Britain and the Defeated French: From Occupation to Liberation, 1940-1944 by Peter Mangold (review)

Peter Mangold's well-paced book explores Britain's complex relationship with wartime France, as represented by the Free French (in London and, from late 1942, in North Africa) and by Vichy. Churchill and De Gaulle are central players, echoing the approach of Mangold's 2006 volume The Almost Impossible Ally: Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle (I. B. Tauris). It is well known that Churchill felt genuine affection for France but was irritated by De Gaulle. Mangold offers a lively account of the highs and lows of this difficult relationship, and informative insights into the individual motives behind it. An acute portrait emerges of mutual tensions and frustrations, marked by Churchill's frequent outbursts about De Gaulle, but also of an enduring 'genuine admiration between the two men' (p. 127). More interesting for many scholars will be Mangold's account of Britain's adversarial yet often pragmatic relationship with Vichy, a less wellworn path in the study of Anglo-French relations. Vichy's Anglophobia, rooted in suspicion about British ambitions for the French Empire, is evoked in a strong narrative line of hostile Franco-British encounters: Mers-el-Kébir and Dakar in 1940; Syria and Lebanon in 1941, and Madagascar in 1942; the British raids on France from 1942. British pragmatism emerges strikingly in Mangold's plot-line on Darlan, Vichy's Admiral of the Fleet who 'converted' to become head of the French administration in North Africa following the Allied landing in November 1942. 'A shabby but inevitable compromise', one British officer commented (p. 163), which was accepted despite widespread distrust of Darlan in London. However, while the scope of the book is admirably wide-ranging, the approach and the source materials are noticeably British-centred. Writing about De Gaulle's rival for power, Giraud, Mangold notes that he 'showed no interest in coming to London' (p. 160, my emphasis). French sources are present (such as De Gaulle's and Catroux's memoirs), but many materials employed to detail French views are third-party anglophone sources (for example, comments attributed to Boisson and Giraud, p. 169, are sourced to Eisenhower's papers). Multiple citations are frequently grouped in one footnote, meaning that it is difficult to be clear about the source of information. There are several inconsistencies of French and English forms. Comité français de libération nationale is abbreviated to FCNL, referring to the English form, while Gouvernement provisoire de la République française retains the French-form abbreviation, GPRF (p. 251). Elsewhere, Lyon (p. 230) and Lyons (p. 112) appear, as do Marseille and Marseilles (p. 115). There are occasional errors of French transcription ('pourvue que', p. 111); some proper names are given incorrectly (Duchêne for Duchesne, p. 247; Helen, for Hanna, Diamond, p. 28); the seventieth anniversary of De Gaulle's first broadcast to France is given as 2011 rather than 2010 (p. 248); and incomplete book titles feature in the Bibliography (for example, those by Bell, Brooks, and by Holman and Kelly). The maps at the beginning of the volume use insufficiently clear gradations of grey to make for easy interpretation. It is regrettable that such scholarly inconsistencies and presentational issues mar an otherwise engaging study.