Voulez-vous convoler avec moi?

In this blog, I have already mentioned at length the ambiguous relationship between France and the UK. But if I were to refer to a recent press release, it would seem that I under-estimated this bond.

In this article, you can indeed read that both countries once evoked a wedding...

Some archivists have sourced an amazing document from the late 50s that could be seen as a pre-nup draft contract. France was then struggling with Independentists in Algeria, and the Suez Crisis was at its paroxysm. Government leader, M. Nollet, investigated in 1956 a possible union of both countries to find a favourable issue. If this idea was rapidly cast aside, the possibility of France joining the Commonwealth had a slightly longer life.

Reactions on both sides of the Channel are interesting. If everyone agrees that this confidential approach was born-dead or even a political manoeuvre to sort out the crisis in the Middle-East, it seems that there is also a consensus on the fact that this awkward document is another brilliant evidence of centuries of tight inter-relations.

It also opens a wide array of possibilities that will never happen... TimesOnline starts its list with the following:

If only we'd got it together...
- Britain would still have a thriving car industry
- The trains might just run on time
- The Channel Tunnel, an idea first mooted in the 1750s and developed by the Victorians, would have been opened at least 20 years earlier
- The end of disputes about “champagne” made in Sussex and Somerset brie
- Arsenal would stop fielding a team full of “foreigners” and England would have won the World Cup more than once
- The empire would grow from a handful of small islands to a slightly larger handful of small islands
- Tales of SAS derring do would include attacks on Greenpeace ship.

The list is endless, so let your imagination work... and get the best of two worlds. On the other hand, this reminds me a frightening anecdote.

Albert Einstein was starting to gain a certain international recognition for his work when he started to receive all sorts of propositions. One of them was from a beautiful model who wrote him: "With your intelligence and my beauty, our children could only be ideally armed to success". He rejected her proposal, replying that he was afraid their heirs could inherit from her intelligence and his beauty!!!

There are always two sides to a medal, so don't look back. Old love stories must sometimes remain memories. Who knows? The long-expected honey moon might be ahead. Or even happening now.