It was not for humanitarian motives that Washington decided to spare Germany a return to a bucolic past.
France's government army was entering the French capital to commence a pitiless battle against the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune
his Speech of Hope--a significant restatement of America's policy on Germany. Until then the Allies had been united in their commitment to convert 'Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character'.
incidentally, isn't it inherently fucked up that the Allies thought they had the right to do that
De Gaulle never forgave the Americans for having denied France a place at the victors' table in the closing stages of the Second World War, especially at the Yalta meetings between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.
[...] Eventually de Gaulle softened his opposition to the European Union, after repeated American pledges in the 1950s that France would remain Europe’s administrative center. But he would only embrace it so long as, in his own words to a visiting journalist, the European Union resembled 'a horse a…
