Duff Cooper and Western European union, 1944–47.

Abstract

Duff Cooper fell in love with France during his first visit to Paris in 1900 and he remained faithful to her for the rest of his life. The fact that Paris in 1900 was deeply Anglophobic, because of the Boer war, had no effect upon Cooper's feelings for the city. His affection for France was no fair-weather plant. It was deepened by the experience of nine months in the trenches in the Great War and was, thereafter, proof against all discouragements. As a young Foreign Office clerk in 1923 he did not join in the fashionable disparagement of France inspired by the French occupation of the Ruhr. As Minister of War from 1935 to 1937 he fought for the creation of a British army which would be large enough to play a continental role and later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was a leading advocate of Anglo-French co-operation. After his resignation in protest against the Munich agreement, Cooper spent his time fostering the idea of an Anglo-French alliance as the corner-stone of a European combination against Hitler's Germany. His love for France even survived the fall of France in June 1940 and, at a time when many francophiles were repenting of their former faith. Cooper renewed his pledges of devotion. Speaking on the wireless as Minister of Information on the eve of the Franco-German armistice, he declared his faith that France would rise again: ‘This is not the first time that a great nation has been defeated and has recovered from defeat. They have fought with heroism against superior numbers and superior weapons; their losses have been terrible.’ At the Ministry of Information Cooper was one of the earliest patrons of General de Gaulle and his Free French Movement. Given such a long history of Francophilia what could have been more natural than that he should have been appointed as Britain's first post-war ambassador to France. It was not, however, quite so simple as that.