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.
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.