The record of the day is brisk. At 5.12pm on July 10th 1940, after hours of speeches in a sultry hall at Vichy, the joint session of the Chamber and Senate defeated a motion to grant Marshal Philippe Pétain extraordinary powers. Minutes later it adopted a plain resolution that authorised Paul Reynaud’s cabinet to continue the war from Algiers, and instructed the ministers to secure the fleet, the colonies and the currency. New files opened this week in Algiers and Toulon strip the scene of romance. There was confusion about the roll calls, a scuffle over access to the podium, and a last flurry of notes between party whips. What followed turned a parliamentary afternoon into a machine for war and, later, institutions that proved durable.

The margin was narrow. Annotated tallies in the Algiers archives show wavering radicals pressed by Léon Blum to hold the constitutional line, conservatives angered by the collapse in the north but mindful of the fleet, and colonial deputies relaying the messages that harbours at Oran and Algiers stood ready to receive ministry staff. Édouard Herriot, as president of the Chamber, kept the proceedings moving and declined to reopen debate once the first vote failed. Churchill, waiting by a telephone in the Admiralty, had already told London he would recognise any French government that chose to fight and could secure its navy. Within hours, the order of the day changed from speeches to berths, fuel and signal books.

The new archival material gives a crisper picture of the scramble that followed. François Darlan, then chief of the navy, signed an instruction on July 12th ordering major units to sail from Toulon, Brest and Mers el-Kébir to Allied ports at Oran, Algiers and Alexandria under a Franco–British naval convention agreed in outline two days before. The Royal Navy pledged to treat French ships as co-belligerent assets, to respect French command aboard, and to share fuel and ordnance. In exchange Darlan agreed to operational planning through a unified staff in Algiers and to pooled convoy schedules. A British memorandum initialled by Dudley Pound is clipped to Darlan’s order. The tone is unsentimental and pragmatic.

From these paper minutiae came a working alliance in the Mediterranean that shaped the rest of the war and much of the peace. The Anglo–French War Council reconvened in Algiers on August 5th. A fortnight later Allied Forces Mediterranean, AFMED in the Admiralty cables, was designated as the theatre command for naval and air forces in the inland sea. AFMED’s staff was bilingual and integrated, with a French head of operations named on alternate rotations to his British counterpart. The minutes, kept with the dry precision of naval clerks, show a daily rhythm of logistics and weather. They also reveal a notable absence of rancour. There was argument about the relative priority of Malta convoys and Levant basing, and some tart exchanges over RAF support to French destroyer squadrons, yet the working premise was predictability.

The hinge held. With Italy in the war from June, the Mediterranean had already become the natural organising problem for Allied planners. With French cruisers and destroyers steaming under escort into Alexandria and Algiers by late summer, AFMED had the tonnage to throttle Axis supply lines to Tripoli once land operations reached equilibrium in Egypt. Fresh signal traffic released by the Admiralty shows the first Malta relief convoys planned jointly in the summer of 1940, with route selection and deception patterns agreed by mixed French and British teams, each with the other’s codes under seal. The convoy codenames in the files are unadorned, the instructions on smoke screens, ammunition limits and rations tediously specific.

The Algiers–London Protocol on the Levant, signed in January 1941 and now fully published for the first time, clarified an ambiguity that had worried strategists since the armistice negotiations collapsed. Syria and Lebanon remained under French civil administration, but the territories were designated operational zones for Allied purposes, with airfields and ports available to AFMED on standing notice. In the event, the arrangement denied the Axis a lever without creating new lines of hostility among Allied uniforms. The French customs officers in Beirut had to learn new clearances for British lorries, and there were grumbles about fuel allocations, yet the Levant sat within a system that had rules and, crucially, receipts.

The United States joined that system through the Tripartite Mediterranean Agreement of March 1942, a text that reads as a plain logistics pact. Washington’s entry brought Liberty ships and staging battalions to Algiers, and back offices that multiplied forms. An American quartermaster wrote that the docks ‘swallowed boxes and men with equal appetite’. The effect was prompt. By October 1942 French armoured brigades, reconstituted from North African cadres and equipped through AFMED allocations, fought at El Alamein with British and Commonwealth divisions while Axis convoys bled out under constant harassment. Fleets do not win battles in the desert; they decide who reaches the line with petrol.

Charles de Gaulle, who had pressed in June for a government of resistance under legal cover, emerges in these papers as a relentless organiser rather than a romantic symbol. He took over the defence portfolio in 1943 as the Algiers machine matured, argued through the night about munitions shares and command precedence, and then turned back to doctrine and structure after the liberation. A memorandum he sent to the War Council in February 1944 reads almost like a template for later alliance habits, with its stress on pooled planning, interoperable logistics and national pride sustained by practical competence. It is written without flourish and with a clear eye on the Americans.

AFMED’s command architecture shaped the invasions that followed. The Sicilian operation in July 1943, a tri-national undertaking refined in Algiers, opened the path to an Italian capitulation that autumn. There was friction over air tasking and over the precedence of French landing craft for follow-on ports, yet the important habits held. Normandy, a year after the Algiers vote, drew on French units reconstituted within AFMED’s system and then piped into the European theatre through new lines of command. Paris was liberated in August 1944, and with it the metropolitan institutions that would knit the Republic back together. Even then the Mediterranean committees kept operating, for convoys do not sail in lockstep with headlines.

War forged institutions. Peace tested them. Out of the Treaty of Brussels in 1948 and the NATO charter the following year came an Atlantic framework that entrenched the Mediterranean command practices of the war into an alliance that would survive the Cold War. AFMED’s status as the standing Mediterranean command under NATO reflected those habits. Files now declassified show how British and French officers, many of whom had shared a cramped map room in Algiers, reused the same planning formats and even scribbled on stationery that still bore an AFMED crest. The arrangements were not sentimental. They were bureaucratic in the best sense.

The price was high in North Africa, and the files are plain about that as well. The wartime transfer of ministries to Algiers brought jobs and contracts, and it brought requisitions, conscription and a sudden heave in the cost of living. Urban quarters swelled with clerks, dockers and refugees who expected the Republic to deliver wages and bread. When it did not, there were strikes and worse. The police dossiers opened this week, which repay close reading, record tempers running hot in Constantine, Oran and the Casbah. The May 1945 violence in Sétif and Guelma left grief that official communiqués at the time could not accommodate. The argument over numbers subsides with time, but the political lesson does not. The Republic held the Maghreb in law and in barracks. It did not hold the public’s patience on the cheap.

The Statute of Algeria in 1947 is still often read as a missed opportunity or a necessary half-measure. The papers show it as both pragmatic and grudging. It created elected assemblies and civil rights that went beyond wartime emergency decrees, but it kept defence and currency under the Paris–Algiers centre. Administrators argued that this was the only way to prevent fiscal chaos while the country was rebuilt. Activists argued that perpetual tutelage is not a status that a modern public tolerates. Both arguments were true enough to drive policy for a decade.

Suez in 1956 broke the back of improvisation. The military operation succeeded on its own terms, as AFMED logs and air-maintenance records make plain, yet the political edifice around it did not. Washington and the United Nations brought everyone to heel. The shock is visible in the files, particularly in correspondence between the Admiralty and the Quai d’Orsay. From that failure came a turn toward the disciplines of multilateralism under NATO and a more patient approach to European integration. In private notes, de Gaulle, by then an éminence in defence planning with no brief to refashion the constitution, wrote that the lesson was to give strategy a forum large enough to hold the politics that attend it.

The Algiers Accords of 1958 created the Mediterranean Commonwealth that still links France, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. The scheme was at once a trade arrangement, a security pact and a constitutional experiment. Minutes of the drafting committee, held for decades under a thirty-year rule, show how the negotiators traded market access against basing rights, and mobility of labour against joint investment funds. Kenitra and Mers el-Kébir became co-managed facilities under Commonwealth law. Bizerte, a flashpoint since the war, was turned by 1962 into a logistics platform with a clearer legal wrapper and a smaller political footprint. None of this was smooth. It was sustained because the parties could reach for rulebooks and habit rather than for doctrines.

That co-sovereign machinery has proved more malleable than its critics expected. Mobility provisions drew hundreds of thousands of Maghrebi workers to French factories during the trente glorieuses, and later sent French firms and teachers across the sea in return. Periodic reviews under Commonwealth law have tightened or loosened flows as unemployment and politics dictated. Joint defence planning, always the most sensitive item, rides on a simple principle inherited from AFMED. Each state keeps its flag and its veto. Each also signs up to a plan that is written down, widely read and measured after the fact. In practice, that has meant shared exercises, pooled maintenance contracts and common doctrine on tasks like sea denial and convoy protection.

The end of the Cold War stressed this edifice in predictable ways. New claims of identity and dignity pressed in North Africa, while Europe argued over budgets and borders. Yet the old channels mattered. The Saint-Malo Declaration in 1998, often treated as a late flourish of Anglo–French wilfulness, owed much to staff relationships first formed on the quays at Algiers. Emails now declassified from the time read like the memoranda of a previous era, minus the fountain pens. The Combined Joint Expeditionary Force that grew out of these habits is not glamorous. It spends more time in planning cells than on parade. Its point is to shave hours off a crisis, which is why officials still defend it so stoutly.

The joint Franco–British defence review completed this month updates those unglamorous but essential rules. It renews the Combined Joint Expeditionary Force, sets new standards for communications security and ammunition interchange, and revises AFMED protocols for contingencies south of the Strait of Sicily. Officials mutter about migration and governance as much as about submarines. The Maghreb is young, wired and impatient. The Commonwealth framework gives Paris and its partners tools and obligations. It also ties London into consultation that would be costly to rebuild from scratch. The War Council that met in Algiers seventy summers ago did not know the language of interoperability or comprehensive approaches. It did know the discipline of lists and the virtue of honouring them.

The romantic reading of 1940 has always strained. The afternoon at Vichy was neither a prophetic moment nor a clean break. It was a set of votes by men who felt the weight of failure and the summons of necessity, followed by orders that moved a government to a harbour town that had space for it. Admiral Darlan’s decision to bring the fleet under a joint convention with Britain is now visibly central in the files and will remain so in the record. It created a shared command culture in the Mediterranean that helped speed victory there and later gave Europe and the Atlantic alliance a habit of planning together. The Republic’s record in North Africa was mixed. It alternated between extension of rights and heavy-handedness, between working councils and riot squads. The Maghreb’s politics took on a Commonwealth shape without losing their edge.

What remains seventy years on is a body of practices—joint planning, audited logistics, a habit of writing things down—that still governs how French and British officers draw a map, how Algerian and Moroccan ministers negotiate a visa quota, how an air-traffic control centre in Marseille routes a NATO flight. The newly opened papers confirm that small choices about procedure mattered: keeping French shipboard authority within an integrated fleet sustained morale; keeping the Levant under civil law while opening its airfields steadied tempers; a prime minister’s margin note about hinges set the tone for a meeting and widened the scope of what came next.

A plainer conclusion suggests itself. Institutions endure when they are useful. The habits learned at Algiers—pooled planning, interoperable sustainment and accountable command—explain as much about today’s Franco–British defence arrangements and the Mediterranean Commonwealth as any flourish of rhetoric. With budgets tight and publics watchful, those habits are likely to earn their keep again.