CHAPTER 9

Decadence and Regeneration

We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.

CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man, 1871¹

Pécuchet sees Humanity’s future as dark: Modern man is diminished and becomes a machine. Final Anarchy of the human race. Impossibility of Peace. Barbarity due to excessive individualism, and the madness of Science . . . There will be no more ideal, religion, humanity. America will have conquered the earth . . . Bouvard sees Humanity’s future as bright. Modern man is progressing . . . Balloons. Submarines . . . Evil will disappear as want disappears. Philosophy will be a religion. All people will be united . . . When the earth is exhausted, Humanity will move to the stars.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, c.1880²

Certainties were dissolving. Religion was questioned, but so was rationalism. Tradition had failed, but so had revolution. ‘Progress’ itself generated new and incomprehensible evils. All over Europe people detected the whiff of decay. Optimists hoped it would nourish regeneration. It certainly fed a flush of intellectual, political and artistic blossoms, some carnivorous. Conservatives demanded a return to faith and discipline. But strange faiths appeared that were new and far from disciplined. Some sought escape from politics into aesthetics (‘art for art’s sake’) but others applied aesthetics to politics – one of the seeds of totalitarianism. Rationalists trusted in science, but science was not always rational. Reason itself proved its own limitations, and psychological theories stressed the importance of the unconscious. Flaubert’s unfinished book, Bouvard et Pécuchet, was a bitter satire not only on the pretentions to wisdom of the semi-educated, but on the chaos of modern culture, in which everything had been said and the result was cacophony.

Intellectual alarms were linked with social and political upheavals: population growth, urbanization, economic change, migration, labour militancy, mass education, and pressure for increasing democratic rights, culminating in socialism and even violent anarchism. To many, the rise of what came to be called ‘the masses’ threatened social and political stability, and especially cultural standards, threatened by a ‘vulgar’ and ‘philistine’ commercial culture.

Scientists came up with theories endorsing and explaining the sense of foreboding. Darwin, and those claiming to apply his ideas to human societies, created ‘a sense of permanent crisis’,³ in which the achievements of the last century were threatened from within. Urban life, industrial society, crowds and democracy seemed to be causing mankind to regress. A eugenics movement demanded limits on the reproduction of inferior human types. All over Europe, modernist intellectuals denounced the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘masses’ with loathing, and sought ‘avant garde’ forms and ‘aristocratic’ values that would exclude them.

France’s recent disasters aggravated its intellectual and moral turmoil. The defeat by Germany and the Commune crisis were taken as signs of decadence (the word itself was a novelty). Conservatives blamed the revolution for weakening religion, solidarity and hierarchy. Republicans blamed Catholicism for destroying virile patriotism. Liberals blamed excessive centralization of authority. Everyone blamed the Second Empire for its materialism, immorality, and above all for its defeat. France seemed sick: its falling birthrate and near stagnant population seemed unanswerable proof. Politicians and intellectuals proposed incompatible remedies which led to thirty years of bitter political disputes, seen as further proof of decadence. Paradoxically, as Frenchmen lamented their sliding status, France attained a worldwide cultural dominance, especially in the fine arts, that had not been seen since the days of Louis XIV.

Britain found its own reasons to worry about decadence. Its industrial revolution had created ugly cities that seemed hotbeds of new dangers, and caused intellectuals and the middle classes to yearn for authenticity, craft-made goods and rural retreat, even if only behind a suburban privet hedge. The economic dominance that had compensated for ugliness was slipping. At the Paris exhibition of 1867, British goods had won prizes in only ten of the ninety categories. France remained ahead in quality, and America and Germany were forging ahead in quantity. Religious revivalism, appealing to women and men of the numerous, prosperous, educated and respectable lower-middle and working classes, fuelled an obsessive concern with moral and social evils – especially concerning sex and drink – that earlier generations had regarded as normal or at least irremediable.

Purity campaigns were one reason why artists and writers, led by Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne and later Oscar Wilde, were attracted to the exquisite pourriture noble across the Channel. By the end of the century Britain was showing other signs of decadence, such as a falling birthrate, strategic vulnerability, and the poor physical condition of many city-dwellers. A motley crusade of Christians, eugenicists, imperialists, radicals and feminists ran a range of vocal reform groups. Some intellectuals, most famously G.K. Chesterton, the half-French Hilaire Belloc, and later T.S. Eliot, were attracted by the drastic remedies against corrupt modernity being preached by French nationalists, most importantly Charles Maurras. He rediscovered Catholicism as a barrier against democracy and a source of fragrant distinction, showing that ‘we are the bosses, the chic.’⁴

Germany’s growing power changed the relationship between France and Britain. For two centuries, their concern had been with each other, as antagonists and as rival models of civilization. Everyone else had shared the fascination. But France was now in another tense relationship, which has lasted until the present day. Germany became for France (and others) a new model, combining authoritarian rule with modern efficiency. For Britain it became an economic rival whose success cast doubt on progressive British assumptions about free trade, free enterprise and an unobtrusive state. America and Russia, long seen as future superpowers, were stirring. Cultural inspiration was coming too from non-European societies. There were other vistas than that from Calais to Dover.

Nevertheless, the old fascination did not disappear. Though Germany’s universities, industry, music and military science might dazzle, its political and social systems were too alien to exert much influence on France or Britain. When France adopted a republican constitution in 1875, its largely anglophile creators tried to make it as close as possible to a parliamentary monarchy, with a conservative upper house and a president with the right to be informed, to advise and to warn. Global competition led to a wave of imperial expansion that saw Britain and France again as rivals, as in the 1840s. Whether in search of difference or similarity, people still crossed the Channel to learn, and, as ever, to praise and to blame.

Into the Abysm

I was hardly a progressive or a humanitarian. Yet I had my illusions! And I
didn’t expect to see the end of the world. Because that’s what it is. We are

witnessing the end of the Latin world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, 1871⁵

Authors – essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.
Rip your brothers’ vices open, strip your own foul passions bare;
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence – forward – naked – let them stare.
Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainings of your sewer;
Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue pure.
Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism, –
Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the abysm.
ALFRED TENNYSON, 1886⁶

French observers interpreted the disasters of ‘the terrible year’ within pre-existing ideological frameworks, even if those frameworks had to bend to accommodate them. The two most prominent intellectuals, Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine, show this well. Renan, far from being an anglophile, shared the usual stereotypes of the British as materialistic, practical, unintellectual and lacking idealism, but after 1870 he began to think that France should try to obtain at least the benefits of these attributes. Taine was a real anglophile, mainly through studying English literature: his visits to England were few and short, and his spoken English poor. He explained human societies as the products of race, geography and circumstance, and this coloured his Notes sur l’Angleterre (1871), one of the most intelligent of the travel-book genre, and which was soon published in English. Taine’s observations certainly featured the conventional tropes: fog; wet Sundays; teeming London; speed and efficiency; high living standards alongside extreme poverty; ugly, badly dressed women; brutal popular amusements and drunkenness; the taste for facts rather than theory; snobbery; electoral corruption; Oxbridge idleness and so on. His famous conclusion was that ‘the English [were] stronger and the French happier’.⁷ But his principal lesson concerned the competence of the English ruling class: ‘expressive, decided faces, which bear, or have borne, the weight of responsibility, less worn than in France, less quick with smiles and the tricks of politeness, but [creating] a broad impression of respect . . . peers, MPs, landowners in their manners and physiognomies show men used to authority and action’.⁸ The principal cause was education – ‘no comparison better brings out the difference between the two peoples’.⁹English public schools, though he deplored their brutality and intellectual narrowness, he thought freer and more natural: ‘the children’ – here comes another hoary simile – ‘are like trees in an English garden, ours like the clipped, straight hedges of Versailles’. Their sports, though time-consuming, reminded him of the ancient Olympics – an idea that was soon to bear fruit in France. The boys’ self-government, with teams, societies and prefects, was ‘an apprenticeship for command and obedience’.¹⁰ Taine later undertook a pessimistic six-volume historical panorama of France’s plight, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1878–94), which impartially blamed the Old Regime, the revolution and the Empire for France’s decline, making a sustained implicit contrast with Britain. France, in short, was on a downhill path. Taine’s arguments were seminal.

Writers and artists too were concerned with various notions of decadence. Common ground was rejection of the exuberant literary and political romanticism of the 1840s, now seen as absurd and empty, and equal disgust with the corrupt populism of the Second Empire, commonly compared with decadent imperial Rome. Many artists rejected a public role for art, seen as producing propagandist kitsch, and stressed its self-justification – l’art pour l’art. Some took this to involve a fastidious withdrawal into purely aesthetic values, introspection, social and intellectual elitism, and contempt for politics and convention. Baudelaire and Flaubert, both prosecuted for outraging public morality in the 1850s, were the heroes of this tendency. The ‘Parnassian’ poets, less controversially, espoused purely aesthetic concern with style and beauty. ‘Realism’ and ‘Naturalism’ – the anti-Romantic ambition to create objective, ‘scientific’ art – inspired the painting of Courbet and Manet, and the novels of the Goncourt brothers. After the defeat of 1870 and the fall of the Empire, Emile Zola and his followers, influenced by Taine and contemporary scientific theories of heredity, embarked on deliberately shocking exposures of the greed, lust, hypocrisy and savagery of degenerate French society. Poets such as the Symbolists Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé and Rimbaud sought new forms of poetic expression and self-exploration. A review, Le Décadent, defined its eponymous condition enticingly as ‘refinement of appetites, of sensations, of taste, of luxury, of pleasures; neurosis, hysteria, hypnotism, morphinomania, scientific skulduggery, extreme schopenhauerism’.¹¹

French self-flagellation and self-indulgence were equally absorbing spectacles for foreigners. British missionaries laboured to convert French workers to Protestantism – something that French liberals such as Renan approved of. France’s missing out on the Reformation in the sixteenth century was widely seen as its first step towards decadence, whereas Protestantism, with its supposed fostering of the work ethic and intellectual liberty, was the road to modernity. Another mission was that of the charismatic Christian feminist Josephine Butler, who took her crusade against prostitution across the Channel: ‘Two words from the mouth of a woman, speaking in the name of all women, and these two words are – We rebel!’¹² She and her many supporters were outraged by the Contagious Diseases Acts, which gave the police powers to declare women prostitutes and force them to submit to intimate medical examinations. This law was modelled on Continental practice, most fully developed in Paris, where the police des moeurs(‘morality police’) regimented prostitutes in closed brothels and prison-hospitals. Butler, who aimed to abolish prostitution, first targeted the laws and regulations by which the French and British states connived in the trade. Victor Hugo (doubtless a little guiltily, considering his personal penchants) wrote to her, ‘The slavery of black women is abolished in America, but the slavery of white women continues in Europe.’ The analogy with slavery was doubly appropriate because, after the destruction of slavery in the United States, the great abolitionist alliance was free to take up new moral causes. Butler found allies in France among those who, after the ‘terrible year’, wanted to regenerate French society. Support came from Protestants, feminists and liberals; also from Left-wingers who detested oppressive police authority. Like many abolitionists in Britain, they saw prostitition as a class issue: the sons of the rich defiling the daughters of the poor with the connivance of the State. More broadly, a great crusade for moral purity tried to desexualize culture, stressing the deadly dangers of venereal diseases and masturbation. This was often linked with eugenics, obsessed with the need for ‘the regeneration of the race’. Sex, whether hetero, homo or auto, was regarded by doctors in both countries as a dangerous and debilitating activity, to be repressed as much as possible.

Yet moralistic head-shaking was not the most significant reaction to France. Writers and artists looked for inspiration to ‘decadent’ France, and particularly to Paris, to a degree unseen for a century, and this would continue until the disaster of 1940. We can suggest several contributory reasons. Paris still enjoyed the notorious glamour of the Empire, and the new Third Republic continued promoting it as the world’s cultural centre, for example by the lavish Universal Exposition of 1889, which made the Eiffel Tower a universally recognized symbol of bold modernity. French was still the most widely spoken foreign language. Paris had good and inexpensive public and private art schools, most famously the Académie des Beaux Arts, major universities, state-sponsored exhibitions, and prestigious official cultural institutions such as the Académie Française. As the world’s main tourist destination, it had plenty of hotels, restaurants, cafés, theatres – and brothels. It had a concentration of economic, political, social and cultural life unparalleled in any other city: only one-third of British intellectuals lived in London, whereas two-thirds of French intellectuals lived in Paris.¹³ So there were many small reviews, and cafés and clubs in the Latin Quarter or bohemian Montmartre where writers and artists congregated, and could be admired and even approached. Leaders of the Irish literary world, including Yeats and Synge, were particularly impressed, and wanted cafés to replace Dublin pubs.

The Third Republic was uniquely free. The influence of the Church shrank and censorship relaxed. Social barriers were relatively permeable – though intellectuals could rarely if ever be accepted in high society, as Proust (who tried hard) found. Personal freedom – artistic, intellectual and not least sexual – increased. As reformers battled against prostitution, painters and writers found it a fascinating subject. The cosmopolitan, noisy and undisciplined atmosphere of the famous Académie Julian, a private art school, was more exciting than the austere Slade School in London – it had, noted George Moore, a ‘sense of sex’.¹⁴ This comment presumably referred not mainly to the students – Parisian schools were predominantly, and in the case of Beaux Arts exclusively, male, unlike the largely female Slade – but to the nude models, which were a Paris speciality. The experience could be a shock: one Scottish woman student, at her first sight of naked men, ‘shut myself in the lavatory and was sick’.¹⁵ Finally, Paris was cheap, at least for British and Americans, who crowded the art schools: ‘best brandy two francs a bottle and claret for a song, peaches and grapes enough for two pence and Women for asking’.¹⁶ There were plenty of underpaid young women in the city’s huge fashion trade ready to provide modelling, skivvying and sex – for of course, sexual liberation for men often meant sexual servitude for women. The dark side of Bohemia was syphilis – the nemesis for youthful transgressions that returned years later to destroy mind and body, and passed from one generation to the next. So it became the obsessive literary metaphor for degeneration.¹⁷

There were also purely cultural reasons for Paris’s attractiveness. French ‘decadence’ and the cultural response to it seemed relevant to those intellectuals who condemned western society, and who tried to apply French artistic approaches in their own cultures. These might be the unsparing investigations of the Naturalists; or a search for the unspoilt exotic in warmer climates; or the aesthetic refinement epitomized by the effete Duc des Esseintes, hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel A Rebours (1884) – published in English as Against Nature. Esseintes, last of an ‘effeminate’ aristocratic family, bored with orgies and ‘the innate stupidity of women’, gives a banquet to mourn his dead virility (all the dishes are black – caviar, truffles, black pudding, etc.). He then withdraws into a contrived world of exquisite sensation, a refuge from ‘the waves of human mediocrity’, with a pet cricket, a gold-plated tortoise, Turkish cigarettes, a machine for mixing exotic cocktails, and a library of ‘decadent’ Latin authors, where he is nourished by gourmet meals fed by enema. Esseintes became a hero for aesthetes. ‘I have the same sickness,’ proclaimed Oscar Wilde, who seems to have misunderstood Huysmans’s irony.

In short, Parisian culture provided inspiration at every turn. Wilde, working on Salome but short of ideas despite the stimulus of Egyptian cigarettes laced with opium and copious draughts of absinthe, asked a violinist in a boulevard café to improvise some music suitable for ‘a woman dancing with bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain’. He produced such ‘wild and terrible music that those who were there stopped talking and looked at each other with blanched faces. Then I went back and finished Salome.’ It could never have happened at the Crown in the Charing Cross Road, where Wilde and his friends, absinthe-less, had to make do with mulled port.¹⁸

British, Irish and American intellectuals – and not only intellectuals – flocked to Paris. The image of ‘Bohemian’ life in the Latin Quarter, popularized during the 1840s in short stories by the cynical Henri Murger, was sentimentalized in Trilby (1894), a hugely popular novel and play by the Anglo-French artist and writer George du Maurier. Bohemia (from the French for ‘gipsy’) promised a coming-of-age away from the constraints of home: drinking absinthe, perorating in cafés, fighting duels, sleeping with adoringgrisettes – perhaps even learning to paint. Murger’s French bohemians had been poor; their foreign emulators often were not. The Irish painter-turned-novelist George Moore, the heir to a large estate, led an elegant ‘student’ life in Paris in the 1870s, where studios and models were cheaper than in London, on £400 a year – six times a French schoolteacher’s salary. His boastfully embroidered Confessions of a Young Man (1888) include wonderful pieces of self-parody, as in his description of his lodgings: ‘The drawing-room was in cardinal red . . . looped up to give the appearance of a tent; a faun, in terra cotta, laughed in the red gloom, and there were Turkish couches and lamps . . . an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of Apollo and a bust of Shelley . . . a Persian cat and a python that made a monthly meal off guinea pigs.’¹⁹ Cultural tourists flocked to the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse and Montmartre. They mixed mostly with other foreigners. At least one art school taught in English. Many models were foreign too, especially Italian immigrants, though the ‘most famous model in Paris’ was an English girl, Sarah Brown, who caused a scandal by appearing at the annual student Bal des Quat’z Arts as Cleopatra, wearing only gold gauze – and risking several days in gaol for ‘outraging public morals’.²⁰ A remarkable feature of Trilby is that there are no major French characters. It is the story of three British art students, the Franco-British model Trilby O’Ferrall, and the sinister German-Jewish musician and hypnotist Svengali. Trilby herself – she of the soft felt hat – a statuesque Pre-Raphaelite beauty, is portrayed as more British than French, not least in her strapping physique. In the end she, like Murger’s Mimi, has to die: a working girl (even the daughter of a disgraced Fellow of Trinity) has no future with a gentleman (even an artist).

A spell in Paris, and proclaimed affinity with French culture, was a mark of distinction: ‘no other country has been so consistently used to help define British class differences’.²¹ The belief that culture was being debased and provincialized in a Britain ruled by a vulgar bourgeoisie and increasingly dominated by a strident, semi-educated and prudish ‘mass’ was a central aspect of the ‘decadence’ of these years. Britain was ‘philistine’ (the word popularized by the francophile Matthew Arnold). French culture, and Parisian style, were escapes and weapons for those who could ‘exult in beautiful English over the inferiority of English literature, English art, English music, English everything else’.²² Oscar Wilde assured a French newspaper that ‘To me there are only two languages in the world: French and Greek. Though I have English friends, I do not like the English in general. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in England that you in France very justly find fault with. The typical Briton is Tartuffe, seated in his shop behind the counter.’²³ British and American modernists in every genre established Parisian links: painters such as Sickert and Whistler (who set up an art school for English-speaking students); ‘Naturalist’ novelists and dramatists such as George Gissing and Arnold Bennett; and the overlapping ‘aesthetic’ and ‘decadent’ coteries – Walter Pater and his acolytes, Oscar Wilde and his friends, the Yellow Book group, the Café Royal set, the Rhymers’ Club, and the New English Art Club. The Parisian connection was similarly cultivated in the early twentieth century by T.S. Eliot (influenced by the Symbolists and the extreme nationalist Action Française) and by the Bloomsbury group, who tried to emulate a fanciful notion of eighteenth-century French salon culture. In 1910, Roger Fry organized a sensational exhibition in London of what he named ‘post-Impressionism’. ‘On or about December 1910’ wrote Virginia Woolf with an odd mixture of cosmopolitanism and insularity, ‘human character changed’.²⁴

Although artistic influence flowed strongly from France to Britain in these years, there were interesting counter-currents. Some French critics even deplored ‘invasion’ by British and ‘Northern’ culture, including the novels of George Eliot, dismissed as emotional and moralistic. While British modernism was marked by an ‘aggressive internationalism, or even antinationalism’,²⁵ in France, the dominant current was a reassertion of national identity, in a perennial conflict between French ‘clarity’, often associated with the sunny classical south, and British (or German and Scandinavian) obscurity, associated with the gloomy romantic north. But some French artists wanted to touch realities beyond the visible and the rational, and try new ways of expressing them. The old obsession with fog thus found new meanings, and its great artistic celebration in Monet’s paintings of the Thames, viewed in 1899–1901 from St Thomas’s Hospital and his room at the Savoy Hotel: ‘I adore London’ – except on Sundays – ‘but what I love more than anything else is the fog . . . the beautiful effects I have observed on the Thames over a two-month period are scarcely to be believed . . . No country could be more extraordinary for a painter’.²⁶ Rimbaud and Mallarmé, both English teachers, were interested by the sounds of English words. Mallarmé, who considered that English had retained the youthful vigour of old French, translated poems by Poe and Tennyson, wrote potboilers for learners of English (featuring phrases such as ‘Knit my dog a pair of breeches and my cat a tail coat’), and invented a toy with a moveable tongue to help French children pronounce ‘th’. His work in English influenced the development of both the lexicon and the syntax of his idiosyncratic French. Marcel Proust admired George Eliot and was influenced by the aesthetic ideas of John Ruskin, some of whose works he translated despite not knowing much English – but, he said, he knew Ruskin. The young sculptor Henri Gaudier spent his short career in London, where he came to earn a living, to avoid military service, and to escape petty persecution over his unusual platonic but emotional relationship with the older Zofia Brzeska.²⁷

So obvious was the British presence in Paris that Huysmans’s effete Duc des Esseintes finds that on a suitably rainy day he can make a virtual trip to London and be ‘saturated with English life’ without the bore of crossing the Channel. In the Rue de Rivoli he visits Galignani’s English bookshop and a bar serving port, sherry, Palmer’s biscuits, mince pies, and sandwiches ‘hiding hot mustard plasters within their bland envelopes’. In an English tavern near the Gare Saint-Lazare he manages oxtail soup, haddock, roast beef, Stilton (‘sweetness impregnated with bitterness’) and rhubarb tart, washed down with three pints of beer (‘a little musky cowshed taste’). Above all there are the English themselves, tweed-clad and smelling of wet dog, the men with ‘pottery eyes, crimson complexions, thoughtful or arrogant expressions’; the ‘robust’ women stuffing themselves with steak pie, ‘without male escorts, dining together, boys’ faces, teeth as big as bats, apple cheeks, long hands and feet’.²⁸

PILGRIMS OF PLEASURE: THE PRINCE OF WALES AND OSCAR WILDE

I want to make my life itself a work of art. I know the price of a fine verse,
but also of a rose, of a vintage wine, of a colourful tie, of a delicate dish.
OSCAR WILDE, Paris, 1891²⁹

See the twinkle in me eye?
Just come back from France, that’s why
Do you like my make-up? Ain’t it great?
It’s the latest thing from Paris straight
And I’d like to go again
To Paris on the Seine
For Paris is a proper Pantomime
And if they’d only shift the Hackney Road and plant it over there
I’d like to live in Paris all the time!
MARIE LLOYD, ‘The Coster Girl in Paris’, 1912

The Prince was a regular visitor from the 1870s onwards, usually incognito to avoid state protocol, though there were still numerous courtesy visits and sometimes political meetings. Paris meant freedom to indulge in his favourite pastimes, including sex, food, gambling, the theatre, racing and socializing with old friends, mostly members of the French aristocracy, some whose ancestors had been ‘anglomaniac’ cronies of an earlier Prince of Wales in the 1780s. The Jockey Club provided congenial sport at Longchamps and Chantilly. The boulevard theatres provided nightly variety: his taste was more for the diverting than for earnest explorations of social problems – though the press reported that his liking for Sarah Bernhardt caused a ban on the rather daringDame aux Camélias to be lifted, causing the author, Dumas the Younger, to thank him for his ‘gracious protection’.³⁰ Gambling took place late at night, after the theatre, in private houses, some specializing in semi-professional gaming. Eating, of course, was amply provided for. The prince’s favourite was appropriately the Café Anglais, for decades one of the best restaurants in Paris. His Paris life followed a routine: the Place Vendôme; the restaurants and theatres of the Boulevard a few hundred yards north; the houses of friends, in neighbouring quarters, and the racecourses in the suburbs. It was a strenuous round, rarely ending before the early hours. The Princess of Wales, if she was present, went to bed just after the theatre. His social life was fairly common knowledge: on one occasion in 1886 the police tore down posters advertising a publication entitled ‘Les Amours du Prince de Galles’.

The police kept a close eye on his activities, both to ensure his safety (especially if there were Irish Fenian conspirators in town) and to monitor political and other contacts.³¹ Some of his aristocratic friends were enemies of the Republic. More worryingly, a few of his meetings were with republican opponents of the government, most importantly Léon Gambetta. He first met Gambetta in 1878, probably through the mediation of his friend the aristocratic but republican General de Galliffet and the Radical MP Sir Charles Dilke. The intention seems to have been to help Gambetta, France’s rising politician, to improve his standing as an international statesman, and to prepare a future Anglo-French rapprochment, including a trade agreement – Dilke advised that ‘M. Gambetta is a free-trader and desires that which we desire.’³² The prince, though keen to make a personal diplomatic contribution, was no loose cannon: the meeting was prepared in Whitehall and the embassy. With similar discretion, he adroitly avoided meeting the extreme nationalist General Boulanger, who came hopefully hanging round his hotel in the 1880s.

His gambling was something the French police were concerned about. It seems that the prince needed money, and winning in Paris was one way of getting it. But some of his gambling acquaintances had bad reputations, and there were complaints from French losers. Women were an equal concern. The police wanted to know all the prince’s lovers, mainly to ensure that they were not royalist ‘agents of influence’. They followed the women and ensured they had identified them, where necessary by questioning neighbours, servants and concierges. But the prince was careful: his mistresses, despite legend, were rarely if ever Parisian. Only on one occasion did the police report that he and some of his Jockey Club cronies were ogling the professionals on the boulevard. This was not only, presumably, because he had a taste, noted the police, for tall well-dressed blondes, but because of the need for discretion and reliability. The lover of the moment would arrive from London in advance, and took up residence usually at the Hôtel du Rhin, or piquantly the Balmoral, near his own pied à terre, the Hôtel Bristol in the Place Vendôme, where a suite was kept permanently. Taking his dog for a walk provided a discreet opportunity for assignations. The social-climbing Miss Jennie Chamberlain from Baltimore, chaperoned by her mother, took up residence in the Place Vendôme in 1884. She later married a Guards officer. Several aristocratic Russians were obligingly furnished by the diplomatic corps during the 1880s, for example Baroness Pilar von Pilchau, wife of a Russian military attaché in London, and Countess Buturlin, wife of the Warsaw chief of police and sister-in-law of another attaché. This did not guarantee complete discretion, however: the gossipy Goncourt reported a Russian woman as saying ‘The Prince of Wales is exhausting: he doesn’t just screw you, he eats you alive.’³³ On one occasion in 1888, the police became very concerned that he was seeing an unknown French-sounding ‘Madame Hudrie’, but investigation soon established that this was a Russian who had borrowed her chambermaid’s surname.³⁴

Wilde made a fairly triumphant visit to Paris in 1891, where he met the right people, paid court to the sociable Mallarmé, was rude to Proust, and made friends with the young André Gide. He enthralled some and bored others. Perhaps his laboured paradoxes were less amusing in strongly accented French, or perhaps the French were harder to amuse (‘Cet Anglais est emmerdant,’ thought the poet Jean Moréas).³⁵

The prince and the poet seem not to have met in Paris, though such a meeting would have been possible, given that Edward asked to meet Oscar and spent an evening with him in 1881 in Chelsea, along with the actress Lillie Langtry, Oscar’s friend and Edward’s mistress. He had subsequently praised Oscar’s plays, greatly to his pleasure – ‘What a splendid country, where princes understand poets.’³⁶ Their Parisian paths might easily have crossed at the theatre or on the boulevards, or the more daring places where the prince and other tourists occasionally set foot: the Moulin Rouge and the famous artistic Chat Noir (where Erik Satie played the piano, and establishment figures mingled with the avant garde) or the rather notorious Latin Quarter Mabille dance hall, a traditional pick-up place for students and grisettes. Wilde too went slumming, visiting the Chateau Rouge dancehall at Montmartre, but he found it rather scary.

Victorianism fought back against decadence and ‘Zolaism’. In March 1888 the crusading Pall Mall Gazette carried a racy interview with a French publisher entitled ‘Why French novels sell’.³⁷ The answer was that ‘the average aristocratic young lady in this country dotes on anything naughty . . . You English are fond of prattling about the purity of your literature, and yet English society is shrieking for Zola’ – hence British sales of 200,000 copies of Nana, the story of a Parisian courtesan. In June, the Channel, Boulogne’s English newspaper, reported that the stage version was drawing crowds to the local theatre – presumably including English tourists.³⁸ In August, the National Vigilance Association began a private prosecution of Henry Vizetelly, a leading London publisher of foreign literature, for selling slightly expurgated translations of three of Zola’s punishing twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, Nana, La Terre and Pot-Bouille (thrillingly titled Piping Hot!) Vizetelly pleaded guilty to charges under the Obscene Publications Act after the blushing jury pleaded to have no more extracts read out – they balked at a scene where a little girl helps a bull mount a cow. Vizetelly was fined. But he soon brought out newly expurgated editions, was prosecuted again in 1889, and this time was given three months in Holloway Prison, the first publisher to be imprisoned for publishing works of recognized literary importance. The flood of ‘foreign filth’ was not to be staunched so easily. The following year the headmaster of Eton complained to the prime minister that boys were receiving parcels of porn from Paris. Eventually, the National Vigilance Association got their French ally, the redoubtable Senator Béranger, to prosecute the main international peddler, who turned out to be an Englishman named Charles Carrington.

Wilde too suffered when Salome (written in French) was banned in England for portraying biblical characters on stage. He indignantly proclaimed that ‘I shall leave England to settle in France where I shall take out letters of naturalization. I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in artistic judgement.’³⁹

Vizetelly and Zola could hardly have found themselves in more hostile circumstances than the 1880s. We have noted the political and moral unease in both Britain and France. In 1887, France was rocked by political corruption and the rise of the demagogic nationalism of General Boulanger, while London had the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riots. There had been militant cross-Channel campaigning against prostitution, child abuse, alcoholism (one of several newly classified social diseases) and cruelty to animals, and this reached a climax in the 1880s. In 1885, the brilliant political career of Sir Charles Dilke was ruined when a woman accused him of teaching her ‘every form of French vice’.⁴⁰ The Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, involving enterprising telegraph boys making more than the regulation deliveries to gentlemen customers, made world headlines, and much scorn in France at English perversion. The Pall Mall Gazette and its editor William Stead, combining moralism with circulation, carried the notorious exposé of ‘white slavery’ in July 1885, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, in which Stead claimed that he had been able to buy a twelve-year-old girl. The outcry culminated in a rally of over 100,000 people in Hyde Park, including feminists, socialists, clergymen of all denominations, and trade unionists. It forced Parliament to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act and pass the Criminal Law Amendment Act, outlawing brothels and pimping, raising the age of consent to sixteen and (in an amendment proposed by the francophile radical MP Henry Labouchère) criminalizing homosexual acts. The National Vigilance Association, established during this campaign, was soon prosecuting rapists, paedophiles, homosexuals, pornographers and pimps. To crown it all, Vizetelly’s prosecution coincided with the eight murders, mainly of prostitutes, by ‘Jack the Ripper’. It is significant that the extracts from Zola stressed in Vizetelly’s trial concerned predatory female sexuality, child sex, incest and a combination of these – the rape of a girl abetted by her sister – not least shocking because the victim derives pleasure from it. The campaigners saw Vizetelly’s offence as aggravated by publishing the translations in cheap illustrated series called ‘Sensational Novels’ and ‘Boulevard Novels’, made accessible to young women and ‘scattered broadcast among the lightly educated’. They believed cultural representations of sex stimulated the social evils they were fighting.

Petitions were produced calling for Vizetelly’s release, signed by writers, artists, actors, and a few maverick MPs. Though they deplored his imprisonment and were alarmed by the threat to artistic freedom, their comments were embarrassed, often criticizing Zola’s work. Zola did not help, saying that his books were not meant for a large readership, should not be read in translation, and that in France young women would not be allowed to read them.⁴¹ The many critics of Zola – who included Gladstone – alleged that he and Vizetelly were no better than pornographers, motivated by profit. The whole affair led to timidity and sullen self-censorship among British authors, who realized more than ever that, unlike in France, ‘Grocerdom is organized in conventicle and church and rancorously articulate.’⁴² The struggle continued. A diplomatic incident was narrowly avoided when the government rescued twenty-two paintings of scenes from Rabelais by a French artist, which zealous purity crusaders were about to have destroyed. There were scandalized protests when Degas’s L’Absinthe was exhibited in 1893.

DEPRAVITY AND CORRUPTION

Punch had little doubt why English gentlemen really read Zola.

Why should England be flooded with foreign filth, and our youth polluted by
having the most revolting and hideous descriptions of French vice thrust upon
their attention?
Pall Mall Gazette, 1 May 1889⁴³

The intolerable Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy of these austere Englishmen . . .
would have the world believe that all the evils of their social system are
imported from us, and they seem to consider me the incarnation of all that
is worst in France.
EMILE ZOLA, 1888⁴⁴

The Frenchness of Zola, Degas and others was, if not an offence in itself, at least prima facie evidence of turpitude. Being famous and dead could not save Balzac from the zeal of the Manchester branch of the NVA, which had 25,000 copies of his novels pulped. For several years, until ruthlessly expurgated, many French novels disappeared from circulation in Great Britain, and Zola remained banned in Ireland long after independence. But despite the fears of moralists for ‘the budding rose of boyhood’ and unleashed ‘maiden fancies’, the most popular French books among English readers appear to have been Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckling adventures, and histories of the Napoleonic period.⁴⁵

The contrast between repressive (or decent) Britain and liberated (or corrupted) France was overdrawn for obvious polemical reasons. Many modern French artists were feted in Britain, in Establishment as well as dissident circles. Impressionism swept British art schools when the French art establishment still resisted it. French art was regularly exhibited in London, and all the British reviews reported in detail on Paris shows. Verlaine and Mallarmé were invited to speak in London, Cambridge and Oxford, and given more recognition than they had received in France – indeed, Christ Church had some difficulty in getting a happy Verlaine to vacate his rooms.⁴⁶ Auguste Rodin, who in France had ‘never altogether escaped the whiff of scandal associated with “modern art”’, was acclaimed in England as the heir of Michelangelo.⁴⁷ He was given an honorary degree by Oxford in 1907, and was so proud that he often wore his doctoral gown in Paris and wanted it placed on his coffin. King Edward VII visited his studio in 1908.⁴⁸Edmond de Goncourt was assured by a female friend that on the London stage ‘kissing, caressing and touching up went much further than one would dare in any French theatre’.⁴⁹ On the other hand, Wilde found himself ostracized by Parisian society after his 1895 prosecution – the left-wing Paris City Council had recently been pressing Parliament to outlaw homosexual acts. In rural France sexual conduct was closer to Galway than to Gomorrah, with young women treated with ‘a degree of strictness of which English people have no conception’.⁵⁰ English women had much more freedom, and were suspected of unsettling their French sisters. As late as 1907, a school inspector criticized a teacher who ‘scandalized’ her provincial town by walking on her own: ‘Having spent a long time in England [she] has adopted the free manners of English misses.’⁵¹ Bourgeois French families did not allow their sons and daughters to study art in Paris – one reason why the schools were so dependent on British and American students. As for ‘Zolaism’, it was frowned on in France too. Zola himself escaped with having publication of his novels suspended in the late 1870s and failing twenty-four times to get into the French Academy. But during the 1880s seven ‘Naturalist’ authors, including Guy de Maupassant, were prosecuted for obscenity, and three were jailed. Zola was publicly repudiated by five of his disciples for La Terre, a book for which Vizetelly was prosecuted.⁵² Finally, if Britain was prudish, it is not clear that it merited the traditional French reproach of greater hypocrisy. The greatest tribute paid by vice to virtue, to adopt the elegant French definition, was regulated prostitution, a nasty secret known to all but officially ignored.⁵³

Despite the images of brutish French peasant life created by Zola, Maupassant and others, these years saw the first flirtation in the long British love affair with rural France. Of course, thousands of British had spent time in provincial France from 1815 onwards. But most of the landscape was regarded as monotonous, with too many poplars and dull plains,⁵⁴ and the presence of French people had been an unavoidable necessity rather than a positive attraction. However, one aspect of the concern with decadence was repudiation of ‘mass’ urban industrial society and a search for the primitive and unspoilt. For an earlier generation, this could be done by fleeing to the Lake District, but by the last quarter of the century, with population growth, urban sprawl and mass education, urban society by the charabanc-load was catching up. France, whose population was barely increasing, had many ‘unspoilt’ regions, whose people seemed to embody values dead or moribund in Britain. Descriptions and novels appeared for readers interested not only in the comforts of Pau or Biarritz, or the glories of the Alps and Pyrenees, but in the natives and their ways in less-favoured regions. The pioneer rural colonist and writer on rural France was an art critic, P.G. Hamerton, who bought a house in the Rhône valley for ‘beauty and convenience’. In Around My House (1876) he wrote in detail about peasant society as the bedrock of France, and stressed its cultural remoteness. Though his peasants are less cuddly than in popular twentieth-century descriptions, he and other writers began to assert their moral superiority over English farmers and labourers. A pioneer in another genre was Robert Louis Stevenson, in Travels with a Donkey (1879), an account of a walking holiday in the Cevennes highlands. Far from sentimental – the peasants are mainly unfriendly, and he takes a revolver to be on the safe side – the book was ahead of its time, thought, even by its author, to be an odd idea. It would need a generation of tourist penetration for the French countryside – still typified by squalor, linguistic incomprehension and bad food – to become visitor-friendly. Henry James’s A Little Tour in France (1884) is still largely about buildings and history, with the people only intruding to disappoint expectations by being dirty, tacitum and eating disgusting food. But a stream of new perspectives began appearing, such as A Year in Western France (1877), Life in a French Village (1879), Our Home in Aveyron (1890) and even The Romance of a French Parsonage (1892). By the 1930s, writers such as Lady Fortescue, in Perfume from Provence, were creating the now familiar image of comfortable exoticism ‘before the £ collapsed’. Her workmen were comical and ‘Rabelaisian’, her peasants ‘perfectly maddening, entirely without initiative, and quite irresponsible, but most lovable’, and sometimes ‘very, very wise’.⁵⁵ The age of Elizabeth David, Peter Mayle and mass-conversions of farmhouses was beginning to dawn.

Regeneration: Power and Empire

We have to cure the very soul of France.
JULES SIMON, philosopher and politician, to French Academy, 1871⁵⁶

In the North we have the rising of the future; in the South,
the crumbling of a decaying past.
EDMOND DUMOLINS, Anglo-Saxon Superiority (1898)⁵⁷

As some intellectuals, artists and politicians were deploring or celebrating ‘decadence’, others – or sometimes the same ones – were trying to end it. Renan and Taine, despite their pessimism, had not despaired of France: they advocated profound political and educational reforms to cure the country’s ills. Republicans, who took power at the end of the 1870s, intended to recreate a healthy, patriotic nation cleansed of the vices of Catholicism and Bonapartism. Catholics too, though despondent at the Republic’s victory, and tempted to see France’s fate as divine punishment, had not abandoned hope of redemption. Many people remained optimistic about the future, and the novels of Jules Verne or the opinions of Flaubert’s M. Bouvard were closer to their views than the writings of Zola, Huysmans, Ibsen or Hardy. Optimism was not complacency: reformers agreed that France needed to be bolder, healthier, and better educated, even if they disagreed about the means.

Colonial expansion had been a remedy for French ills ever since the Restoration, and the argument changed little from Tocqueville to de Gaulle. France had to prove that it was still a great nation, and this was more urgent than ever at a time of defeat and decadence. As the republican leader Jules Ferry said in 1882, ‘France would not easily be content to count for no more in the world than a big Belgium.’ Imperialism would be a unifying national adventure, and would create a breed of intrepid soldiers and hardy colonists who would rejuvenate the flabby body politic. A great imperial population would supplement the flagging birthrate – one of the deepest concerns of late-nineteenth-century nationalists. The republican patriot Léon Gambetta declared that ‘it is through expansion, through influencing the outside world, through the place that they occupy in the general life of humanity, that nations persist and last’. This was something that both Right and Left could support. For the Right, France was spreading Catholicism as well as its own influence through its widespread missionary activities. The Left set up the Alliance Française in 1883 as a secular missionary organization, ‘to make our language known and loved’ and hence contribute to ‘the extension beyond the seas of the French race which is increasing too slowly on the Continent’.⁵⁸ Novelists such as Pierre Loti and Ernest Psichari lauded the invigorating effects of desert air and oriental sensuality; and Gauguin’s friends paid for him to go and seek passion and inspiration among the dusky maidens of Tahiti. Even Rimbaud was toughened up trading coffee and guns in Abyssinia.

Not everyone thrilled to these visions. Voters feared war and expense. Investors sought safer profits. Some nationalists regarded imperialism as weakening France on the Continent, and they disdained colonies as an unworthy distraction from recapturing Alsace and Lorraine: ‘I have lost two sisters and you offer me twenty servants,’ cried the nationalist leader Paul Déroulède. Bismarck indeed encouraged French ambitions overseas for that very reason, and with the added bonus that it created rivalry with Britain. French colonial expansion relied on the minority enthusiasm of leading republican politicians, geographical societies, missionaries, the armed forces and a few economic interests. Their sights were set on North Africa and Indo-China. It proved possible to compromise with the British over the latter, and London raised fewer objections to the French declaration of a protectorate over Tunisia in 1881 than did critics inside France. Gambetta proclaimed that ‘France has regained her rank as a great power.’

France and Britain did quarrel seriously over Egypt, a cause of periodic contention from 1798 to 1956. As in 1840, the French considered they had not merely interests but an affinity with Egypt, as if Napoleon’s invasion had been a delicate compliment to an ancient civilization. They had invested money and effort in building up cultural, economic and political influence. This was crowned in 1869 by the opening of the Suez Canal, an idea of Napoleon and the Saint-Simonians, and built by Ferdinand de Lesseps, one of France’s greatest (though finally ill-fated) economic adventurers. The canal was a strategic asset, above all for British communications with India. So when in 1875, the khedive of Egypt, short of money, sold his shares in the Suez Canal Company, they were snapped up by Disraeli’s government. In 1881–2, nationalist riots in Egypt led to naval action and military intervention by Britain, which the French held back from, mainly because of domestic opposition. The British found themselves governing Egypt. French colonialists and – too late – French public opinion were outraged at the latest trick of perfidious Albion, depriving France of a great colonial prize. The British were even accused of bribing the Egyptians to pretend to revolt in order to provide a pretext for intervention. As during colonial friction in the 1840s, the French navy meditated on how to steal a march on the British. Plans for a Channel Tunnel, for which excavations had begun, were called into question.

THE TUNNEL: FALSE DAWN

The first Channel tunnel proposal came from a French engineer, Albert Mathieu, in 1802, during the Peace of Amiens. The idea never entirely went away. A multitude of plans had been drawn up for bridges, tunnels, submerged tubes and even a waterproof train driven by compressed air. New means of crossing the Channel always guaranteed publicity. The first balloon crossing (by a Frenchman and an American) had happened as early as 1785. A submarine telegraph cable had been laid in 1851, making Britain and France ‘Siamese twins’, according to one enthusiast. An American, Paul Boyton, ‘swam’ across in April 1875, using an inflatable suit, a paddle and a small sail, and smoking a cigar. The first true Channel swim was the following August by a merchant navy captain, Matthew Webb, sustained by beer, brandy and coffee. By this time, a tunnel had strong supporters on both sides of the Channel, and they sponsored Channel swims as publicity. Bills had been submitted to Parliament, and an Anglo-French commission in 1876 produced a draft treaty ready for ratification. Blithely confident that the technical problems could be overcome by technology recently developed for digging under the Alps, a Submarine Continental Railway Company and a Société Française du Tunnel Sous-marin were set up. They started experimental tunnelling at Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover, and Sangatte, near Calais, using boring machines invented by a British colonel. By 1882, the British tunnel had progressed more than a mile, and politicians, journalists, soldiers and celebrities were taken for champagne and canapés under the sea. The companies expected the two tunnels to meet in four or five years. However, there were fears on both sides. If some in France suspected British designs on Calais, most fears, given the weakness of their army, were British, and strongest of all among military men. However many assurances were given that a tunnel could be fortified, mined, filled with poison gas or instantly flooded, they could not rule out the possibility of its being captured by an invading force. As cross-Channel relations suddenly turned sour, a parliamentary select committee found against the tunnel in 1883, and the Gladstone government agreed. Though the tunnel companies kept up the argument, and the House of Commons was told in April 1913 that a tunnel was still being considered, no government before 1914 was willing to reopen the question.⁵⁹ This surely prevented at least technical and financial disaster. Meanwhile, Louis Blériot had shown the shape of things to come and caused a sensation on both sides of the Channel by flying from near Sangatte to a golf course near Dover in the early hours of 25 July 1909.

Victorian technology halted by politics.

Unfair though it might be, the British were undeniably the more successful imperialists, not only in Egypt or India, but by spawning new settler colonies, including the United States. Some in France emphasized the global power of les Anglo-Saxons – a concept that now entered the French political vocabulary.⁶⁰ ‘The great peril, the great rivalry’ was not now ‘on the other side of the Rhine’, but ‘on the other side of the Channel [and] the Atlantic’.⁶¹ French resentment was displayed when almost alone they resisted an American suggestion to agree a universal prime meridian, as this meant adopting the Greenwich Meridian; and in 1894 a young French anarchist killed himself trying to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.⁶² Several influential commentators in the 1880s and 90s, mostly admiring liberals, asked brutally frank questions. What explains Anglo-Saxon superiority? What must France do to compete, and keep her place in the sun? A series of publications identified the ‘political psychology of the English people’ and the ‘education of the middle and ruling classes’ as their advantages.⁶³ Not all these diagnoses were new. Indeed, some went back not only to Taine, but to Tocqueville, and even Voltaire. But there was an important novelty. They looked less admiringly now at British parliamentary institutions, which after the 1884 Reform Act seemed little different from those of France. Instead, they focused on the men they considered the real rulers – civil servants, colonial administrators, and businessmen – and how they were produced.

The British education system, they argued, did not cram its victims with rote-learned classics and undigested theory as in France, but taught practical skills, encouraged intellectual freedom, and above all developed self-reliance, teamwork and character – precisely what a modern economic and a political elite of ‘practical energetic men’ required.⁶⁴ Taine had not gone quite so far a generation earlier. It had, after all, been commonplace for French and many British commentators to condemn British universities and schools for incompetence or worse; and it was generally accepted that, whatever their other failings, the French were well educated. Dr Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby, considered that France produced ‘more advanced and enlarged minds’ than England, and took his children on visits.⁶⁵ His son Matthew, one of the most influential of Victorian intellectuals, had in the 1860s praised ‘the French Eton’ – a provincial lycée – for the quality of education given to the middle classes, and had pressed for French-style reforms. It was he who enviously reported the famous story that the French minister of education could see from a chart on his wall what every schoolboy was doing at every minute of the day. But the defeat of 1870, commonly attributed to ‘the Prussian schoolmaster’, tarnished the prestige of French education and caused the republicans to look for models abroad. They studied English and Scottish educational legislation in creating that hallmark of Frenchness, the école laïque.⁶⁶ Critics now attacked the French classical tradition itself as sterile, and the Napoleonic lycées as stultifying ‘barracks’. Moreover, they were doing something about it. The sociologist Edmond Demolins in 1899 founded the model Ecole des Roches in Normandy (still in existence as France’s leading independent school), modelled on progressive English boarding-schools such as Bedales. More importantly, Emile Boutmy (with Taine as an adviser) had founded in 1871 the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques – soon famous as ‘Sciences Po’. This was not modelled on any English institution – in fact the London School of Economics was copied from it – but it was a conscious attempt to create a new ruling class as practical-minded as the one its founders thought Britain, having escaped revolution and the Napoleonic state, already possessed. Within a generation Sciences Po was educating a high proportion of senior French civil servants, and it has done so ever since.

EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION

Whatever the aspirations of reformers such as Arnold and Desmolins, educational ideas, habits and institutions in both countries have proved singularly impermeable to the influence of the other – the reason they are not treated at length in this book. But we must suggest briefly some of the effects educational difference (in turn connected with differences in religion, legal systems and intellectual traditions) has had for the broader relationship. To cut a very long story short, French education remains essentially ‘classical’: it hands down approved models of the right way of doing things, which are to be mastered and reproduced. This remains true from école maternelle to grande école. A bright young Oxford-trained British civil servant seconded in 2004 to the elite École Nationale d’Administration told us that ‘if you haven’t been sitting in front of a lecturer for four hours they don’t think you’ve learnt anything’. The approved models include ideas, techniques and – a central feature – styles of ordering and presenting knowledge, usually the famous ‘three-part plan’ based on traditional principles of logic and rhetoric: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is often characterized as ‘Cartesian’, based on deductive reasoning – that is, the theory comes first, applications follow. British education is unsystematic, and it tends to aim at individual expression rather than correctness or mastery of a body of knowledge. Success requires at least an attempt at originality and ‘lateral thinking’, and mistakes and gaps in knowledge are tolerated. Thinking usually proceeds inductively, from facts to theory. The French tradition assumes that specialist training is required for professional activity at all levels, and the higher the level, the greater the specialization. The British is more sceptical of ‘paper qualifications’; it regards non-intellectual qualities such as enthusiasm, teamwork and imagination as valuable, and values non-specialist education as giving potentially fresh insights. Both approaches, of course, have characteristic strengths and weaknesses. What is important from our point of view is that they still produce different styles of thought and expression, which are noticeable whenever the French and British come into contact. In politics, the French have complained for generations that the British refused to discuss hypotheses, but would only consider actual problems. Palmerston stated that ‘it is not usual for England to enter into engagements with reference to cases which have not wholly arisen’, and Granville a generation later echoed that British practice was to ‘avoid prospective understandings to meet contingencies, which seldom occur in the way which has been anticipated’.⁶⁷ The British, as the French saw it, were incapable of thinking logically about future possibilities. In the 1920s André Tardieu, a future prime minister, deplored the ‘repugnance of the Anglo-Saxon to the systematic constructions of the Latin mind’. An ambassador in the 1950s agreed: ‘For an Englishman a proposition has no real existence.’ Nothing had changed by 2003: a British diplomat found that ‘the French are most comfortable when they can define a set of principles . . . The British shy away from principles.’⁶⁸ So the British have tended to dismiss general statements about future intentions as empty verbiage – something they at times had reason to regret. Margaret Thatcher, for example, admitted that in discussions about European integration ‘we in the British delegation were inclined to dismiss such rhetoric as cloudy and unrealistic expectations which had no prospect of being implemented’.⁶⁹ In business relations, French interlocutors were often thought better prepared, with a clear agenda worked out in advance, but incapable of ‘brainstorming’ and unwilling to discuss and take on new ideas. Their practice was to define their position logically at the outset, and defend it. This was often seen by the British as arrogant and inflexible: ‘the French don’t listen, they stick to their positions, they mock your ideas.’ But British ‘open-mindedness’ seemed to the French to be illogical, indecisive and time-wasting.⁷⁰ The difference is summed up by Graham Corbett, finance director of Eurotunnel: ‘The French can only think in threes, the Brits without any structure at all; the French are more likely to keep you out of trouble, but the Brits will get you out of it once you’re in it.’⁷¹

Putting Colour into French Cheeks

I shall put colour into the cheeks of solitary and confined youth.
PIERRE DE COUBERTIN⁷²

Imitate the English. The taste for struggle that the French have learnt on the sports field is showing itself boldly in seeking to conquer a bigger share of the globe.
GABRIEL BONVALOT, explorer⁷³

It would seem to be infinitely more important for French boys to become aware of the poetry to be found in a whole afternoon spent playing with a ball, than in struggling to uncover . . . the poetry that may or may
not reside in a given verse by Racine.
HENRY DE MONTHERLANT, writer⁷⁴

One aspect of English culture and education that the French had long disdained now began to be singled out as a vital ingredient of Anglo-Saxon success: games. ‘Boys who learned to command in games were learning to command in India,’ concluded the headmaster of an elite Dominican school near Paris after visiting Eton.⁷⁵ The defeat of 1870 had made physical exercise a patriotic duty. Its first aim was military training, and its first manifestation was a vast gymnastics movement, copied from Germany. Collective gym fostered strength and coordination useful in military drill. For several decades it was immensely popular, especially in the patriotic north-east, and in 1900 was still the main single form of mass recreation. But gymnastics had limits. It did not foster the desired liberal qualities of voluntary cooperation, individual effort combined with imaginative teamwork, and fair play. What were called les sports anglais came in useful here: cycling, swimming, rowing, atheltics, boxing, tennis, competitive skiing, and especially the team games football and rugby. Within a generation, what began as an aspect of educational reform and a means of countering national decadence revolutionized popular culture. Along with parliamentary government, it is France’s most important import from Britain.

Before the 1860s, the French did not much play team games, sometimes called ‘les petits jeux anglais’. Gratuitous outdoor exertion was not common. ‘The word sport,’ explained the mayor of Pau in 1842, ‘is one of those English expressions that are impossible to translate into French.’ One Paris newspaper in the 1890s believed that football required ‘long flat mallets’.⁷⁶ The upper classes, and their emulators, continued hunting and racing. That one French prime minister had a Cambridge rowing blue is the exception and far from the rule. Fencing, and even duelling, expanded into the lower-middle classes late in the century. The lower classes had bull-baiting, bowls, cockfighting, shooting and so on, and these survived and expanded as leisure opportunities increased. English sports, involving violent physical contact, had long been despised as expressions of English brutality, mindlessness, and lack of social propriety. One of Béranger’s most sarcastic anglophobe songs is ‘Le Boxeur’. Early Parisian rugby players found physical contact and rolling in the mud distasteful, and placed less emphasis on the scrum and the tackle – arguably initiating the French national style.⁷⁷

Games codified in British schools and universities in mid-century were soon being played in France by men working or holidaying. The regional pattern of French sport was shaped by social and economic contacts with Britain: the Channel ports, the Paris region, the south-west (tourism and wine) and the north (textiles and engineering) were the main areas of influence. The first sports clubs in France were the Havre Athletic Club (1872) and in Paris the English Taylors’ Club (1877). Old boys of Scottish Catholic schools were prominent in establishing soccer. These expatriates had no missionary aim of promoting sport in France or playing against Frenchmen. Rather, the initiative was taken by Parisian schoolboys. The famous Racing Club de France, the first native sports club, was set up by boys from four right-bank schools in 1882, and its rival Stade Français mainly by boys from the left-bank Lycée Saint-Louis. ‘Racing’, as it was called, was extremely ‘aristocratic’ and intellectual in its values and membership. At first they failed to get it quite right, sprinting round the Gare Saint-Lazare dressed as jockeys and taking bets. Others went in for acrobatics, and ran a highly exclusive private circus. But British-style orthodoxy soon prevailed, as expatriates joined in. British players took part in the first French national rugby championship in 1892. In 1893 Racing Club played Oxford, and introduced their visitors to the delights of the Moulin Rouge. In 1900 they hosted the athletics events of the second Olympic Games.⁷⁸

The spread of sports owed much to enthusiastic individuals, who believed that they were fighting modern decadence. Their missionary zeal is shown by the prominence of Frenchmen in organizing international organizations – hence FIFA, not IFAF. The great apostle was a Sciences Po graduate, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. He was inspired by Taine’s praise of English public schools, by reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays, by the ideal of le fair-play, and by the wish to ‘exalt the fatherland, the race, the flag’. In his twenties, during the 1880s, he used his social and political connections to lobby for the introduction of games. There was an early setback: in 1893 he brought a French crew to the Henley Regatta, and the Thames Rowing Club rammed them. Undeterred, in 1894 Coubertin set up the largest French sports federation, and the same year he founded the modern Olympic movement. His inspiration was the Much Wenlock Olympian Games, a festival of miscellaneous sporting contests enlivened by heraldic processions, award ceremonies and flags, which took place every year in a Shropshire village, and to which Coubertin had been a delighted visitor.⁷⁹ Other sporting pioneers were Georges de Saint-Clair, formerly French consul in Edinburgh, who wanted games to ‘forge the man of action . . . who knows how to will, to dare, to undertake, organize, govern and be governed’.⁸⁰ Pascal Grousset, the former Communard exile, did not wish to leave sport to right-wingers and anglophiles, and in the late 1880s he tried to push French sport in a nationalist direction, as in the United States and Ireland, by developing native games. A doctor, Philippe Tissier, in 1888 founded the first non-Parisian sporting association, the Ligue Girondine de l’Education Physique in Bordeaux. All but Grousset were anglophiles, and their success at a time of relative anglophobia showed yet again that ill-feeling did not prevent fashionable emulation.

The pioneers made use of existing educational, religious and political networks. Tissier made rugby the sport of the south-west. Helped by the strong British presence at Bordeaux, Pau and Biarritz, he persuaded the republican education authorities to support rugby in state schools, not least to counter Church sponsorship of football. It is tempting to think that rugby has an affinity with the rugged masculine culture of the rural south – bull-fighting in the summer and scrums in the winter. It became an expression of fierce loyalties to city, to village, and to Basque, Béarnais and Provençal ethnicity. There is a chapel dedicated to Notre Dame du Rugby in a village in the Landes, with a stained glass window of the Madonna and Child holding a rugby ball and seemingly taking part in a celestial line-out. Today, the small Landes town of Saint Vincent de Tirosse, with seven clubs, can claim to be the capital of French rugby. By 1900, it had become the national game. In 1911, France won its first international, against Scotland. A new standard in fast, open play – the French style – was set by a former rowing club, Aviron Bayonnais, which dominated the game for years thanks to its Welsh fly-half and coach Owen Roe, who is commemorated by a stained-glass window in Biarritz’s British church. This proudly Basque team popularized the regional beret – thus first establishing as fashionable for young men and women a hat often thought of by foreigners as universally French.

Boxing was another Anglo-Saxon import (the first Paris boxing hall in 1907 was named ‘Wonderland’ after its Whitechapel model), and it similarly became naturalized when Georges Carpentier beat ‘Bombardier’ Billy Wells for the world light-heavyweight championship in 1913. Boxing defied some stereotypes of Frenchness – ‘All England had roared. A boxing Frenchman! It was the absurdest of paradoxes.’ But other stereotypes were maintained: French commentators praised Charpentier for his skill, speed, courage and honour, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon brute force.⁸¹ Soccer was small before the First World War, and at first almost entirely British. The first club, Standard Athletic, an anglophone enclave to this day, was founded by the employees of a British firm in Paris. The 1894 national championship was won by a team with ten British players. By 1914 there were only four fairly large clubs: Paris, Marseilles, Lille and Strasbourg. Popular interest was confined to the industrial north and the towns of the south-east.⁸² The First World War was a watershed, owing to contacts with British soldiers and matches organized by the armies. Thereafter, the game expanded rapidly, though it remained less popular and less professionalized than in Britain or neighbouring Continental countries, and France was consequently unsuccessful in international competitions.

Cycling, athletics, team sports and boxing brought changes in social and cultural life, in dress and body shape, in gender relations, even in ideas. Yet as they were adopted, sports were transformed. Cycling is the best example. The first road races in the 1870s were dominated by upper-class British and French amateurs. But road racing was banned in Britain in 1896, and the sport declined. In France, it democratized as bicycles grew cheaper, and their manufacture became an important industry. Sponsoring races – both indoor and road – enabled manufacturers and new sporting newspapers to reach a growing market.⁸³ Cycle racing became France’s first commercial spectator sport – and a highly exploitative and corrupt one. The Tour de France, its name recalling the traditional wanderings of the journeyman craftsman, and also the title of a best-selling patriotic children’s book, became the first national sporting event. It was started in 1903 during the turbulent Dreyfus affair by the right-wing sporting paper L’Auto to scoop its political rivals. The race – a gruelling test of will and endurance on heavy gearless bicycles – became a celebration of France’s unity in diversity, a lesson in history and geography, and an exciting taste of modernity for remote towns and villages on the route. People came ‘out of the tavern’ to cheer the riders ‘as yesterday’s crowds hailed the return of Napoleon’s grizzled veterans from Spain and Austria.’⁸⁴

Seen as a means of national regeneration, sport attracted intellectuals and artists. Sport expressed modernity, rebellion against tradition, and a new experience of the body. Avant-garde artists painted sporting subjects. Some of the most fashionable pre- and inter-war literary figures were enthusiasts, including the novelist Alain-Fournier, the writer and producer Jean Cocteau and the playwrights Jean Giraudoux and Henry de Montherlant. The poet Charles Péguy introduced football – played in the street – to his lycée at Orleans, and he took up rugby when he moved to Paris. Because of its nationalist and militarist associations – ‘war is sport for real’ – sport long remained a male activity, with women marginalized until well after the Second World War, except in tennis.

The First World War increased the appeal of sport, and superseded its upper-class anglophile origins. Political groups, and firms such as Peugeot and Michelin, took increasing interest. The southern mining town of Carmaux, with a history of violent labour relations, had two clubs, one Catholic and subsidized by the bosses, the other supported by the trade union. Such links intensified an already high level of violence on and off the pitch – knuckle-dusters were confiscated from the players in a schools soccer championship in 1905, and the France–Scotland rugby match in 1913 led to riots from which the English referee had to be rescued by the gendarmerie.⁸⁵ Uncontrollable violence in the 1920s led to the British, Dominions and Irish rugby unions breaking off relations. The French continued to play against Germany, Italy and Romania, whose authoritarian regimes took to rugby. But the game declined in France, and it was overtaken in popularity by football. Only under strong pressure from both governments did a British team agree to play France in January 1940 as a gesture of allied solidarity: it won 38–3.

The modern rise in popularity, quality and participation in French sport has very different foundations from the British system of plucky amateurism or commercial professionalism: namely, state support. Schoolteachers and soldiers had always played a part, but from the late 1930s, the central state increased its role. The left-wing Popular Front in 1936 began spending money on sports facilities, and this was greatly increased by the right-wing Vichy regime under its minister of sport, Jean Borotra, a Wimbledon champion. General de Gaulle took a personal interest in sports success in the 1960s. Effectively, sport was nationalized: the State took over the organization of major sporting events and the selection of national teams.⁸⁶ By the early twenty-first century, in Britain, there were ten civil servants involved in running sport; in France, 12,000. Sport, a predictable, rule-bound and repetitive activity, is one where bureaucracy can excel. As in the 1880s, national regeneration and prestige provide the motives for promoting both grass-roots participation through state-funded mass coaching (including skiing for schoolchildren and compulsory sport as part of the baccalauréat and university degree courses) and also advanced training facilities and financial support for international performers. In 2002, 83 per cent of the French between the ages of fifteen and seventy-five took part in some sporting activity, and 8 million in competitions.⁸⁷ This explains the success of French athletes in a range of sports, and the prominence of French-trained specialists in transforming the training, tactics, diet and discipline of professional British football teams – a piquant historical irony. If we consider the prominence of sport in French culture, the numbers participating in a wide variety of activities, and the high level of international achievement in a unique range of sports from rugby and football via tennis and athletics to skiing and ocean yachting, France could claim to be the world’s most sporting nation. Britain, the sometime model, might just, on the same criteria, be thought a distant runner-up.

The one major British game the French do not play is cricket – their single rebellion against the Victorian sporting empire. There were attempts. The Standard Athletic Club had a ground just south of Paris, and in the 1900 Paris Olympics, France missed the only ever gold medal in cricket, losing to Devon County Wanderers. But from then to the present-day Fédération Française du Cricket, practically all players have been expatriates.⁸⁸ This absence should tell us something, but what? Did the Victorians mainly play their winter team games in France? Was there some socio-economic barrier? Unlike football, the urban sport par excellence, proper cricket needs sophisticated team organization, complex skills, a pitch, elaborate equipment, and leisure. Yet English children, like those in India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, play with bits of wood and stumps chalked on walls. Is there some uncrossable French cultural barrier, as has often been jokingly suggested? But rugby and boxing were far more alien practices. Cricket, on the contrary, would perfectly fit French self-images – subtlety, intelligence, dexterity, courage, elegance. Moreover, the cricketing ethos of sportsmanship, teamwork and self-control perfectly fitted the aspirations of anglophile educational reformers – le fair-play did indeed enter French vocabulary. The lone struggle of the batsman against overwhelming odds would have seemed admirable training for patriotic resistance to the Teutonic hordes. So let us regret the aristocratic Parisian batsmen and the terrifying Basque bowlers that never were. The sports historian Richard Holt suggests that cricket seemed insufficiently strenuous, even too plebeian for the likes of Coubertin, and too rooted in the pastoral idyll of the English village. The French equivalent of cricket is the Tour de France – a summer sport that is prolonged, tactical, unendurable for outsiders, and an excuse to sun-bathe.

Food and Civilization

Paris is the culinary centre of the world. All the great missionaries of good cookery have gone forth from it, and its cuisine was, is and ever will be the supreme expression of one of the great arts in the world.
The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe (London, 1903)

If sport is Britain’s great cultural export to France, the French have reciprocated with la cuisine. The British were ‘always the primary audience for French food’.⁸⁹ There is the same conscious emulation; the same lamentation of one’s own inferiority; and the same influence of fashion. There is even a connection with the fin-de-siècle obsession with decadence: for many cultural critics, the inferiority of English food was a symptom of aesthetic decline, proof of the rise of the philistine ‘masses’ and the horrors of urban life. As John Carey remarks, tinned food aroused particular ire among British intellectuals. The Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell lamented that there were ‘but two or three restaurants in London where it is an unqualified pleasure to dine’.⁹⁰ French food, like its art and literature, was the cynosure of the cultivated Briton. However, the British have been less successful at internalizing (in all senses) French cuisine than the French with English sport. The history of French culinary influence in Britain is complex, and rather sad. The undoubted desire of the British social elite and their emulators to eat as well as the French has repeatedly turned to ashes in their mouths at home, and is a major cause of their pilgrimages, and even migrations, to rural France.

The restaurant, a Parisian development of the late-eighteenth century, was partly copied from London taverns – an aspect of contemporary anglomania. The first famous and successful example, opened at the Palais Royal in the 1780s by Beauvilliers, a former royal cook, was called La Grande Taverne de Londres. London at that time was a city where eating out was more established as a social activity than in Paris. This had been condemned as one of the barbarities of London life, where lodgings were inadequate for entertaining properly. The revolution boosted the Paris restaurant by abolishing remaining guild restrictions and creating new customers, including politicians and the new rich. What distinguished the restaurant from the tavern and the inn were its separate tables, relative privacy, and choice of dishes. There is some truth in the old story of cooks from the court and aristocratic houses opening restaurants, though they had done so before the revolution too.⁹¹ Some came to London, notably Louis-Eustache Ude, formerly employed by Louis XVI, who cooked at Crockford’s Club. Paradoxically, the revolution made the cooking of the court and the great nobility the basis of the new commercial haute cuisine – an aspect of the Old Regime that France’s new rulers did not repudiate. Some cooks became international celebrities, moving between private patrons, official households, and restaurants. The greatest was Antonin Carême, who cooked, among others, for Talleyrand, the Prince Regent, and the tsar. He laid down strict standards for la haute cuisine, a world away from domestic cooking, la cuisine bourgeoise. The summit of the style was artistically pretentious, lavishly expensive and visually impressive, with food being decoratively arranged and displayed on pedestals. On grand occasions there would be picturesque ruins carved from lard and Carême’s particular speciality, miniature classical architecture in icing-sugar.

Throughout the nineteenth century this haute cuisine, hard on the purse and the arteries, became the speciality of the great Parisian restaurants, most of them neighbouring establishments at the Palais Royal and later on the boulevards – the Café Anglais, the Café de Paris, the Café Riche, the Maison Dorée, the Trois Frères Provençaux and (the only one that survives) the Grand Véfour. They created an autonomous form of inventive professional cooking, attracting customers by quality and constant innovation: sauce béarnaise, for example, comes from the boulevards, not the Pyrenees.⁹² French cuisine was not, and is not, a single style, but a variety of styles to which skill and attention were applied by craftsmen in a cultural context in which food, like clothes and manners, was regarded as a badge of gentility. Haute cuisine became the epitome of elegance and excellence in food, and an important aspect of social prestige. Talleyrand used Carême’s cooking as a diplomatic instrument, and the Paris Rothschilds used him as the ‘principal attraction in this early phase of [their] social ascent’, giving four grand dinners a week for the international aristocracy and diplomatic corps.⁹³ As Lady Morgan put it after one such occasion, this was ‘an art form by which modern civilization is measured’.⁹⁴

British tourists were an important part of restaurant clientèle. The 11th Duke of Hamilton even gave haute cuisine a martyr, when on 15 July 1863 he broke his neck falling down the stairs after a good dinner at the Maison Dorée. British lack of taste, some said, lowered standards – though these were defended by a superb waiter at the famous Voisin’s, who one Christmas told a British customer asking for plum pudding that ‘The House of Voisin does not serve, has never served, and will never serve plum pudding.’⁹⁵French cooks, exclusively male, rigorously trained, organized, articulate and imperialistic, were in demand all over the world. One of the most famous, Alexis Soyer, chef of London’s Reform Club, became a prominent Victorian dandy, entrepreneur and character, organizing soup kitchens for the poor in London and Ireland during the 1840s, and eventually working alongside Florence Nightingale in the Crimea to improve the nutrition of the troops. London became the principal annexe of haute cuisine. Yet London, in the mid nineteenth century, had practically no restaurants, with the exception of a few in Soho – smoky, noisy and alarmingly foreign – run by and for expatriates. London had, of course, many eating places, from pubs at one end of the spectrum to gentlemen’s clubs at the other. The latter (notably Crockford’s and the Reform) provided some of the best food in London, and fulfilled some of the functions of Paris restaurants, where it was similarly not customary for men to go with their wives. Unlike in London clubs, however, they could go with other women, and the private rooms of boulevard restaurants were famous for more than gastronomic pleasures. The other British shrines to haute cuisine were a few aristocratic houses, and one or two hotels. This difference between London and Paris (where in 1890 some 10,000 people worked in the restaurant trade) reflects Paris’s unique importance as a tourist centre. It also reflects a difference already noted. London’s development emphasized domestic comfort, space and privacy, with the growth of suburban houses – the ecology of that English phenomenon, the dinner party. Most Parisians lived in relatively small flats or furnished rooms, and dined and entertained in a range of eating-places, from the cheap to the hugely expensive. So Paris had a large, highly professional food trade, whereas most English professional cooks, poorly trained and badly paid, worked for families.

This had two consequences for British eating habits. First, the most prestigious food was French, and this is what the best cooks tried to produce – and many mediocre ones too. English ‘country-house’ cooking had been considered until the end of the eighteenth century equally prestigious and in some respects of better quality than the French. The last important English cookery books in this tradition date from the eighteenth century, such as Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769).⁹⁶Thereafter it was, in Stephen Mennell’s term, ‘decapitated’,⁹⁷ with declining respect, and without well-trained professional cooks to set standards and innovate, as French restaurant chefs did through cookery books, lectures and the press. During the nineteenth century, a derivative, ‘bastardized’, pseudo-French style became common, in which the appearance of Frenchness was more important than the substance.⁹⁸ When between 1860 and 1880 large modern restaurants such as the Café Royal and the Criterion did open in London, this was what they offered, though without equalling the effort or skill of their Parisian models.

English native cookery survived in vestigial form in cheaper eating places, or was relegated to the home. But domestic cooking, often for upwardly mobile families with limited means, epitomized by Mrs Beeton’s mid-century collection, began to emphasize economy, short-cuts, the basic and the safe. The economical use of leftovers became a major theme – one consequence of the prominence in English cooking of large roast joints. British cooks suddenly reversed their eighteenth-century practice and began over-cooking meat and vegetables – whereas the French, under the older British influence, now did the opposite. The ostensible reason was hygiene, preached by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, but it may be that gentility was also at work: bloody meat and flavoursome vegetables were not quite ‘nice’. So Britain ended up with the worst of both worlds: the prestige of French haute cuisine led to the neglect of native traditions, but only a tiny minority actually ate genuine French-style food, whose influence was always more aspirational than real. The middle-class French ambassador Paul Cambon was shocked by Queen Victoria’s ‘detestable’ food at Windsor: ‘in my household such a dinner would not have been tolerated’.⁹⁹ Less august British families were condemned to the rissoles-and-boiled-cabbage style of English cooking at home; and if they went out, to food ‘cooked without care [and] given a French title because it was thought the diner would be conned into thinking it better’.¹⁰⁰ No wonder they tried to get it over with quickly and talk as little about it as possible. Not all of this, of course, can be explained as a perverse effect of French influence. Urbanization, the rise of convenience foods, imports, and the baleful effects of an incompetent and greedy catering trade also had a strong, early and lasting effect on British tastebuds.³

The great Georges Auguste Escoffier came to the rescue in 1890, and for a generation ran the kitchens of the Savoy Hotel and later the Carlton as the prototypes of modern, efficient cooking. He made London the headquarters of a new ‘French’ cuisine. One stunt was to prepare an ‘epicurean dinner’ at the Cecil Hotel, and have it simultaneously served to hundreds of diners in thirty-seven Continental cities.¹⁰¹ Escoffier rewrote the rules of professional cooking, and standardized it worldwide. Traditional haute cuisinehad become too staid, too expensive, too fattening, even too inedible. Escoffier simplified, rationalized and modernized it for an expanding international clientele, largely tourists in the big new seaside and city hotels. His Guide Culinaire (1903) became the bible of what was later called ‘international hotel and restaurant cooking’ – Sole Véronique and Pêche Melba are perhaps his most famous creations. Escoffier’s fans (including the Prince of Wales) took little notice when he was sacked by the Savoy in 1898 for peculation gross beyond even the usual standards of the trade.¹⁰² An artist, after all, had to be excused his foibles.

Escoffier’s greatest innovation was to bring enriched versions of French provincial cooking into the professional repertoire. Previously, country food had been at best considered a dubious oddity. Paris’s only important restaurant with regional connections, Les Trois Frères Provençaux, soon dropped nearly all its Mediterranean dishes. In Alexandre Dumas’s exhaustive Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, written in 1869, there is no mention of such subsequent staples as cassoulet, boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin, poulet à la basquaise or choucroûte à l’alsacienne – though there is plum pudding, ‘very widespread in France in recent years’.¹⁰³

The discovery of French country cooking was an important aspect of the discovery of rural France mentioned earlier. The British were pioneers. The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe (1903), by Lieut. Col. Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, an early food journalist, and Algernon Bastard, provided one of the earliest surveys. Unlike Henry James, who twenty years earlier had pronounced gras double ‘a light grey, glutinous, nauseating mess’, the Guide found tripes à la mode de Caen ‘a homely dish, but it is not to be despised’. Only Paris and the holiday regions on the coasts and in the Pyrenees were covered; the whole of inland France, even Lyon, France’s second culinary city, was terra incognita to the authors and their readers. Caen was ‘an oasis in the midst of the bad cookery of Western Normandy’. Roquefort, the cheese town, the authors confused with Rochefort, the seaport. They described brandade as ‘codfish stew’, and confit as ‘a sort of goose stew, utterly unlike anything you have ever tasted before’. Relatively intrepid as theGuidewas, it periodically warned its readers to steel themselves for exposure to garlic and other strong tastes and odours.¹⁰⁴

Parisians only began to take an interest in provincial cooking in the 1920s and 30s, with the growth of motoring and the Guide Michelin. The upside-down caramelized apple tart accidentally invented near Orleans by the Demoiselles Tatin, for example, was discovered and publicized by the first encyclopedia of provincial food, La France Gastronomique, in the 1930s.¹⁰⁵ This made those maiden ladies immortal – even commemorated, in anaemic, reduced-cholesterol form, in the frozen-food sections of British supermarkets. The vogue for traditional peasant food arguably came to France as late as the 1970s.

Provincial cooking has been the aspect of French cuisine that has most influenced British eating habits – even if cassoulet might be thereby transformed into ‘some pieces of old sausage warmed up with beans’. This is fitting, because provincial cuisine owed its development largely to tourism. Poverty meant that everyday French peasant food, as in England, was poor, monotonous and badly prepared; it often still is. Vegetable soup – the soupe maigre mocked by Gillray – was the main staple, thickened with stale bread. Good food was ‘a costly luxury . . . an indulgence which is not for them.’¹⁰⁶ Only on special occasions were festive dishes prepared, and they were eaten somewhat more frequently by prosperous peasant farmers, artisans and the rural middle classes. These dishes were the main source of the provincial specialities discovered by tourists in the early twentieth century, provided in rural inns that smartened themselves into hotels and restaurants for the tourist trade, and eventually universalized by the Escoffier school. After the rigours of the Second World War, Patience Gray, Elizabeth David and their successors made the ability to cook like an idealized French grandmother an aspiration for smart metropolitan Englishwomen, hinting at hedonistic Mediterranean summers.

One British writer quipped that it was as if Paris society had gone mad for Lancashire hot-pot.¹⁰⁷ That this is funny shows how much had changed even since the mid nineteenth century, when French gourmets admitted to liking le rosbif, le plumpouding and other goodies. By the 1920s, not even British gourmets were interested. When the English Folk Cookery Association tried to collect and promote traditional British recipes, they were discouraged by professional caterers and British gastronomes, both equally francocentric. It is safe to bet that no folk recipes crossed the Channel from north to south. Probably the only major book by a Frenchman on English cooking, La Cuisine anglaise, was published in 1894 by Alfred Suzanne, who had spent his career cooking for the British nobility. His intention was not to introduce French eaters to the delights of steak and kidney pudding and spotted dick, but to instruct French chefs working in England on how to give their employers the occasional nursery-style treat – though Frenchified by the addition of ‘refinement and the cachet of good taste’.¹⁰⁸

Nevertheless it seems clear – though rarely remarked on – that British tastes, refined or not, transformed French eating habits, through fashion, through their effect on Parisian and later provincial restaurants catering to tourists, and through French cooks who spent time working in England. Beef, in the eighteenth century considered an English speciality, became ‘sovereign’ in nineteenth-century Parisian haute cuisine.¹⁰⁹ Carême served rosbif à l’anglaise, while French-sounding dishes such as selle de mouton andfaisans rôtis served at the Reform Club¹¹⁰ and on the Paris boulevards seem suspiciously English in substance. Underdone grilled and roasted meat, barbarously English in the eighteenth century, became naturalized. We have seen (see above, page 316) how steak arrived. The tartine à l’anglaise, the card-table snack of the Earl of Sandwich (gambler, lecher and able First Lord of the Admiralty), spread during the nineteenth century. French gourmets adapted these imports to their own tastes. Alexandre Dumas devised elaborate instruction for the proper preparation of sandwiches. Although he agreed with the English choice of the ‘infinitely more tasty’ rump for steaks (‘it must be eaten in English taverns’) over the French preference for insipid aloyau (fillet), he noted the poverty of English sauces, and suggested adorning le bifteck with truffles or crayfish butter. Dumas in 1869 described saddle of lamb à l’anglaise as ‘much prized by those Parisian gourmets in whom our 217 years of war with England have not inspired an inveterate horror of all that comes from across the Channel’.¹¹¹ In the provinces, however, peasants ‘had a profound feeling of disgust for mutton’.¹¹² But a century later, that English staple gigot rôti had become France’s favourite dish among all ages, social groups and political tendencies – twice as popular as the quintessentially French pot-au-feu, and most popular of all among peasants. And whisky had become more popular than Armagnac or Calvados.*

Perhaps we might end by sagely recalling the vanity of human ambitions. The British Empire survives mainly in sport. French aspirations to universal cultural influence were only really achieved at the table. But now British football teams depend on Frenchmen, while London is hailed (though not by President Chirac) as the capital of world gastronomy. Worse still, French home cooks have resorted to Jamie Oliver’s Rock ’n roll cuisine and Delia Smith’s La Cuisine facile d’aujourd’hui.

On the Brink, 1898–1902

France in general is off its head . . . a standing danger and menace to Europe.
SIR EDMUND MONSON, British ambassador, February 1898¹¹³

England is the most domineering and violent of countries.
THEOPHILE DELCASSé, foreign minister, April 1900¹¹⁴

Three simultaneous crises – the Fashoda incident, the Dreyfus affair and the Boer war – made Franco-British relations worse at the turn of the century than they had been for at least fifty years, with extremes of vituperation, and even, many feared, the danger of war. All three crises were connected to the pervading fear of decline. The two African episodes stemmed from the urgent desire of both France and Britain to consolidate their imperial power before challenges from newer rivals, Germany, Russia, Japan and America, became too great. The Dreyfus affair grew directly from French fears of both external and internal threat. The belief of one prominent French nationalist was that ‘a gang of free-masons, Jews and foreigners are trying, by discrediting the army, to hand over our country to the English and the Germans’.¹¹⁵ The British interpretation was that France was decadent indeed.

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, one of the few Jewish officers in the French army, was found guilty by court martial of spying for Germany, and sentenced to degradation and life in solitary confinement on tiny Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. British observers considered this treason a symptom of French rottenness, but had no inkling that Dreyfus was innocent or that France was on the verge of a profound crisis. This only began to emerge three years later, when the Dreyfus family (who had engaged a firm of London detectives) discovered that a disreputable swashbuckler with expensive tastes, Commandant Esterhazy, was the real traitor. The embassy in Paris soon informed London that Dreyfus was in fact innocent, and had suffered owing to a ‘diabolical conspiracy’ by the army, supported by a ‘fanatical and anti-Semitic public’.”¹¹⁶ The affair only engaged British opinion, however, in January 1898, when Esterhazy was acquitted by court martial – a verdict of ‘really surprising perversity’, thought The Times. The Prince of Wales concluded that ‘there is evidently some mystery wh[ich] the French govt do not wish should be made public’.”¹¹⁷ This was too generous a view: the only secrets being hidden were the prejudice and corruption of the general staff. As this became increasingly clear, British press comment grew more and more scathing, as the French government officially complained. The scandal broke when an intelligence officer was found to have forged the evidence incriminating Dreyfus, and committed suicide. Dreyfus, in bad health from his harsh treatment, was retried at Rennes by a new court martial in August and September 1899. So great was the interest that the queen asked the lord chief justice to attend and report to her. When Dreyfus was again found guilty there was a storm of protest, not only in Britain but across the world: Dreyfus, it has been said, became the most famous Frenchman since Napoleon.”¹¹⁸

British reactions were heightened by knowledge that Dreyfus’s persecutors were anglophobic nationalists, who accused Britain and Germany of funding the Dreyfusard campaign. The Fashoda incident in November 1898 seemed to show their bellicosity. A military coup in France (as attempted, though with farcical incompetence, in February 1899) would be dangerous for Britain, because, warned the ambassador, a nationalist regime would try ‘to divert attention by a foreign quarrel from the contemplation of internal discord and disgrace’.”¹¹⁹ Queen Victoria was particularly indignant at the ‘monstrous horrible sentence against the poor martyr Dreyfus’, as she put it to the prime minister Lord Salisbury, and she repeated similar sentiments in an unciphered telegram to the Paris embassy, which, as she must have expected, was leaked to the press. She also cancelled her regular holiday in France – regarded by both governments (and the tourist trade) as an important token of good relations.¹²⁰ The queen’s outrage was shared by most of her subjects. British tourists stayed away. Businesses considered boycotting the 1900 Exposition. The British Association for the Advancement of Science was urged to cancel the forthcoming Franco-British congress at Boulogne. A French honeymoon couple were ordered out of their Lake District hotel. The French ambassador was bombarded with protests, and he demanded that the government should deploy 3,000 policemen to prevent the tricolour from being insulted at a mass rally at Hyde Park of some 50,000 people.

‘Marianne’ as Little Red Riding Hood: note ‘Albion’s’ straggly hair and protruding teeth – characteristics of the Englishwoman in French eyes.

British Dreyfusards found their prejudices about French decadence confirmed. The persecution of Dreyfus, they thought, was the culmination of France’s long history of cruelty and oppression. The rights of the individual were not respected by the State, the mob, or the press. French civilization, declared Blackwood’s Magazine (October 1899), was ‘a mere external skin, veneering a body corrupt, decaying and ready to perish’. Not all accepted this picture. The main exceptions seem to have been Catholics, who saw the Dreyfus affair as an indirect attack by the Left on the Church. They including the lord chief justice, Lord Russell of Killowen, a Dubliner whose report on the Rennes trial to the queen was markedly cool towards the ‘mean-looking’ Dreyfus.¹²¹ The other main group that did not share the nation’s Dreyfusard fervour were anti-semitic socialists, who, caught between their detestation of ‘reactionists’, the ‘rascally Jew press’, ‘self-righteous Pharisees’ in Britain, and ‘our ultra-German royal family’, got ‘heartily sick of the Dreyfus case’. Besides, the British, starting a war in South Africa as ‘the hirelings of a ravenous horde of Jewish diamond thieves’, had no right to preach.¹²² Overall, the agitation over Dreyfus served to confirm the widespread view, not only in Britain, that France was unstable and degenerate. However, in June 1899 a moderately Dreyfusard ‘government of republican defence’ took office, including radicals, a socialist, and republicans such as the Prince of Wales’s crony General de Galliffet. It was greeted with relief as being composed of ‘honest and upright men’ and friends of Britain – practically synonymous concepts. They pardoned Dreyfus, who was subsequently exonerated.

At the height of the Dreyfus crisis, on 10 July 1898, eight French and 120 Senegalese soldiers raised the tricolour over the ruined fort of Fashoda, on the Sudanese upper Nile, after a testing two-year journey from French West Africa. For even such a small party to travel through central Africa, a huge effort had been required, above all by thousands of porters and paddlers, ‘any man or women we could find’, often requisitioned by force, who manhandled equipment and supplies. These included 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 16 tons of coloured beads, 70,000 metres of coloured cloth, 10 tons of rice, 5 tons of corned beef, 1 ton of coffee (though only 50 kilos of tea), a mechanical piano, 1,300 litres of claret, 50 bottles of Pernod absinthe, brandy, champagne and a very unsuitable little steamboat, which often had to be dismantled and dragged through the bush, sometimes at a rate of only 300 yards per day. Yet they reached their objective, despite mosquitoes, crocodiles, angry hippopotami and understandably fearful natives (‘It was no use even shooting or hanging those that were caught . . . Sometimes the whole population would flee, in which case I would set fire to one or two huts. This generally brought everyone back . . . It is the only way to get anything from these brutes’).¹²³

The plans of the expedition were undefined, other than to annoy the British in Egypt – it was ‘a deliberate attempt on the part of responsible authorities across the Channel to oppose us’.¹²⁴ The Sudan, originally governed by Egypt, had since 1882 been in the hands of an Islamic ‘Mahdi’, who had expelled the Egyptians and killed their governor, the British General Gordon, in 1885. In 1898, an Anglo-Egyptian army under General Kitchener was defeating the Mahdist forces and bringing the Sudan under Anglo-Egyptiancontrol. French nationalists had not forgiven the original occupation of Egypt, and the British now had the gall to use it as a base for further expansion. Marchand’s expedition was a rash attempt to block this move by establishing a presence and trying to win support among the Mahdists, or local inhabitants, or independent Abyssinia. Fanciful plans had long been floated for building dams on the upper Nile that could hold Egypt to ransom and force the British to make concessions – though given the difficulty of moving even the mechanical piano to the Nile, building dams would have been an interesting challenge. In brief, the French hoped to stir up enough trouble to force the calling of an international conference on the future of Egypt, and hence shake Britain’s grip on the country. Three weeks after Marchand reached Fashoda, Kitchener’s army of 26,000 men crushed the Mahdist army on 2 September 1898 at Omdurman. The French press applauded this as a victory for civilization. But on 18 September Kitchener arrived in person at Fashoda with five gunboats, a company of the Cameron Highlanders, and two battalions of Sudanese. ‘Our poor Froggies are virtually our prisoners, they cannot budge a step,’ noted one officer.¹²⁵ Kitchener’s instructions were to remove them by persuasion.

Oscar Wilde observed that life imitates art, and the confrontation between Kitchener and Marchand was a Franco-British pantomime. Observers with binoculars saw Marchand gesticulating, and Kitchener being phlegmatic. Kitchener gave him a whisky and soda: ‘one of the greatest sacrifices I ever made for my country was to drink that horrible smoky alcohol’. When Kitchener returned the visit, Marchand’s men were in new uniforms carefully carried across Africa. Toasts were drunk in sweet, warm champagne. Kitchener noticed that the French had planted a garden – ‘Flowers at Fashoda! Oh these Frenchmen!’ Kitchener warned Marchand’s officers that France was too occupied with other matters to give them support, and to prove it left copies of French newspapers giving details of the Dreyfus affair, which the French expedition knew nothing about: ‘an hour after we opened the French newspapers [we] were trembling and weeping.’¹²⁶

In both countries, news of the distant confrontation provoked self-righteous emotion. Neither side wanted war, but for a time both took the possibility seriously. The French hoped that the British would offer a deal. Instead, they strengthened their Mediterranean fleet. The French, fearing a Copenhagen-style surprise attack to destroy their fragile navy, agreed to withdraw Marchand unconditionally. He pluckily insisted on marching out through Abyssinia rather than steaming comfortably down the Nile in British gunboats. Fortunately, the soldiers on the spot generally got on well. Kitchener spoke French, having served as a volunteer in the French army in 1871. As Marchand left, the British presented him with a captured Mahdist flag and played the ‘Marseillaise’.

Marchand returned home a hero, and French politicians claimed a moral victory. Winston Churchill agreed: ‘Happy the nation that can produce such men. Dark though her fortunes, and vexed though her politics may be, while France can find soldiers like Marchand . . . her citizens need not despair.’ Many French politicians realized their narrow escape: ‘We have behaved like madmen in Africa,’ exclaimed the President. Colonial enthusiasts realized that their policy of confrontation with Britain had failed, and they became early advocates of an entente. Yet bitterness at the humiliation remained, as Charles de Gaulle, then eight years old, later recalled: ‘Nothing saddened me more profoundly than our weaknesses and our mistakes, as revealed to my childhood gaze . . . : the surrender of Fashoda, the Dreyfus case, social conflicts, religious strife.’¹²⁷

EXILES: OSCAR WILDE AND EMILE ZOLA

Oscar Wilde entered Pentonville prison in 1895 within a month of Alfred Dreyfus’s arrival on Devil’s Island. Wilde’s ordeal, beginning with his imprudent libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry in 1894 for calling him a ‘somdomite’ [sic], led to his prosecution for sex with teenage rent-boys. He had refused to flee to France, as people in scrapes traditionally did. His fate was widely reported there, and relished by anglophobes. ‘What joy to see your nose out of joint, Old England,’ wrote the fashionable writer Willy. The sordid details, declared the Echo de Paris, ‘would never be made public in any French court’ – anyway, such things did not happen in France. Members of Edmond de Goncourt’s literary circle speculated that English sexual proclivities were ‘engendered by Anglo-Saxon furniture, and the increase in pederasty brought about by Liberty fabrics’; or perhaps the problem was that English women were made skinny and ‘mannish’ by sport. Whatever the explanation, coming from ‘perfidious Albion’ the scandal was ‘particularly pleasant to French ears’, thought La Lanterne, and ‘the whiff of this filth is for us the perfume of vengeance’, proving that the decadent English ‘have more urgent need of purification than us’. It also provided a weapon in literary feuds.Le Figarobegan to publish the names of Wilde’s Paris acquaintances. The poet Catulle Mendès denied friendship with Wilde, ‘whose talent I respect very little’, and fought a duel with a journalist who suggested otherwise. Wilde’s sentence of two years’ hard labour was hypocritical as well as barbarous, said the French, because much of English high society shared Wilde’s sexual preferences: ‘London is closer to Sodom than Cairo or Naples.’ So ‘the disgust I feel for the aesthete I also feel for those who have condemned him’, wrote Mendès. The Echo de Paris stigmatized England for the ‘frightful brutality . . . of its gaols and labour camps . . . We are rather more generous and kind in our country of France’, where Wilde would find defenders. One of them exclaimed ‘With what joy should I see Pentonville in flames . . . on behalf of all of us pagan artists and writers.’ However, if indignation with England was strong, sympathy for Wilde was limited. Many leading writers, including Zola, declined to sign a petition for clemency. The avant-garde theatre director Lugné-Poë did however put on Salomé during Wilde’s imprisonment. On his release in 1897 he crossed the Channel, staying first near Dieppe, where he organized a party for the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria. But he was ordered out of a restaurant and threatened with expulsion by the sub-prefect, and so moved to the more anonymous world of Paris.¹²⁸

Emile Zola was as notorious a writer as Wilde. He published his famous open letter, J’accuse, on 13 January 1898, two days after the Rennes court-martial, and a month before Wilde sought refuge in Paris. His letter accused the army, ministers and the clergy of conniving in the punishment of an innocent man. He was prosecuted for insulting the army, and, amid riots and threats, sentenced to a year’s imprisonment – a reminder that the freedom to write about sex did not extend as far in politics. The British ambassador reported that ‘there are many people who declare that his acquittal would produce a revolution or at least a Jewish massacre’.¹²⁹ Zola fled to England. His reputation for quasi-pornography meant that many suspected his motives: he was accused of using the agitation to revive his flagging career. Yet sympathy for Dreyfus was so overwhelming that public attitudes changed. The Times soon hailed Zola as a new Voltaire. Rather than allowing himself to be fêted or taking part in Dreyfusard protests, he kept his movements secret to avoid being officially served notice of his conviction and sentence. He lived mainly in a rented house in Weybridge, protected by his faithful publisher Vizetelly. As well as using a grammar book to plough through accounts of l’Affaire in theTelegraph and theStandard, he kept busy cycling through the lanes, and writing another novel, La Fécondité.¹³⁰”

Wilde also lived quietly in Paris, where he spent most of the remaining months of his life. It was a miserable time. Parisian society was shocked by open homosexuality, and decadence was no longer so fashionable: they ‘licked my conqueror’s boots only ten years ago’ but ‘everyone cuts me now’. One who did seek his company was Commandant Esterhazy. This bizarre encounter inspired some of Wilde’s silliest pronouncements. ‘The innocent must always suffer . . . it is their métier,’ he reassured Esterhazy. ‘The interesting thing surely is to be guilty and wear as a halo the seduction of sin.’¹³¹ At times he was reduced to cadging drinks and asking near strangers for money in the street. He was kept going by the generosity of the owner of the then humble Left Bank Hôtel d’Alsace, in the Rue des Beaux-Arts, where he died of meningitis in November 1900.

The Boer war, which began in 1899, offered the French an opportunity for a dazzling political and moral revenge over their British rivals. Britain had sought to bring the two Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, to heel. The reason was not overweening imperial arrogance, but fear. London believed that the Pretoria government, rich with gold from the Rand (‘the Boers have arms and ammunition enough to shoot down all the armies of Europe’), was aiming to destroy British predominance in southern Africa, with French and German support. This would not only threaten the vital Cape sea-route to Asia, but show the world that Britain was no longer the dominant power. Imperialists, led by the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, believed that this was their last opportunity to check Britain’s decline by creating an imperial confederation strong enough to withstand the growing power of Russia, Germany and the United States – any of whom might ally with the eternal mischief-maker, France. ‘What is now at stake is the position of Great Britain in South Africa, and with it the estimate of our power and influence in our colonies and throughout the world.’¹³²

Sympathy for the Boers’ resistance, joy at their early successes, disappointment at their setbacks, and outrage at British treatment of women and children (of whom thousands died in ‘concentration camps’) was worldwide. The exceptions were Africans and their sympathizers, who hoped that a British victory would protect them against the Boers, and who played a major part in their eventual defeat. In France, admiration for the Boers’ self-proclaimed ‘struggle against the new world tyranny of Capitalism’¹³³ united nationalists who detested the British and the Jews; socialists who detested imperialism and capitalism; conservatives who admired a patriarchal white race of peasant-farmers; and republicans who respected self-determination. Ladies wore slouch hats à la Boer. The military cadets at Saint-Cyr christened their 1900 cohort ‘Transvaal’. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, one of the most popular exhibits was a Boer farmhouse. Hardly any Frenchman doubted that the war was due to ‘the insatiable appetites of the City gold merchants’.¹³⁴ This fitted the old belief that ‘only financial interest counts for an Englishman’. The French had the rest of Europe on their side, and a chance to harm those who had humiliated them in Egypt and Fashoda and insulted them over the Dreyfus affair: ‘That tricolour flag pulled down at Fashoda and torn up in London has been carried to Pretoria by French volunteers.’¹³⁵

Those volunteers (including a prince of the deposed French royal family, and a descendant of Charette, the Chouan leader of the 1790s) went to join a picturesque International Legion some 1,600 strong, among them Russians, Germans, Dutch, Irish, Van Gogh’s brother, the Pope’s nephew and Graf von Zeppelin. They were commanded by a French officer, Colonel the Comte de Villebois-Mareuil. L’Evénement wrote, ‘Like Lafayette [he showed] that France was the protector of the weak, and that no one asked in vain for the help of its sword and shield.’¹³⁶ People who take extreme positions on faraway issues of which they know little are generally motivated by matters closer to home. So it was with Villebois-Mareuil. The son of an old military family, he was a ferocious anti-Dreyfusard and a co-founder of the nationalist Action Française. Disgust over the Dreyfus affair caused him to resign his commission and offer his services to the Boers. This, he hoped, would in some degree vindicate the honour of France and its army. ‘France,’ he declared, ‘is treated with contempt by other nations . . . decadence and cosmopolitan customs witness the end of a nation’s genius.’¹³⁷ He appeared to be a stereotypical French hero: his admiring cousin, the playwright Edmond Rostand, may have used him, with his bristling imperial whiskers and taste for grandiloquent proclamations, as a model for his Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Yet there were unexpected sides to him. He was known as an anglophile, spoke good English, had his clothes made in London, and had an English governess for his daughter. He knew Oscar Wilde and the Prince of Wales, and was a friend of the writer J.E.C. Bodley, whose important book on France he had begun translating, and at whose Biarritz house he was entertained just before leaving for Africa.

The exploits of Villebois-Mareuil and the International Legion were brief. He was determined to prove the Legion’s worth to the sceptical Boers, who found the European volunteers rather a nuisance. So he led 600 men on a reckless raid in April 1900, ignoring information about superior enemy forces. Lord Methuen and a force of imperial yeomanry surrounded them. Dug in on a kopje, Villebois-Mareuil refused to surrender, and when the British finally charged he managed to shoot Sergeant Patrick Campbell (husband of the famous actress) before himself being killed. This futile little fiasco, far from causing mockery or outrage against what might now be considered ‘illegal combatants’ – who were expecting to be shot – produced a lavish display of chivalrousness. At Villebois-Mareuil’s funeral (‘too sad for words’ wrote Methuen) the Legion’s second-in-command, another French nobleman, the Comte de Bréda, declared that ‘we are prisoners of an army which is the bravest of the brave’. Methuen paid for the headstone, and wrote expressing ‘my sympathy and the sympathy of my comrades’ to Villebois-Mareuil’s daughter: ‘we all regret the death of an accomplished and gallant soldier but he preferred death to becoming a prisoner’. The Frenchman’s horse was brought back to England as a cherished trophy, and now has its own memorial plaque on a Buckinghamshire village green. The French volunteers were relieved to find that their captors were ‘young people of very good family, and nearly all of them members of Oxford University’. One English major ‘treats us with great kindness and speaks French very well, having studied at the Lycée Sainte-Barbe’. Many were released, including Bréda. Those less lucky ended up following in Napoleon’s footsteps to St Helena.¹³⁸ In France, Villebois-Mareuil became a hero. In 1971 his body was ceremoniously reburied in the Boer national cemetery, in the presence of a French government envoy – one of the last gestures of European solidarity with Afrikaner nationalism.

During these eventful years the British and French came close to being enemies, and were, as we shall see, very ready to imagine themselves as such. But however sharp the verbal exchanges, personal relations even at points of confrontation seem lacking in bitterness and real hatred. On both sides, resentment in some circles was balanced by admiration in others. Perhaps so much cultural and personal contact created a wish for better relations. There were substantial economic ties. There were political affinities as Europe’s most democratic and liberal Great Powers. Certainly, a sense was growing that in some contexts, Britain and France ought to be on the same side.

IMAGINING THE ENEMY

Invasion scares and fictions about war were nothing new, but the 1890s and 1900s were the heyday of war fantasy novels in England and France. The leading practitioners were the Anglo-French fantasist and amateur spy William Le Queux, and the nationalist French officer Captain Emile Driant. Serialized in new mass-circulation papers such as Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, they reached huge readerships, and were also adapted for the stage. One of Le Queux’s books was translated into twenty-seven languages and sold a million copies. Harmsworth insisted on accounts of bloody battles in as many places as possible to attract local readers. Hull, Birmingham, Glasgow, Eastbourne, London and many others were fictitiously bombarded and invaded, with street names and buildings tediously listed, and actual local Volunteer units and their commanders being heroically massacred in print. The alarmist tone of British writing was not accidental. In an international system now divided into alliances, Britain stood alone. ‘We are an object of envy and greed to all the other Powers,’ lamented the secretary of state for India in 1901.¹³⁹ Pessimists imagined Britain as one day ‘a crippled island under the heel of a despotic military government, a tributary state of less consequence than Bulgaria, and a people crushed, ruined and enslaved’.¹⁴⁰

If English books were nightmares of vulnerability, French books were fantasies of revenge. In the very successful Plus d’Angleterre (1887) – Down with England in its translated edition – a war over Egypt ends with France depriving Britain of its colonies and confiscating the Elgin marbles.¹⁴¹ Driant, writing as ‘Capitaine Danrit’, produced several popular novels describing war against England, culminating in the three-volume La Guerre fatale: France–Angleterre (1902–3). This ‘inevitable war’ was against British world economic domination. Its hero, Henri d’Argonne, is a predestined anglophobe, being of Breton descent and engaged to a red-haired Irish beauty, Maud Carthy (based on Maud Gonne, an extreme Irish nationalist familiar in French pro-Boer and anti-semitic circles). Driant drew on familiar themes: Britain is ‘Carthage’ exploiting the world, but is far weaker than it appears. The French land at Deal and take London, where they are welcomed by downtrodden English workers. They blow up the ‘Waterloo Column’, distribute the Empire to more deserving nations, free Ireland, and levy a 10 billion franc indemnity. To perpetuate British subjection, they make them build a Channel tunnel, garrisoned by French soldiers. Although Driant began to write about war with Germany from 1906 onwards, and was said to have retracted his anglophobia, as late as 1908 a new edition of La Guerre fatale claimed that anglophobia had ‘spread throughout the mass of the [French] population, despite official pressure and the trickery of the entente cordiale’.

Though these fictions were shocking and gory, and necessarily show foreign governments as scheming and ruthless, they did not generally go in for stimulating visceral national hatred. Even Le Queux’s French master spy, Gaston La Touche, though a ‘fiendish’ and ‘pitiless’ villain, is also ‘easygoing, devil-may-care’, possessing ‘iron nerve and muscles that rendered him practically invulnerable in a tussle’ and full of ‘droll stories which convulsed his companions with laughter’.¹⁴² Tracy, another popular author, refers to ‘the splendid spirit of the French soldier’.¹⁴³ There is little heavy caricaturing of the enemy, as was to be common in twentieth-century war fiction, and no lingering over atrocities. The French army is shown as efficient, gallant and patriotic, though often gratifyingly ready to admit British superiority. When a doughty Cockney cyclist is captured by Zouaves and threatened with shooting as a spy, his defiant cry that ‘La Hongletaire est la première nation de la monde’ [sic] has the French muttering ‘Sacré bleu, c’est vrai!’ and releasing him with a hearty handshake.¹⁴⁴

The most significant feature of these stories is that they signalled a change of enemies. In 1890s publications, the French and their Russian allies are always the invaders. Hordes of Cossacks and Zouaves come sailing from the Baltic or charging through a Channel tunnel. The United States and Italy are usually cast as friendly or neutral, and Australians, Canadians and the Indian army – even sometimes Germany – figure as last-minute saviours. In one story a surprise attack by France and Russia is triggered by the signature of an Anglo-German alliance. In the 1900s, the line-up changed, owing to fears about German naval expansion. In the best written work of the genre, Erskine Childers’s sensational success The Riddle of the Sands (1903), the German navy plots a surprise invasion one misty morning from the soggy coast of Frisia. This was plausible enough for the Admiralty to investigate. It found the danger illusory – as had the Germans themselves, who had drafted an experimental invasion plan in 1896. The importance of Childers’s book and others that followed lay in reiterating that Germany was now the danger, and hence that France and Britain were potential allies. Their French counterparts did the same, eventually even fire-breathing anglophobes such as ‘Capitaine Danrit’.

These stories were absurd, but not wholly absurd. The sudden outbreak of war in 1914 due to a Balkan assassination, Germany’s surprise attack through Belgium, naval bombardment of Hull and Lowestoft, and the sinking by submarines of British cruisers in the Channel would have seemed very familiar to keen readers of Le Queux or Danrit. Moreover, the apocalyptic dénouement of these stories, ending with absolute victory followed by universal peace and happiness, foreshadows the idea of a great war to end wars.

Back from the Brink:
Towards a New Entente Cordiale, 1902–4

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.
RUDYARD KIPLING

This policy . . . has brought conflict with England, the main customer for our agriculture, commerce and industry, and not only with England,
but with . . . the whole British empire, those young states . . . whose giant strides we have been too ignorant even to suspect.
PAUL D’ ESTOURNELLES, republican deputy¹⁴⁵

I fear . . . that anything like a hearty good will between the two nations will not be possible.
lord salisbury, prime minister¹⁴⁶

The Boer war was finally won in May 1902, a victory for the Empire and even for ‘Splendid Isolation’. Solidarity with Australia, New Zealand and Canada had been strengthened. The main strategic and political object – British control of the Cape – had been preserved, and it was to last through two world wars. A compromise with the Boer leadership, creating an autonomous Union of South Africa, even won their alliance. The long-term losers were the Africans, though Whitehall, genuinely concerned to circumscribe Boer oppression, retained Swaziland, Bechuanaland and Basutoland outside the Union as protectorates.¹⁴⁷ The war had been far longer, bloodier and costlier than expected. Seen from Whitehall, an empire scattered round the globe was vulnerable, and the cost of defending it potentially crushing. Yet seen from Paris, St Petersburg and Berlin, it was formidable. The French had even feared a pre-emptive British attack on their navy or colonies, and the war minister warned that the British army in South Africa might follow up its victory by invading Madagascar.¹⁴⁸ However popular the Boer cause, no country thought of taking on the Royal Navy. At most, there were circumspect diplomatic soundings to see what other countries might be thinking. The French foreign minister from 1898 to 1905, Théophile Delcassé, was as cautious as the rest.

Consequently, it is difficult to know precisely when he and other French decision-makers decided that a change of policy towards Britain would be advantageous. He had told the British ambassador that he hoped for a rapprochement between Britain, France and Russia, and the ambassador reported that ‘I really do believe the little man is honest in saying this.’¹⁴⁹ The French bluff had been called at Fashoda, and France’s ally Russia refused to support its colonial adventures. During the Boer war, cooperation with Germany and Russia had aborted when the Germans insisted that France should explicitly endorse the 1871 loss of Alsace-Lorraine. If Russia and Germany would not back France’s colonial tussles with Britain, the alternative was to make a bargain with Britain itself. Immediately after Fashoda the French colonial lobby, hitherto a hotbed of anglophobia, had begun urging an Anglo-French agreement. Politicians began to speak about an ‘entente cordiale’, even if at first to dismiss the idea. The bait was Morocco, attractive because colonialists imagined it as the cornerstone of a North African empire whose closeness to France made it less dependent on seapower. Almost ‘part of France itself’, it could become a French Australia, with eventually ‘fifteen to twenty million of our compatriots’.¹⁵⁰

The British knew that ‘splendid isolation’, without treaty ties to any of the Great Powers, was increasingly risky and expensive. Russia, whose strength was over-estimated by everyone, seemed by far the most dangerous antagonist. It was expansionist in the Middle East, central Asia and China; industrializing rapidly; and ‘compared to our empire . . . invulnerable. [There is] no part of her territory where we can hit her.’¹⁵¹ Germany seemed the obvious counterweight. Apart from racial and religious affinities, which at the time all thought important, its land power complemented British sea power. Approaches were made in the 1890s, but came to nothing. The Kaiser was erratic, the German public was anglophobic, and then, in 1900, Germany began expanding its navy, which, the First Lord warned the Cabinet in 1902, ‘was being carefully built up from the point of view of a war with us’.¹⁵² That left France as a possible partner, but in the aftermath of the Dreyfus crisis, it was regarded as politically unstable and militarily weak – as well asbeing devoted to Russia and fundamentally anglophobic. As the twentieth century began, there was little to suggest that Britain and France were on the verge of a new and historic relationship. The prime minister Lord Salisbury hoped at best for ‘a mutual temper of apathetic tolerance’.¹⁵³

To lighten their strategic burden, Salisbury’s government did not seek a partnership with any European state, but rather worked to improve their relations with the United States and signed a treaty with Japan in 1902. This was to encourage the Japanese to stand up to Russian expansionism in north China. It proved to be the catalyst in Franco-British relations, because Japan wanted Britain to prevent France from aiding Russia in case of war. Neither Whitehall nor the Quai d’Orsay wished to find themselves fighting in the Channel because of Russo-Japanese conflicts over Manchuria or Korea. This, in A.J.P. Taylor’s view, made an agreement between Britain and France ‘inevitable’.¹⁵⁴

It was not, however, politically easy, given the ill feeling in both countries. ‘We must not forget,’ the embassy in London reminded Delcassé, ‘the anti-English prejudices of a notable part of French opinion.’¹⁵⁵ King Edward VII took a personal initiative, with the lukewarm acquiescence of the government, by making in May 1903 the most important royal visit in modern history. It was doubly important because the French wrongly believed that the king ‘personally directs the foreign policy of Great Britain’.¹⁵⁶Paradoxically, foreign policy was much more decided by a small inner circle in the Republic than in the monarchy. Little is known about the king’s inner thoughts, though it is assumed that affection for France – he had referred in a speech to theentente cordiale as early as 1878¹⁵⁷ – combined with suspicion of his nephew the Kaiser caused him to want a rapprochment. It was a bold strategy, as a visit unsuccessful in terms of popular reaction would make diplomatic agreement more difficult. There were assassination attempts on visiting heads of state in 1900 and 1905. Insulting cartoons of Victoria and Edward had already caused irritation. The effect if the king were jeered, or worse, in the streets of Paris would be grave. The visit has gone into legend as a watershed, with the king’s astute charm and flattery winning over a hostile people in a few days. The reality is a little more complex.

‘VIVE NOTRE BON EDOUARD!’

He comes to us as a conqueror,
But only to conquer the prettiest girls
So come on ladies, stand in line.
It’s among us that he spent his youth
And he’s the only king who agrees
That this is the realm of liberty.
It’s here he thinks his kingdom is
Let’s cheer this Rabelaisian king,
For that will make Emperor William squirm
And give a boost to Parisian business.
Song, 1903¹⁵⁸

The royal plan was to spend several days in Paris at the end of a European tour, and to invite President Loubet to make a return visit. The main danger came from anglophobe, pro-Boer and anti-semitic nationalists, who were strongest in Paris and had a record of violence, including a public assault on Loubet himself. When the visit of ‘the king of the hereditary enemies of the French’ was announced, La Patrie headlined ‘Down with Fashoda! Down with the murderers of the Boers!’ Many wished to shout pro-Boer slogans and hang out Transvaal flags on the royal route. However, the principal nationalist leader, the quixotic Paul Déroulède, was – unusually – an anglophile. He had always put the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine ahead of colonial expansion, and saw that an agreement with Britain would strengthen France against Germany. His Ligue des Patriotes threatened to expel any member guilty of anglophobic agitation, for that amounted to ‘going over to the enemy’ – Germany. His followers grumbled but obeyed, and subsequently support for the entente cordiale became official Ligue policy.¹⁵⁹ Moreover, upper-class nationalists, often royalists, whose political anglophobia clashed with their social anglophilia, were unlikely to insult a monarch or spoil an occasion in which they played a prominent part. So shouts of ‘Vive les Boers’ or ‘Vive Fashoda’ rarely assailed royal ears – and when they did, Delcassé pretended they were enthusiastic cheers.

The other popular force, the socialists, were less dangerous, even though the king was arriving on May Day, a time of violent demonstrations. He later joked that ‘it will interest him to see a Revolution’.¹⁶⁰ In fact, the socialists and trade unions were relatively anglophile, seeing Britain as a model of high wages, social legislation, and limited working hours. Although some socialist leaders deplored the ‘sheer stupidity of the masses neglecting their interests, preferring to watch a king go by’, most welcomed the visit as a token of international peace and proof that republican France was not ‘ruined and humiliated in the eyes of other powers’, as claimed by right-wing propaganda.¹⁶¹ In the old revolutionary Faubourg Saint-Antoine Edward was more cheered than in Paris’s elegant west end.

One of the many satirical postcards confiscated by the French police before Edward VII’s visit, and which have barely seen the light of day since. His reputation as a bon viveur was widespread.

Hosts and guest were equally out to please. At the Elysée the king was served (not, one imagines, his favourites) crème Windsor, oxtail soup, œufs à la Richmond, selle de mouton à l’anglaise and pudding à la Windsor. The Quai d’Orsay achieved true cross-Channel commensality with a luncheon of jambon d’York truffé champenoise. The king played effectively on his reputation as a Parisian homme du monde. He went racing with his Jockey Club friends (the horse John Bull won – surely not a fix?). At the theatre he spoke to an actress he had known in London, complimenting her on ‘all the grace and esprit of France’. At the Elysée he spoke ‘charmingly’ of his ‘childhood memories’ of Paris and of his many later visits to a city where one meets ‘all that is intelligent and beautiful’. These words were reported in the press, contributing to his image as a true lover of France and ‘le roi parisien’. He charmed and flattered his audiences in French, speaking without notes, and repeatedly stressed his personal wish for good relations.

It was politically desirable to have cheering crowds, and they duly appeared, shouting ‘Vive notre bon Edouard!’ and ‘Vive notre roi!’ mixed undogmatically with ‘Vive la République!’ The throng was strengthened by British tourists. Business interests greatly favoured better relations, Britain being France’s biggest customer. Commerce contributed to the festive atmosphere. Part of the lavish street decoration was provided by the many British shops, and there was an advertising campaign for English goods. New fashions were launched, for example a coat called ‘Le King Edward’; and street vendors peddled handkerchiefs printed with the programme of the visit, walking sticks carved with the king’s head, and countless trinkets and postcards. Café owners were keen to encourage the jollifications, and make money out of the authorities’ permission for dancing in the streets.

President Loubet made an immediate return visit, which was less charismatic but also successful. According to the ambassador Paul Cambon ‘that coldness, that reserve that normally characterizes the English had momentarily disappeared’, and the president was given a popular ovation.¹⁶² He met the ‘French colony’ in London, some of whom told him they were ‘children of political exiles’ who had lived in ‘this great country’ for half a century. A ticklish problem was overcome by permitting him and Delcassé to appear at court ‘in Trousers instead of “Tights”’ – too embarrassing for heirs of the sans-culottes.¹⁶³ The king made a point of drinking a toast to Loubet from ‘the goblet given to me by the city of Paris’, and Nelly Melba sang songs by Bizet, Gounod and Reynaldo Hahn. Edward decided that as Loubet was a farmer, he would present him with a pedigree shorthorn bull and a heifer from Windsor – apparently much appreciated.¹⁶⁴ Loubet’s down-to-earth image was well received by the British press. They liked, as Cambon summed it up, his ‘love of simplicity, calm good sense, hard work, spotless private life, and preference for the solid over the superficial and brilliant’.¹⁶⁵ In short, the English liked Loubet for what they thought were his un-French qualities, just as the French liked Edward for his un-English ones – cross-Channel reconciliation in homeopathic doses.

The visits injected cordiality into a rapprochement that might otherwise have amounted to no more than mean-minded haggling. A veteran French diplomat, Vicomte d’Harcourt, wrote privately that the king had ‘blown away the dark clouds’, and he expressed his ‘joy’ that the years of ‘misunderstandings and prejudices’ had ended.¹⁶⁶ Cheering crowds and expressions of friendship, reiterated in the press, produced a world-wide response, especially in the colonies where friction had been greatest. The Australian government sent a goodwill message to its French neighbour, New Caledonia. In Singapore, 400 French marines were allowed to sight-see, and were spontaneously cheered as a British military band played the ‘Marseillaise’. In Madagascar, recently bracing itself for an attack by the Royal Navy, the officers of HMS Fox were lavishly entertained by the French garrison.¹⁶⁷

Edward VII visited France regularly throughout his life, where he was always treated as the personification of the entente. Herbert Asquith, uniquely in British history, was formally made prime minister at Biarritz in April 1908 – an event commemorated by a plaque in the lobby of the Hôtel du Palais. The king spent most of his last months by the sea there, also visiting Pau and the Pyrenees. He returned to England only ten days before he died in May 1910.

The haggling could now begin. ‘In a word,’ said Cambon at the start of negotiations, ‘we give you Egypt in exchange for Morocco.’¹⁶⁸ That was always the essential, but the negotiations were a long unravelling of two centuries of bickering. Britain, notes A.J.P. Taylor, had won, and was happy to give ‘a sporting victor’s cheer . . . for a gallant loser’.¹⁶⁹ Harcourt pleaded for ‘a few sops to our pride’.¹⁷⁰ One of the knottiest problems – French cod-fishing privileges at Newfoundland – had been an issue at every negotiation since the Treaty of Utrecht. The difficulty was that the Newfoundland government was putting pressure on the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, while representatives of Breton fishing ports – led by M. Surcouf, presumably a descendant of the famous Saint-Malo privateer who had been a thorn in Britain’s side under Napoleon – were putting pressure on M. Delcassé. After nine months of tough negotiations, Cambon and Lansdowne shook hands on a deal by which France recognized British occupation of Egypt, Britain promised to aid a French protectorate over ramshackle Morocco, and there was give-and-take on the details. Lansdowne, the 5th marquess, must surely have reflected on his hereditary fitness for his role: the 1st marquess (previously Lord Shelburne) had signed the Treaty of Versailles ending the American war in 1783, and had welcomed the French revolution. Subsequent Lansdownes were also descended – unofficially – from Talleyrand. The formal agreement, christened the entente cordiale long before it was concluded, was signed on 8 April 1904.

It was far from clear that it was the historic watershed that many hoped. For Whitehall, its purpose was to stave off conflict, not create amity. The need for this agreement, and the similar deal in 1907 with Russia, France’s ally, was because they were the two countries with whom there were most difficulties. By resolving them, Britain confirmed its detachment from European alliances, defended by a naval superiority stronger than before the Boer War. Moreover, the cheering crowds – dismissed by cynics as displaying emotion to order – cannot obscure the deep ambivalence that the French and British felt about each other.

³ When first in France, RT remembers being asked by the mother of a French friend how the English made crême anglaise. She expected tips about vanilla pods and egg yolks; he had to admit to Bird’s Custard Powder.

⁴ Survey in the magazine Cuisines et Vins de France, September 1984. Gigot was most popular among Gaullists, and least among Communists. The preferred composite meal consisted of: oysters, smoked salmon, leg of lamb, Camembert (those epicurean Communists preferred Roquefort!) and strawberry charlotte. This is not a very traditional French meal, though somewhat less cosmopolitan than the British love of curry – which was, however, already established in the eighteenth century.