there was more to London’s stance in 1950 than imperial self-delusion or bloody-mindedness. Britain, as Jean Monnet would later acknowledge in his memoirs, had not been invaded or occupied: ‘she felt no need to exorcise history.’ The British experienced World War Two as a moment of national reconciliation and rallying together, rather than as a corrosive rent in the fabric of the state and nation, which was how it was remembered across the Channel. In France the war had revealed everything that was wrong with the nation’s political culture; in Britain, it had seemed to confirm everything that
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