History of French foreign relations

Overseas empire in the nineteenth century

Starting with its scattered small holdings in India, West Indies and Latin America, France began rebuilding its world empire. It took control of Algeria in 1830 and began in earnest to rebuild its worldwide empire after 1850, concentrating chiefly in North and West Africa, as well as South-East Asia, with other conquests in Central and East Africa, as well as the South Pacific. Republicans, at first hostile to empire, only became supportive when Germany started to build her own colonial empire In the 1880s. As it developed the new empire took on roles of trade with France, especially supplying raw materials and purchasing manufactured items, as well as lending prestige to the motherland and spreading French civilization and language, and the Catholic religion. It also provided manpower in the World Wars.

It became a moral mission to lift the world up to French standards by bringing Christianity and French culture. In 1884 the leading exponent of colonialism, Jules Ferry declared; "The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior races." Full citizenship rights – assimilation – was a long-term goal, but in practice colonial officials were reluctant to extend full citizenship rights. France sent small numbers of white permanent settlers to its empire, in sharp contrast to Britain, Spain and Portugal. The notable exception was Algeria, where the French settlers nonetheless always remained a but powerful minority.

Napoleon III

Despite his promises in 1852 of a peaceful reign, Napoleon III could not resist the temptations of glory in foreign affairs. He was visionary, mysterious and secretive; he had a poor staff, and kept running afoul of his domestic supporters. In the end he was incompetent as a diplomat. Napoleon did have some successes: he strengthened French control over Algeria, established bases in Africa, began the takeover of Indochina, and opened trade with China. He facilitated a French company building the Suez Canal, which Britain could not stop. In Europe, however, Napoleon failed again and again.

The Crimean war of 1854–1856 against Russia, in alliance with Britain and the Ottoman Empire, produced no gains. War with Austria in 1859 facilitated the unification of Italy, and Napoleon was rewarded with the annexation of Savoy and Nice. The British grew annoyed at his intervention in Syria in 1860–61. He angered Catholics alarmed at his poor treatment of the Pope, then reversed himself and angered the anticlerical liberals at home and his erstwhile Italian allies. He lowered the tariffs, which helped in the long run but in the short run angered owners of large estates and the textile and iron industrialists, while leading worried workers to organize. Matters grew worse in the 1860s as Napoleon nearly blundered into war with the United States in 1862. His Plan to take control of Mexico in 1861–1867 was a total disaster. The United States forced him to evacuate his army from Mexico, and his puppet Emperor was executed.

Finally Napoleon was outmaneuvered by Otto von Bismarck and went to war with the Germans in 1870 when it was too late to stop German unification. Napoleon had alienated everyone; after failing to obtain an alliance with Austria and Italy, France had no allies and was bitterly divided at home. It was disastrously defeated on the battlefield, losing Alsace and Lorraine. A.J.P. Taylor is blunt: "he ruined France as a great power."

Late 19th century

In the early 1880s, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was exploring the Kongo Kingdom for France, at the same time Henry Morton Stanley explored it in on behalf of Léopold II of Belgium, who would have it as his personal Congo Free State (see section below). France occupied Tunisia in May 1881. In 1884, France occupied Guinea. French West Africa (AOF) was founded in 1895, and French Equatorial Africa in 1910.

In the 1875-1898 era, serious tensions with Britain erupted over African issues. At several points war was possible, but it never happened. One brief but dangerous dispute occurred during the Fashoda Incident when French troops tried to claim an area in the Southern Sudan, and a British force purporting to be acting in the interests of the Khedive of Egypt arrived. Under heavy pressure the French withdrew securing Anglo-Egyptian control over the area. The status quo was recognised by an agreement between the two states acknowledging British control over Egypt, while France became the dominant power in Morocco. France had failed in its main goals. P.M.H. Bell says, "Between the two governments there was a brief battle of wills, with the British insisting on immediate and unconditional French withdrawal from Fashoda. The French had to accept these terms, amounting to a public humiliation....Fashoda was long remembered in France as an example of British brutality and injustice."

During the Scramble for Africa in the 1870s and 1880s, the British and French generally recognised each other's spheres of influence. The Suez Canal, initially built by the French, became a joint British-French project in 1875, as both saw it as vital to maintaining their influence and empires in Asia. In 1882, ongoing civil disturbances in Egypt (see Urabi Revolt) prompted Britain to intervene, extending a hand to France. France's expansionist Prime Minister Jules Ferry was out of office, and the government was unwilling to send more than an intimidatory fleet to the region. Britain established a protectorate, as France had a year earlier in Tunisia, and popular opinion in France later put this action down to duplicity. It was about this time that the two nations established co-ownership of Vanuatu. The Anglo-French Convention of 1882 was also signed to resolve territory disagreements in western Africa.

Entry into war

In spring 1939 both Britain and France formally announced they would defend the integrity of Poland. Hitler did not believe they would fight in such a faraway hopeless cause, and he invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war on September 3, 1939. But there was little they could or did do to help Poland.

French Republic

France and Britain together declared war against Germany two days after it invaded Poland. Apart from the British Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa), no independent nation joined their cause. Britain and France took a defensive posture, fearing German air attacks on cities. France hoped the Maginot Line would protect it from an invasion. There was little fighting between the fall of Poland in mid-September and the following spring; it was the Phoney War in Britain or Drôle de guerre – the funny sort of war – in France. Britain tried several peace feelers, but Hitler did not respond.

When Germany had its hands free for an attack in the west, it launched its Blitzkrieg against Denmark and Norway, easily pushing the British out. Then it invaded the Low Countries and tricked Britain and France into sending its best combat units deep into the Netherlands, where they became trapped in the Battle of France in May 1940. The Royal Navy rescued over 300,000 British and French soldiers from Dunkirk, but left behind all the equipment.

Paris fell to the Germans on 14 June 1940, and the government surrendered on 24 June 1940. Nazi Germany occupied three-fifths of France's territory, leaving the rest in the southeast to the new Vichy government, which was a bit more than a puppet state since it still had a navy. However nearly 2 million French soldiers became prisoners of war in Germany. They served as hostages and forced laborers in German factories. The United States suddenly realized Germany was on the verge of controlling practically all of Europe, and it determined to rapidly build up its small Army and Air Force, and expand its Navy. Sympathy with Britain was high, and many were willing to send munitions, but few Americans called for war.

Vichy France

The fall of France in June 1940 brought a new regime known as Vichy France. Theoretically it was neutral, but in practice it was partly controlled by Germany until November 1942, when Germany took full control. Vichy was intensely conservative and anti-Communist, but it was practically helpless with Germany controlling half of France directly and holding nearly two million French POWs as hostages. Vichy finally collapsed when the Germans fled in summer 1944.

The United States granted Vichy full diplomatic recognition, sending Admiral William D. Leahy to Paris as American ambassador. President Roosevelt hoped to use American influence to encourage those elements in the Vichy government opposed to military collaboration with Germany. Vichy still controlled its overseas colonies and Washington encouraged Vichy to resist German demands such as for air bases in Syria or to move war supplies through French North Africa. The essential American position was that France should take no action not explicitly required by the armistice terms that could adversely affect Allied efforts in the war. When Germany took full control the U.S. and Canada cut their ties.

French fleet

Britain feared that the French naval fleet could end up in German hands and be used against its own naval forces, which were so vital to maintaining north Atlantic shipping and communications. Under the armistice, France had been allowed to retain the French Navy, the Marine Nationale, under strict conditions. Vichy pledged that the fleet would never fall into the hands of Germany, but refused to send the fleet beyond Germany's reach by sending it to Britain or to far away territories of the French empire such as the West Indies. Shortly after France gave up it attacked a large French naval contingent in Mers-el-Kebir, killing 1,297 French military personnel. Vichy severed diplomatic relations but did not declare war on Britain. Churchill also ordered French ships in British ports to be seized by the Royal Navy. The French squadron at Alexandria, Egypt, under Admiral René-Emile Godfroy, was effectively interned until 1943.

The American position towards Vichy France and Free France was inconsistent. President Roosevelt disliked and distrusted de Gaulle, and agreed with Ambassador Leahy's view that he was an "apprentice dictator."

North Africa

Preparing for a landing in North Africa in late 1942, the US looked for a top French ally. It turned to Henri Giraud shortly before the landing on 8 November 1942, but he had little local support. By hapstance the Vichy leader Admiral François Darlan was captured and supported the Americans. The Allies, with General Dwight D. Eisenhower in charge, signed a deal with Admiral Darlan on 22 November 1942 in which the Allies recognized Darlan as high commissioner for North Africa and West Africa. The Allied world was stunned at giving a high command to man who days before had been collaborating with the Nazis; Roosevelt and Churchill supported Eisenhower, for he was following a plan that had been worked out in London and had been approved by Roosevelt and Churchill. Darlan was assassinated on 24 December 1942, so Washington turned again towards Giraud, who was made High Commissioner of French North and West Africa. Giraud failed to build a political base and was displaced by the last man with any standing, de Gaulle.

Free France

Free France was the insurgent French government based in London and the overseas French colonies and led by charismatic general Charles de Gaulle. He was the most senior French military officer to reject the June 1940 surrender ("Armistice") and oppose the Vichy government of Marshall Pétain. From London on 18 June 1940 he gave an impassioned radio address exhorting the patriotic French people to resist Nazi Germany He organized the Free French Forces from soldiers that had escaped with the British at Dunkirk. With British military support the Free French gradually gained control of all French colonies except Indochina, which the Japanese controlled. The U.S., Britain and Canada wanted Vichy to keep nominal control of the small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon for reasons of prestige, but de Gaulle seized them anyway in late 1941.

When the British and Americans landed in France in June 1944 de Gaulle headed a government in exile based in London, but he continued to create diplomatic problems for the U.S. and Britain. He refused to allow French soldiers to land on D-Day, and insisted that France be treated as a great power by the other Allies, and that he himself was the only representative of France. Roosevelt disliked him, but he had Churchill's support. The U.S. and Britain allowed de Gaulle the honor of being the first to march into Paris at the head of his army after the Germans had fled.

Cold War

The Cold War Beginning 1947, as Britain and the United States started providing aid to Greece and Turkey, in order to prevent a Communist takeover.

The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was the American initiative 1948-1951 to aid Europe, in which the United States gave away $17 billion (approximately $160 billion in current dollar value) in economic support to help rebuild European economies and foster European unity in the face of Soviet threats. France received $2.3 billion about 18% of the total. This allowed France to make heavy purchases of food and machinery from the United States. The Marshall Plan required a lessening of interstate barriers, a dropping of many petty regulations constraining business, and encouraged increase productivity, labour Union membership, and the adoption of modern business procedures.

France, the United States, Britain, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Following Soviet refusals to participate in a German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948, the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of West Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in April 1949.

Indochina War (1946-1954)

The First Indochina War (generally known as the Indochina War in France) began in French Indochina on 19 December 1946 and lasted until 1 August 1954. Fighting between French forces and their Communist opponents known as the Viet Minh began in September 1945. The conflict pitted a range of forces, including the French Union's French Far East Expeditionary Corps, led by France and supported by Emperor Bảo Đại's Vietnamese National Army against the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. Most of the fighting took place in Tonkin in Northern Vietnam, along with Chinese border. The conflict eventually reached most of Vietnam and also extended into the neighboring French Indochina protectorates of Laos and Cambodia.

After the Japanese surrendered, Chinese forces in September 1945 entered Tonkin and a small British task force landed at Saigon. The Chinese accepted the Vietnamese government under Ho Chi Minh, created by resistance forces of the Viet Minh, then in power in Hanoi. The British refused to do likewise in Saigon, and deferred to the French there from the outset, against the ostensible support of the Viet Minh by American OSS representatives. On V-J Day, September 2, Ho Chi Minh, had proclaimed in Hanoi the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The DRV ruled as the only civil government in all of Vietnam for a period of about 20 days, after the abdication of the "Japanese puppet", Emperor Bảo Đại. On 23 September 1945, French forces overthrew the local DRV government, and declared French authority restored in Cochinchina. Guerrilla warfare began around Saigon immediately.

The first few years of the war involved a low-level rural insurgency against French authority. However, after the Chinese communists reached the Northern border of Vietnam in 1949, the conflict turned into a conventional war between two armies equipped with modern weapons supplied by the United States and the Soviet Union. French Union forces included colonial troops from the whole empire (Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese ethnic minorities), French professional troops and units of the French Foreign Legion. The use of metropolitan recruits was forbidden by the government to prevent the war from becoming even more unpopular at home. It was called the "dirty war" (la sale guerre) by the Left in France.

While the strategy of pushing the Viet Minh into attacking a well-defended base in a remote part of the country at the end of their logistical trail was validated at the Battle of Nà Sản, the lack of construction materials (especially concrete), tanks (because of lack of road access and difficulty in the jungle terrain), and air cover precluded an effective defense, culminating in a decisive French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

At the international Geneva Conference on July 21, 1954 the new socialist French government and the Viet Minh made an agreement that was denounced by the government of Vietnam and by the United States, but which effectively gave the Communists control of North Vietnam above the 17th parallel. South Vietnam, with heavy American support. continued under Emperor Bảo Đại. In 1955 Bảo Đại would be deposed by his prime minister, Ngô Đình Diệm, creating the Republic of Vietnam. Soon an insurgency backed by the North developed against Diệm's government. The conflict gradually escalated into the Vietnam War.