Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America, 1945-2016
R T Howard

In early 1947, French intelligence officers received reports that foreign spies were instigating rebellion in some of their overseas colonies. The alleged culprits were not Soviets or their communist sympathisers but British and American agents. And the reports confirmed their deepest fears - that ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ were secretly conspiring to seize France’s empire for their own selves and demote France to the rank of a second-rate power.

Drawing on original French, British and American archival sources and interviews, this book tells the true story of the ‘Great Game’ that France has played against Britain and America since 1945. The story moves from the forests of Madagascar in the late 1940s, where the French shadowed the mysterious British operative ‘Major Morris’, to the plains of Indochina, where France manoeuvred against the American forces it was dependent upon to beat back communism; and from the Middle East in the mid-1950s, when France tried to wrest Israel away from the United States, to Central Africa in the late 1990s, when Paris fought a war by proxy with the Americans. It looks at the ‘last Anglo-French War’- in Biafra in 1968 - as well as ‘the first Franco-American’ conflict, in North Africa in 1942. And it tells the true story of how anti-British elements within the French government secretly assisted the Argentine forces during the Falklands war - causing panic in Whitehall and nearly rupturing relations between London and Paris.

This is a story of extraordinary and remarkable personalities - spies, adventurers, gun-runners and conniving politicians - who shaped the course of events in the post-war period.