Eighty years ago this week France proposes a unique consitutional experiment

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The French constituent assembly voted through a new constitution for the country. In an almost unique system for a large nation there would only be a single legislative chamber which was intended to obviate (somehow) the ineffectiveness and instability of the Third Republic. As a mark of the break between the two constitutions and in recognition of the fact that Petain's Etat Francais had indeed existed, the new arrangement was dubbed the Fourth Republic.

French troops finally withdrew entirely from Syria bringing to an end France's post-Versailles colonial, "mandatory" foray into the region. The date is still celebrated as a de facto day of independence. The British were still locked into their analagous role in Palestine. A joint anglo-american committee of inquiry had examined the question in the hope that it would produce a settlement acceptable in the US. The committee delivered its report but recommended little more than pious platitude. The only positive concrete proposal was to allow 100,000 more Jews to settle in Palestine. An independent state was not to be dominated by any ethnic group.

The League of Nations, emblem of the failure of multilateral harmony in the wake of the First World War, held a final meeting at which the organisation formally voted itself out of existence. Its assets were transferred to the new United Nations.

The British economist John-Maynard Keynes died at the age of only 62. He had worked throughout the war culminating in leadership of the British team in fraught and draining  negotiations with the US over British war debt and the post-war economic order. The immediate cause of death was a heart attack but this was certainly provoked by exhaustion.

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