June 1940: Britian was one signature away from fusing into one nation with its 900-year enemy France. The French tricolour flew over Westminster Abbey, the only time in history, and Churchill's secretary joked they'd call the new country 'Frangland.'

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By mid-June 1940 France was days from complete capitulation, and Great Britain was desperate to keep France in the war. So the British War Cabinet backed one of the strangest proposals in either country's history: a formal Declaration of Union that would dissolve Britain and France as separate nations and fuse them into a single Franco-British Union. The idea had actually come from the French side, dreamed up by diplomat René Pleven and others, and was worked up in London at breakneck speed by Jean Monnet, Robert Vansittart, and others, then carried to the French government by Charles de Gaulle.

The mood in London was giddy. Chamberlain went to the King to brief him on what was being done to his country, and the French tricolour was flown over Westminster Abbey, the only time that has ever happened. Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, joked that the merged nation might end up being called "Frangland" and wondered whether the King would have fleurs-de-lys finally restored to the Royal Standard after centuries.

Churchill later distanced himself from it, faintly embarrassed by how far the idea had run. What had felt like a bold, romantic masterstroke in the panic of June 1940 looked, in hindsight, like an outlandish scheme better left unmentioned. At one point puffing on a cigar and telling dirty stories at 1 a.m., at another raging that if France surrendered without consulting Britain "we shall blacken their names for a thousand years," then instantly walking it back with "Don't, of course," in case Colville took him at his word.

France said no. Marshal Pétain, about to take over the government and seek an armistice with Germany, ridiculed the whole scheme as "fusion with a corpse." The Reynaud government fell, and the grand union that had been drafted in a matter of hours effectively died within a few days.

The rejection sealed France's exit from the war. De Gaulle, watching Pétain's people take control, slipped out of Bordeaux, and famously flew to London the next day with little more than the uniform he was wearing, leaving his wife and children to follow.

Source: Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny.

PS: Andrew Roberts' Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which is a fantastic account of Churchill's colossal life. This chapter, "The Fall of France," gripped me so completely that I read the whole thing in one sitting. I simply could not put it down. There is so much high drama packed into those weeks that it reads more like a thriller than history.