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Book Review, 13 July 2006 The most cordial of rivals
That Sweet Enemy Who wrote, “I fear the French are so fickle, corrupt and ignorant, so conceited and foolish that it is hopeless to think of their being sensibly governed.”? And who said, “There are only seven leagues of salt water between Calais and Dover – but between the English and French character there is an abyss”? The answers are: Queen Victoria, and the French writer Jules Vallès. These quotations are from Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ monumental study of the love-hate relationship between the French and the British over the last three centuries. The task is daunting. From the Sun King to Tony Blair, from Blenheim and Waterloo to “Up yours Delors!” and “Hop off you Frogs!”, the canvas is vast and the bones of contention innumerable. But who better to tell this story of wars and alliances, of betrayal and friendship, of cutthroat colonial and commercial rivalry, but also of food, fashion, sport, literature, sex and music than this Anglo-French couple of historians. He is a slightly eurosceptic British Reader in French History at Cambridge; she a pro-European teacher of French at the Foreign Office. The originality of their synthetic approach is that we get both sides of the story, and when the authors disagree they say so and allow the reader to reach his own conclusion. There have been other books on the same theme but none as fascinating, and all- encompassing, as the present study. The detail and erudition are impressive and many clichés and misconceptions are laid to rest. Our histories are so intertwined that it is often difficult to trace the origins of hallowed customs. The British national anthem, arranged in its modern form by Thomas Arne in 1745, probably emerged from earlier words and music, although there is little proof to support the French claim that it was written by Lully for Louis XIV as “Dieu protège le Roi”. The French Tricolour, invented by Lafayette in 1789, sports the same colours as the Union Jack since it was partly inspired by the red, white and blue of the American flag, which had developed from the British. It is generally admitted that class distinction in Britain is the most rigid, yet in the eighteenth century French visitors to England were surprised by the free-and-easy mixing of British society in coffee shops. De La Rochefoucauld was amazed to see farmers discussing agriculture with gentlemen on equal terms. Eating out was more typical of London than of Paris, the first restaurants being inspired by English taverns. Even France’s national dish, le steak-frites – described by Roland Barthes as the “alimentary sign of Frenchness” – was introduced to France by Wellington’s army in 1815. French visitors to London found the meat “revoltingly undercooked”; today it is the opposite. Although Britain fought France in six of the 12 greatest wars in history between 1688 (the Glorious Revolution) and 1815 (Waterloo), the Peace of Utrecht (1713) ushered in 80 years of calm and intense cross-Channel scrutiny. British scientists (Bacon, Newton), philosophers (Locke) and writers (Swift, Pope, Defoe, Addison) influenced French thought. The two French intellectuals who made England a model for reform were Voltaire and Montesquieu. The latter was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. While French writers went to England on an “intellectual mission”, the English went to Paris for amusement, the food and the literary salons. Eighteenth-century English novels (Tom Jones, Pamela) were popular in France and French studies on manners and education, based on Rousseau, intrigued the English. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his (half-French) son – described by Marc Fumaroli as “the moral testament of French Europe” – was dismissed scornfully by Dr Johnson, as “teaching the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master”. More surprisingly, even when the two countries were at war collaboration never ceased and tourism thrived. The French Revolution had its enthusiasts in Britain (Wordsworth, Fox, Coleridge, Blake, Burns, Paine), at least in its early stages. Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. But hundreds of exiles were also welcomed warmly (the French royal family, Beaumarchais, Lafayette, Chateaubriand) and half of the total were clergy, including 30 bishops. The Government offered Winchester Castle as a temporary monastery; the Oxford University Press printed many Latin Bibles and breviaries free of charge; and the Jesuit school Stonyhurst was founded. Up to 80,000 French sought asylum, including France’s next three kings and several future prime ministers. From “hereditary enemy”, dubbed la Perfide Albion(originally a reproach for its infidelity to Rome), described by Napoleon as “a nation of shopkeepers” (a phrase coined in fact by Adam Smith) to l’entente cordiale and the present scramble by the British to buy property in France (in 2002, some 600,000 houses were owned by Britons: one for every 30 families), the road was long and twisting. The mutual fascination of thiscouple infernal endures, but so does distrust and rivalry. Finally, conclude the authors, “England and France are much more like each other than they suppose — more than the British are like the Americans or the French are like the Germans.”  |
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