wolf_brother
Banned
The whole relationship could best be described as an one sided crush. Napoleon III was comitted to an alliance with England and made it the cornerstone of his foreign policy (he wanted to avoid the mistakes of his uncle) but the British were indifferent to his advances and only gave in when it suited them.
Not so one-sided; many within the British establishment we're great fans of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, including Palmerston himself, who personally congratulated Bonaparte on the coup d'état on 2 December 1851 - which Bonaparte took to be British approval. Hell, even Victoria was personally and diplomatically enamored with the emperor. The British certainly had no quarrel with the French when they intervened in Cochinchina, Syria, Mexico, or Korea, nor did the British overly care much when France involved itself in the Campagne d'Italie. Hell the two nations worked closely together intervening in Argentina, China, and Japan. Likewise Paris didn't worry itself about the British colonial campaigns in Burma, Nicaragua, Persia, West Africa, Bhutan, or Ethiopia, and nor did the the French attempt to take advantage of British weaknesses when she faced uprisings in India, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, unlike other powers (*coughRussiacough, coughUScough*). There simply were no major issues between the British and Second French empires, it truly was the first stage of the entente cordiale. The Franco-British rivalry only was reignited under the Third Republic, which the British established viewed (correctly) as unstable.
So the idea that the British are going to suddenly buddy up to the US, considering how close they came to war IOTL, and fight against the French, in the middle of the ACW, is pretty far-fetched.