Abstract
The main thrust of this chapter, in some contrast to the previous one, will be to examine the Franco-American relationship of the 1930s, with the British somewhat in the background. The rationale for this is that the essentials of the Franco-British relationship were the focus of the previous chapter and the more interesting, and maybe more original, focus in the 1930s is on the Franco-American relationship. This is because the United States had had a much longer positive relationship with France and the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ was by no means cemented before the 1940s. France thus presented a possible alternative for the United States to Britain in a search for an ‘interlocuteur valable’ in a troubled Europe. It is only if we read history backwards, in the light of the French defeat of 1940, that we see France as the ‘decadent’ country that many historians and politicians have depicted it as having been.
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Notes
In a very crowded field: K. Robbins, Appeasement, 2nd edn (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997);
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For a comprehensive account of this process see Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance; R. Douglas, New Alliances, 1940–41 (London: Macmillan, 1982).
Mentioned in Neilson, ‘An Excellent Conning-Tower ….’, pp. 263–264; P. Bell, ‘The Foreign Office and the 1939 Royal Visit to America: Courting the USA in an Era of Isolationism’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2002, pp. 599–616; The smoking discussion figured in a cartoon by Sidney (George) Strube, in the Daily Express, 9 June 1939, British Cartoon Library, University of Kent.
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The quote is from: I. Drummond, Imperial Economic Policy, 1917–1939 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), p. 31.
For more on the Conference see Dallek FDR and American Foreign Policy, pp. 36–38, and ‘State Department Memorandum on United States Monetary and Economic Policy’, 3.4.33 [in which the Gold Standard was seen as ‘essential to world recovery’], E.B. Nixon (ed.), Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, Vol. 1, January 1933—February 1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, Belknap Press, 1969), pp. 35–39.
See also K. Mouré, Managing the Franc Poincaré: Economic Understanding and Political Constraint in French Monetary Policy, 1928–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Laboulaye to Laval, 8 and 16 January 1935, MAE Correspondance Politique et Commerciale, 1914–1940, Box 304. On the Hoare-Laval Pact see: R. Overy with A. Wheatcroft, The Road to War (London: Vintage, 2009), chapter 4 ‘Italy’.
Williams , Trading with the Bolsheviks, chapter 5; Stimson Diary, entry of 22 February 1931, and Reel 4, op. cit., entries for 24 April 1932 and 16 May 1932.
I.M. Wall, ‘Teaching the French Popular Front’, The History Teacher, Vol. 20, No. 3 (May 1987), pp. 361–378.
For the most recent summary of this debate see: G. Bailey, Aircraft for Survival. Anglo-American Aircraft Supply Diplomacy, 1938–1942, PhD, University of Dundee, 2010,
and R.J. Young, ‘The Strategic Dream: French Air Doctrine in the Inter-War Period, 1919–39’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 9, No. 4 (1974), pp. 65–67.
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Williams, A.J. (2014). France, Britain and the United States in the 1930s until the Fall of France. In: France, Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century 1900–1940. Studies in Diplomacy and International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315458_5
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