Our Time Has Come

ANDERSEN / AFP/GETTY

Earlier this year, the BBC unearthed some startling documents in the British National Archives. The papers, which dated back to the Suez crisis in 1956, documented a proposal by Guy Mollet, France's Socialist Prime Minister of the time, to create a union between France and Great Britain. When his British counterpart, the Conservative Anthony Eden, flatly rejected the idea, Mollet suggested that France could instead become a member of the British Commonwealth.

The idea was quickly dropped, but the discovery of it a half-century later caused a stir on both sides of the English...

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