AHC: Cold War Non-Aligned France

With a PoD no later than 1943, achieve non-aligned (democratic if we can) France. Bonus if she would be ruled by a communist PM for some time.
 
Not that hard, get the US to piss off the Frogs even harder after World War II while being less competent, and you could actually see France leaving NATO unlike OTL.
 
They go full military dictatorship in the 50s to preserve their crumbling empire and eventually become the voice of the Third World making economic and political agreements with various African, Asian, and South American leaders as they compete for markets and clout. The latter occurs as deals are made with colonial subjects to fill the military ranks in order to hold Algeria and the state goes grimdark with the methods needed to do so (knowledge of the atrocities stay hidden, the rebellious Algerians are viewed as religious extremists vs an oppressed people, urged on by outsiders with an agenda rather than by French misrule). The willingness to extend meritorious opportunities to non-whites is used as an example of French progressivism. Once the French have nukes, NO ONE is leaving the empire. Viewed as a pariah by the West, the French are forced to invest in their colonies and look elsewhere for opportunities.

Would be a weird but interesting scenario.
 
If Germany was divided into three occupational zones (USA, UK, USSR) instead of OTL four, would that make France more anti-American? Or at least strenghten Communist Party of France in post-war elections?
 
France left NATO in 1966
Nope. It left the integrated command of NATO in 1966, which is a VERY different thing.

If it left NATO, then why are there French troops in Afghanistanas part of NATO’s operation there, hmm? Oh, by the way, it reintegrated said integrated command under Sarkozy, who was president between 2007 and 2012 while the French troops answered the US’ call for help in 2001 as part of their treaty obligations.
 
Nope. It left the integrated command of NATO in 1966, which is a VERY different thing.

If it left NATO, then why are there French troops in Afghanistanas part of NATO’s operation there, hmm? Oh, by the way, it reintegrated said integrated command under Sarkozy, who was president between 2007 and 2012 while the French troops answered the US’ call for help in 2001 as part of their treaty obligations.

Cooperation agreements were signed with NATO, but technically France was technically not part of the whole NATO things, it was a bit distant. I must admit I don't get how the whole NATO work, and I know Sarkozy reintegrated NATO in 2007. I however didn't know that there was still a strong alliance between NATO and France, that's interesting
 
Cooperation agreements were signed with NATO, but technically France was technically not part of the whole NATO things, it was a bit distant. I must admit I don't get how the whole NATO work, and I know Sarkozy reintegrated NATO in 2007. I however didn't know that there was still a strong alliance between NATO and France, that's interesting
Once again, wrong. France never left NATO. It left the integrated command, meaning that if WW3 happened, British, West German, Dutch, Belgian, etc., troops would be under a unified command but the French ones wouldn’t, even though they would fight alongside. You can see in wargaming exercises done by the US in the Eighties that the French troops are considered as part of the rest, with interesting remarks about expected Soviet advances towards Paris with neutrality offers. The big reason for leaving the integrated command was that, bluntly, we didn’t trust the US with our interests in mind. So we kept our military under our own command, unlike the Brits who coordinated even the nuclear response, because after Suez, noone really believed the US would sacrifice New York to protect Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO
France withdrew from the integrated military command in 1966 to pursue an independent defense system but returned to full participation in 2009.

The myth of France leaving NATO is the result of very bad history teaching, on the level of the myth of France and UK running out of precision bombs in Libya (it was Denmark that did).
 
Don't give France all of its back. If the US told the French that their protectorates over Morocco, Tunisia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are to be ended immediately and establishes independent Constitutional Monarchies in all of them, the French will be very angry. The Americans will have gone from liberators to "thieves of their empire" (even though it is anti-imperialism if anything).

France, unhappy with the Americans, refuses to join NATO. Western European integration TTL is oriented around an Anglo-German tilt rather than a Franco-German one.
 
Find some way to prevent the May 1947 Crises. Perhaps the American threats of cutting aid if the Communists aren't excluded from government get leaked causing a backlash. The Americans are forced to back-pedal and guarantee continued aid but the damage is done and the Communists gain a boost in both countries and remain influential in government. Either country aligning with the Soviet Union would probably be politically impossible but non-alignment would be viable.
 
France left NATO in 1966

NO,

France didn't left NATO in 1966.

France were upset by the Americans who command NATO in two occasions at least :

NATO refused that the French used more airpower in the Algerian War by blocking french airforce units in NATO service.

The Americans were upset that the French developed their own atomic and nuclear weapon and asked to control it.
 
Cooperation agreements were signed with NATO, but technically France was technically not part of the whole NATO things, it was a bit distant. I must admit I don't get how the whole NATO work, and I know Sarkozy reintegrated NATO in 2007. I however didn't know that there was still a strong alliance between NATO and France, that's interesting

NO...

From Wikipedia :

France withdrew from the integrated military command in 1966 to pursue an independent defense system but returned to full participation in 2009.

Doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defense against a prospective Soviet invasion – doubts that led to the development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of France from NATO's military structure in 1966.
 
They go full military dictatorship in the 50s to preserve their crumbling empire and eventually become the voice of the Third World making economic and political agreements with various African, Asian, and South American leaders as they compete for markets and clout. The latter occurs as deals are made with colonial subjects to fill the military ranks in order to hold Algeria and the state goes grimdark with the methods needed to do so (knowledge of the atrocities stay hidden, the rebellious Algerians are viewed as religious extremists vs an oppressed people, urged on by outsiders with an agenda rather than by French misrule). The willingness to extend meritorious opportunities to non-whites is used as an example of French progressivism. Once the French have nukes, NO ONE is leaving the empire. Viewed as a pariah by the West, the French are forced to invest in their colonies and look elsewhere for opportunities.

Would be a weird but interesting scenario.
This sounds like the plot of For All Time where a military regime in Paris fights to hold the colonies until the last man and teams up with various lil buddies like Franco, Salazar, and an independent Sardinia to form a latin, catholic, and vaguely reactionary fascistic system. Eventually Jean Bedel Bokassa becomes a Napoleon II: electric Boogaloo when France sees a period of major crisis.
 
Could France hold onto Algeria if it just fills the territory with African and Asian settlers until Arab Algerians are a minority? If they can provide the proper economic incentives and give French citizenship to any subject from Indochina or West and Central Africa willing to move there they could try to attract enough immigrants. The white South Africans were too divided between the English and Boers to consider immigration that would upset their ethnic balance, but the French may be willing to try this if they care more about keeping the territory than maintaining Pied Noir minority rule.

If an authoritarian regime tries to hold the empire together, it would probably need some kind of mass mobilizing ideology that gets people politically active in support of the regime. It would have to be some kind of vaguely integralist regime that tries to hold the empire together by creating erasing the cultural and racial distinctions of local territories. Arabs and Vietnamese would be "Muslim Frenchmen" or French subjects of the "Buddhist faith".

Brazilian ultra-nationalists like Integralist Action have pushed a multiracial form of ultranationalism like this that either predicts some kind of superior mixed race people with the "best" characteristics from every other group or sees them all as part of a unified cultural state.
 
If the Fall of France is done differently somehow, with Free France not being a thing perhaps. If France is largely let go by Germany as an aligned, but not puppet, state then it could survive the war in that form. Semi-authoritarian and nationalist, but still acceptable enough to not be taken down with the Reich. Of course there's no reason for Germany to do this, but it's one way for France to reemerge as a state with a more independent foreign policy.
 
This sounds like the plot of For All Time where a military regime in Paris fights to hold the colonies until the last man and teams up with various lil buddies like Franco, Salazar, and an independent Sardinia to form a latin, catholic, and vaguely reactionary fascistic system. Eventually Jean Bedel Bokassa becomes a Napoleon II: electric Boogaloo when France sees a period of major crisis.
So pretty damn entertaining!!!
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If the Fall of France is done differently somehow, with Free France not being a thing perhaps. If France is largely let go by Germany as an aligned, but not puppet, state then it could survive the war in that form. Semi-authoritarian and nationalist, but still acceptable enough to not be taken down with the Reich. Of course there's no reason for Germany to do this, but it's one way for France to reemerge as a state with a more independent foreign policy.
The narrative of the French resistance was little more than a useful fiction of postwar state-building for the fourth republic. There's a tendency today to read history backwards to the French revolution and read France as an inherently left-wing, revolutionary, or statist country compared to the English speaking peoples.

The third republic had fierce polarization between the socialist left and a more rural, catholic and even monarchist right. There was little to no resistance in the mainland until after 1942, and much of the French right was happy to collaborate as long as Petain was the figurehead of a de jure independent France. After the war france had a mini reign of terror where collaborators where publicly shamed, humiliated, or murder in revenge for what the did during the war.

French politics and the French right even more so, were rebuilt from the ground-up around De Gaulle's image as a war hero and a newly secular Gaullist conservatism.

It's pretty easy to find photos of French women with shaved heads from the liberation who were punished for "horizontal collaboration" (sleeping with German officers) during the occupation.
 
Yeah, of course. An apartheid Maghreb, state-sponsored cannibalism, Breton separatist terrorism and no nuclear taboo!
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Some of us find ATL Corman style fascinating (odd, out there, and only JUST believable as a knock-off of our own).
 
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