Map showing the Israeli offensives and the Franco-British reaction during the Suez crisis of 1956.

‘The man at the tap.’ In August 1956, shortly after the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the cartoonist Fritz Behrendt portrays the threat hanging over the Western nations’ oil supplies.

In October 1956, members of the French Second Regiment of Colonial Parachutists (2nd RCP) are on patrol in Port Said, Egypt. In the near distance, stores of fuel are on fire.

In November 1956, Soviet military intervention in Hungary ensures that ‘law and order are restored once again’; however, it also reveals the true political objectives of the leaders in Moscow.

In this interview, Jean François-Poncet, former Secretary-General of the French Delegation to the Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom, outlines the impact of the war in Algeria and of the Suez Crisis on the Val Duchesse negotiations and on France’s commitment to European integration.

At the conference held in Rome from 25 to 28 March 1987 to mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Treaties establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC or Euratom), Robert Rothschild, former Principal Private Secretary to Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister, outlines the circumstances in which Spaak learned of the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in November 1956.

On his return from Budapest in November 1956, a journalist gives an account of the violence of the battles in the Hungarian capital which took place following an uprising by part of the population and the army against the Communist regime.