EVER SINCE, back in the 1960s, I wrote the Price of Glory trilogy about Franco-German wars, I have been enticed by the dangerously ambitious project of attempting a full-scale History of that complex, sometimes exasperating, but always fascinating country— France. At last, the year 2004 provided a kind of launching pad. It was the hundredth anniversary of the signature of the Entente Cordiale, the Treaty which ended centuries of war and enmity between Britain and her neighbour. Friend or Foe? Over the centuries more often the latter than the former. (2004 also happened to be the bicentenary of the Coronation as Emperor of Britain’s deadly enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte; he who came within several inches that same year of repeating the success of William the Conqueror, failing where a later despot, Adolf Hitler, also failed.)
The Entente Cordiale conveys rather different things in British and American history—and for France. For France it meant, quite simply, the certainty at last of an ally who would counter-balance the dread power of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s vast and menacing Reich on her doorstep; and regain the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine so brutally torn from her thirty-three years previously. At terrible, unacceptable cost for France, it would bring victory in 1918, but predictable defeat in 1940.
For Britain the Entente, if it signified the end of all those centuries of conflict with France, it also meant inevitable involvement in a major European war, for the first time since 1815—and against a new enemy. (There are today, however, still a revisionist minority of British scholars who think that maybe the Entente was a thoroughly bad thing for Britain, and that somehow we should have kept out, and made friends with the Kaiser with his glaring eyes and aggressive moustaches, and hang-ups derived from that shrivelled arm.)
For the USA, the Entente, which was still to leave an unbalanced alliance not sufficiently powerful enough to defeat Germany by itself in 1914–17, would make inevitable involvement in two world wars, and (to date) a permanent departure from the exhortations of Washington’s Farewell Address. So, inescapably, perceptions of French history and its message differ radically from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
While writing Seven Ages of Paris, I was constantly reminded of the unique centralism of Paris throughout the history of France. In Maurice Druon’s generous preface [p. xiv], he remarks “. . . he offers us, in effect, a new history of France herself—a personalised history . . .” I am proud to think this might be so. In reading Druon’s words, I too came to realise how impossible it is to write a history of Paris without it in some way being a history of France—and vice versa. And this new book is also, unashamedly a highly personalised, idiosyncratic view of France through the ages, written by a Briton, a cher ennemi.
I should perhaps explain the title. When I was researching my first book about France, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, in the early sixties, every morning the head of the Service Historique de l’Armée out at Vincennes, a splendid central-casting for a French Army officer of the epoch, [General] de Cossé-Brissac, would greet me with a warm handshake, and the words “Mon cher ennemi!” It echoed the sentiment of that sixteenth-century warrior-poet, Sir Philip Sidney
“That sweet enemy, France!”
and he explained this superlative oxymoron as follows: though we’ve been at war almost all our histories, we do really quite like you. In the context of the recent rift with France, the oxymoron may be somewhat less comprehensible to US readers. As one New York publisher remarked: “Americans today have some difficulty in seeing the adjective ‘dear’ in relation to those French people!” But, I repeat, this is, as Seven Ages was, a highly idiosyncratic book, written by a twentieth-century Briton, partially educated in the US of A.
This leads one to those different perceptions of French history in UK and USA. For the best part of a thousand years England was at war with France, with brief (and often rather artificial) intervals of peace in between. There was, for instance, the Peace of Amiens, 1802, which lasted three months. It dates back, obviously, to the Norman Conquest (though the French really couldn’t be blamed, as the Normans of 1066 were not in effect French); it runs through the Hundred Years War (two of them), the wars of Louis XIV, and of Napoleon. Even in July 1940 Britain’s killing of 1300 French sailors at Oran, out of the necessity of fighting Hitler, struck a terrible blow at the soul of France—and brought Churchill, that great Francophile, to tears in the Commons. The following year British troops were killing the French of Vichy in Syria.
Hence the 2003 rift over Iraq came perhaps as less of a shock to the British system than to the American. For America, there were the French-Indian wars of the 1750s; but they were long ago, peripheral, and fought against what was shortly to become a common foe—the British Redcoat. Then came Lafayette and Yorktown, the Louisiana Purchase and the Napoleonic Wars; in all of which France to America was a benevolent item. In the War of 1812, surely that most foolish of all conflicts, it was against Britain—not France—that Americans fought their sole engagement of the Napoleonic Wars. So 1904 signifies America’s reluctant, but decisive involvement in two European wars. “Lafayette, we are here!”—was it France the doughboys of 1917 came to save? Then came the wild 1920s, with the proper slogan “good Americans die in Paris.” In 1944, many did die on Omaha and Utah beaches (whence William once sailed to conquer England), to save France yet a second time over.
In such a reading of history the terrible shock to post-9/11 USA of the perceived “ingratitude” of 2003 becomes comprehensible. “Enemies,” to some—but not very “dear.” France, however, with her two thousand years of history behind her, goes on immortally, pursuing her own unique path—sometimes inspiring, sometimes infuriating, but never boring, to her friends and neighbours. Charles de Gaulle perhaps judged it well when he once wrote of the country, whose virtues and faults he often personified:
In the classical French garden, no tree seeks to stifle the others by overshadowing them; the plants accommodate themselves to being geometrically arranged; the pond does not aspire to be a waterfall; the statues do not vie to obtrude themselves upon the admiring spectator. A noble melancholy comes over us,1 from time to time. Perhaps it comes from our feeling that each element, in isolation, might have been more radiantly brilliant. But that would be to the detriment of the whole; and the observer takes delight in the rule that impresses on the garden its magnificent harmony.
The pursuit of harmony, though by no means always attainable, is what France is about.