Introduction

Abstract

This book is about Anglo-French relations in the middle-1930s. By then the Entente Cordiale had vanished as the governing principle of British and French foreign policies. But the pressure of events, especially German rearmament and Hitler’s diplomacy, forced the governments on both sides of the Channel to revive the Entente Cordiale as their indispensable alignment. Alliance with Britain was the first goal of every Frenchman who saw a danger to France in a strong, expansionist Germany; and, although the British always were more uneasy about it than the French, the Entente Cordiale was a conditioned reflex, shaping the pattern of response in London as well as in Paris to the threat of war that became manifest after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. Put another way, this study examines why both governments, but especially the British, found it so difficult to accept the truth of bad news and to act on it.