For the first time since the Norman Conquest, three generations have gone by without the armies of England and France meeting in battle array. The last of the veterans of Toulouse and of Waterloo have passed away . . . there is no man living who has fired a shot in warfare between the French and English nations . . . and for the first time the manhood of the two peoples have never seen mourning garb worn by their women.
J.E.C. BODLEY, France (1898)1
The summer of 1815 began the period during which not only were Britain and France at peace, but there was no prospect of war. All over Europe, most people were heartily relieved: Franco-British peace meant European peace. The Congress of Vienna – in which France took part – established a system for maintaining peace by negotiation between governments, and some statesmen dreamt of permanent European institutions. Tsar Alexander I attempted to give Christian sanction to the bargaining by proposing a ‘Holy Alliance’. Described by Castlereagh with stereotypical British pragmatism as ‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’, and by democrats and nationalists as a cloak for oppression, it was nevertheless proof of a new desire to inject idealism into international politics. Those who like identifying precursors might see this, rather than Napolenic imperialism, as the beginning of European integration, and a foreunner of the United Nations to boot. Britain and France had to get used to the idea of peaceful coexistence. They managed fairly easily to work as neighbours, traders, tourists, and even on occasion allies. Friendship, however, proved more difficult.
CHAPTER 7
Legitimate monarchy re-entered Paris behind those red uniforms which had just deepened their dye with Frenchmen’s blood.
RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND 1
To abolish absolute power in the political sphere and the intellectual sphere . . . that is the role of England in the development of our civilization.
FRANÇOIS GUIZOT, Sorbonne lectures on European civilization, 18282
The realities of power were unmistakable after Napoleon’s ‘Hundred Days’. The Allied armies occupied northern and eastern France, levied a war indemnity of 700 million francs (on top of the 500 million the occupation cost), and trimmed strategic fortresses from France’s frontiers. Castlereagh’s four-power Treaty of Chaumont remained in force to prevent any revival of French aggression, and the Admiralty continued discreetly spying on French naval bases: better to be safe than sorry. The Bourbon Restoration – Britain’s preferred solution to the French problem – would be overthrown in 1830, as would its successor, the July Monarchy, in 1848. But the story is not wholly one of futility. The historian Pierre Rosanvallon has suggested that two histories of France can be told.3 One, the ‘Jacobin’ history, emphasizes conflict: a succession of revolutions and wars lasting at least until the 1870s. The other, the ‘English’ history – rarely told – is about reform and continuity. From this viewpoint, the Restoration marks the beginning of constitutional government closely copied from Westminster, with the speaker of the House of Commons offering the new French parliament advice on procedure. France had greater intellectual, political and cultural freedom than it had known under the Old Regime, the Republic or Napoleon. Influential voices, such as that of Guizot, argued that the two countries had become partners. Unlike the older idea that they were the two great rivals dividing the world between them, they were now seen as the two great liberal states whose mission was to defend and propagate freedom. Many people on both sides remained unconvinced.
Our Friends the Enemy
Every whore in Paris cries
‘Long live our friends the enemy!’
Song by PIERRE-JEAN DE BÉRANGER
In general, the English, whatever their rank, showed themselves as they are always and everywhere: arrogant and haughty.
Souvenirs of a Parisian Doctor4
I cannot tell what made me dislike France so very much; one reason I think was that I had raised my expectations too high.
MARY BROWNE, aged fifteen5
As always, peace meant tourism, which replaced privateering as the main earner for the Channel ports. The British presence, ‘massive and unrivalled’ – about 14,000 in 1815, 70–80 per cent of all visitors – swamped the foreign potentates, politicians and adventurers who came to France to enjoy what their armies had won, so much so that all foreigners were assumed to be British.6 ‘English’ hotels and English-speaking waiters emerged after long hibernation. We might expect big differences: not only were the British the victors, but France had torn itself apart, and destroyed much of what the British had previously admired. Visitors picked up macabre first-hand stories of the Terror. They noted the ruined churches, the uncultivated fields, and the frequency of beggars, including children who had picked up some English from the soldiers: ‘How do you do. Give me a penny, papa. I hope you’re very well.’7 France was now a place in which the British had privileges. Pauline Bonaparte had moved out of her palace in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; Castlereagh moved in, succeeded by Wellington and every British ambassador since. The dais of Pauline’s bed acquired a plush throne for visiting monarchs.8 Sir Walter Scott, who had a wonderful time, described Paris as a frozen lake over whose perilous depths one could now skate without fear. The British no longer needed to show particular tact, or the old sense of cultural inferiority. Those who hurried to the Louvre knew that their government was about to dispose of much of its contents. If French cartoonists can be believed, they no longer felt they had to conceal their Britishness under French fashions. Whereas Lord Chesterfield had considered it the ultimate accolade to be taken for a Frenchman, the British ambassadress Lady Granville was furious when French acquaintances whispered that ‘one would never suspect she was English’.9
Yet it is striking how much had not changed, at least in perceptions. Writers described the same attractions of Paris with the same breathless excitement, and sometimes disapproval, as fifty years earlier. Carriages in Paris still threatened life and limb – despite the revolution. The British still found the French ‘forward’ and talkative (‘they never say they do not know a thing’). The French still found the British stiff and inarticulate. Wellington’s laconic sarcasm perplexed French acquaintances: when asked by one lady why he had taken so long to cross the Adour, he replied, ‘Il y avait de l’eau, Madame.’ British adolescents like Mary Browne were again seeking French tutors to learn genteel dancing, drawing, writing and music, as if Robespierre had never lived. But Mary, a sharp critic, found her teachers hopeless (though cheap), and discovered only one old woman whose ‘French politeness . . . was at all like what I expected’.10 Perhaps the revolution had made a difference after all. But only a temporary one: Paris and France would pursue a successful counter-revolution in manners, and restore their position as the world centre of fashion, pleasure, and elegance.
The British were eager to let bygones be bygones – easy for the winner. The generally untroubled relations the army had established with the population helped.11 Wellington, who did not believe the French people were to blame for Napoleon’s Hundred Days, was commander-in-chief of the Allied armies of occupation. He remained determined to minimize friction, and was tough on troublemakers. Except in the case of his own indiscreet repos du guerrier with Napoleon’s ex-mistress the singer Grassini, thought insulting to French propriety and sensibilities, he was sensitive to symbols. He told one of his officers – who had bought the battlefield of Agincourt – to stop excavations there; he resisted London’s instructions to take back British flags captured at Fontenoy in 1745; and he stopped the Prussians blowing up the Pont de Jéna by placing a British sentry on it.12 Many British sympathized with their former antagonists. Ordinary redcoats were eager collectors of Napoleonic memorabilia and, reported a French official, ‘spoke of [him] with enthusiasm’.13 Sergeant Wheeler had little time for the king he had helped restore: ‘His pottle belly Majesty . . . who blubbered like a big girl . . . an old bloated poltroon, the Sir John Falstaff of France.’14 When Marshall Ney, one of the heroes of Waterloo, was executed by the Bourbon government, it was reported to have caused universal displeasure in the British army. One of Napoleon’s other generals avoided a firing squad thanks to three Englishmen who aided his escape.
One issue on which Wellington’s attempt to find a compromise failed, however, was that of the treasures of the Louvre. During the summer of 1815, British riflemen occupied the palace to enforce the return of works of art gloriously conquered/shamefully looted in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Low Countries. The Republic had begun systematic spoliation, justified by ‘its power and the superiority of its culture’, and Napoleon had systematized the policy. The stupendous haul included 2,000 paintings (among them fifteen Raphaels, seventy-five Rubenses, and dozens of Rembrandts, Leonardos, Titians and Van Dycks); 8,000 ancient manuscripts; hundreds of classical statues; and the Byzantine horses of St Mark from Venice – the greatest accumulation of European art there has ever been. Their removal humiliated Louis XVIII and angered Parisians, who grumbled that Wellington himself had been in the Louvre ‘on a ladder’ taking down paintings, and ‘perched all morning on the monument’ supervising the removal of the Venetian horses.15 It was one consequence of Napoleon’s ‘Hundred Days’ and the increased severity with which France was now treated. Probably most French contemporaries, and many since, regarded this as shockingly vindictive, as did British sympathizers. The British government took the lead, intending to diminish French ‘vanity’ and prevent Paris from being ‘in future the centre of the arts’, the cultural dimension of Napoleon’s ambition to make it the centre of Europe. The Allies agreed. An international petition of artists urged the return of works to Rome, ‘the capital of the arts for all peoples’.16 The Pope sent the sculptor Antonio Canova (expenses paid by Britain) to recover works belonging to the Church. The French concealed as much as they could: half the Italian pictures are still in French museums. Meanwhile, to the victors the spoils: in 1816 the Greek antiquities controversially collected by the Earl of Elgin were placed in the British Museum.
What the French thought of the British was largely a function of their political loyalties: to call the invaders ‘the Allies’ or to call them ‘the Enemy’ was an unambiguous shibboleth. Supporters of the Restoration, from Louis XVIII down, felt a mixture of resentment and respect. ‘It is possible not to like the English,’ decided the poet Lamartine, ‘but it is impossible not to esteem them.’ The Bourbons and many of their advisers had been refugees in Britain. A noticeable sprinkling of the elite had British wives (from the last prime minister of the Restoration, Polignac, to the first President of the Second Republic, that same Lamartine). Others had mistresses, notoriously the ageing royal roué the Duc de Bourbon, whose devotion to the notorious Sophie Dawes (alias Baronne de Feuchères) owed much to her professional skills in ‘strangulatory manipulations’.17 The main British representatives in France, Castlereagh and Wellington, were francophiles, at least in the sense that they sincerely respected the restored Bourbon monarchy and were committed to its success. The American envoy in London was impressed to find that at dinner at Castlereagh’s everyone was speaking French (though in fact Castlereagh’s own French was not good). British visitors to the French court were equally impressed by Louis XVIII’s addressing them in (rather better) English.
The many opponents of the Bourbons (who included former Republicans, Bonapartists, and many Parisian workers) blamed Britain for political and economic ills. ‘Hatred for the English is growing daily,’ a police agent reported late in 1815. ‘They are regarded as the destroyers of French industry.’ Despite official friendship, a British Admiralty yacht, flying the British ensign, sent to pick up the secretary to the admiralty and his family at Boulogne, was impounded by zealous – or patriotic – customs officers, and despite apoplectic protests detained for a month. Ordinary travellers frequently complained of ill-treatment by customs officials. British tourists beat a hasty retreat from the Tuileries gardens after being surrounded by a hostile crowd.18 British officers in Paris had to be ready to fight duels with their demobilized former adversaries, who systematically picked quarrels. The British were certainly the main targets of cartoonists. Probably this was partly because Russians and Prussians were too risky as subjects, partly because mocking the British was an indirect way of mocking the Bourbons, and partly because British visitors were far more numerous and happily bought satirical cartoons of themselves. Nevertheless such cartoons indicate a lively spirit of anglophobia. Rossini’s fashionable opera Il Viaggio a Reims (1825), commissioned to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, had an English character, ‘Lord Sidney’, as romantic hero. But in many literary works – including by Vigny, Stendhal, Nerval and Balzac – the English characters (unlike in eighteenth-century literature) were villains: nearly all the thirty-one English characters in Balzac’s novels are bad.19 The popular (and frequently prosecuted) songwriter Béranger, France’s first great chansonnier, produced catchy lines that could sound friendly but in context are bitterly sarcastic.
THE BRITISH IN PARIS
The image – or rather images – of the British now became well-established and would last throughout the century, if not longer. If they echo eighteenth-century prejudices, we can even now recognize them as concretely ‘British’ in a way that rather abstract earlier symbols were not. Both British and French were struck by physical differences between them. The British were indeed taller and plumper. The candid Mary Browne noted that though old women were fat, most French women were ‘as flat as boards’ – something that fashion encouraged. Some English women, lamented one Henry Mathews, copied them by ‘compress[ing] their beautiful bosoms as flatly as possible, and destroy[ing] every vestige of those charms for which, of all other women, they are perhaps the most indebted to nature’.20 French cartoonists made the British absurd in body, dress and behaviour. Men and women are outsized: sometimes fat (in the ‘John Bull’ manner) but often angular. Their fashions are eccentric and exaggerated. English girls may be shown as pretty, but are insipid, gawky and charmless. As the patriotic General Lamarque put it, ‘hundreds of English women lanky as poplars . . . are spoiling the gentle, gracious landscape with their abrupt manners and purposeful stalk’.21 Men, if not in absurd uniforms (Highlanders in kilts clearly inspired much curiosity) are coarsely dressed, for travelling, and hence are not fashionable, civilized or elegant. Their gestures and bearing lack ease and naturalness. With their gaping and their guidebooks, they are always provincial. The title of one series of caricatures, Le Suprême Bon Ton (roughly ‘the height of class’), mocks British manners, the anglomaniac fads they inspired, and their hopeless inability to be truly smart.
Even after a generation of revolution and war, the French still saw themselves as embodying elegance and grace in contrast to British clumsiness, stiffness and lack of taste.
The English, like the French, perceived a strong contrast between the two nations’ manners – though they interpreted it rather differently. The umbrella had by now become a badge of Englishness, not Frenchness.
Lady Granville, wife of the ambassador appointed in 1824, was sensitive to this. She both resented and feared les élégantes who would judge you on whether you had ‘six curls or five on the side of your head’. Although she thought there was ‘not so much mind as would fill a pea shell’ among the ‘exquisite set’, ‘their effect upon me is to crush me with a sense of my inferiority whilst I am absolutely gasping with the sense of my superiority . . . they have an aplomb, a language, a dress de convenance, which it is as impossible for me to reach as it would be for one of them to think five minutes like a deep-thinking, deep feeling Englishwoman’.22
E. Delacroix, ‘Campaign Baggage’: the redcoats got on quite well with French civilians – and perhaps introduced them to steak and chips.
FAST FOOD A L’ANGLAISE
One of France’s great nineteenth-century gourmets, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, remembered ‘having seen, after the 1815 campaign, when the English remained for two or three years in Paris, the birth of le bifteck in France’. Dumas advised serving the steak with potatoes ‘cut into little square sticks the length of a finger’ and fried.23 France’s national dish, le steack-frites – which the philosopher Roland Barthes defined as ‘the alimentary sign of Frenchness’24 – was thus imported from England, thanks to Wellington’s army.
Above all, the British were famous for spending money, and so they received at least a venal welcome, though not necessarily a good bargain. ‘English’ shops and services developed. The Irish writer Lady Morgan related that she tried to buy some French sweets for her grand-daughter and was told that the shop stocked only plum-cake, mince pies, apple dumplings and other ‘english pastry’.25 At Mrs Harriet Dunn’s establishment near the Palais Royal an English-speaking waiter (from Dunkirk) served roast beef and mutton washed down with porter brewed in Paris. The Great Nelson Hotel served bacon, eggs and tea for breakfast. Galignani’s English bookshop (still in existence) began to publish an English newspaper, the Register. Paris was the destination of more visitors than ever, and some intended a long stay, for splendid houses could be rented cheaply from Napoleon’s dispossessed aristocracy, and a grand style maintained on far less money than in London. Moreover, the origins and respectability of foreigners were less scrutinized. British visitors could be received at court, especially after the 1830 revolution – ‘a favour they could never dream of in England, where all they know of His Britannic Majesty is what they read in the newspapers’.26 As the novelist Thackeray put it snootily, ‘foreigners become great personages as long as they have lots of money’. All this was an attraction for nouveaux riches, noble families in straitened circumstances, and those who – sometimes spectacularly – had kicked over the traces. These famously included theménage a trois of Lord and Lady Blessington and the Comte d’Orsay (the leading dandy in both Paris and London); the Marquis de Custine and his English lover Edward Sainte-Barbe; and the wealthy, cultivated but notoriously dissipated Hertford family.
Parisian social life became more like that of London. Although salons remained, fashion increasingly centred on commercial public entertainments such as panoramas, arcades, theatres, cafés, restaurants (of which the Café Anglais long remained one of the most celebrated), and pleasure gardens modelled on, and sometimes named after, London originals such as Vauxhall and Ranelagh. The main tourist centre in the 1820s was still the Palais Royal, given over to eating, gambling, shopping (‘very dear . . . the people seem to make quite a favour of selling you anything’) and sex – ‘scenes such as no Englishman can conceive . . . of frightful and unimaginable sensuality’. It also had Paris’s first – if not only – public lavatories, which made a handsome profit.27 British entrepreneurs helped to pioneer a new and eventually more attractive social centre along ‘the Boulevard’, for example Robinson’s new Tivoli gardens, with romantic grottos, scenery inspired by the novels of Scott, a roller-coaster and a dance floor. Horse-racing was imported on a more elaborate scale than in the 1770s. Chantilly, a royal domain, set up a course. The ‘derby de Chantilly’, run over the same distance as its Epsom model, became the great spring social event, attracting 30,000 spectators by the mid-1830s. Horse-racing provided the pretext for the fashionable and raffish ‘Jockey-Club’. The gentleman’s club was a post-war British import alien to the French tradition of the salon, organized by women. It is one sign of the development of ‘separate spheres’ for the sexes that began in the eighteenth century. The English Jockey and Pigeon Shooting Club was founded in 1825 by two English racing enthusiasts, Thomas Bryon and ‘Lord’ Henry Seymour, an illegitimate offspring of the Hertfords and a flamboyant social figure in Paris. It quickly became the home of the anglomaniac ‘dandy’,and it established premises on the Boulevard des Italiens, the axis of the new social scene. Seymour resigned, finding the club insufficiently obsessed with racing, and was succeeded by Anne-Édouard Denormandie, winner of the first-ever French steeplechase and so anglomaniac that he sometimes pretended to be English. The Club, apolitical and cosmopolitan, attracted fashionable young men, often from nouveau-riche families. Its immediate success symbolized rejection of Republican ‘virtue’ and Napoleonic discipline and a return to aristocratic indulgence, including gambling and the new amusements of ‘the Boulevard’, not least the ballerinas of the Opera – club members were allowed to use the stage door. The Jockey-Club linked the upper class with the world of commercial entertainment, and this was the attraction of Boulevard society throughout the nineteenth century.28 In this the Club played a prominent and often scandalous part. Now more sedate, it is closer to its original purpose of promoting horse-racing.
PAU: BRITAIN IN BEARN
Pau is a pretty town of 25,000 inhabitants, a prefecture, with a court, a lycée, a college, a public library etc . . . But there is a small detail unmentioned in the geographical data . . . Pau is obviously and unambiguously part of England.
FRENCH SATIRIST,187629
It was not only Paris that drew the British. The seaports had long been a refuge for debtors and those facing other forms of social ruin. Invalids tried the Pyrenean hot springs. Despite discovering that the local alcohol was ‘poisoned with aniseed’, colonies of visitors and long-term residents settled in the southern provinces for health, economy and enjoyment. The Riviera (still all Italian until 1860) attracted winter residents. Pau owed its strange destiny to a series of accidents. Some British had been interned there in 1803. In 1814 it welcomed Wellington with cries of ‘Vive le libérateur!’ and dancing in the streets.30 Such memories encouraged British visitors to return in the following decades, as perhaps did the fact that only three people had been guillotined there during the Terror. British – noticeably Scottish – visitors started coming in hundreds in the 1820s and 30s, attracted by the bracing climate and romantic view of the Pyrenees. All strangers were assumed to be Anglès. The town was transformed: ‘Twenty years ago, not a single house in Pau had a carpet; there were no carriages for hire. There was only one private carriage in the town; there was no sign of what we now call le comfort, and not a single street had a pavement. Today, the houses in part are furnished according to English needs and habits.’31 In 1841, a Mrs Ellis pioneered a durably popular literary genre with Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees, which enlarged on the beauties of the landscape and the quaintness of the inhabitants, unsophisticated, incompetent, but honest and warm-hearted. The town’s fortune was made by a medical treatise by Dr Alexander Taylor the following year. Taylor, having opened a practice there, discovered that the life expectancy of the locals was unusually high, and attributed this to the climate, particularly favourable to those with lung complaints. Families started bringing their consumptive members. They found that the surrounding countryside provided stimulus for watercolourists, and the nearby mountains a challenge for the athletic. British climbers rushed in where locals feared to tread. A French observer was ‘frozen in horror’ in the 1830s to see a ‘fairly old’ Englishman and his teenage daughter climbing down a waterfall, expecting at every moment to see them ‘rolling into the abyss’.32 The first guidebook, Packe’s Guide to the Pyrenees, was published in 1862, and the first French guidebook – by another Englishman – three years later.
The Pau Hunt was the only genuine fox-hunting pack on the Continent. Foxes were few, however, and the expedient of bringing captive (and sometimes rather tame) quarry along in boxes made the British rather shamefaced. They had no shame, however, about excluding French members until the end of the century, when a few aristocratic cavalry officers were finally allowed to join. So widely did the hunt’s fame spread – giving Pau an advantage over the foxless Riviera – that Americans came, and in 1879 the New York newspaper magnate Gordon Bennett became Master. L’équitation became one of the town’s great attractions, shrewdly encouraged by the tourist lobby. Pau became, and remains, the capital of French steeplechasing, and also a centre of polo. In 1856, three Scots founded the Pau golf club, another sporting first for the Continent. There was also cricket, skating, croquet, an English Club, and English shops and churches. The local cuisine was English. Russians, Germans, Americans and Italians followed in British footsteps. Mountain resorts, spas, and the seaside resorts of Biarritz and Saint-Jean-de-Luz flourished as its offshoots.
Disaster struck in the 1850s and 60s. A mixture of jealousy and honesty produced damaging allegations. The sewers stank. Tourists were fleeced. It was as much fun as ‘a Presbyterian town in Scotland’, and bored consumptives spent their days smoking and playing billiards at the Club. In 1864, a Dr Madden demonstrated that the winter climate was the same as Birmingham, and more likely to kill than cure. Pau fought back: not only by denial and prevarication, but by improving its infrastructure (the railway, luxury hotels, a ‘winter palace’, a theatre, an opera house, banks, clinics) and promoting itself as ‘the hub of the sporting world’. So distinguished visitors continued to come: the Prince of Wales, President Grant, Mrs Lincoln – proof of the increasing prominence of Americans, who by the early twentieth century had taken over from the British. By 1913 the secretary of the English Club was an Irish-American oilman.
Pau pioneered tourism as an industry. Britain was the first society rich enough to create the demand and set the pattern. Others – even the French within their own country – followed in British footsteps to the mountains, the country, and the seaside. The Pau golf club still flourishes; the English Club still stands; the Pau Hunt still meets; and in 2003, Ryanair carried 80,000 passengers from London to Pau.33
Romantic Encounters
There reigned in every spirit an effervescence of which we have no idea today. We were intoxicated by Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron and Walter Scott . . . we toured the galleries with gestures of frenetic admiration that would make the present generation laugh.
THEOPHILE GAUTIER,185534
French people too crossed the Channel, though fewer in number and often with a more serious purpose: to observe and often write about society, the political system or the new economy, or to experience cultural novelty. Like their eighteenth-century predecessors, they tended to be ‘struck by the immense prosperity . . . in all classes . . . the people so clean . . . beautiful children so well turned out’, and to express aesthetic disappointment with London.35 Now they often went further, expressing alarm, even horror, at the city’s size, smoke, crowds, wealth and poverty. What were new in the nineteenth century were pilgrimages to the sources of Romanticism. This cultural revolution was in part a development of the eighteenth-century cults of nature and sensibility, in part a rejection of other eighteenth-century tendencies towards uniformity, rationalism and materialism. Romanticism was marked by a more acute interest in the past, in nature, in mysticism, in cultural diversity and in individual self-expression. Especially in Germany and Britain, it also signified rejection of French cultural dominance and political ideas. In France – where the Romantic current had been dammed by the neo-classical universalism of the Republic and the Empire – it manifested an interest in older French traditions, and an unprecedented admiration for northern Europe.
The vogue for modern British culture brought pilgrims across the Channel. Many made their way north to the land of Scott and Ossian. ‘Today,’ said a French guidebook to ‘romantic Scotland’ in 1826, ‘Italy with its beautiful sky and monuments, hardly attracts more leisure travellers, painters and poets than poor Scotland with its mists and druidic stones.’ The writer Charles Nodier was overwhelmed: ‘Who could communicate with cold ink and sterile words the astonishing emotions that one believed one no longer had the strength to feel!’ Scotland made some reflect on the very nature of Romanticism: ‘The romantic, in terms of landscape, is it not the attractiveness of wild nature? . . . the ruins, the rocks [and] the solitude are lovely and evoke melancholy, and that is what we term a romantic place.’36
British history offered keys to France’s past and future: ‘Sixty years ago France entered on the path opened by England.’37 Sir Walter Scott won enormous popularity with his vivid historical chronicles, which brought the past to life and made British and French history part of a single epic. One could speak more freely about the death of Charles I than that of Louis XVI, but convey the same messages about revolution and terror. Similarly, Paul Delaroche produced emotive and popular paintings of British episodes, including the famous Death of Lady Jane Grey. Victor Hugo wrote a play, Cromwell, in 1827. France seemed to be following a parallel historic path: revolution, rule by a military dictator, and restoration of a limited monarchy. ‘The English Revolution has . . . borne a double fruit: its authors founded Constitutional Monarchy in England; and in America their descendants founded the Republic of the United States.’38 France must follow. History became central to political debate. Augustin Thierry discerned a fundamental shared pattern (which Disraeli would later take up as ‘the two nations’). English society stemmed from the Norman Conquest, when the Saxons were dispossessed and ruled by a foreign aristocracy. Similarly, said Thierry, the Gauls had been conquered by a Frankish aristocracy, and subsequent history (including the revolution) was the continuing struggle between them. French historians wrote about Britain’s revolutions with the intensity of people who had lived through their own. François Guizot aimed to explain how, from a similar starting point, Britain had developed free institutions and France had not. This was a question that brought crowds to his lectures at the Sorbonne, not merely to defy the government (which for seven years banned him from lecturing) but to hear why France, under the Bourbons, the Republic and Napoleon, had been trapped by oppressive systems.
During the 1820s, every area of French cultural novelty was saturated with British themes. The exoticism of Byron, the epics of Scott, and lurid episodes from Shakespeare were transmuted into paintings, opera and music (such as Rossini’s Otello, a Parisian success in 1821, and Berlioz’s Byronic Harold in Italy). Artists crossed the Channel in both directions in search of subjects, customers and contact with other artists. London crowds, avid for Napoleana, flocked to see David’s huge Coronation painting. But French Romantics were tired of such ‘tedious grand paintings’,39 glossy neoclassicism turned into propaganda. This was the very opposite of the individual creativity they aspired to. The London art world, in ‘a country flowing with gold’, as Eugène Delacroix hopefully put it, meant freedom from stultifying official patronage. The work of Turner, Constable, Richard Parkes Bonington and Sir Thomas Lawrence in more personal, more realistic and less political genres – landscapes, portraits, animals – and in a more spontaneous and relaxed style offered liberation. The young Bonington introduced French artists, especially his friend Delacroix, to the rapid execution and brightness of watercolour (previously regarded as an inferior female and English genre). According to the novelist Théophile Gautier, ‘the revolution in painting proceeded from Bonington just as the literary revolution proceeded from Shakespeare’. Constable made a similar impact when he exhibited The Hay Wain at the official Salon in 1824 – ‘the first time, perhaps,’ said the French artist Paul Huet, ‘that one saw a luxuriant, verdant nature.’ Lawrence aroused controversy with his relaxed and touching (some said mawkish) portraits. Delacroix, the most anglophile of painters, produced in the 1820s a series of dramatic, colourful and stylistically uninhibited works influenced by Bonington, Constable and Turner as well as by the Italian Renaissance. They established him both in London, where his works were acclaimed, and in Paris, where they aroused controversy, as the leader of French Romantic painting. His sadistic Death of Sardanapalus (1827), drawn from Byron, brought a warning that he would lose government patronage if he continued in this shocking style. French critics were worried by an ‘Anglo-French school’ that they saw as unintellectual, sensational, trivial, crude in execution and market-driven, compared with French classicism that was idealistic, inspiring, controlled and perfected. This was precisely the debate that would be heard concerning drama; indeed one leading critic referred to British painting as ‘Shakespearean’ – not meant as a compliment.
THE FRENCH AND SHAKESPEARE:
THE ROMANTICS
Shakespeare is the great glory of England . . . Above Newton there are Copernicus and Galileo; above Bacon there are Descartes and Kant; above Cromwell there are Danton and Bonaparte; above Shakespeare there is no one.
VICTOR HUGO40
When in 1822 a British company played Othello, notorious for sex and violence, in Paris for the first time in English, the audience booed and pelted ‘Wellington’s lieutenant’ off the stage. When another company tried again in 1827 with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Richard III, Macbeth and King Lear at the Odéon, it was a triumph. The young Romantics, many of whom had been to see plays in London, acclaimed Shakespeare as the prophet of their own rebellion, ‘the interpreter of my life’.41 Hugo, Vigny, Gautier, Dumas and Delacroix turned out for the first performance of Hamlet, always Shakespeare’s most famous play in France, on 11 September 1827. ‘It’s an invasion,’ Delacroix wrote jubilantly to Hugo, ‘the undermining of all dramatic law and order . . . It behoves the Academy to declare all imports of the kind absolutely incompatible with public decency.’42 The twenty-four-year-old Hector Berlioz, a rebel against the musical conventions of the Conservatory, was so overwhelmed that he fell madly in love with the company’s Ophelia/Juliet, the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
Victor Hugo, brilliant and pugnacious, the rising leader of literary Romanticism, appointed himself Shakespeare’s spokesman. He later recalled that, aged twenty-three, he ‘like everybody, had never read him and had laughed at him’. During a lull in the interminable coronation ceremony of Charles X at Rheims in 1825, a friend passed him a copy of King John, bought for 6 sous in a junkshop, and they spent the evening deciphering it.43 Two years later Hugo wrote Cromwell, whose preface was the manifesto of French Romanticism, his own declaration of war on ‘absurd pseudo-Aristotelian’ classical conventions, and at the same time an encomium to ‘the leading poet of all time’, Shakespeare, ‘that god of the theatre’.
Hugo’s challenge to the intellectual establishment went far beyond that of Voltaire a century earlier. Voltaire had patronized ‘Gilles’ Shakespeare as a bumpkin with flecks of genius, but inferior to the French masters. But Hugo saw Shakespeare’s supposed defects as signs of superiority: ‘The giant oak has a twisted shape, knotted branches, dark leaves, and hard, rough bark. That is what makes it the oak.’ He hailed him as ‘the Drama itself’, for he combined ‘the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the ridiculous, tragedy and comedy’. Shakespeare was not Voltaire’s archaic primitive but the founder of modernism – ‘the torrent that has burst its banks’. It was French classicism that was archaic, and Hugo cast himself as Shakespeare’s heir who would drag French drama into the nineteenth century.44
His Hernani, described by critics as an amalgam of Spanish romanticism and Shakespeare (it had hints of Romeo and Juliet), opened at the Théâtre Français in March 1830 and started a famous literary battle. Every night defenders of the classical tradition came to jeer and blow whistles. Hugo’s friends (he issued wads of free tickets) came to cheer and heckle the hecklers. What the critics hated was what Voltaire had condemned in Shakespeare: irregular versification, unpoetic language, ignoble characters and violent events: a woman calling her lover ‘my lion’ (which the actress insisted on changing to ‘my lord’); bandits on stage; disrespectful words addressed to a monarch; a noblewoman portrayed ‘without dignity or modesty’; and naturalistic dialogue – ‘What time is it? Nearly midnight.’ As one of Hugo’s friends observed, what critics wanted were phrases like ‘The day will soon attain its last repose.’ At issue, as during the previous century, were different conceptions of drama, and of art. In Hugo’s words, the classicists wanted art to rectify nature, to ennoble, to discriminate, but he believed it should ‘paint life’.45 Yet Hugo, though he orchestrated the clamour, had not defeated classical decorum, and many of the Romantics, despite their revolutionary aspirations, in practice respected traditional standards, changing Shakespeare’s endings and poeticizing his language. In French versions of Othello, it took 100 years before Desdemona’s handkerchief could be called a ‘mouchoir’, and another 100 years before it could be described as ‘spotted with strawberries’.46
Three decades after Hernani, Hugo wrote a long preface to the first unabridged French translation of Shakespeare. It was by his son François-Victor, who had begun it in 1853 at the age of twenty-four, knowing no English. This great work, much of which remained the standard version for 140 years, had special significance because it was done in exile, on British soil, and was dedicated ‘To England’. Victor could not resist pointing out that in London ‘one looks for a statue of Shakespeare, one finds a statue of Wellington’, and making the tart comment that Shakespeare’s gift to mankind made England seem less selfish – ‘It reduces England’s resemblance to Carthage.’47 Shakespeare was duly grateful: his ghost dictated to Hugo (a fanatical spiritualist) a whole new play – in French, as the Bard had finally realized that ‘the English language is inferior’.48
King Cotton, Queen Silk
Their material civilization is so far ahead of all neighbouring states today that in observing it one foresees in a sense the future of Europe . . . It is an appalling prospect.
ASTOLPHE DE CUSTINE, 183049
The English . . . can forge iron, harness steam, twist matter in every way, invent frighteningly powerful machines: . . . but real art will always escape them; . . . despite their stupendous material advances, they are only polished barbarians.
THEOPHILE GAUTIER,185650
Peace brought the hope of prosperity. Haltingly, a measure of prosperity came. But the revolution, war and postwar trading conditions shaped the two countries in very different ways, and had permanent effects not only on their economies, but on their societies and cultures too. They had grown much further apart economically than they had been when the Eden Treaty was signed in 1786. Then, both had been dynamic maritime traders and growing manufacturers. The revolution, and the ensuing wars, had profound economic consequences for France. First, the number of small and medium landowners had greatly increased and agricultural productivity had fallen: by 1815 there were about 5 million landowners, a formidable lobby whose power grew after 1830 as the electorate widened. Second, though this is difficult to measure, an instinctive wariness seems to have developed that discouraged economic risk. Investors, with memories of inflation and disruption, preferred to buy land, bricks and mortar, even government bonds. Governments, with memories of popular violence, wanted to avoid economic upheavals and discontents. Third, the colonial trade that had powered France’s eighteenth-century growth had gone; the British blockade had strangled the flourishing ports and their hinterlands. Not until the boom of the 1840s did French exports regain their level of the 1780s. Fourth, war had largely cut France off from British technology, which despite legal restrictions it had previously imported. So the French economy could not compete directly with the British, whose products, especially textiles, flooded Europe after 1815. Most Frenchmen did not wish to: they agreed that Britain was courting social and political disaster with its smoky towns and bloated industrial labour force. The French, by choice and by necessity, developed a different kind of economy and society. There was overwhelming support for protection, with quotas and subsidies imposed as early as 1816. The import of cotton cloth was prohibited, and iron carried a 120 per cent tariff. Consequently, France imported and exported relatively few manufactured goods, and deliberately slowed down economic change.51
Despite wartime and post-war fluctuations, the British economy continued to grow. It had fundamental advantages: cheap water-borne transport, and vast coal reserves that generated cheap steam-power and smelted cheap iron. It enjoyed unchallenged freedom of the seas. Its manufactured goods, above all cotton, found worldwide markets, inside and outside its empire. Its ships carried them; the City of London financed the trade and lent to developing countries. These conditions made the British economy unlike any other, and it diverged sharply from the French. For at least a century it concentrated heavily on mass production of cheap goods for distant markets: still in 1914 cotton textiles, especially to India, were its largest export item. The British manufacturing labour force overtook the agricultural by 1840; in France, not until the 1950s. France remained, in comparison with Britain, a country of land-owning peasants, self-employed craftsmen, and small towns and villages. In 1850, three out of four Frenchmen lived in districts whose main centre of population had fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. Only three towns, Paris, Lyons and Marseilles, had more than 100,000 people. Small-scale craft production remained, protected by stringent quotas and tariff barriers. There were some free-traders, many linked to the wine exporting trade, and one spokesman, the economist Bastiat, sarcastically called for all shutters to be kept closed to protect French candle-makers from ‘unfair’ competition from sunshine. But workers, employers, and politicians of all parties were unconvinced. Fear of British competition was a potent source of anglophobia. They used the chilling argument that the 1786 treaty had helped cause the revolution. Protection worked. Hand-weaving actually increased: by 1860, France had 200,000 hand looms, while Britain had only 3,000. Iron was smelted in charcoal furnaces. Machinery was powered by water. In Paris, the main manufacturing city, there were 100,000 firms in 1870 – but nearly two-thirds of them employed only one worker, or the patron worked alone. Thanks to state subsidies to protect it against competition from steam, France had the world’s largest sailing fleet in 1900.52
Unable to compete with Britain in overseas markets for mass-produced products, and with a domestic market dominated by a large peasant population that consumed little, French manufacturers went up-market, supplying luxury goods to the rich consumers of the Continent, America and above all Britain. Their selling-points were fashion, quality and exclusivity, rather than cheapness and technology. The two pillars of French manufacturing exports throughout the nineteenth century were elaborate silks from Lyons and what were called articles de Paris – fashion items such as clothes, shoes, jewellery, and perfume. In agriculture too, exports depended on luxury products – wine and brandy. Traditional production reached peaks of sophistication. Peasants worked part-time in specialized industries such as lace-glove- and clock-making. The mighty Lyons silk industry employed more than 300,000 people in the 1860s, in a complex system of domestic outwork spread over a radius of 100 miles from the city. The profits of the luxury industries sustained French trade and provided the money for large overseas investments. Parisian craftsmen (though not women) were well paid. However, much of the economy, and especially much of agriculture, remained unproductive and poor, and overall incomes and wage levels did not keep pace with those in Britain, or, eventually, with other European countries. In the 1890s, Lancashire cotton workers were paid twice as much as those in the Vosges or Normandy, but their unit labour costs were still 30 per cent lower.
Comparing their products with others at the London Great Exhibition of 1851 convinced the French that they could outdo their rivals in design and taste. They concentrated on lavishness, in styles associated with the aristocratic past. But they also kept an eye on cost, successfully providing the middle class with affordable luxury.53 These economic patterns therefore also shaped perceptions, confirming stereotypes that both French and British accepted. The French were artistic, sophisticated and natural possessors of le goût, just as in the days of Pompadour. The British were down-to-earth, crude and materialistic, able to run banks, build ships or railway engines, and churn out cheap standard products, but not to create beauty, or ‘even a hat that a Paris shop-girl would wear’. France seemed to cherish eternal values: cultural elitism, the spartan virtues of peasant life, and the ethics of craftsmanship.
The consequences were deep and durable. Both economies had difficulty in adapting to technological and manufacturing modernization in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when they fell behind Germany and the United States. Both were relatively poor at educating their workforces, the British relying on semi-skilled factory labour, the French on inherited agricultural skills and craft apprenticeship. The effects are still evident. In France, support for the protective and regulatory role of the State; suspicion of globalization and economic liberalism; the political clout of agriculture; the importance for the export trade of quality, prestige and fashion (seen in determination to protect valuable brand names and extend appellations contrôlées). In Britain, greater acceptance of free trade and competition; the breadth of global commerce; the importance of the City; and the chronic weakness of mass education and technical training.
However, the most profound and long-term – and also mysterious – socioeconomic contrast between the two countries was demographic. France had been by far the most populous country in Europe until matched by Russia towards the end of the eighteenth century. Britain had been a relative pygmy. But in the early 1890s the United Kingdom’s population overtook that of France, despite a high level of British emigration to North America and Australasia, while French emigration was negligible. By 1900 the French population was stagnant, and in the 1930s it actually fell. Patriots despaired. The French stopped having babies by choice: they used various kinds of contraception within marriage. The birthrate began to fall during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Many attempts have been made to explain why. The answer must be a complex one. Partly the revolution’s weakening of traditional pressures to have large families. Partly, perhaps, uncertainty about the future. Certainly after 1789 the chance of social ascent, with the consequent need for saving and education – many lower-middle class families wanted only one son. Where Britain enters the picture (in addition to its part in causing the revolution) is in the global consequences of the Napoleonic struggles and Britain’s post-war economic ascendancy. France became more static and more inward-looking. The French had never been keen on colonial emigration, but after Waterloo, the world overseas was even more uninviting. Yet the falling birthrate was not simply a consequence of lack of opportunity: many jobs, especially in the newer industrial sectors, were taken by immigrants – Belgian, German, Italian, even British. Having few children was a fundamental part of the way the French chose to live in the post-revolutionary and post-Napoleonic world. France shrank: as François Crouzet points out, had its population grown at the same rate as Britain’s, it would have had 100 million people by 1914.54
NAVVIES AND ‘KNOBSTICKS’
The export of machinery and the emigration of skilled workers from Britain was in theory illegal until 1825. Nevertheless, thousands of workers and managers helped to bring the ‘Industrial Revolution’ to France. Technicians and entrepreneurs set up businesses. James Jackson brought over steel-making techniques that the French had been trying to acquire by espionage and bribery since the days of the Duc de Choiseul. Technical skills had to be taught face to face, so skilled workers were tempted to France by big cash payments. This caused jealousy among local workers. Language difficulties, arrogance, offers from rival firms, lots of cash, and being far from home made the British tricky to handle. The Lorraine ironmaster François de Wendel had sent his English foreman back in 1824 to recruit more workers, but found he could not manage the men on his own: ‘your absence me nuit beaucoup [causes me great problems] je paye your worckmans and they do not worck the carpentar is an ivrogne [drunkard], one can not employe him. I believe it is better for you to kom and to remaine her.’55
The largest group of British workers were navvies, employed by British contractors such as the famous Thomas Brassey to build France’s first railways, using substantially British capital. Despite early scepticism regarding the value of rail transport, and violent opposition from coachmen and boatmen, the government – aware of the possibility of war with Britain – wanted a strategic link between the Channel and the Mediterranean. Brassey’s first contract was for the Paris–Rouen section, begun in 1841, which also served the tourist trade. He recruited 5,000 British navvies as the core of the workforce, and the same number of Frenchmen. An Anglo-French railway lingua franca grew up, later used across Europe. Some words became naturalized: rail, tunnel, tender, wagon, ballast. The British, hardened and experienced, were paid twice the French rate, and were used on the toughest and most dangerous work – though they found that French law gave them more protection in case of accidents. They were a turbulent lot, who spent much of their wages on alcoholic binges. When laid off during the hard winter of 1842–3, many ended up relying on soup kitchens in Rouen. About 1,000 went to work on new Paris fortifications (begun after a crisis in 1840 that brought France and Britain to the brink of conflict). Large numbers continued to work on railway building until financial crisis in 1846 halted work for several years. By that time, Brassey had been involved in building three-quarters of French lines. Economic rivalry and nationalist propaganda meant that relations between British and French were often bad. French workers attacked railways and bridges, and the nationalist press crowed when a British-built viaduct collapsed in June 1846. The nickname ‘knobsticks’ given to British workers in Paris suggests that they were less than conciliatory. The 1848 revolution, which came in a period of high unemployment, saw riots against British workers, of whom there were some 4,000 in Normandy alone. Some were chased on to boats at Le Havre, and others, frightened by the hostility against them, made for the Channel ports. Yet some British workers did settle in France and marry French women, and others were working again on railway building in the 1850s.
Fog and Misery
Can France and Britain communicate only by gunshots? No indeed; the two nations must see, know and speak to each other . . . So let us risk sea-sickness.
VICTOR-ANTOINE HENNEQUIN, Voyage philosophique (1836)56
Nothing can distract the imagination from the depression the climate creates, and the most intrepid curiosity will not resist the pitiless monotony that presides over everyday life in this temple of boredom.
ASTOLPHE DE CUSTINE, Courses en Angleterre et en Ecosse (1830)57
The French rarely leave their country, and when they venture out, they travel too hastily . . . Our stay-at-home habits leave a big gap in our education. Hence our numerous prejudices and our difficult relations with other nations.
FRANCIS WEY, Les Anglais chez eux (1854)58
More French people visited Britain by choice in the decades after Waterloo than ever before, though they were, as always, only a fraction of the number of British visiting France. Paul Gerbod, using official records, estimates 1,450 in 1815; 3,700 in 1835; and 4,290 in 1847. Travel was becoming easier, quicker and cheaper. Paddle steamers crossed the Channel from 1816, and in ten years replaced sail. If this did not prevent seasickness, at least it reduced its duration. Trains to Rouen and steamboats down the Seine further speeded the journey. The trip from Paris to London could be done in twenty hours, and the cheapest ticket was 31.75 francs – about a week’s wages for a skilled worker.59 Custine was incensed that ‘not a soul wanted to understand my English . . . it is not enough to say the words to them, one actually has to pronounce them in a certain way that suits them’.60 The linguistically challenged could frequent French-speaking establishments concentrated round Leicester Square. There were French hotels, most famously the Brunet, and restaurants such as the Véry (named after a famous Palais Royal establishment). Some thought that although they were more expensive than English eating-houses they were not much better. As in the eighteenth century, many people came to earn a living in the world’s biggest and most dynamic city, including language teachers, chambermaids, cooks, jewellers, hairdressers, cobblers and wine merchants. Many, according to the feminist writer Flora Tristan, were bogus asylum-seekers. There were over 7,000 French in London by mid-century, enough to form a recognizable colony. A Société de Bienfaisance (welfare society) was set up in 1842. Attempts were made to set up a Society of French Teachers.61 Writers came over to observe and to comment, for the benefit of the great majority who derived their impressions of Britain from the printed page.
Even those who went in person usually knew in advance what to expect and how to react. Often badly, because anglophobia was ‘the most basic form of patriotic discourse’.62 Well-known advantages might be grudgingly acknowledged: the rich countryside, the excellent public transport, the cleanliness, even of lavatories (excessive, some thought). Intellectuals admired – or at least envied – the wealth and beauty of Oxford and Cambridge, which some thought wasted on English philistines. But broadly speaking, nineteenth-century French visitors did not like England or the English. The only near-enthusiasts were liberal economists and engineers. Charles Dupin, after wandering the islands in 1816 visiting everything from naval dockyards to hospitals, published six volumes of admiring observations, and helped to pioneer technical education in France. Others had mixed feelings. Romantics admired the Lake District, but were horrified by London and Manchester. Conservatives approved of Britain’s victory over Jacobinism, but deplored its coarse manners, Protestantism and parliamentary government, and abominated its treatment of Catholic Ireland. Liberals admired the House of Commons and approved of the relative absence of policemen and soldiers, while regretting the weak coffee, the banal conversation, and the weather. Bonapartists, republicans and the few socialists, however, loathed and resented everything. Britain was the root of every evil, the vision of a future they feared, and above all the victorious enemy out to humiliate them. One writer claimed to have thrashed his cabby for taking him from Waterloo Station via Waterloo Bridge and Waterloo Square to the Waterloo Hotel.
A common first reaction was that Britain was outlandish, ‘the Japan of Europe’.63 ‘It’s strange,’ pronounced King Louis-Philippe, ‘it’s nothing at all like France’ – too tidy, too clean, and too quiet.64 Fog, as the cultural historian Alain Corbin has pointed out, became a universal cliché, although the climate of southern England is no foggier that of northern France. Different, however, was urban smog, which became a symbol both of depression and of modernity. Food, in contrast to many approving eighteenth-century comments, was found not merely bad but revealing of character. Particularly disliked was the widespread use of pepper and curry – which had just begun its progress towards becoming the English national dish. ‘There are links between their severe climate, their cold personality, and their over-spiced dishes,’ pronounced one socialist.65 It was symptomatic of the lack of that quintessentially French quality, le goût, as obvious in greasy turtle soup, curried stew, boiled vegetables and English puddings as in architecture and women’s fashions. Women, indeed, became as much a symbol of England as fog or cabbage: from this period dates the still common stereotype of the unfeminine, inelegant Englishwoman. Instead of ‘taste’, the English only had ‘comfort’ – a word untranslatable into French (‘fortunately’, sniffed Custine).
Both fascinating and frightening was the Industrial Revolution. The Midlands and the North were now on the circuit for serious tourists. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative. The size, the crowds and the smoke of English cities inspired mythological hyperbole: the Black Country, strewn with coal and slag, was ‘the plain of the Cyclops’; Manchester was ‘the styx of this new hell’; while if ‘the inhabitants [of Birmingham] go to hell they won’t find anything new’, thought Custine. The economist Adolphe Blanqui (coiner of the term révolution industrielle) felt horrified admiration for the scale of industry and the power it represented. Inspecting Black Country foundries, ‘for the first time I began to understand English industry’. He recalled the ‘fifteen thousand muskets a month’ they had produced for use against France, and ‘admiration turns to tears and thoughts of vengeance’ at the realization of how ‘a great empire succumbed to the efforts of a few million islanders’. Though one anglophobe reluctantly admitted that ordinary people were better dressed in England than France, and a Lyons businessman who had lived in America thought that ‘the poor seem less poor than elsewhere’, these were unusual views.66 Many visitors stressed the poverty of the urban masses, the pallor and dirt of miners and factory workers, and what they saw as the widening gulf between wealth and poverty. Britain was in a pathological state, and heading for disaster.
One of the most hostile and ideologically charged caricatures was Flora Tristan’s widely read Promenades dans Londres (1840). Her picture of London is of a foggy, gas-lit hell of poverty, oppression, hypocrisy and crime, full of prostitutes, beggars and thieves. ‘Melancholy is in the very air you breathe [creating] an irresistible desire to end one’s life by suicide . . . the Englishman is under the spell of his climate and behaves like a brute.’ To these old clichés, Tristan, a pioneer feminist and socialist, added the anglophobe nationalism of the French Left. English liberty was a sham: ‘a handful of aristocrats . . . bishops, landowners and sinecurists’ was able to ‘torture and starve a nation of twenty-six million men’ because ‘the school, the Church and the press’ created ‘ignorance and fear’ which caused ‘the English people, plunged into abjection, to await slow and convulsive death by starvation’. This was a lesson and warning to the French ‘proletariat’. Such loathing was a problem for French politicians aiming at a closer relationship with Britain.
Ally or ‘Anti-France’?
The July Monarchy . . . British liberty in French society, realized all our ideas.
CHARLES DE RéMUSAT67
If France overcomes, the world will be governed by the twenty-four letters of the alphabet; if England prevails, it will be tyrannized by the ten figures of arithmetic. Thinking or counting; those are the alternative futures.
VICTOR HUGO68
Between the Frenchman and the Englishman God has created an antipathy that will not be drowned out by floods of verbosity from the English milords . . . Let England, confined to her island, remain clearly what God made her: the natural enemy of all the peoples of the Continent.
La Réforme (leading republican newspaper), 184769
After the July Revolution of 1830, France was ruled, perhaps for the only time in its history, by a party of political anglophiles. Their predecessors, Charles X and his ‘ultra-royalist’ supporters, had been far less so. They had begun a more assertive foreign policy for which they hoped to obtain the assistance of Britain’s other great rival, Russia. Their invasion of Spain in 1823 and their capture of Algiers in 1830 were welcomed in France as acts of defiance against Britain. At best reluctant converts to parliamentary government – the king remarked that ‘he would rather chop wood than be king of England’ – they attempted what amounted to a coup d’état in July 1830, and popular resistance in Paris toppled the regime. The British ambassador, Castlereagh’s pleasure-loving brother Lord Stewart, is said to have reported that ‘these fools are in serious trouble and they think everything is going wonderfully’.70 There was little regret in Britain when Charles X took refuge once again at Holyrood.
The ‘Three Glorious Days’ of July 1830, interpreted as the French version of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, brought to power an intellectually outstanding and often high-minded liberal elite whose political model was Britain, and who hoped that the two countries would become partners as the progressive powers of Europe. The new king, the clever and voluble Louis-Philippe, formerly the Duc d’Orléans and a hereditary anglophile, peppered his letters and conversation with English, had been an exile in Britain and America, and had hoped to marry into the British royal family (eventually he practically did). He is regarded by his recent biographer as having been at one time effectively a British agent. In 1804 he had written, ‘I left my country so early that I have hardly any French habits, and I can truthfully say that I am attached to England not only by gratitude, but also by taste and inclination . . . The security of Europe and the world, the future happiness and independence of the human race, depend on the safety and independence of England.’71 The chief political personalities of the new regime were the austere Calvinist François Guizot, translator of Gibbon and Shakespeare and the leading historian of English liberty, and the bouncy young journalist-politician Adolphe Thiers, famous for predicting before the revolution that the Bourbons would end like the Stuarts. In the new regime’s cultural firmament sparkled Victor Hugo, the worshipper of Shakespeare; Eugène Delacroix, the disciple of Bonington; Alexis de Tocqueville, the analyst of American democracy; Benjamin Constant, the Scottish-educated political philosopher and proponent of ‘modern’ liberty; and many distinguished commentators on British history and politics. In Britain, many of the governing Whigs – especially the ‘Foxite’ group, Lords Grey, Clarendon, Lansdowne, and Fox’s nephew Lord Holland – were eager to respond. They had deplored the long struggle against France. They saw 1830 as a revival of the hopes of 1789, and a belated vindication of their francophile opinions and tastes. Guizot, when ambassador in London, was a welcome guest at Holland House, where his host ‘belonged almost as much to the Continent and France as to England . . . we talked at length of great French writers and orators, La Bruyère, Pascal, Madame de Sévigné, Bossuet, Fénelon’. Holland called for a ‘cordial understanding’ between France and Britain to resist the reactionary states in Europe – a phrase that would have a distinguished future.72
The 1830 revolution briefly aroused fears of a repetition of the wars of the 1790s, but Louis-Philippe followed a determinedly cautious path – ‘peace at any price’, in the notorious phrase coined by one of his ministers. Although revolution in Belgium, and its separation from Holland, caused a French army to intervene at the request of the Belgians, the government ignored pleas to annex Belgium, refused the throne for Louis-Philippe’s son, and resisted nationalist pressure to have the French troops at least blow up the Allied war memorial as they marched through Waterloo. The Belgian crisis was settled between the veteran ambassador Talleyrand and the new foreign secretary Viscount Palmerston, and guaranteed by the Treaty of London (1839), mainly remembered now because it took Britain into war in 1914 as an ally of France. The new King of the Belgians, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg – who was to be the son-in-law of Louis-Philippe and the brother-in-law of Queen Victoria – became a zealous intermediary between the two countries. In Spain too, Anglo-French difficulties were sorted out by negotiation between Talleyrand and Palmerston, and in 1834 the two countries became allies in a Quadruple Alliance including Spain and Portugal designed to support liberal governments in the Peninsula.
The July Monarchy was a system of compromises; some said of contradictions. A conservative government that emerged from a popular revolt, it had a very regal monarch who put on a ‘bourgeois’ act, sending his sons to school in Paris and famously strolling about carrying an umbrella. Such compromises were not necessarily disadvantageous: what the elderly La Fayette defined in 1830 as ‘a popular throne surrounded by republican institutions’ would prove a winning combination in much of Europe, including Britain. But one contradiction proved impossible to manage: that between the regime’s pacific and anglophile instincts, and its inescapable need to create a patriotic image. Many of those who had fought the Bourbon troops during the ‘Three Glorious Days’ of 1830 – including former soldiers of Napoleon – believed they had fought not only the internal system established in 1815, but also the external system commonly called the Holy Alliance, which they detested as humiliating, oppressive and reactionary. General Lamarque, who had fought Wellington, and (as well as disliking ‘lanky’ English women) was the most vocal nationalist spokesman, proclaimed in parliament that ‘the cannon of Paris has silenced the cannon of Waterloo!’ France must now resume the struggle. In an enduring left-wing fantasy, oppressed peoples from Ireland to Poland would rally to the French liberators, who, ‘half by persuasion, half by force’, would create a French-dominated European Republic.
For these left-wing patriots, Britain was the malignant obstacle to their utopia. It was the spider in the post-Waterloo web of worldwide oppression and corruption, and at the same time it embodied a model of the future (liberal, reformist, commercial) that rivalled their own revolutionary vision (democratic, authoritarian, military). It was necessary to emphasize how awful England was – ‘a big shop on a big island’, a ‘cancer’ – in case it proved more seductive than their own Spartan ideal. Flora Tristan, whose lurid depiction we have seen, was one of many who insisted that the English were both exploited and exploiting, a corrupted nation motivated by greed, obeying a ruthless aristocratic caste bent on imposing new forms of industrial slavery on the world, and using their power to force unwilling peoples to accept their goods, their machines, and their immigrant workers. In language echoing Jacobin propaganda of the 1790s, the English people as a whole were seen as the universal enemy – ‘social vampires’, not even a genuine‘nation’, but merely ‘a race destined to perish.’73 England, according to the great Republican historian Jules Michelet, was ‘the anti-France’, the political, moral and cultural negation of the ‘leading nation in the universe’.74 Even moderates agreed that the two countries were engaged in a struggle to shape the future of the planet through ideological, commercial and colonial competition. The anglophobe world view (which ramified into anti-americanism and anti-semitism) explained everything. The ills of French workers stemmed from economic competition from Britain. Political oppression in France was a consequence of France’s rulers obeying their British masters. Even resistance to French colonialism was ascribed to British machinations. So Britain’s power had to be broken, by war if necessary. Such views were held by a minority, but they were a noisy minority who reached a wide audience. Attempts by the July Monarchy to seek entente with Britain therefore led to accusations of national betrayal, cowardice, and corruption – in short of being no better than the deposed Bourbons. The ‘Legitimist’ supporters of those same Bourbons were eager to join in these accusations against a regime they detested, and to denounce a Britain they too regarded as the embodiment of much that was evil in the modern world. It was the Legitimist press (though it could as easily have been the Left) that stigmatized the July Monarchy as an ‘anti-national’ creation, ‘an English government ruling France’.75
So the July Monarchy had somehow to prove itself patriotic as well as pacific. This was not just tactics. Liberals were patriots too, and many were veterans of the Empire and even the Republic. Moreover, they believed that patriotic pride was necessary to hold the nation together at a time of political and social turmoil. The Monarchy proclaimed itself ‘the sole legitimate heir of all the proud memories of France’ – royal, republican and Napoleonic.76 This cult of memory had the advantage of focusing emotion on the past. It was the July Monarchy, not Napoleon, that completed the Arc de Triomphe, adding the stirring sculpture by Rude of the republican Volunteers of 1792, one of the great icons of French patriotism. Louis-Philippe constantly recalled that he had fought under the Tricolour at Jemmapes in 1792. Present-day adventures were carried out safely away from Europe, namely the conquest of Algeria (in which the British uneasily acquiesced), where the king’s dashing sons played prominent roles.
The climax of the strategy of patriotic symbolism masking peaceful diplomacy came in 1840. The new prime minister, Adolphe Thiers, eager to demonstrate both his patriotism and his good relations with Britain, requested London (which was willing, though privately supercilious) to hand over Napoleon’s body, buried at St Helena, for ceremonial enshrinement in Paris. ‘If England gives us what we are asking, her reconciliation with France will be sealed; the past fifty years will be wiped out; the effect in France will be huge.’77 This scheme proved too clever for the regime’s own good: ‘Napoleon’s ashes are still smouldering,’ complained Lamartine, ‘and they’re blowing on the sparks.’ When the emperor’s remains reached France, they produced probably the greatest peacetime patriotic demonstration in France’s history, with crowds of several hundred thousand gathering in Paris.
The return of Napoleon’s remains from St Helena were intended to improve Franco-British relations, but patriotic fervour aggravated the worst crisis since Waterloo.
Even before this, when the ‘ashes’ were still sailing back from the South Atlantic, the patriotic and political excitement had got out of hand. The emperor’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, attempted a coup d’état. Strikes and riots broke out in Paris. An assassination attempt was made on the king. The most dangerous international crisis since 1815 began in July, and raised spectres of a neo-Napoleonic war. The French supported territorial expansion into Syria by their protégé, the pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. Britain and Russia, unwilling to see France rebuild its power in the Near East and probably destroy the Ottoman empire in the process, ordered the Egyptians to withdraw, and Austria and Prussia supported them. For the French this was a provocative revival of the alliance of 1814. What might seem a trivial and distant issue (though it caused lasting upheaval in the Levant) aroused intense emotion in France. Even level-headed liberals such as Tocqueville wanted France to assert itself: ‘no government, indeed no dynasty, would not be exposing itself to destruction if it tried to persuade this country to stand idly by’. To back down would devastate national pride – ‘often puerile and boastful but still . . . the strongest link holding this nation together’ – and condemn France to a political and moral decline ‘more fatal than the loss of twenty battles’.78 As the British navy dominated the eastern Mediterranean, Thiers tried to bluff the Allies into concessions by threatening to invade Italy and Germany – a milestone in francophobe German nationalism which inspired, among other things, the composition of ‘Deutschland über alles’. Within France, patriots clamoured for war. The poet Heinrich Heine, who lived in Paris, noted ‘a joyful warlike enthusiasm . . . the unanimous cry is “War on perfidious Albion”’.
In Austria, Prussia and Britain, there were many, including Queen Victoria, the prime minister Lord Melbourne and several cabinet ministers, who pressed the foreign minister Lord Palmerston to give the French government a face-saving way out. ‘Letters from [francophiles in] London’, according to Palmerston, were encouraging Thiers to hold firm. But hints from Louis-Philippe and his ambassador Guizot indicated that Thiers would not be allowed to go too far. Palmerston regarded the French attitude as posturing that deserved a rebuff to deter further mischief. He informed Thiers ‘in the most friendly and inoffensive manner possible, that if France . . . begins a war, she will to a certainty lose her ships, colonies and commerce . . . and that Mehemet Ali will just be chucked into the Nile’.79 Thiers’s bluff having been called, Louis-Philippe dismissed him in October 1840. Guizot, known to favour peace, was recalled from London to form a government.
So 1840, the year Thiers had hoped would seal Franco-British reconciliation, intensified anglophobia and ended with what Lamartine, in the course of a tumultuous parliamentary debate, called ‘the Waterloo of French diplomacy’.80 ‘What a profound and perhaps irremediable evil Lord Palmerston has done to the two countries and to the entire world!’ was Tocqueville’s verdict.81 But a senior French diplomat concluded, ‘Let’s be fair . . . Palmerston has very strong arguments on his side.’82 The blame can certainly be divided several ways. Palmerston’s share is that he refused to let the French off the hook when their manoeuvres went wrong. He ascribed the crisis to
a spirit of bitter hostility towards England growing up among Frenchmen of all classes and all parties; and sooner or later this must lead to conflict . . . I do not blame the French for disliking us. Their vanity prompts them to be the first nation in the world; and yet at every turn they find that we outstrip them in everything. It is a misfortune to Europe that the national character of a great and powerful people . . . should be as it is.83
In France, anglophobe pique in the early 1840s, shamefully, caused the government to refuse to cooperate with Britain in its long campaign to stop the African slave trade: as the mercenary British could not really be interested in protecting Africans, they thought, it must be a pretext to interfere with French commerce. Guizot and Louis-Philippe tried to repair the relationship, but their effort was politically damaging. As Louis-Philippe predicted, he was execrated as ‘the foreigners’ king’.