prejudices were confirmed in Occupied France, where the Communists, whom one would have thought would be anti-Nazi, declared their support for Hitler because of the non-aggression pact he had signed with Stalin. Later on in the war, the Communists played a major role in the armed Resistance, but in July 1940, their newspaper L’Humanité, which is still published today, ran an article congratulating Parisian workers for ‘showing friendliness to German soldiers’. With comrades like that, who needed enemies?

  France’s first great victory over Nazi tyranny

  In December 1941, de Gaulle hatched a plot that proved beyond all doubt to Churchill and Roosevelt (who had recently entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor) that he was too much of a nuisance to be consulted on anything.

  Admiral Émile Muselier was one of de Gaulle’s faithful, and had been the first to use the Croix de Lorraine to distinguish his ships from those loyal to Vichy. On 23 December 1941, Muselier was moored off the Canadian coast in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a French submarine and three ships. De Gaulle ordered him to sail to the nearby islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, 242 square kilometres of windblown but French-owned rock, and liberate them from the pro-Vichy governor ‘without telling the foreigners’ (that is, the Brits and Americans).

  At dawn on Christmas Eve, the four-vessel French fleet sailed into Saint-Pierre harbour, and Muselier’s men seized control of the island. This was a relatively simple matter, and involved little more than taking over the lone radio transmitter and the Western Union telegraph office and arresting the Vichy governor. Once these objectives had been achieved, the Admiral cabled Churchill, who was at the White House conferring with Roosevelt, to inform him of this momentous development in world events – a tiny group of Canadian islands had been liberated from the Nazis. At last the tide of war was turning!

  Roosevelt was furious. This was effectively a coup d’état, and no one changed regime in the Americas without asking him first. He therefore declared that the islands would be run under joint British, Canadian and American rule for the duration of the war, after which they would be returned to whichever regime was then governing France.

  De Gaulle, though, wasn’t going to let anyone spoil his first successful invasion, and announced that his men would open fire if the Allies tried to send in their troops. He must have been hugely satisfied when, to everyone’s amazement, Roosevelt backed down. France had stood up to the giant America and won.

  In fact, of course, the President had only done so because at such a critical time, with the whole course of both the Asian and European wars in the balance, he couldn’t be bothered to argue with a few Frenchmen in a Western Union office somewhere up the Canadian coast. Besides, Admiral Muselier was now in a huff because de Gaulle had ruined his good relations with the Americans, and was threatening to rebel against the Général and take the navy with him. The French were fighting amongst themselves again, and didn’t need any outside interference to screw things up.

  The affair tipped Roosevelt and Churchill over the edge. If de Gaulle wanted to behave like a rebellious teenager, they decided, then he was grounded. He was in London, entirely dependent on British transport to go anywhere further than the local French restaurant, and there he was going to stay.

  Meanwhile, Churchill was hatching a plan of his own that was going to have the
Frenchman spitting with fury …

  Mad about Madagascar

  In May 1942, a British force invaded the island of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa. The Allies were afraid that it could be used as a base by Japan to torpedo shipping in the Indian Ocean and off the Cape of Good Hope, and Vichy’s recent surrender of its colony in Vietnam had convinced Churchill that the same thing could happen in Madagascar. The Brits duly sent out an invasion force from South Africa and attacked the French garrison at Diego Suárez, the island’s largest harbour.

  De Gaulle only learned about the invasion when a journalist called him and asked him for a quote. He was trebly furious. For a start, the Anglais were trying to steal a French island. Secondly, they were doing it behind his back.* And worst of all, just like the whole mechanized warfare business, they had stolen his idea – he was the one who had suggested the Madagascar scheme to Churchill in the first place.

  The Frenchman lapsed into an even deeper paranoia than usual and sent a cable to his men in Africa and the Middle East, saying, ‘We must warn the people of France and the whole world … about Anglo-Saxon imperialist plans.’ He added that ‘under no circumstances must we have any relations with the Anglo-Saxons’, and complained that he was being held captive by the British in London.

  The cable was encrypted in a French code, but was easily deciphered by the Brits and, no doubt, by some delighted Nazis.

  The Bogeyman comes to Casablanca

  The Allies knew that if they were to control the Mediterranean and keep valuable oil resources out of Nazi hands, then it was necessary to liberate all the French colonies† in North Africa. As well as the Nazi occupiers, in 1942 there were over 100,000 potentially dangerous Vichy troops stationed there.