All the issues raised by de Gaulle would have come up even if he had not returned to power. The American President Eisenhower observed in November 1957 that the French government was threatening ‘the most dire things such as a complete breakup of the Atlantic Alliance’.8 Harold Macmillan noted in his diary a month later: ‘All kinds of usual accusations about perfide Albion. We and the Americans are accused of (a) trying to dominate NATO … (c) preventing France becoming a nuclear power etc.’9 Such Anglo-American concerns about France would become ever more familiar over the next few years. At
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