ABSTRACT
For many years after the Second World War there was a tendency to characterise French foreign policy in the late 1930s as being subservient to that of Britain; that France obeyed her ‘English governess’.1 The FrancoBritish appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938, initiated by Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, and culminating in the Munich Agreement of September, appeared the classic confirmation of this view. Anthony Adamthwaite, however, has demonstrated convincingly that as far as the appeasement of Germany was concerned France was not dragged along unwillingly on the coat tails of Britain, rather that ‘in practice French policy was much more assertive and independent than supposed’. Certainly this was true of France’s relations concerning fascist Italy, as William Shorrock has demonstrated.2 For example, Edouard Daladier, the French Prime Minister, was resisting British pleas to get on better terms with the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, as late as July 1939. In view of this reevaluation of French foreign policy, it is surprising that some historians still persist in seeing Britain as the only real villain responsible for the demise of the second Spanish Republic in 1939, with France cast as an unwilling, almost innocent accomplice unable to resist British demands to maintain non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War even if occasionally she took action or adopted a stance which would benefit the Republican cause.3
