Incredible story of how France seriously considered joining with Britain just 60 years ago

WITH Brexit in full throttle it may seem that Brits are drifting apart from their old ally, rival and neighbour.

But 60 years ago things couldn’t have been more different – because the UK very nearly formed a union with France.

As bonkers as it seems now, the British and French nearly became citizens of the same country on two occasions in living memory.

Just today Theresa May and French president Emmanuel Macron have been thrashing out a £45million deal on how to guard the border between the two nations.

Yet wind the clock back to the mid-1950s and the border was almost abolished.

Declassified documents held in Britain’s National Archives in London reveal an extraordinary proposal which would have seen the Queen become the monarch of France.

The British Cabinet papers concern a 1956 summit in London between Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his French counterpart Guy Mollet.  

One of the Cabinet papers 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."

At the time of the radical proposal France needed help.

And a union with its old enemy was seen as one way of averting a crisis.

It was in economic trouble and faced the escalating Suez crisis caused by Egypt.

The Middle Eastern country had just taken over the shipping canal which all of Europe’s trade with Asia went through. 

But the union proposal was stiffly rejected by Sir Anthony. 

Another plan was for the French to join the British Commonwealth and allow citizens of both countries to live and work easily between each other.

This was met warmly by the British Government but never became a reality because the next year France signed the Treaty of Rome with Germany and the other founding nations of the European Common Market.

This later turned into the EU which of course Britain is now leaving.

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Future French president General de Gaulle and Winston Churchill during World War TwoCredit: Getty – Contributor

But the 1950s union proposal was not the first time the two countries discussed merging.

In June 1940 following the allied evacuation from Dunkirk, Prime Minister Winston Churchill proposed an “indissoluble union” between Britain and France.

The idea was supposed to convince the French to stay in the war against Nazi Germany.

But it did not go down well with the French government who rejected the idea and later surrendered. 

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