‘A hideously difficult country’: British propaganda to France in the early Cold War

Abstract

This article examines British propaganda efforts in France in the early Cold War in the light of a developing relationship in which the senders' own strategies were to be modified and challenged. The article argues that initiatives to broadcast propaganda from Britain into France via the BBC operated within a broader and developing information policy context. Broadcasting from outside the country through the BBC was supplemented with attempts by British personnel stationed in France to embed positive messages directly within the contemporary French media. By 1950 however, the British propaganda initiative seemed inappropriate and outmoded, taken over by the French themselves and by a British desire to prioritise countries outside Western Europe.