Despite liberation and victory, Franco-British relations in 1945 were not good. Setting aside the complex memories left by the war, the two countries were violently opposed in Syria and Lebanon and the British took exception to the Franco-Soviet pact of 10 December 1944. Yet though the British had an excessive, though understandable sense of superiority, they both got on with it.
In the longer term, the war confirmed and further underlined the diverging geopolitical and even cultural orientations of the two countries: for the United Kingdom it would clearly be towards the Atlantic, independently even of the Commonwealth. For France it would be the continent or, at most, European-influenced Africa—on that, both Vichy and free France had in fact been in agreement. And yet this divergence would return again and again: its latest, and current resurgence is with Brexit.
Despite everything, from the summer of 1946 and with the hardening of Soviet policy, the British and French began a phase of rapprochement, the first step of which was the Treaty of Dunkirk of 4 March 1947—an alliance against possible resurgence of the German danger and more particularly against the USSR.
The coup d’état in Czechoslovakia on 25 February 1948 gave a boost to this development; the Franco-British conversations on the security of Western Europe accelerated and resulted on 17 March 1948 in the Brussels Pact made between the United Kingdom, France and the three Benelux countries. The Pact included a military assistance clause as provision against Germany (it was not possible not to mention the country by name) and also against any other country— which therefore included the USSR, and which was of course the principal objective…