France and the Commonwealth of Nations at times, it has been suggested that France join the Commonwealth. In 1956, during the Suez Crisis, during which France and the United Kingdom's interests in the Middle East aligned, it was proposed by French Prime Minister Guy Mollet that France and the UK create a Franco-British Union, with common citizenship and Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. His British counterpart, Anthony Eden, instead proposed that France join the Commonwealth, with Commonwealth citizenship rights and recognising the Queen as Head of the Commonwealth. However, this was rejected by Mollet. La Francophonie, which was founded to promote the French language
D. R. Thorpe considerably in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Indeed, a feature of Thorpe’s biographical trilogy was that all three subjects, though having each held two of the three great offices of the British state (Eden and Home, in addition to being Prime Minister, both served more than one term as Foreign Secretary), tended, in retrospect, to be underestimated. Lloyd was remembered as Eden’s compliant Foreign Secretary at the time of Suez who, as Chancellor, was dismissed ignominiously by Harold Macmillan in a major Cabinet reshuffle (the so-called "Night of the Long Knives") in 1962; Home, then an hereditary