>>7892
My personal headcannon is that the French government decides to be less neutral than historically in the Spanish civil war and sends their own Legion Condor equivalent over there in order to stimulate the war economy and show everyone how relevant France still is as a great power.
The Spanish Republic gradually wears down the Spanish State, but as they do so they keep murdering clerics and razing civilian settlements so hard France and Europe by proxy experience somewhat of a refugee crisis which pisses off the Church and much of France's right wing while making the Krauts and Italians slightly less evil in mainstream media for providing humanitarian aid to the Nationalists.
The refugees are weaponized into making the French government look like degenerate heretics for aiding the Red Terror by France's growing right wing opposition, Britain eventually drops out after the fucken reds use French-supplied tanks adorned with the heads of their enemies as decoration in the Sevilla holocaust of late 1938, the French government suspends all lend-lease to the Spanish Republic in January 1939 and withdraws its volunteers.
Hitler meanwhile does Hitler things, albeit being aware of France's increasingly dysfunctional government he tends to avoid the topic of Elsaß-Lothringen in order to keep the French somewhat divided.
The Spanish Nationalists keep losing territory with refugees continuing to flow into Europe
through Gnahzee NGOs :^) even as tensions between the Great Powers build up, the French left wing doing their best to cite the rapid German rearmament as reason for their continued existence while the French right wing argues that the Germans would've never been able to do so if not for Left-France's disgusting war conduct fueling pro-fascist sentiment across the continent.
While this is going on France decides to recall some guns, artillery pieces and the occasional light tank that were loaned to the Spanish Republic, they agree as the Spanish State is on its last legs in Galicia with the Germans and Italians having largely stopped their regular lend-lease supplies but then the various Soviet-supplied groups largely responsible for the red terror remove the Republican government only to purge each other into open warfare the moment after.
A vote of no confidence against Daladier follows, but it's aborted mid-session due to German tourists crossing the Polish border.
As WW2 kicks off French authorities try to shut down the French Right wing though media censorship, but they can't do a whole lot other than screech at Hitler due to a significant portion of the French armed forces holding less than favorable views of their civilian leaders and Swiss journalists observing the conditions at refugee camps.
During the phony war the French right prepare to coup the government in the hopes of stopping the war before it can escalate into another trench bloodbath, they do this by putting as many leftists as they can on the German border while hunting for unpatriotic traitors within their own ranks, which is where they discover an eerie amount of MI6 glow in the darks snooping as usual.
An ebin spy crusade ensues that's just successful enough to catch MI6niggers off guard when the coup happens on the same day Hitler has the Wehrmacht visit Belgium for the first time, the newly proclaimed 5th French Republic immediately signs a ceasefire with the Krauts not wanting to risk a repeat of 1870 and soon after a peace treaty in which Belgium has to surrender Eupen-Malmedy to Germany leaving Hitler content as the stunned British recall the BEF troops stationed in France.
Over the summer Hitler, Mussolini, Petain and punished Franco discuss ways to solve the Spanish problem, direct military involvement is considered but ruled out due to the ongoing war between Britain and Germany.
Instead they agree to arm and train able-bodied Spanish refugees en masse as "volunteers", ship them off to Spain and have them defeat the anarcho-syndicalist bandits scouring the Iberian wasteland with "volunteer" air support from the Great Powers.
In exchange the Balearic islands are split between France and Italy, with a super sekrit clause that permits Spain to reclaim Gibraltar in the event of unforeseen circumstances involving the British.
MI6 gets wind of this but somewhere down the line "cede the Balearic islands in exchange for lend-lease and in the event of unforeseen circumstances involving Britain a reclamation of Gibraltar" turns into "cede the Balearic islands in exchange for Gibraltar" due to a faulty cipher and the agent transmitting the message getting captured before he was able to finish according to official sources, though some argue the agent may have done this deliberately
at the same time a French merchant ship is sunk by a British submarine in the south Atlantic having been mistaken for a German Q-Ship.
Churchill immediately screeches out a declaration of war against everyone who pissed on his empire, the French, Germans and Italians rapidly move into Iberia, Portugal joins the alliance that would later be known as the Axis powers and Gibraltar is lost to anti-semitic forces which leads into
>>7877
How retarded is this on a scale from alternatehistory.com to Ace Combat?