Prof. Greg Jackson

Even the leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle, or anglicized as Charles de Gaulle, now in exile in London, struggles hard to swallow this bitter pill.

Yet, he does.

He'll continue to work with the British.

And two decades later, when emotions have subsided a bit, the Frenchman will even say that he understands.

That, or he in Winston Churchill's shoes, fighting for his nation's long-shot survival in a war that appeared all but over as Nazi Germany held a conquered continent.

He'd have done the same thing.

I realize I nodded to this British attack back in episode 189, but it bore an in-depth telling today.

The reason is that today's tale requires understanding the complications of France's position as a defeated British ally turned Nazi collaborating regime that nonetheless still has a massive colonial empire.

An empire that includes the very place where the Americans are going to take their first major swing at the Nazi empire, North Africa.

To capture all the intricacies at play here, we'll begin with a basic primer in France's colonization of North Africa, which includes moving from west to east, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

We'll also note Italian colonization in Libya and British control in Egypt.

With this full context, we'll be on solid ground to follow why Benito Mussolini has a presence in North Africa, how he botches it so badly that the soon-to-be infamous Desert Fox, Erwin, or Erwin Rommel, and his Africa Corps have to come bail him out, and how the Allies' pincer movement, consisting of British forces coming from Egypt and mostly American forces landing on, then advancing from, French North Africa, will ultimately put the squeeze on the axis.

All that said, ready to see our boy Dwight D. Eisenhower lead the amphibious landing, codenamed Operation Torch, in Vichy-administered French North Africa, then team up with his fellow tank lover, George Patton, to battle their way east across these dune-strewn and arid lands, as Bernard Montgomery leads his British and Commonwealth forces west in a combined attack on the Axis?

Excellent.

Then let us begin with France's first colonial step in North Africa, taken in the region more than a century before World War II.

Rewind.

In the summer of 1830, France's deeply unpopular King Charles X makes an odd play to stave off revolution.

He sends his military across the Mediterranean to conquer the nominally Ottoman-controlled North African city of Algiers.

The king and his prime minister, Jules de Polignac, think this will help the regime's popularity.

They even frame the invasion as a matter of national honor, pointing to an incident three years earlier in which the city's ruler, the day, slapped the French consul with a fly whisk during a dispute over a nearly three-decade-old debt, one taken out by a French revolutionary government that the restored French king has zero intent of paying.