[Transcript]
Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.
Season 4 Supplemental, 2000 Years of Anglo-French Relations, part III
I’ll warn you in advance, this episode runs long. We’re going to make a mad sprint through about 600 years of history in the next 40 or so minutes.
Let’s pick up where we left off, in the late 1400s.
Henry VII is the King of England and Louis XII is the King of France. The Hundred Years’ War is finally over. England and France are finally at peace with each other. For a hot second.
King Henry worked to reimpose the majesty of the English monarchy, which had been tarnished by decades of civil war and multiple depositions of anointed rulers. Louis picked up where his predecessor Charles VIII had left off, by invading Italy again. It went about as well as Charles’s invasion had, which is to say, not very well.
Spain came into the mix with England and France in two different ways. First, Henry VII’s eldest son and heir, Arthur, was married in 1501 to Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon (yes, the same Ferdinand of Ferdinand and Isabella fame, who sent Christopher Columbus west to find a route to the East Indies). Second, Ferdinand and Louis XII entered into an agreement to divvy up the kingdom of Naples between them. The agreement was not fully thought through, and in the end, France and Spain ended up at war with each other instead of being allies. Spain prevailed in the conflict in 1503.
In 1509, Henry VII died. But his son and heir Arthur had predeceased him in 1502, so Henry’s second son took the throne. We know him as Henry VIII. Henry VIII promptly married his dead brother Arthur’s widow, Catherine, and then in 1514, Henry’s sister Mary became the third wife of Louis XII. That marriage didn’t last long though, and produced no children to join together France and England, because Louis XII died three months after the wedding, in January 1515.
Louis had died without any male heirs, despite having been married three times. So the French crown went to a cousin of Louis’s who would be the first king named Francis. Francis and Henry VIII actually met in person in 1520 and spent more than two weeks feasting and celebrating together at an event known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The goal of the summit was for the two monarchs to get to know each other and establish some sort of mutually respectful relationship.
France and England, along with Spain, the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Papal States, had entered into the Treaty of London in 1518. It was a non-aggression pact, committing them to not invading each other and also to aiding each other in the event one of them was attacked by the growing Ottoman threat. But in the end, the Field of the Cloth of Gold didn’t accomplish much besides costing both monarchs a lot of money.
Within a year, Francis decided to invade Italy, and he ended up at war with the Holy Roman Empire and its Emperor, Charles V. It ended badly for France, as these things always seem to do, and King Francis was captured.
England was for a short while allied with the Holy Roman Empire, but then Henry VIII decided that he just had to set aside his wife, Catherine of Aragon, because she had not provided him with a male heir. The problem with that is that Catherine was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. So that put Henry and Charles on opposite sides once again.
But by 1539, Henry had been through three wives, and Catherine of Aragon was dead, as was the woman who had replaced her, Anne Boleyn. Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, had finally provided him with a son, and then she promptly died. So Henry and Charles were ready to be more amenable to each other, and entered into an alliance against France. Henry invaded France in 1544 and captured Boulogne, but then Charles made a separate peace with France behind Henry’s back. So Henry and Francis then entered into a peace treaty in 1546. It was all a big waste of time and money for no real reason.
Much like King Edward IV and King Louis XI, Henry VIII and Francis died the same year, within months of each other in early 1547. Henry’s only son, nine-year-old Edward, became Edward VI. Francis’s son Henry succeeded him to the French throne as Henry II. (You’ll note here that the French are totally ignoring the fact that Henry VI of England had technically been crowned as Henry II of France back in 1431. Not that we can blame them.)
It’s at this point that England and France’s rivalry starts to become religious in nature, rather than merely political. Without getting bogged down in the details, Henry VIII had essentially torn England away from the papacy and the official Catholic Church and declared himself the head of the church in England when the pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The Church of England was still essentially Catholic, but not quite. The Protestant Reformation overlapped with the years that Henry was burning through wives like wildfire, and both Anne Boleyn (his second wife) and Jane Seymour (his third wife) were Protestants. So when Jane’s son took the throne as Edward VI, England took a decided turn toward Protestantism. Whereas France was going hard in the other direction and persecuting Protestants. Henry II was notorious for his persecution of Protestants.
Also notorious for her persecution of Protestants was Queen Mary of England. Edward VI died in 1553 at the young age of 15. Under the terms of Henry VIII’s will, his other surviving children were to inherit the throne in order of birth. Both of his other surviving children were female, which is why Edward had taken precedence over them as a male. England didn’t have the Salic Law that France had, preventing a woman from inheriting the crown, but male heirs were still preferred.
Henry’s eldest surviving child was Mary, the daughter of his first wife, Catharine of Aragon. As such, Mary was Catholic. Very Catholic. She only reigned for five years, but it was a hard five years for Protestants. Mary was married to the equally Catholic Philip II of Spain, but she had no children. So when she died in 1558, the only remaining living child of Henry VIII became queen—we know her as Queen Elizabeth I. Like Edward, Elizabeth had been raised as a Protestant. So suddenly England went from persecuting Protestants back to persecuting Catholics, although to a much lesser extent than under Edward VI. The 1550s were a decade of whiplash for sure.
The same year Queen Mary died and Queen Elizabeth ascended, the Dauphin of France, named Francis, married the Queen of Scotland, named Mary. You may know her as Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary had become Queen of Scotland in 1543 when she was only six days old, so the actual governing of Scotland was handled by a council. Mary had been living at the French court for about 10 years, ever since the marriage between her and Francis had been arranged by King Henry II.
In 1559, Henry II died, and Francis became King Francis II of France, and also King of Scotland, by virtue of his marriage to Mary. And in a fun but confusing twist, Mary and Francis also technically had a claim to the throne of England, because Mary was Henry VII’s great-granddaughter. But Francis II died in 1560, only a year after becoming king. Mary returned to Scotland as a 17-year-old widow, and Francis’s brother Charles became King Charles IX. He was only nine though, so his mother Catherine de Medici acted as regent.
France was embroiled in a series of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants throughout the 1560s. England, under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, was all too happy to aid the French Protestants. Several peace treaties were signed and then violated during the religious wars. An attempt at diplomacy by marriage was attempted in 1572 when the king’s sister, Margaret of Valois, married Henry of Navarre, who was a Protestant. But the wedding in Paris was marred by violence when the Catholics massacred tens of thousands of Protestants throughout France during what became known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
Charles IX felt extremely guilty about the massacre, but he died of tuberculosis only two years later, in 1574. He had no legitimate children, so the French crown passed to his brother, who became Henry III. Henry III had no children, so when he was assassinated in 1589, the next closest descendant in line for the throne was the Protestant King Henry of Navarre, the one who had married Margaret of Valois in 1572, precipitating the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
Henry III’s extremely Catholic supporters refused to recognize that Henry of Navarre would be the king of France. To summarize another very long story: Henry III had had two prominent Catholic nobles killed in 1588; an insane Dominican friar stabbed Henry III to death in 1589; Henry of Navarre inherited the crown but was not accepted by the people of France until he renounced Protestantism, which he eventually did; and Henry of Navarre was finally crowned as King Henry IV of France in 1593. The religious wars in France were mostly brought to an end in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes, declaring that Protestants should no longer be persecuted for their faith.
Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth was ruling over England this entire time, enjoying what would be one of the longest reigns of any English monarch: 44 years. The 1560s and 70s were a revolving door of alliances and rivalries among England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. If I tried to get into it in even a superficial way, we’d be here all day. There was some talk of Elizabeth marrying Henry III’s younger brother, Francis, the Duke of Anjou. Most of Elizabeth’s advisors were adamantly against it, but then he died in 1584, making it a moot point.
When Protestant Henry of Navarre inherited the French throne in 1589, there was hope of a Protestant alliance between the two countries, but then he went and converted to Catholicism in order to keep his crown. So that idea was out the window.
England ended up at war with Spain in 1585, and then improbably defeated the Spanish Armada, the crown jewel of naval forces, in 1588. The war dragged on until 1604, which mostly prevented France and England from entering into hostilities against each other, because England was busy with Spain.
Elizabeth never did marry—partially, or maybe primarily, because if she had, she would have become subordinate to her husband, even though she was the anointed sovereign of England. For a time, the Catholics of England hoped that Mary, Queen of Scots would inherit Elizabeth’s throne. But Mary was forced to flee Scotland during its own Protestant Reformation, and she ended up as Elizabeth’s prisoner. After being convicted of conspiring to murder Elizabeth, Elizabeth reluctantly had Mary executed for treason.
So when Elizabeth died in 1603, the mini Tudor dynasty ended. The English throne went to James V of Scotland, who was the Protestant son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. He became James I of England, while still reigning as James V of Scotland. I know it’s confusing. They were known as the Stuart family, and thus began the Stuart dynasty, which would be interrupted by the execution of the king and the installation of a non-royal government, which we’ll get to shortly. For a while though, England was calm. As John Morrill puts it in Chapter 6 of The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, “Early Stuart England was probably the least violent country in Europe. There were probably more dead bodies on stage during a production of Hamlet or Titus Andronicus than in any one violent clash or sequence of clashes over the first forty years of the century.”
Over in France, Henry IV reigned until 1610 when he was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. He was succeeded by his eight-year-old son, who became Louis XIII. In contrast to England, the first half of the 1600s was about to turn into a literal bloodbath on the Continent. As John Julius Norwich writes in The History of France, “[I]n 1618 there began a war which was to tear apart the whole of central Europe. The Thirty Years’ War was the deadliest and most brutal upheaval the continent had ever seen—the French Wars of Religion, now vastly magnified and transferred to the European stage. By its close in 1648, over eight million men lay dead. It began when the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II attempted to force Roman Catholicism on all his subjects. He should have known better.”
Despite still being a Catholic country, France ultimately sided with the Protestant German principalities and the other Protestant countries of Europe. This was a political, rather than a religious, decision. The Holy Roman Empire, and the Hapsburg family that controlled it, was seen as a greater enemy than Protestantism.
James I of England died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, who became Charles I. Again, we don’t have time for the details, but Charles I was such a disaster, that by 1642, the country was embroiled in a Civil War. Not only did Charles declare war on Scotland, a country of which he was also king, but he was at war with his English subjects as well. It was a hot mess. Religion was at the heart of it, but so was poor governance on the part of Charles. He was eventually executed in 1649. Other English kings had been killed in battle or murdered by rivals to the Crown, but this was the first time that a vote had been taken to kill the sovereign.
From 1642 until 1660, England was a republic, and from 1653 until 1658, Oliver Cromwell was the Lord Protector. Over in France, things were going in the opposite direction, toward the most absolute of all absolute monarchs, Louis XIV. Louis XIII died in 1643, probably of tuberculosis, and his four-year-old son became Louis XIV. He would reign for the next 72 years—the longest reign of any European monarch in history. Even Elizabeth II didn’t beat his record.
The Thirty Years’ War finally ended in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, leaving France in a strong position and Germany literally in pieces—it was now approximately 150 small independent states. While England was rebelling against its king (or maybe its king was rebelling against England), the French people attempted to rebel against their young king, but it all went nowhere. These failed rebellions would contribute to Louis’s later absolutism.
England’s monarchy was restored in 1660, after its experiment with Republicanism failed. Charles I’s son Charles was recalled from exile and became Charles II. His reign was deemed to begin at the moment of his father’s death back in 1649. The Republic and everything it had done was essentially erased.
We don’t have time to get into any of the complicated religious details related to the experiment with Republicanism, so I just want to highlight a few things. Charles II was sympathetic to the Catholics and even converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. He had no surviving sons, so his brother James succeeded him as James II. James was openly and rabidly Catholic, and he attempted to get some sort of toleration of Catholics passed in England, but was blocked by Parliament. James had no sons, so it was widely expected that he would be succeeded by his Protestant daughter Mary, who was married to William, the Prince of Orange (which was part of the Netherlands).
In 1685, King Louis XIV in France revoked the Edict of Nantes which had granted religious freedom to the Protestants of France. In response, 400,000 French Protestants emigrated, many of them to England. Then in 1688, James’s second wife bore him a son, and suddenly England was faced with the prospect of a Catholic dynasty on their throne. They couldn’t have that, so they invited William of Orange to invade and take the crown of England, as co-ruler with his wife, and a legitimate Stuart heir, Mary. They are known as William III and Mary II. This was all accomplished remarkably quickly and without any real battles.
In England, it’s known as the Glorious Revolution. In France, it was considered an abomination. From 1688 until 1697, England and France were again at war with each other in what’s known as the Nine Years’ War. On the side of England was the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Emperor, Spain, and the Duchy of Savoy. This strange alliance of Protestant and Catholic countries was trying to rein in King Louis XIV’s aggressive expansionism. This won’t be the last time the countries of Europe band together to stop France. See: Napoleon, who we’ll get to shortly.
The Nine Years’ War ended in 1697, but by 1701, Europe was at war again. This time it had to do with the very complicated succession to the Spanish throne of King Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip the Duke of Anjou. England, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire were once again allied against France, but this time, Spain was allied with France. This war would come to be known as the War of the Spanish Succession. By the time it ended in 1713, England had a new monarch. Queen Mary II had died in 1694, leaving William as sole ruler. When he died in 1702, Mary’s sister Anne became Queen Anne (so far, the only one of her name).
There was no clear winner of the War of the Spanish Succession, but France did lose the Atlantic colonies of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the English. At this point, it’s probably more accurate for me to start referring to the English as the British. The Act of Union of 1707 united Scotland with England and Wales in a way it had not previously been united, and the British Empire was beginning its long rise. Anne was officially known as the Queen of Great Britain instead of the Queen of England.
In 1714, Queen Anne died, and because her son and heir had unexpectedly died at the age of 11 in 1700, the British crown passed to a man named George, Elector of Hanover. This is what’s known as the Hanoverian Succession, and I definitely don’t have time to go into the details and the politics behind it. Suffice it to say that George was German, but he was descended from James I on his mother’s side. He became George I and established the Hanoverian dynasty.
The next year, in 1715, Louis XIV finally died. His son Louis had predeceased him (at the age of 50, I might add), and then his grandsons Louis and Charles both predeceased him. So Louis XIV was succeeded by his great-grandson, also named Louis, who became Louis XV. No one can accuse the French of being original with their names.
Louis XV was only two years old, so naturally there was a regency government in place. He took the reins of government in 1723 when he turned 20. France and Britain found themselves at war again in 1740 during what is known as the War of the Austrian Succession. Britain was an ally of Austria in this war, whereas France was allied with Frederick II of Prussia, who had kicked off the war by invading the Austrian province of Silesia.
This war lasted until 1748 and ended up benefitting Britain way more than France. By this time, the king of England was George II, who had succeeded his father in 1727. I’ll set the stage for the coming conflict between France and Britain known as the Seven Years’ War in Europe and the French and Indian War in North America with a quote from Paul Langford in Chapter 7 of The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain:
“The War of Austrian Succession had identified major areas of conflict for the future without beginning to settle them. The principal focus overseas was no longer the fate of the Spanish Empire, but the worldwide conflict threatening between Britain and France, in a mercantilist age the most successful mercantilist powers. In North America, the French sought to forge a chain from Quebec to Louisiana, cutting off the English colonies. In the West Indies there was constant bickering over disputed sugar islands, as there was in West Africa over the trade in slaves and gum. In India the factiousness and feebleness of native princes combined with the rapacity of the French and English East India Companies to create a highly volatile situation. Everything pointed to a desperate and conclusive war for empire.”
The North American portion of the French and Indian-slash-Seven Years’ War began in 1754 in what is today Pittsburgh. There was a dispute between the French and the British over trade on the Ohio River, which splits into the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River at the site of a French fort called Fort Duquesne. A young George Washington led a Virginia militia in an ambush of a French patrol, and that was the beginning of the war.
We don’t have time to delve into the details, so I’ll be brief. The alliances of the War of the Austrian Succession rearranged themselves after the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle that ended that particular war. France no longer felt that Austria was a threat, and it was more threatened by Prussia under Frederick the Great, so it allied with Austria, while the British abandoned their previous alliance with Austria and allied with Prussia. Austria and France declared war on Britain in 1756, which is the starting date for the European portion of the Seven Years’ War. Spain eventually got involved on the side of Austria and France.
Long story short, the Seven Years’ War-slash-French and Indian War did not go well for France. By the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, France had lost its colonies in Canada, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tobago. They all went to Britain. France also ceded a portion of the Louisiana Territory—the part between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains—to Britain. So the only portion of North America retained by France was the western part of the Louisiana Territory and some fishing rights in Newfoundland. But even the part of the Louisiana Territory ostensibly retained by France had been granted to Spain in a treaty that wasn’t made public until the following year.
When the Seven Years’ War started, George II was on the throne of Britain. By the time it ended, he had died and been succeeded by his son, George III. This is the King George the American colonies rebelled against during the American Revolution. By the time that conflict broke out, France had a new king as well. Louis XV died in 1774 and was succeeded by his grandson, Louis XVI.
We’ve covered the American Revolution in great detail in this podcast already, so we definitely don’t need to rehash it here. I just want to point out that in the 75-year period from 1688 to 1763, England/Britain was at war for 36 of those years. The same goes for France. So it wasn’t just the French and Indian War that had depleted Britain’s finances. It was decades of war and decades of declining financial soundness that led Britain to impose all the taxes on the American colonies that sparked the Revolution.
And after the humiliating losses incurred in the Seven Years’ War, you can see why France would be ready to stick it to Britain by aiding and abetting Britain’s rebellious colonies. And it’s a good thing too, because without French money, and eventually French ships and troops, it’s safe to say that the Americans would not have prevailed in their Revolution.
Unfortunately for France, its support of the American colonies all but bankrupted it, and eventually led to the very long, very bloody French Revolution. There were many other factors contributing to the Revolution, but we certainly don’t have time to get into them. Fearing that the Austrians and Prussians would come to the aid of the deposed king and queen, France declared war on those two great powers. In September 1792, France officially became a Republic. In January 1793, France executed King Louis XVI. The next month, France declared war on England and Holland, and then on Spain in March. Over in America, President George Washington kept the United States neutral. For the next 12 years, Europe would be embroiled in a series of conflicts which would eventually come to be known as the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1795, a young French general had made his name known by achieving victory after victory. He was Napoleon Bonaparte, and in 1799, he declared himself First Consul. In 1804, a rigged vote was held to elect Napoleon as Emperor of the French. The wars continued, and as we discussed at length in season 4, the United States was eventually dragged into war with Great Britain—the War of 1812. As we also discussed, Napoleon was defeated, abdicated, was exiled, then returned, was defeated again, abdicated again, and was exiled again. By 1815, the long nightmare of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars was finally over. This would miraculously be the last time France and Britain were on opposite sides of a war. More or less. I’ll explain more when we get to World War II.
In the meantime, Britain still had the same sovereign. George III didn’t die until 1820, and he was succeeded by his son George, who became George IV and reigned from 1820 until 1830, and then he was succeeded by his son William, who became William IV and reigned until 1837. When he died, his niece Victoria, daughter of the third son of George III, became Queen Victoria and reigned until 1901.
After the French executed Louis XVI, his son technically became Louis XVII, but he was never crowned because he died as a boy in prison during the Revolution. Upon the boy’s death in 1795, his uncle, Louis XVI’s brother, technically became Louis XVIII. But he was in exile during the Napoleon years, and didn’t become king for real until Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. This is known as the Bourbon Restoration.
Louis XVIII reigned until his death in 1824 and was succeeded by his younger brother, Charles X. Charles abdicated in 1830, during what is known as the July Revolution. Charles named his grandson Henry as his heir, but Henry was only 10 years old at the time. The French people did not take to Charles’s suggestion, and instead a distant cousin was hailed as King. He is known as King Louis-Philippe. He reigned until 1848 when he was forced to abdicate during the Revolution of 1848. The year 1848 saw a number of anti-monarchy revolutions sweep through Europe, most of which did not produce lasting change. There was no complementary revolution in Britain at the time.
The reign of Louis-Philippe saw a distinct thawing of relations between France and Britain. Louis-Philippe admired the constitutional monarchy of Britain. And what’s more, his daughter Louise was married to German Prince Leopold, who was one of future Queen Victoria’s uncles by way of marriage. Britain and France worked together to ensure that Leopold was selected to be king of the new country of Belgium, which had seceded from the Netherlands due to religious differences.
In 1843, Queen Victoria visited France and stayed with King Louis-Philippe at his country house. It was the first time an English sovereign had set foot on French soil since the Field of the Cloth of Gold way back in 1520. Louis-Philippe then visited England in 1844, which was the first time a French monarch had set foot on English soil since King John II had been taken there after being captured at the battle of Poitiers in 1356.
When Louis-Philippe abdicated amidst the Revolution of 1848, he named his grandson as his successor, but the people of France rejected him and declared another Republic. Louis-Philippe and his family escaped to England, where they were offered asylum by Queen Victoria. Louis-Philippe died there in 1850. At the end of 1848, a new president of France was elected— none other than Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon.
In 1851-52, Louis-Napoleon executed a coup that is way too complicated for me to get into, but which resulted in him becoming Emperor of the French. He would be known as Napoleon III. For those wondering what happened to Napoleon II, it turns out he was Napoleon’s son, and upon his defeat in 1815, Napoleon named him as his successor. But he was never crowned, and a few weeks later the Bourbon monarchy was restored. Napoleon II lived his life in exile. He died in 1831 at age 21.
The first time the British and the French were allies on the same side of a war was the Crimean War, which began in 1853. It all started when the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholics fell into a disagreement over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Russia supported the Orthodox; France supported the Roman Catholics. The Ottomans sided with the French, but were then badly defeated by the Russians. It was at that point that the British entered the war on the side of France, in 1854.
In 1855, Napoleon III was invited for a state visit to Britain, and met Queen Victoria and was given the Order of the Garter. I’m glossing over a lot of background drama here, but the point is that England and France were becoming friendlier. Victoria was invited to France a few months later on an official state visit, and she later wrote, “It was touching, and pleasing in the extreme, to see the alliance sealed so completely.”
The Crimean War ended in 1856, with Britain and France on the winning side. By the time France got itself embroiled in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, relations with Britain had cooled, and France was unable to count on Britain for military support. The war was a disaster, and shortly after it began Napoleon III surrendered and was placed in captivity by the Prussians. The Third Republic was declared in France, and the Empress and her son escaped to Britain. The deposed Emperor joined them there in 1871 and died in 1873. He was the last monarch of France.
After a devastating siege of Paris by the Prussians, France accepted an armistice and a peace agreement that ceded Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians. This would be a sticking point right through to World War II. As the 20th century approached, France became more and more wary of the growing power of Germany. In 1870, King William I of Prussia had also become German Emperor, and a united Germany threatened Continental Europe.
Thus, France, Britain, and Russia entered into a series of alliances with each other known as the Triple Entente of 1907. Its intent was to counter the Triple Alliance formed among Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. And that’s how France and Britain came to fight on the same side when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, sparking what we now call World War I.
As I’m sure you know, Germany was defeated in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up, and many millions of soldiers died. Everyone thought the Great War would be the last war, but the Continent was engulfed by war again only a couple of decades later.
We obviously do not have time to get into the weeds of World War II. But for our purposes, it’s important to know that as Hitler came to power in Germany, France felt like it had been hung out to dry by the British. The policy of appeasement under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain allowed Hitler to do whatever he wanted, including enlarging the German Navy, occupying the Rhineland (a demilitarized zone set up after the first World War), annexing Austria, and then annexing the Sudetenland, a border region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by ethnic Germans. All of these moves directly threatened France.
When Hitler annexed not just the Sudetenland but all of Czechoslovakia, and then invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the British had finally had enough. Both Britain and France had defensive alliances with Poland, and both countries declared war on Germany on September 3.
But then in May 1940, Germany invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands and steamrolled them all. For the next five years, the majority of France was occupied territory controlled by the Germans. The remainder of France was nominally independent, governed by the Vichy regime, but they were collaborators with the Nazis, so for all intents and purposes, France no longer existed as an Allied country.
The bravery of the French Resistance, ordinary people of France who fought back against the Nazis and the Vichy regime with everything they had, was matched only by the pettiness of the French army and navy commanders. Again, we don’t have time to get into it, but the last time that there was major military force used by the British against the French was in July 1940. In order to prevent the French navy from falling into the hands of the Germans or Italians, Britain suggested that the ships either sail to a safe port in America or the Caribbean or that they be scuttled. The French stubbornly refused both options, leaving the British with no choice but to destroy the French navy itself. Not a great outcome for ostensible allies.
This happened at Mers-el-Kebir in the Mediterranean, and for many years, it sustained bad blood between the French and British. But let’s face it, without the British, and obviously the Americans, France never would have been liberated from the Nazis, which it finally was in 1945.
Since then, Britain and France have been allies, but sometimes reluctant ones. At times they have vied for dominance of European affairs, but that role has mostly been taken on in our time by, ironically, Germany. All three of those countries are members of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in the aftermath of World War II. It’s a robust treaty among 32 countries to defend each other from attack by any entity not party to the alliance.
No one knows what the future holds, but let’s hope that it’s safe to say that Britain and France will never go to war against each other again. After literally centuries of war against each other, it’s something of a miracle that they were ever able to reconcile themselves to being allies at all. It may seem like we in 2026 are living through violent times, but I hope these last three episodes have made clear that the past was astronomically more violent than our time.
I hope you enjoyed this detour into European history! At the moment, I have no plans to do any other episodes like these, that stray so far from our main subject area. But if there’s a topic you’d like to hear more about that you think would make a good supplemental, feel free to email me at risaweaver at gmail dot com.
I’m going to take a short break, but in two weeks I’ll be back to kick off season 5 on Elizabeth and James Monroe.
Thanks for listening to this episode. As always, it was produced by me, and the music is by Matt Dull.
