Interlude: Je suis français
Alenco98
Not too sore, are you?
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An excerpt from Jean Marie Le Pen's 1999 novel: La France Insoumise, France during the second world war:
The bitter tragedy that befell France in the spring of 1940 was neither inevitable nor swift. It was slow—a slow-motion collapse masked by delusion, ossified bureaucracy, and the crumbling remnants of 19th-century arrogance. From the moment German boots crossed into Poland on September 1, 1939, the French Republic was at war—not only with Hitler's Reich, but with itself. In those nine months leading to the Armistice of June 1940, France's soul was laid bare, stripped of its illusions, and left exposed to history's judgment.
And I was there. A child, yes, but already aware that something inside the very skin of our people had torn.
When war was declared on September 3, after the British ultimatum expired, France followed suit within hours. The declaration was delivered with trembling resolve, wrapped in the weighty, formal language of statesmen who feared what they were invoking. Yet in the salons of Paris, and the chambers of the Quai d'Orsay, the true terror was not German arms—it was French weakness.
It was a strange war. La Drôle de Guerre, they called it. The Phoney War. From the Maginot Line to the coasts of Brittany, French soldiers settled into their bunkers and barracks as if on an extended training exercise. Morale, initially buoyed by patriotic fervor, slowly ebbed into boredom and anxiety. There was little to fight, but much to fear.
The political situation was as stagnant as the front. Daladier, who had presided over the declaration of war, clung to power through inertia more than leadership. The Chamber of Deputies was riven by factionalism: Radicals, socialists, conservative republicans, all jostling for influence while pretending unity. Daladier was soon replaced by Paul Reynaud, a man of bold rhetoric but limited means. He surrounded himself with hawks—Mandel, de Gaulle, and others—but France's military establishment was firmly in the hands of the old guard: men like Gamelin, clinging to World War I doctrines as though the intervening decades had changed nothing.
Yet while the cannons of the Maginot Line remained silent, Europe moved. Norway fell. Denmark surrendered. The Wehrmacht devoured Poland and turned its eyes westward. And throughout this, Italy remained neutral.
That, in itself, was a geopolitical miracle.
In the first week of September 1939, while French troops marched into the Saarland with hesitant steps and British expeditionary forces began assembling across the Channel, a surprising message came from Rome. Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, was requesting a direct meeting with the French and British ambassadors. The Italian leader, still basking in the afterglow of his Ethiopian conquest, offered a bargain: he would remain neutral in the coming conflict—in return, France and Britain would lift the economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation imposed after the Abyssinian War.
It was a cynical offer. But cynicism had become the bloodstream of European diplomacy. The British, eager to prevent another Mediterranean front, agreed without public fanfare. The French followed. Sanctions ended. Trade resumed. And in the cafes of Rome, Italians toasted their Duce for sparing them another war—at least for now.
This agreement would echo loudly in the coming year. For while Italy kept its peace, France's military planners continued to assume—disastrously—that the Alpine front might erupt. Hundreds of thousands of men, material, and logistical resources were kept pinned to the southern frontier, guarding against an attack that would never come. A German invasion alone was one thing. A two-front war was unthinkable. And yet, that phantom threat lingered in every French general's mind, dulling their strategic judgment.
Economically, France suffered in silence. War production ramped up—slowly, painfully. The Third Republic's industrial bureaucracy was not built for emergency mobilization. Factory owners demanded contracts, subsidies, and assurances; workers, many of whom were still in the grip of union militancy from the Popular Front years, balked at extended hours and military discipline. The CGT issued contradictory statements—calling for national unity on one hand, striking over wages on the other.
There was never enough of anything: not enough tanks, not enough radios, not enough aircraft. What existed was scattered among competing commands, deployed based on the preferences of generals rather than the needs of the battlefield. France still manufactured tanks that could outperform their German counterparts—but dispersed, without doctrine, and with feeble air support, they might as well have been museum pieces.
The British sent their Expeditionary Force, under Lord Gort, who worked awkwardly alongside Gamelin's ponderous staff. Communications were poor. Language barriers persisted. Even the most basic coordination—tank support, air cover, shared intelligence—was riddled with duplication and confusion. The Anglo-French alliance had declared war together. They would lose it together as well.
The Germans struck in May 1940. Not through Belgium alone, as the French had expected—but through the Ardennes, that "impenetrable forest" that Gamelin had considered safe. It was a thunderclap. Entire French divisions were encircled before they fired a shot. The Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg was not just military—it was psychological. French units, cut off and leaderless, collapsed not from fear but from disbelief. "Ce n'est pas possible," one colonel reportedly muttered, as he watched a German panzer column roll through his sector unopposed.
By the time Paris was declared an open city, Paul Reynaud had already lost his grip. Pétain, the old marshal, was called into government. The Chamber, in despair, gave its blessing. And on June 22, at Rethondes, in the very same railway carriage where Foch had dictated the 1918 Armistice, the Germans took their revenge.
The Armistice of 1940 was cruel in its dignity. France was divided: the north occupied, the south left in the hands of Vichy. Germany dictated the terms. But there was no Italian delegation present, no Mussolini to preen for the cameras. Italy's neutrality, cynical as it had been, kept her outside this humiliation. Some in France viewed it as cowardice, others as proof that the Duce was wiser than they had imagined.
Yet there was no wisdom in that summer. Only shame.
In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of French soldiers were taken prisoner. Others wandered aimlessly through the countryside. Cities emptied, refugees poured south. My family, like so many others, fled Paris with nothing but a satchel and our name. My father wept once—not for the defeat, but for the surrender.
He was a veteran of Verdun. He remembered what we once were.
As for me, I remember the silence. A silence so deep that even the crows seemed to fall quiet. It was the silence of a broken nation. Not yet conquered, but shattered—by its own failure to believe.
What followed the Armistice was not peace—it was partition. Not just of territory, but of pride, of memory, of the soul of France. We, who had once ruled from Dakar to Damascus, now watched from behind our prison walls as vultures picked apart our fallen glory.
In August of 1940, with Europe shivering beneath the boots of the Wehrmacht, Mussolini, still neutral, arrived in Vienna—not with armies, but with maps and ambitions. Hitler, flushed with his triumph, was in a magnanimous mood. The Duce, eyes gleaming like a Renaissance merchant-prince, spoke not of war but of "stability," of "Mediterranean order," of the "necessity" of preventing British encroachment upon the fallen possessions of Vichy. He promised to keep the Mediterranean quiet, promised to keep the waters safe from German exports, and, most crucially, offered Germany the illusion of benevolence: the image of allowing others to share in the bounty of conquest without bloodshed.
Germany agreed. The Second Vienna Award, remembered today as a formal adjustment of Europe's borders, became something darker—a secret congress of the new world order, held not in Versailles, but under its desecrated ghost.
The terms were brutal.
Hungary was rewarded for its loyalty with the full return of Northern Transylvania. A cruel reparation, for the Romanian army—humiliated and disarmed—was forced to stand by while entire towns were transferred to Budapest's writ, sometimes overnight. Bulgarian ambitions were likewise satisfied. The entirety of Dobruja, stretching from the Danube to the Black Sea, was handed over with German approval and Italian diplomacy. The borderlands groaned as old ethnic hatreds, barely concealed, exploded anew. Deportations, burnings, lynchings. And always, somewhere in the background, German officers smiled and said, "This is not our concern."
But it was the Western Mediterranean where the true crime unfolded.
Mussolini, that ghost of Caesar, pulled a map of France from his briefcase—not of the Republic, but of the Empire. He offered a vision. "Better French Syria in Rome's hands," he said, "than under British boots." Hitler, still dreaming of an eastern frontier, nodded. Why waste German troops securing North Africa when Italy, Spain, and the Arabs could be bought with ink?
Thus it was done.
Italy received what she had long coveted: Corsica, Nice, and Savoy were torn from the corpse of the Third Republic and absorbed into a resurgent Italy. Tunisia, too, became Italian—its people disarmed, its French elite imprisoned and expelled. French Syria and Lebanon, with its mosaic of religions and rivalries, was handed over with a smile. Somalialand, the neglected corner of the Horn, was added as a trinket.
In Morocco and Algeria, Mussolini's charm offensive was subtler but no less ruthless. Spain, newly awakened from its civil war and already under Italian influence was rewarded for it's newfound alignment. Franco was offered all of French Algeria and France's protectorates in Morocco, in exchange for quiet cooperation with Rome.
The new Maghreb would be a Francoist colony in all but name. A Duchy of the Maghreb, with the Moroccan Alaouite king as its figurehead, under Spanish influence. The Berbers, long suppressed by both colonial and Arab overlords, were empowered as auxiliaries and enforcers. French businesses were seized. French families—les pieds-noirs—were declared "undesirable elements." Their homes were stripped. Their lives, uprooted.
The insurgency came fast and bloody. French officers and civilians who refused to surrender were executed in front of their men and families. Bombs tore through market squares. Men, Women and children were rounded up, interned in desert camps that bore a terrible resemblance to the rumors whispered about German Poland. And the world watched, unsure whether to call this "ethnic cleansing" or "stability." Though the Spanish weren't without "mercy". Once they were all rounded up they were expelled to French west Africa.
The Free French—those who had fled south, those who had crossed into British Egypt, or waited in Dakar—seized the cause. In the wastelands of West Africa, tens of thousands of embittered pieds-noirs were recruited, formed into regiments loyal to the free french cause. They brought with them stories: of children dead in desert camps, of priests burned alive in Constantine, of entire towns razed by Berber militias trained by Spanish advisors.
De Gaulle, ever the dramatist, declared the Maghreb "a wound that bleeds France's honor." And for once, few disagreed. And soon they turned their wrath on the Vichy french in West Africa and across the colonies.
In Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia, the pattern repeated. French garrisons were overrun, disarmed by Italian Carabinieri or black-shirted militias, french civilians were interned then expelled. Resistance blossomed in the Levant. The British, ever eager to sabotage the Fascist beast without fully waking it, funneled weapons and advisors to Syrian partisans. But in Iraq, the storm was already gathering—the Golden Square was preparing its coup.
But Mussolini was shrewd.
When it's officers came to him for aid, rather than allow the coup to tie Italian fortunes to a distant and volatile Arab uprising, he offered a bargain to the English: Italy would turn in the leadership of the Golden Square to the British, and allow the British to secure their Iraqi oil routes and fields—in exchange for London's silent withdrawal from the Syrian theatre. A devil's deal. Churchill raged, but Britain complied. And the Free French resistance in Deir Ezzor and eastern Syria found their weapons drying up, their comrades dying in silence.
Then in Anatolia, France's blood would run again.
In the summer of 1941, with Turkey teetering and Greece now a fascist vassal under General Pangalos, the final blow was struck. Italy and Greece invaded eastern Thrace and the Anatolian coast. The Free French, bolstered by exiled units and North African veterans, were dispatched by Britain to aid Turkey's defense. They fought bravely in the hills around Tarsus, in the olive groves of Adana, alongside Turkish conscripts and Kurdish irregulars loyal to Turkey.
But they were no match for Italy.
The Italian air force, revamped and ruthless, rained incendiaries and mustard gas on rebel towns. Greek mountain troops, hardened by Balkan brutality, took no prisoners. Italian tanks—modernized and beggining to be mass-produced—plowed through Thracian and Adanan roads like beasts unleashed. Turkey and France held their ground, they made them pay for every kilometer. But alas they only had mostly men and rifles. And Italy had tanks, planes and gas on their side.
The free French withdrew through Kurdistan, into Iraq, wounded and hollow once the armistice was signed.
By October 1941, Turkey lay broken. Adana, Haytay and Tarsus was under the so-called kingdom of Greater Syria, an Italian puppet. Greece held Constantinople. The world had not merely changed—it had been dissected, rearranged by hands that cared little for flags and less for people.
And France? France was now two countries. One in chains, ruled by Vichy puppets. The other—Free France—was no longer French in empire or orientation. Her soldiers bore the names of Maghrebi villages lost, of mothers executed in Tunisian prisons, of comrades buried in Turkish soil. The Republic was dead. In its place was something older, something harder.
It would take a new kind of Frenchman to survive this world.
On December 16, the rebirth of France began. Not by words coming not from a government, nor a general, but from the marble silence of the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, who had walked a tightrope of neutrality and diplomacy, cast off the mask. The bells of St. Peter's rang as the Pope delivered a worldwide radio address, heard from Boston to Buenos Aires.
Pius denounced the Holocaust by name. Evidence—photos, testimonies, coded military transmissions decrypted by Italian intelligence and personally given to him by Mussolini was presented. He named the camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno. He named the dead. Jews. Poles. Roma. Priests. Children.
He declared Nazi Germany an instrument of Satan, called for a Christian crusade, and issued a bull of damnation excommunicating those who were members of the Nazi party. Every German who failed to rescind their allegience by January 1, 1942, was threatened with eternal damnation. Theological firepower—centuries dormant—was unleashed with precision. Millions of Catholic German citizens across Europe were thrown into spiritual turmoil overnight.
The same day, Italy declared war on Nazi Germany.
Mussolini—who until then had balanced on a knife-edge of neutrality while expanding his empire with surgical opportunism—struck like a dagger. Italian aircraft bombed Ploiești that day as Mussolini delivered his own speech declaring war on Germany. Then, fascist Italy's radio waves blared with a new slogan:
"Rome leads the Crusade—Europe shall be cleansed."
In Milan, crowds cheered under Fascist banners and crucifixes. In Paris, German troops entered a state of siege. In Spain, Franco convened an emergency cabinet meeting as Madrid's clergy praised Mussolini's defense of Christendom. He would soon declare war on Germany as well.
But Mussolini was not done.
That same evening, under heavy security, Mussolini met, André François-Poncet, the French ambassador to Italy. There, beneath frescoes of Caesar and Constantine, Mussolini laid out his vision for a restored France—a third way, a synthesis of monarchy and fascism under a Catholic sword.
France, he said, would rise again. But not as a republic, nor as a German puppet. It would be a kingdom, holy and reborn. The offer was astonishing:
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, great-nephew of Napoleon III and descendant of the Corsican line, would be freed from Vichy custody and crowned King of the French.
André François-Poncet, would serve as the first Prime Minister—an olive branch to the republicans under the cross.
In compensation for France's loss of her African and Levantine empire, the new Kingdom of France would receive:
Belgium
The Rhineland
Luxembourg
The Belgian Congo
And Italian guarantees in helping reconquer it's former colonies.
Italy would even cede Savoy back to France "as a gesture of Latin brotherhood."
French identity, Mussolini said, would not die, but be reforged in royalist steel, papal gold, and crusader flame.
The stunned ambassador, reluctantly accepted.
The very next day, after another meeting with Mussolini, the Pope issued a second decree, stunning even hardened skeptics. It was a spiritual ultimatum.
"Any Catholic found collaborating or a part of the armed forces of National Socialist Germany shall be excommunicated unless they lay down their arms and present themselves to the mercy of God and of legitimate authority by January 1, 1942.
Bishops in Poland, France, Austria, and Germany were warned: neutrality was no longer acceptable. Churches across Europe read the Papal order aloud. Soldiers wept in confessionals. German chaplains burned their vestments. Faith had become treason—or salvation.
The Italian Army, seasoned from Turkey and bolstered by motorized divisions and recent reforms, crossed into southeastern France on December 18. They met stiff resistance from the SS and a few Vichy holdouts, but the Pope's decree had done it's intended effect. The Italian advance was swift.
On December 23, Italian marines landed in Toulon with support from Free French partisans.
By December 28, the 2nd Alpine Division took Marseilles, while local Catholic clergy blessed them.
Meanwhile, deep inside France, Mussolini's OVRA agents stormed the estate where Louis Napoleon had been imprisoned. They freed the prince, who, though frail and pale, greeted them with prayers.
By January 1, 1942, in the cathedral of Vichy itself, surrounded by French and Italian soldiers, Italian generals including Mussolini's firstborn son Benito Albino, and local priests, Louis Napoleon was crowned "Louis XX, King of the French", a crown was placed on his head by Benito Albino, it was the beggining of a friendship between the two men.
That same day, thousands of German Catholic soldiers deserted, seeking refuge with French and Italian forces. Those who didn't were soon being killed in pitched battles across France.
But Mussolini knew symbolism mattered.
Thus, on January 27, 1942, Louis XX was crowned a second time—this time in Reims Cathedral, the traditional seat of French coronations since Clovis, as the bells of Notre-Dame rang in unison. The cathedral, still damaged from the First World War, was hastily restored with Italian funds. The crown was placed on Louis' head with incense rising and chant echoing in Latin and Old French.
French generals—monarchists, republicans, and Catholic nationalists alike—knelt before him. The flag of France, now bearing the Napoleonic bee alongside the white cross of Clovis, was raised across liberated territories.
The people wept. Radio broadcasts sent it across the world. In Quebec, crowds gathered in candlelight. In Dakar, free french soldiers sat in stunned silence and rage. Even in London, where Churchill hated Mussolini, was forced to accept the situation.
The Kingdom of France, as restored by Mussolini, would become a strange hybrid—monarchist, fascist-leaning, Catholic revivalist, and deeply traumatized.
Mussolini, who had once been an atheist, now posed as a defender of Christendom, casting Hitler as a "new Herod" and himself as a Constantine.
But it was the Pope's words that echoed most in history books.
"France is not dead. She was crucified. And on January First, in Vichy, she rose again."
But as France free itself with Italy's help. Italy began to carve up Europe. Flush with the triumph of its December declaration of war against Germany and buoyed by the moral weight of Papal endorsement, Italy acted with ruthless precision to fulfill its new imperial design. The promise of a reborn France—crowned, monarchic, resplendent in Latin glory—demanded tangible compensation for the territories Mussolini had no intention of returning: North Africa, Syria, Corsica. France, humiliated and divided since 1940, would now be rebuilt not from Paris but from Vichy, its new sovereign crowned in exile and returned in triumph by Roman steel.
It began in Belgium.
December 17, 1941 — Italian paratroopers descended into the twilight over Brussels. Their objective: the royal palace, still a symbol of Belgian sovereignty despite the occupation. They seized it with surgical force—but King Leopold III had vanished, spirited away by loyalists into the forests of Wallonia. Still, the symbolism was potent. The fasces flew over the palace spire by dusk. But they found themselves under siege by the angry citizens of Brussels.
Italy didn't let this setback phase it, instead, they extended blanket amnesties to Vichy defectors. A flood of disillusioned officers, petty bureaucrats, and embittered nationalists—many drawn from Action Française and other monarchist circles—saw the Italian advance not as invasion, but deliverance. They became the shock troops of the Latin Restoration.
On January 2, 1942, the siege of the palace was lifted. Italian Paratroopers backed by Vichy defectors stormed into brussels, they were greeted fierce resistance, though Italian air support and arms quickly repressed it. That day, the Italian tricolour flew beside the Imperial Eagle of the House of Bonaparte atop the city hall. The Italian message was clear: the Latin order would return, and it would wear the crown of Louis-Napoléon.
Yet not all bowed.
In Namur, a different flame was kindled. On January 5, a ragged congress convened—teachers, miners, parish priests, and battered union men. With no official insignia, only red armbands and carbon-smeared pamphlets, they proclaimed the Walloon Free Republic. Their allegiance was not to Mussolini's puppet France, nor to the crumbling Vichy order—but to Free France, to de Gaulle, exiled in Brazzaville. A delegation was dispatched to the Congo that very hour.
The "Republic" lasted four days.
January 6, 1942 – 04:22 a.m.: Engines roared overhead as Savoia-Marchetti bombers droned over the misty Ardennes. Italian paratroopers—veterans of Thrace, hardened by the anti-partisan war in Bulgaria—descended on Namur, Charleroi, Liège. What followed was not war but liquidation. In Dinant, factory militias fought with kitchen knives and petrol bombs. In Huy, a railway worker named Georges Duvivier derailed an Italian supply train by manually releasing the brake—he died in the explosion. Bells rang across the Meuse not for liberation but for mourning.
By January 9, it was over. The Walloon Committee for Liberation was disbanded by rifle. Leaders were bound, blindfolded, and flown to Paris. Those not executed were made to kneel before Italian judges in kangaroo courts, humiliated and forgotten.
Then came the charade.
January 12: The "Reunification Referendum" was announced. There were no observers. The ballots were printed in Rome. Voters were herded to polling stations flanked by Blackshirts and foreign legionnaires. The result—97.3% approval—was not believed even by those who cast the ballots.
January 13: André François-Poncet, Mussolini's hand-picked Prime Minister of the new Kingdom of France, announced the annexation of Wallonia. Italian troops marched through the soot-choked streets of Liège beneath banners declaring "Bienvenue à la Maison." The illusion of unity was complete.
But in the north, rebellion brewed.
In Ghent, the ground still reeked of burnt pamphlets and tear gas. As the wallon republic was announced, the old city hall under broken windows and bullet-pocked frescoes came alive, a group calling itself the Flemish Council convened. It was a motley parliament: mayors, university chancellors, a few exiled ministers from the Belgian Congo, and Pieter De Clercq—a once-ignored civil servant, now thrust into history's blinding glare.
At 11:17 a.m., De Clercq, clad in black with the golden lion of Flanders stitched across his chest, read aloud:
"The Belgian State is dead. Flanders will not die with it. We hereby proclaim the independence of the Flemish Republic and request immediate annexation to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, under the protection of Queen Wilhelmina."
Outside, cries rang out—"Lang Leve Vlaanderen!" The proclamation tore through the occupied north like wildfire.
Dutch radio picked it up that night. Though Queen Wilhelmina remained silent, her Prime Minister, Pieter Gerbrandy, spoke directly to the low countries:
"The fate of our southern brothers is entwined with our own. The Kingdom shall not ignore a cry for unity born of war and sorrow."
That same night, Dutch and British armored columns crossed the border at Essen, sweeping southward toward Ghent and Antwerp to "protect Flemish civilians from foreign occupation." They encountered stunned Italian troops in the port district—neither side opened fire. The war had become a game of inches.
In Brussels, the Italian-backed Provisional Regency of Belgium condemned the Flemish declaration as a "temporary disorder." Mussolini raged in the Palazzo Venezia. Reinforcements were dispatched to Louvain, but it was too late. The north was gone.
But that wasn't the only place Italy had turned to.
On December 19, 1941, Italian paratroopers descended upon Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy fell in a matter of hours. On Christmas Day, a referendum was held by candlelight. 99.1% voted for annexation—under duress.
Then came the Saarland. On December 21, the Folgore Division crossed into Germany proper. By December 30, Italy controlled everything west of the Rhine river up to the Dutch frontier. Vichy defectors in Wehrmacht uniforms served as guides through the shattered industrial zones. Italian engineers began erecting French flags atop mines and radio towers.
On January 15, 1942, Mussolini's France held yet another referendum. Again, the result was predictable: the Rhineland was formally annexed to France. Streets were renamed. German books were burned. French flags were pinned onto every civil servant's lapel.
The British, meanwhile, marched in from the west. Dutch and British marched into Germany towards Bremen. The Italians allowed them passage under close watch. Mussolini had no intention of occupying Germany beyond the Rhine. Let the Anglo-Saxons mop up Hitler's ruin. Italy had carved its empire. Now it meant to crown it.
By month's end, the European order was shattered. France, once broken and humbled, stood once more—kingdom restored, crown re-forged, banner raised. But it was not the France of 1789, nor that of the Third Republic.
It was a Latin kingdom, born in exile, returned by foreign sword, and clad in imperial garb.
And in that smoke-wreathed twilight, where red armbands fell to ash and black banners rose again, the people of Belgium and Luxembourg realized one brutal truth:
They were not liberated.
They had been rearranged.
But the storm that had shattered Europe was now rolling southward across the vast, trembling continent of Africa. In the vacuum left by the collapse of the Third Republic and the fragmentation of Belgium, new powers clashed over old colonial frontiers, and ancient grievances boiled to the surface.
On the humid banks of the Congo River, under the red-and-gold banner of the french Tricolor, General Charles de Gaulle stood before a modest but defiant assembly of soldiers, administrators, and exiled intellectuals. In a speech broadcast via crackling shortwave transmitters to embattled outposts across the French-speaking world, de Gaulle proclaimed the founding of the French Fourth Republic. The ceremony took place in Brazzaville, the heart of Free France in Africa, and de Gaulle—clad in a simple khaki uniform, his voice dry but resolute—was named President of the Republic in Exile by acclamation.
By that day, February 4, 1942, the vast patchwork of French colonies stretching from The Caribbean to Vietnam had declared for the Free French cause. French West Africa, Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina had all rallied under de Gaulle's banner. Most remarkably, the Belgian Congo too was placed under Free French "protection," with King Leopold III—now a guest of the British Crown—granting limited authority to de Gaulle to ensure its security and prevent Italian encroachment. Belgian colonial officers in Léopoldville reluctantly cooperated, fearing fascist advance more than Gaullist ambition.
But even as de Gaulle basked in his triumph, the ground was shifting beneath him.
In a grand spectacle staged at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Benito Mussolini unveiled what would become the warning shot of the coming cold war. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Spanish Caudillo Francisco Franco and the newly frowned Bonapartist pretender Louis Napoléon. Il Duce addressed a crowd of diplomats, soldiers, and journalists under a banner that read: Per un'Africa Libera, per un Mondo Nuovo—"For a Free Africa, for a New World."
In a thundering oration, Mussolini announced the creation of the Global Federation of Free Alliances (GFFA). It was to be a revival of the league of nations, one with more teeth, backed by Italian institutions, banks, and peacekeeping forces.
More shockingly, Mussolini proclaimed the founding of a new body: the Organization of African Unity and Liberation (OAUL), headquartered in Addis Ababa, to oversee the "orderly transition" of Italian and Spanish colonies toward nominal self-rule. It was, as the Duce put it, "a gift of Latin civilization to the African soul."
In the background however, the three powers intended to divide and rule Africa via "emancipated countries," rooted in a "third way" philosophy: de jure European monarchs, de facto African governments on the ground, European economic control, racial equality, all under paternalistic modernization, and pan-African collaboration on fascist terms.
Franco gave a few terse words about the "glory of Iberia in Africa," in an interview once the speech ended. While Louis Napoléon proclaimed that "its time for a new type of empire, not of tyranny, but of fraternity." The carefully orchestrated show concluded with African delegates—some legitimate chiefs, others collaborators in tailored uniforms—pledging loyalty to the OAUL. It was theater, yes—but deadly theater, and it played to full houses in Dakar, Algiers, and Bamako.
The reaction from Brazzaville was immediate and incandescent. De Gaulle took to the radio that same evening, his voice cutting and cold:
"This proclamation is not liberation—it is seduction in the service of servitude. The fascist powers seek to steal the language of freedom to enslave those who have bled for it."
He denounced the OAUL as a puppet organization and branded the GFFA "a conspiracy of empire against humanity." He accused Mussolini of trying to destroy France's colonial birthright and condemned Spain and the Bonapartist faction as "parasites gnawing at the root of French civilization."
In London and Washington, reactions were cautious. Roosevelt, already skeptical of de Gaulle's pretensions and wary of colonial commitments, offered no immediate response. Churchill, juggling his own imperial dilemmas, limited himself to a private note: "This will not help."
But the speech did not stop the wave now gathering force across the continent.
In Dakar, pro-Italian youth began marching under banners of "African Brotherhood." In Bamako, disgruntled colonial troops rioted after being denied the backpay promised by Free French officials. Pamphlets printed in Casablanca and distributed covertly by Italian OVRA operatives urged young African men to "trust Rome, not Brazzaville." OVRA operatives began circulating in Abdijan, Libreville, Nairobi, and across British Africa, offering food, guns, money, radios, and a vision of "Latinate emancipation."
What followed was not a single war, but a patchwork of revolts, intrigues, and shifting front lines that would later be known collectively as the African Wars of Independence.
Over the next few years in French West Africa, Italian and French trained insurgents launched coordinated uprisings in Senegal and Upper Volta, triggering a brutal crackdown by Gaullist forces. In Madagascar, OAUL-backed rebels proclaimed a Malagasy Republic, resulting in a three-week siege of Tananarive that ended in a massacre. In Mauritania, Bonspartist agents helped stir up anti-Gaullist Berber factions, promising them freedom and independence under a french banner like Italy did with greater Syria.
In response, Free French counterintelligence—led by André Dewavrin—launched Operation Vigilance, a ruthless campaign of arrests, deportations, and assassinations targeting suspected OAUL sympathizers. Cities like Dakar and Brazzaville saw mass raids and curfews. Torture chambers operated quietly in colonial barracks. The ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to the logic of martial law.
The conflict marked the quiet burial of the Atlantic Charter—the postwar dream co-authored by Roosevelt and Churchill, promising decolonization, democracy, and global cooperation. In the deserts of Mauritania and the forests of Cameroon, those words rang hollow. The allure of direct Italian arms and money proving more tempting than British and American gestures.
Washington, watching the Franco-African War unfold with alarm, quietly shelved its proposed United Nations Organization, having been outmanoeuvred both morally and diplomatically by Italy and beginning the process to join the GFFA.
And so began the longest war of France's 20th century—not against Germany, not against fascism, but against its own ghosts in the mirror of Africa.
The bitter tragedy that befell France in the spring of 1940 was neither inevitable nor swift. It was slow—a slow-motion collapse masked by delusion, ossified bureaucracy, and the crumbling remnants of 19th-century arrogance. From the moment German boots crossed into Poland on September 1, 1939, the French Republic was at war—not only with Hitler's Reich, but with itself. In those nine months leading to the Armistice of June 1940, France's soul was laid bare, stripped of its illusions, and left exposed to history's judgment.
And I was there. A child, yes, but already aware that something inside the very skin of our people had torn.
When war was declared on September 3, after the British ultimatum expired, France followed suit within hours. The declaration was delivered with trembling resolve, wrapped in the weighty, formal language of statesmen who feared what they were invoking. Yet in the salons of Paris, and the chambers of the Quai d'Orsay, the true terror was not German arms—it was French weakness.
It was a strange war. La Drôle de Guerre, they called it. The Phoney War. From the Maginot Line to the coasts of Brittany, French soldiers settled into their bunkers and barracks as if on an extended training exercise. Morale, initially buoyed by patriotic fervor, slowly ebbed into boredom and anxiety. There was little to fight, but much to fear.
The political situation was as stagnant as the front. Daladier, who had presided over the declaration of war, clung to power through inertia more than leadership. The Chamber of Deputies was riven by factionalism: Radicals, socialists, conservative republicans, all jostling for influence while pretending unity. Daladier was soon replaced by Paul Reynaud, a man of bold rhetoric but limited means. He surrounded himself with hawks—Mandel, de Gaulle, and others—but France's military establishment was firmly in the hands of the old guard: men like Gamelin, clinging to World War I doctrines as though the intervening decades had changed nothing.
Yet while the cannons of the Maginot Line remained silent, Europe moved. Norway fell. Denmark surrendered. The Wehrmacht devoured Poland and turned its eyes westward. And throughout this, Italy remained neutral.
That, in itself, was a geopolitical miracle.
In the first week of September 1939, while French troops marched into the Saarland with hesitant steps and British expeditionary forces began assembling across the Channel, a surprising message came from Rome. Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, was requesting a direct meeting with the French and British ambassadors. The Italian leader, still basking in the afterglow of his Ethiopian conquest, offered a bargain: he would remain neutral in the coming conflict—in return, France and Britain would lift the economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation imposed after the Abyssinian War.
It was a cynical offer. But cynicism had become the bloodstream of European diplomacy. The British, eager to prevent another Mediterranean front, agreed without public fanfare. The French followed. Sanctions ended. Trade resumed. And in the cafes of Rome, Italians toasted their Duce for sparing them another war—at least for now.
This agreement would echo loudly in the coming year. For while Italy kept its peace, France's military planners continued to assume—disastrously—that the Alpine front might erupt. Hundreds of thousands of men, material, and logistical resources were kept pinned to the southern frontier, guarding against an attack that would never come. A German invasion alone was one thing. A two-front war was unthinkable. And yet, that phantom threat lingered in every French general's mind, dulling their strategic judgment.
Economically, France suffered in silence. War production ramped up—slowly, painfully. The Third Republic's industrial bureaucracy was not built for emergency mobilization. Factory owners demanded contracts, subsidies, and assurances; workers, many of whom were still in the grip of union militancy from the Popular Front years, balked at extended hours and military discipline. The CGT issued contradictory statements—calling for national unity on one hand, striking over wages on the other.
There was never enough of anything: not enough tanks, not enough radios, not enough aircraft. What existed was scattered among competing commands, deployed based on the preferences of generals rather than the needs of the battlefield. France still manufactured tanks that could outperform their German counterparts—but dispersed, without doctrine, and with feeble air support, they might as well have been museum pieces.
The British sent their Expeditionary Force, under Lord Gort, who worked awkwardly alongside Gamelin's ponderous staff. Communications were poor. Language barriers persisted. Even the most basic coordination—tank support, air cover, shared intelligence—was riddled with duplication and confusion. The Anglo-French alliance had declared war together. They would lose it together as well.
The Germans struck in May 1940. Not through Belgium alone, as the French had expected—but through the Ardennes, that "impenetrable forest" that Gamelin had considered safe. It was a thunderclap. Entire French divisions were encircled before they fired a shot. The Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg was not just military—it was psychological. French units, cut off and leaderless, collapsed not from fear but from disbelief. "Ce n'est pas possible," one colonel reportedly muttered, as he watched a German panzer column roll through his sector unopposed.
By the time Paris was declared an open city, Paul Reynaud had already lost his grip. Pétain, the old marshal, was called into government. The Chamber, in despair, gave its blessing. And on June 22, at Rethondes, in the very same railway carriage where Foch had dictated the 1918 Armistice, the Germans took their revenge.
The Armistice of 1940 was cruel in its dignity. France was divided: the north occupied, the south left in the hands of Vichy. Germany dictated the terms. But there was no Italian delegation present, no Mussolini to preen for the cameras. Italy's neutrality, cynical as it had been, kept her outside this humiliation. Some in France viewed it as cowardice, others as proof that the Duce was wiser than they had imagined.
Yet there was no wisdom in that summer. Only shame.
In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of French soldiers were taken prisoner. Others wandered aimlessly through the countryside. Cities emptied, refugees poured south. My family, like so many others, fled Paris with nothing but a satchel and our name. My father wept once—not for the defeat, but for the surrender.
He was a veteran of Verdun. He remembered what we once were.
As for me, I remember the silence. A silence so deep that even the crows seemed to fall quiet. It was the silence of a broken nation. Not yet conquered, but shattered—by its own failure to believe.
What followed the Armistice was not peace—it was partition. Not just of territory, but of pride, of memory, of the soul of France. We, who had once ruled from Dakar to Damascus, now watched from behind our prison walls as vultures picked apart our fallen glory.
In August of 1940, with Europe shivering beneath the boots of the Wehrmacht, Mussolini, still neutral, arrived in Vienna—not with armies, but with maps and ambitions. Hitler, flushed with his triumph, was in a magnanimous mood. The Duce, eyes gleaming like a Renaissance merchant-prince, spoke not of war but of "stability," of "Mediterranean order," of the "necessity" of preventing British encroachment upon the fallen possessions of Vichy. He promised to keep the Mediterranean quiet, promised to keep the waters safe from German exports, and, most crucially, offered Germany the illusion of benevolence: the image of allowing others to share in the bounty of conquest without bloodshed.
Germany agreed. The Second Vienna Award, remembered today as a formal adjustment of Europe's borders, became something darker—a secret congress of the new world order, held not in Versailles, but under its desecrated ghost.
The terms were brutal.
Hungary was rewarded for its loyalty with the full return of Northern Transylvania. A cruel reparation, for the Romanian army—humiliated and disarmed—was forced to stand by while entire towns were transferred to Budapest's writ, sometimes overnight. Bulgarian ambitions were likewise satisfied. The entirety of Dobruja, stretching from the Danube to the Black Sea, was handed over with German approval and Italian diplomacy. The borderlands groaned as old ethnic hatreds, barely concealed, exploded anew. Deportations, burnings, lynchings. And always, somewhere in the background, German officers smiled and said, "This is not our concern."
But it was the Western Mediterranean where the true crime unfolded.
Mussolini, that ghost of Caesar, pulled a map of France from his briefcase—not of the Republic, but of the Empire. He offered a vision. "Better French Syria in Rome's hands," he said, "than under British boots." Hitler, still dreaming of an eastern frontier, nodded. Why waste German troops securing North Africa when Italy, Spain, and the Arabs could be bought with ink?
Thus it was done.
Italy received what she had long coveted: Corsica, Nice, and Savoy were torn from the corpse of the Third Republic and absorbed into a resurgent Italy. Tunisia, too, became Italian—its people disarmed, its French elite imprisoned and expelled. French Syria and Lebanon, with its mosaic of religions and rivalries, was handed over with a smile. Somalialand, the neglected corner of the Horn, was added as a trinket.
In Morocco and Algeria, Mussolini's charm offensive was subtler but no less ruthless. Spain, newly awakened from its civil war and already under Italian influence was rewarded for it's newfound alignment. Franco was offered all of French Algeria and France's protectorates in Morocco, in exchange for quiet cooperation with Rome.
The new Maghreb would be a Francoist colony in all but name. A Duchy of the Maghreb, with the Moroccan Alaouite king as its figurehead, under Spanish influence. The Berbers, long suppressed by both colonial and Arab overlords, were empowered as auxiliaries and enforcers. French businesses were seized. French families—les pieds-noirs—were declared "undesirable elements." Their homes were stripped. Their lives, uprooted.
The insurgency came fast and bloody. French officers and civilians who refused to surrender were executed in front of their men and families. Bombs tore through market squares. Men, Women and children were rounded up, interned in desert camps that bore a terrible resemblance to the rumors whispered about German Poland. And the world watched, unsure whether to call this "ethnic cleansing" or "stability." Though the Spanish weren't without "mercy". Once they were all rounded up they were expelled to French west Africa.
The Free French—those who had fled south, those who had crossed into British Egypt, or waited in Dakar—seized the cause. In the wastelands of West Africa, tens of thousands of embittered pieds-noirs were recruited, formed into regiments loyal to the free french cause. They brought with them stories: of children dead in desert camps, of priests burned alive in Constantine, of entire towns razed by Berber militias trained by Spanish advisors.
De Gaulle, ever the dramatist, declared the Maghreb "a wound that bleeds France's honor." And for once, few disagreed. And soon they turned their wrath on the Vichy french in West Africa and across the colonies.
In Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia, the pattern repeated. French garrisons were overrun, disarmed by Italian Carabinieri or black-shirted militias, french civilians were interned then expelled. Resistance blossomed in the Levant. The British, ever eager to sabotage the Fascist beast without fully waking it, funneled weapons and advisors to Syrian partisans. But in Iraq, the storm was already gathering—the Golden Square was preparing its coup.
But Mussolini was shrewd.
When it's officers came to him for aid, rather than allow the coup to tie Italian fortunes to a distant and volatile Arab uprising, he offered a bargain to the English: Italy would turn in the leadership of the Golden Square to the British, and allow the British to secure their Iraqi oil routes and fields—in exchange for London's silent withdrawal from the Syrian theatre. A devil's deal. Churchill raged, but Britain complied. And the Free French resistance in Deir Ezzor and eastern Syria found their weapons drying up, their comrades dying in silence.
Then in Anatolia, France's blood would run again.
In the summer of 1941, with Turkey teetering and Greece now a fascist vassal under General Pangalos, the final blow was struck. Italy and Greece invaded eastern Thrace and the Anatolian coast. The Free French, bolstered by exiled units and North African veterans, were dispatched by Britain to aid Turkey's defense. They fought bravely in the hills around Tarsus, in the olive groves of Adana, alongside Turkish conscripts and Kurdish irregulars loyal to Turkey.
But they were no match for Italy.
The Italian air force, revamped and ruthless, rained incendiaries and mustard gas on rebel towns. Greek mountain troops, hardened by Balkan brutality, took no prisoners. Italian tanks—modernized and beggining to be mass-produced—plowed through Thracian and Adanan roads like beasts unleashed. Turkey and France held their ground, they made them pay for every kilometer. But alas they only had mostly men and rifles. And Italy had tanks, planes and gas on their side.
The free French withdrew through Kurdistan, into Iraq, wounded and hollow once the armistice was signed.
By October 1941, Turkey lay broken. Adana, Haytay and Tarsus was under the so-called kingdom of Greater Syria, an Italian puppet. Greece held Constantinople. The world had not merely changed—it had been dissected, rearranged by hands that cared little for flags and less for people.
And France? France was now two countries. One in chains, ruled by Vichy puppets. The other—Free France—was no longer French in empire or orientation. Her soldiers bore the names of Maghrebi villages lost, of mothers executed in Tunisian prisons, of comrades buried in Turkish soil. The Republic was dead. In its place was something older, something harder.
It would take a new kind of Frenchman to survive this world.
On December 16, the rebirth of France began. Not by words coming not from a government, nor a general, but from the marble silence of the Vatican. Pope Pius XII, who had walked a tightrope of neutrality and diplomacy, cast off the mask. The bells of St. Peter's rang as the Pope delivered a worldwide radio address, heard from Boston to Buenos Aires.
Pius denounced the Holocaust by name. Evidence—photos, testimonies, coded military transmissions decrypted by Italian intelligence and personally given to him by Mussolini was presented. He named the camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno. He named the dead. Jews. Poles. Roma. Priests. Children.
He declared Nazi Germany an instrument of Satan, called for a Christian crusade, and issued a bull of damnation excommunicating those who were members of the Nazi party. Every German who failed to rescind their allegience by January 1, 1942, was threatened with eternal damnation. Theological firepower—centuries dormant—was unleashed with precision. Millions of Catholic German citizens across Europe were thrown into spiritual turmoil overnight.
The same day, Italy declared war on Nazi Germany.
Mussolini—who until then had balanced on a knife-edge of neutrality while expanding his empire with surgical opportunism—struck like a dagger. Italian aircraft bombed Ploiești that day as Mussolini delivered his own speech declaring war on Germany. Then, fascist Italy's radio waves blared with a new slogan:
"Rome leads the Crusade—Europe shall be cleansed."
In Milan, crowds cheered under Fascist banners and crucifixes. In Paris, German troops entered a state of siege. In Spain, Franco convened an emergency cabinet meeting as Madrid's clergy praised Mussolini's defense of Christendom. He would soon declare war on Germany as well.
But Mussolini was not done.
That same evening, under heavy security, Mussolini met, André François-Poncet, the French ambassador to Italy. There, beneath frescoes of Caesar and Constantine, Mussolini laid out his vision for a restored France—a third way, a synthesis of monarchy and fascism under a Catholic sword.
France, he said, would rise again. But not as a republic, nor as a German puppet. It would be a kingdom, holy and reborn. The offer was astonishing:
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, great-nephew of Napoleon III and descendant of the Corsican line, would be freed from Vichy custody and crowned King of the French.
André François-Poncet, would serve as the first Prime Minister—an olive branch to the republicans under the cross.
In compensation for France's loss of her African and Levantine empire, the new Kingdom of France would receive:
Belgium
The Rhineland
Luxembourg
The Belgian Congo
And Italian guarantees in helping reconquer it's former colonies.
Italy would even cede Savoy back to France "as a gesture of Latin brotherhood."
French identity, Mussolini said, would not die, but be reforged in royalist steel, papal gold, and crusader flame.
The stunned ambassador, reluctantly accepted.
The very next day, after another meeting with Mussolini, the Pope issued a second decree, stunning even hardened skeptics. It was a spiritual ultimatum.
"Any Catholic found collaborating or a part of the armed forces of National Socialist Germany shall be excommunicated unless they lay down their arms and present themselves to the mercy of God and of legitimate authority by January 1, 1942.
Bishops in Poland, France, Austria, and Germany were warned: neutrality was no longer acceptable. Churches across Europe read the Papal order aloud. Soldiers wept in confessionals. German chaplains burned their vestments. Faith had become treason—or salvation.
The Italian Army, seasoned from Turkey and bolstered by motorized divisions and recent reforms, crossed into southeastern France on December 18. They met stiff resistance from the SS and a few Vichy holdouts, but the Pope's decree had done it's intended effect. The Italian advance was swift.
On December 23, Italian marines landed in Toulon with support from Free French partisans.
By December 28, the 2nd Alpine Division took Marseilles, while local Catholic clergy blessed them.
Meanwhile, deep inside France, Mussolini's OVRA agents stormed the estate where Louis Napoleon had been imprisoned. They freed the prince, who, though frail and pale, greeted them with prayers.
By January 1, 1942, in the cathedral of Vichy itself, surrounded by French and Italian soldiers, Italian generals including Mussolini's firstborn son Benito Albino, and local priests, Louis Napoleon was crowned "Louis XX, King of the French", a crown was placed on his head by Benito Albino, it was the beggining of a friendship between the two men.
That same day, thousands of German Catholic soldiers deserted, seeking refuge with French and Italian forces. Those who didn't were soon being killed in pitched battles across France.
But Mussolini knew symbolism mattered.
Thus, on January 27, 1942, Louis XX was crowned a second time—this time in Reims Cathedral, the traditional seat of French coronations since Clovis, as the bells of Notre-Dame rang in unison. The cathedral, still damaged from the First World War, was hastily restored with Italian funds. The crown was placed on Louis' head with incense rising and chant echoing in Latin and Old French.
French generals—monarchists, republicans, and Catholic nationalists alike—knelt before him. The flag of France, now bearing the Napoleonic bee alongside the white cross of Clovis, was raised across liberated territories.
The people wept. Radio broadcasts sent it across the world. In Quebec, crowds gathered in candlelight. In Dakar, free french soldiers sat in stunned silence and rage. Even in London, where Churchill hated Mussolini, was forced to accept the situation.
The Kingdom of France, as restored by Mussolini, would become a strange hybrid—monarchist, fascist-leaning, Catholic revivalist, and deeply traumatized.
Mussolini, who had once been an atheist, now posed as a defender of Christendom, casting Hitler as a "new Herod" and himself as a Constantine.
But it was the Pope's words that echoed most in history books.
"France is not dead. She was crucified. And on January First, in Vichy, she rose again."
But as France free itself with Italy's help. Italy began to carve up Europe. Flush with the triumph of its December declaration of war against Germany and buoyed by the moral weight of Papal endorsement, Italy acted with ruthless precision to fulfill its new imperial design. The promise of a reborn France—crowned, monarchic, resplendent in Latin glory—demanded tangible compensation for the territories Mussolini had no intention of returning: North Africa, Syria, Corsica. France, humiliated and divided since 1940, would now be rebuilt not from Paris but from Vichy, its new sovereign crowned in exile and returned in triumph by Roman steel.
It began in Belgium.
December 17, 1941 — Italian paratroopers descended into the twilight over Brussels. Their objective: the royal palace, still a symbol of Belgian sovereignty despite the occupation. They seized it with surgical force—but King Leopold III had vanished, spirited away by loyalists into the forests of Wallonia. Still, the symbolism was potent. The fasces flew over the palace spire by dusk. But they found themselves under siege by the angry citizens of Brussels.
Italy didn't let this setback phase it, instead, they extended blanket amnesties to Vichy defectors. A flood of disillusioned officers, petty bureaucrats, and embittered nationalists—many drawn from Action Française and other monarchist circles—saw the Italian advance not as invasion, but deliverance. They became the shock troops of the Latin Restoration.
On January 2, 1942, the siege of the palace was lifted. Italian Paratroopers backed by Vichy defectors stormed into brussels, they were greeted fierce resistance, though Italian air support and arms quickly repressed it. That day, the Italian tricolour flew beside the Imperial Eagle of the House of Bonaparte atop the city hall. The Italian message was clear: the Latin order would return, and it would wear the crown of Louis-Napoléon.
Yet not all bowed.
In Namur, a different flame was kindled. On January 5, a ragged congress convened—teachers, miners, parish priests, and battered union men. With no official insignia, only red armbands and carbon-smeared pamphlets, they proclaimed the Walloon Free Republic. Their allegiance was not to Mussolini's puppet France, nor to the crumbling Vichy order—but to Free France, to de Gaulle, exiled in Brazzaville. A delegation was dispatched to the Congo that very hour.
The "Republic" lasted four days.
January 6, 1942 – 04:22 a.m.: Engines roared overhead as Savoia-Marchetti bombers droned over the misty Ardennes. Italian paratroopers—veterans of Thrace, hardened by the anti-partisan war in Bulgaria—descended on Namur, Charleroi, Liège. What followed was not war but liquidation. In Dinant, factory militias fought with kitchen knives and petrol bombs. In Huy, a railway worker named Georges Duvivier derailed an Italian supply train by manually releasing the brake—he died in the explosion. Bells rang across the Meuse not for liberation but for mourning.
By January 9, it was over. The Walloon Committee for Liberation was disbanded by rifle. Leaders were bound, blindfolded, and flown to Paris. Those not executed were made to kneel before Italian judges in kangaroo courts, humiliated and forgotten.
Then came the charade.
January 12: The "Reunification Referendum" was announced. There were no observers. The ballots were printed in Rome. Voters were herded to polling stations flanked by Blackshirts and foreign legionnaires. The result—97.3% approval—was not believed even by those who cast the ballots.
January 13: André François-Poncet, Mussolini's hand-picked Prime Minister of the new Kingdom of France, announced the annexation of Wallonia. Italian troops marched through the soot-choked streets of Liège beneath banners declaring "Bienvenue à la Maison." The illusion of unity was complete.
But in the north, rebellion brewed.
In Ghent, the ground still reeked of burnt pamphlets and tear gas. As the wallon republic was announced, the old city hall under broken windows and bullet-pocked frescoes came alive, a group calling itself the Flemish Council convened. It was a motley parliament: mayors, university chancellors, a few exiled ministers from the Belgian Congo, and Pieter De Clercq—a once-ignored civil servant, now thrust into history's blinding glare.
At 11:17 a.m., De Clercq, clad in black with the golden lion of Flanders stitched across his chest, read aloud:
"The Belgian State is dead. Flanders will not die with it. We hereby proclaim the independence of the Flemish Republic and request immediate annexation to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, under the protection of Queen Wilhelmina."
Outside, cries rang out—"Lang Leve Vlaanderen!" The proclamation tore through the occupied north like wildfire.
Dutch radio picked it up that night. Though Queen Wilhelmina remained silent, her Prime Minister, Pieter Gerbrandy, spoke directly to the low countries:
"The fate of our southern brothers is entwined with our own. The Kingdom shall not ignore a cry for unity born of war and sorrow."
That same night, Dutch and British armored columns crossed the border at Essen, sweeping southward toward Ghent and Antwerp to "protect Flemish civilians from foreign occupation." They encountered stunned Italian troops in the port district—neither side opened fire. The war had become a game of inches.
In Brussels, the Italian-backed Provisional Regency of Belgium condemned the Flemish declaration as a "temporary disorder." Mussolini raged in the Palazzo Venezia. Reinforcements were dispatched to Louvain, but it was too late. The north was gone.
But that wasn't the only place Italy had turned to.
On December 19, 1941, Italian paratroopers descended upon Luxembourg. The Grand Duchy fell in a matter of hours. On Christmas Day, a referendum was held by candlelight. 99.1% voted for annexation—under duress.
Then came the Saarland. On December 21, the Folgore Division crossed into Germany proper. By December 30, Italy controlled everything west of the Rhine river up to the Dutch frontier. Vichy defectors in Wehrmacht uniforms served as guides through the shattered industrial zones. Italian engineers began erecting French flags atop mines and radio towers.
On January 15, 1942, Mussolini's France held yet another referendum. Again, the result was predictable: the Rhineland was formally annexed to France. Streets were renamed. German books were burned. French flags were pinned onto every civil servant's lapel.
The British, meanwhile, marched in from the west. Dutch and British marched into Germany towards Bremen. The Italians allowed them passage under close watch. Mussolini had no intention of occupying Germany beyond the Rhine. Let the Anglo-Saxons mop up Hitler's ruin. Italy had carved its empire. Now it meant to crown it.
By month's end, the European order was shattered. France, once broken and humbled, stood once more—kingdom restored, crown re-forged, banner raised. But it was not the France of 1789, nor that of the Third Republic.
It was a Latin kingdom, born in exile, returned by foreign sword, and clad in imperial garb.
And in that smoke-wreathed twilight, where red armbands fell to ash and black banners rose again, the people of Belgium and Luxembourg realized one brutal truth:
They were not liberated.
They had been rearranged.
But the storm that had shattered Europe was now rolling southward across the vast, trembling continent of Africa. In the vacuum left by the collapse of the Third Republic and the fragmentation of Belgium, new powers clashed over old colonial frontiers, and ancient grievances boiled to the surface.
On the humid banks of the Congo River, under the red-and-gold banner of the french Tricolor, General Charles de Gaulle stood before a modest but defiant assembly of soldiers, administrators, and exiled intellectuals. In a speech broadcast via crackling shortwave transmitters to embattled outposts across the French-speaking world, de Gaulle proclaimed the founding of the French Fourth Republic. The ceremony took place in Brazzaville, the heart of Free France in Africa, and de Gaulle—clad in a simple khaki uniform, his voice dry but resolute—was named President of the Republic in Exile by acclamation.
By that day, February 4, 1942, the vast patchwork of French colonies stretching from The Caribbean to Vietnam had declared for the Free French cause. French West Africa, Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina had all rallied under de Gaulle's banner. Most remarkably, the Belgian Congo too was placed under Free French "protection," with King Leopold III—now a guest of the British Crown—granting limited authority to de Gaulle to ensure its security and prevent Italian encroachment. Belgian colonial officers in Léopoldville reluctantly cooperated, fearing fascist advance more than Gaullist ambition.
But even as de Gaulle basked in his triumph, the ground was shifting beneath him.
In a grand spectacle staged at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Benito Mussolini unveiled what would become the warning shot of the coming cold war. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Spanish Caudillo Francisco Franco and the newly frowned Bonapartist pretender Louis Napoléon. Il Duce addressed a crowd of diplomats, soldiers, and journalists under a banner that read: Per un'Africa Libera, per un Mondo Nuovo—"For a Free Africa, for a New World."
In a thundering oration, Mussolini announced the creation of the Global Federation of Free Alliances (GFFA). It was to be a revival of the league of nations, one with more teeth, backed by Italian institutions, banks, and peacekeeping forces.
More shockingly, Mussolini proclaimed the founding of a new body: the Organization of African Unity and Liberation (OAUL), headquartered in Addis Ababa, to oversee the "orderly transition" of Italian and Spanish colonies toward nominal self-rule. It was, as the Duce put it, "a gift of Latin civilization to the African soul."
In the background however, the three powers intended to divide and rule Africa via "emancipated countries," rooted in a "third way" philosophy: de jure European monarchs, de facto African governments on the ground, European economic control, racial equality, all under paternalistic modernization, and pan-African collaboration on fascist terms.
Franco gave a few terse words about the "glory of Iberia in Africa," in an interview once the speech ended. While Louis Napoléon proclaimed that "its time for a new type of empire, not of tyranny, but of fraternity." The carefully orchestrated show concluded with African delegates—some legitimate chiefs, others collaborators in tailored uniforms—pledging loyalty to the OAUL. It was theater, yes—but deadly theater, and it played to full houses in Dakar, Algiers, and Bamako.
The reaction from Brazzaville was immediate and incandescent. De Gaulle took to the radio that same evening, his voice cutting and cold:
"This proclamation is not liberation—it is seduction in the service of servitude. The fascist powers seek to steal the language of freedom to enslave those who have bled for it."
He denounced the OAUL as a puppet organization and branded the GFFA "a conspiracy of empire against humanity." He accused Mussolini of trying to destroy France's colonial birthright and condemned Spain and the Bonapartist faction as "parasites gnawing at the root of French civilization."
In London and Washington, reactions were cautious. Roosevelt, already skeptical of de Gaulle's pretensions and wary of colonial commitments, offered no immediate response. Churchill, juggling his own imperial dilemmas, limited himself to a private note: "This will not help."
But the speech did not stop the wave now gathering force across the continent.
In Dakar, pro-Italian youth began marching under banners of "African Brotherhood." In Bamako, disgruntled colonial troops rioted after being denied the backpay promised by Free French officials. Pamphlets printed in Casablanca and distributed covertly by Italian OVRA operatives urged young African men to "trust Rome, not Brazzaville." OVRA operatives began circulating in Abdijan, Libreville, Nairobi, and across British Africa, offering food, guns, money, radios, and a vision of "Latinate emancipation."
What followed was not a single war, but a patchwork of revolts, intrigues, and shifting front lines that would later be known collectively as the African Wars of Independence.
Over the next few years in French West Africa, Italian and French trained insurgents launched coordinated uprisings in Senegal and Upper Volta, triggering a brutal crackdown by Gaullist forces. In Madagascar, OAUL-backed rebels proclaimed a Malagasy Republic, resulting in a three-week siege of Tananarive that ended in a massacre. In Mauritania, Bonspartist agents helped stir up anti-Gaullist Berber factions, promising them freedom and independence under a french banner like Italy did with greater Syria.
In response, Free French counterintelligence—led by André Dewavrin—launched Operation Vigilance, a ruthless campaign of arrests, deportations, and assassinations targeting suspected OAUL sympathizers. Cities like Dakar and Brazzaville saw mass raids and curfews. Torture chambers operated quietly in colonial barracks. The ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to the logic of martial law.
The conflict marked the quiet burial of the Atlantic Charter—the postwar dream co-authored by Roosevelt and Churchill, promising decolonization, democracy, and global cooperation. In the deserts of Mauritania and the forests of Cameroon, those words rang hollow. The allure of direct Italian arms and money proving more tempting than British and American gestures.
Washington, watching the Franco-African War unfold with alarm, quietly shelved its proposed United Nations Organization, having been outmanoeuvred both morally and diplomatically by Italy and beginning the process to join the GFFA.
And so began the longest war of France's 20th century—not against Germany, not against fascism, but against its own ghosts in the mirror of Africa.