Denis MacShane: Why all of Europe should thank Churchill and the BBC

He made a short broadcast in French lasting barely two minutes. No-one can remember hearing it live. In 1940, the BBC broadcast only five minutes in French a day, so the habit of tuning in to the BBC's recently launched broadcast in foreign languages had not really taken hold.

The appeal to France to continue resisting the German invader and occupier has entered French legend with the same impact that the English revere Magna Carta or the Americans worship the Declaration of Independence.

It was an act by a lonely individual who only a few months previously had been a mere colonel in the French army. It was part of the tumultuous tractations between France and Britain as the most Francophile Prime Minister in British history, Winston Churchill, gazed with horror on the country he loved and admired nearly as much as his own England or his mother's America.

Looking backwards through the prism of the carefully-constructed memoirs, part history, part myth-making that Churchill and de Gaulle wrote after the war, the appeal of June 18, 1940, seems a logical and necessary point in history in which two men of destiny embraced.

Churchill had given France everything except the RAF to try to stop the defeat. Britain, alone, saved Europe and, arguably, the world, from a long period of authoritarian rule.Churchill became the free world's hero in 1945.

De Gaulle had to wait much longer to transform the brief statement he made on June 18 into his re-creation of a France splendid, confident, puissant and able, by the time of Churchill's death, to have overtaken Britain in terms of economic, social and cultural power and moreover to have helped give birth to a process

of European integration which isolationist British politicians, Eurosceptic avant la lettre, turned their noses up at.

The voice of France making the appeal of was that of General de Gaulle. But the words and the ideas in it were equally those of Churchill. The two men had met briefly in the preceding weeks of June as Churchill flew backwards and forwards to France to try to persuade the French government to fight on.

De Gaulle was not a Montgomery or Eisenhower. He was a political soldier who made his name as an intellectual able to think about fighting the next war with new methods and tactics.

De Gaulle sought friends among rising French politicians. Ministers and politicians are never quite sure what to do about warfare – just look at the disaster in Afghanistan – and if an authoritative soldier comes along and tells them that the policy of their rivals is wrong, and this is what should be done, they lap up such seemingly inside information.

De Gaulle's patron, Paul Reynaud, became prime minister of France at almost the same time as Churchill. He promoted Colonel de Gaulle to temporary two-star general rank and made him a junior defence minister. But it was too late. Churchill's last noble throw was to offer France joint citizenship.

The French government and parliament had decamped to Bordeaux. What would France do? Fight on? Send her soldiers and warplanes to north Africa and her fleet to link up with the Royal Navy to continue the combat?

On the Saturday and Sunday, June 15 and 16, De Gaulle flew between Bordeaux and London to help keep French resistance alive. But, on June 17, Marshall Petain assumed power and announced he was seeking an armistice with Hitler.

De Gaulle was told by Churchill to make a short broadcast. The text was almost pathetic as De Gaulle repeated three times "La France n'est pas seule. France is not alone. France is not alone".

He avoided direct attacks on Petain or his later mortal enemies, the communists, who were then actively working to endorse the Stalin-Hitler pact on the carve-up of east Europe and the Baltic states.

He finished by saying: "Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must and will not be extinguished."

There is no record of anyone hearing the appeal though it was published in some French papers which, for a short while longer, were still able to exercise editorial freedom. British newspapers also published a short extract.

Over the next few days, he was actually stopped by the Foreign Office from broadcasting stronger appeals on the BBC. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, a notorious Old Etonian appeaser, had no time for de Gaulle. But the 50-year-old French general was protected by Churchill and the even more ardently Francophile, Duff Cooper.

Churchill's "Finest Hour" speech ruptured all hopes of working with Petain, and de Gaulle was allowed to make ever stronger appeals for resistance and, in effect, to declare himself the equivalent of the other governments-in-exile in London.

On June 28, the British government officially recognised "General de Gaulle as leader of all free Frenchmen, wherever they may be, who rally to him in support of the Allied cause".

In effect, Churchill and Britain had just created a new French state, a new French government and a new French leader. It can be argued that de Gaulle never forgave the British for being our creation. And, even today, France and Britain look at each other like an elderly married couple, often thinking of murder but never contemplating divorce.

The events of June 18, 1940, will be commemorated today by David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. Those events gave birth to a free and independent France that resisted the Nazis and then shaped post-war Europe. But the midwife was Winston Churchill and the delivery room was Broadcasting House in London, not Paris.