What if France formed a union with the UK in 1956?

"Much was made yesterday of Radio 4's enchanting scoop: a document showing that in 1956 the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, asked Anthony Eden for formal union between the UK and France. Eden blushingly turned him down ("Why, M Mollet! this is so sudden!”)", notes the journalist Libby Purves who imagines what would have happened if a 'Frangland' had been created. "Would we have taught them binge drinking, or would they have taught our young to sip? Would Englishwomen be thinner, Frenchwomen fatter? ... Would there by now be a militant French Separatist movement, or indeed a British one, and how would this affect the smaller separatisms of Scotland and the Basques? Would government have been less inclined to post-imperial guilt and anxious multiculturalism, and more like the brutally pragmatic French, who ban hijabs and interrogate terrorist suspects without a lawyer? ... Large questions and small ones cluster in, all equally beguiling."

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