ENGLISHMEN: All rich
ENGLISHWOMEN: Be amazed that they have such pretty children.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, ‘Dictionary of Commonplaces’1
Victorian England was vaguely convinced that nineteenth century France had too good a time; that Frenchmen laughed too much and cooked too well . . . More serious still, Victorian England suspected that the French put more into, and got more out of, sex than the English. Victorian England had not the vaguest idea of how this was done, but was sure that the advantage was not fair, and quite sure that it was not nice!
SIR ROBERT VANSITTART, diplomat2
Franco-British perceptions – or, as the French thought of them, Franco-English – developed by repetition and accretion. Many clichés were old: snails, garlic and frogs’ legs were proverbial in Hogarth’s time; as were French pronouncements on English weather, women and taciturnity. The stock of images was adapted and added to, but rarely invented or abandoned: thus le milord anglais of the eighteenth century evolves into le gentleman anglais of the twentieth. They were embodied in phrases, allusions, songs, books, events, legends and pictures, and held together by a history and a logic not necessarily grasped by the perceivers. People – not least writers and politicians – often believe they are thinking or saying something original when their minds are sliding down deep ruts of convention.
Mutual stereotypes were largely accepted on both sides. It is impossible to class as ‘English’ or ‘French’ statements such as ‘The English like tradition’, ‘The French are politically unstable’, ‘The English are eccentric’, ‘The French are frivolous’, or indeed ‘English food is dreadful’ or ‘French women are attractive’. There were exceptions: the British never accepted that they were perfidious or the French that they were effeminate. But a wide range of negative and positive views were accepted on both sides of the Channel. Many French ‘anglophobe’ views were accepted in England (e.g. ‘We English are philistines’), and many British ‘francophobe’ views were shared in France (e.g. ‘We French are vain’). At the same time, as we have already emphasized, there was always in both countries a strong, if often ambivalent, admiration for the qualities of the other: from Voltaire to Clemenceau, and from Lord Chesterfield to Winston Churchill (‘Those British are so orderly’; ‘Those French are so cultured’).
Many beliefs about Frenchness and Britishness can be interpreted either in praise or in blame: ‘philia’ and ‘phobia’ are often two sides of the same currency. For example, British economic success could be seen as ‘enterprise’ or as ‘greed’. French courtesy could be described as ‘charming’ or as ‘affected’. French taste could be praised as ‘elegant’ or criticized as ‘foppish’. British ‘phlegm’ could be admired as ‘calmness’ or condemned as ‘coldness’. And so on. When ‘philes’ and ‘phobes’ disagreed, it was rarely that they contested the reality of certain characteristics – by denying that the French had taste, for example, or that the English were phlegmatic. This agreement about each other, combined with fluid ambivalence, made possible a close but unstable relationship. It made transition between positive and negative feelings easy without the need for any reassessment. As at the time of the entente cordiale, sullen hostility changed rapidly to effusions of friendship. It also gave an illusory sense of mutual understanding. ‘This is typical of the British/French’ has always been a more common refrain than ‘Perhaps we have misunderstood the French/British.’
National stereotypes are based on observation, if usually at second or third hand. It would to some extent be possible, and even mildly interesting, to gauge the accuracy of some of them. (Was it as foggy in London as French writers suggest? No. Was inequality of living standards greater in London than Paris? No. Did British tourists wear tweeds? Often. Did the French eat better than the British? It depends who. Was French sexuality less repressed? Yes and no.3) But more important than accuracy is interpretation – joining the dots to make a picture. Perceptions were selective (only certain things were seen as significant), partial (whole swathes of the other society were never seen or registered) and archaic (based on events and literature from earlier generations). Here, books (and later newspapers, films and television) have always been crucial. Voltaire, Byron, Dickens, Dumas, Thackeray, Taine, Verne and Conan Doyle had huge and lasting influence. So, in the twentieth century, did André Maurois, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Georges Simenon – and perhaps Peter Mayle and Julian Barnes. Once it was accepted that certain characteristics were ‘British’ or ‘French’, this affected what people saw and felt. Commandant Marchand’s dislike of Kitchener’s whisky (see above, page 429) was not because it was bad whisky, but because it tasted of Britain – rather as Irish whiskey reminded Des Esseintes of an unpleasant trip to the dentist. Parisian fashions were elegant, not because of their intrinsic qualities, but because they were Parisian.
French perceptions of Britain – even before the revolution – have been influenced by internal French politics: extreme Right and Left have tended to anglophobia, centrists to anglophilia. But English perceptions of France have rarely been determined by politics (since the 1790s there has been little British interest in French politics, and usually complete indifference). Instead, British attitudes have been cultural, social and moral. The overall balance of ‘favourable’ and ‘unfavourable’ feelings is influenced by the relative success, wealth and power of the two countries.4 A sense of inferiority produces stronger feelings, both of admiration and of resentment. Hence, dramatic changes in relative power have been watersheds in modifying perceptions.
Even when relations have been bitter, commentators in France and Britain have recognized the other as in some ways a model, for example the British in government and administration, the French in culture. This was as true in the twentieth century as it had been during the eighteenth. British intellectuals praised, envied and went to live among their French confrères. French social reformers referred to British achievements in health, social security, wages and housing. Such cross-Channel references were handy weapons against opponents at home, whether British ‘philistines’ being exhorted to show as much regard for culture as the French, or French republicans being urged to show ‘solicitude for our workers at least equal to that shown by the English monarchy’.5Even if grudgingly, most agreed that both were nations and cultures of historic importance, with special roles in the world, notoriously described as the mission civilisatrice and the ‘White man’s burden’.
The ‘languages’ of Englishness and Frenchness were comprehensible to a large audience: the frequency and consistency with which stereotypes appear show that they were widely understood. Let us try to explore their origins, meanings and logic.
Origins: Race, Land, Climate
Ideas about why Britain and France were different went back at least to the seventeenth century, and were updated by nineteenth-century theories about climate, race and history. ‘As is the nest, so is the bird’, as Michelet put it. The British nest was a sea-girt rock, inhospitable, wet, foggy, northern, and cut off. The French still tell a joke about British insularity, supposedly based on a British newspaper headline: ‘Fog in the Channel: Continent isolated.’ France was the Continent, comfortable, sunny, and central, a sort of European ‘Middle Kingdom’ commonly described as complete within itself: ‘France is a beautiful garden. Its provinces are like flowers of all kinds . . . which together make our beloved Fatherland the finest country and the most pleasant to live in.’6Moreover, the bedrock of France came to be seen in the later nineteenth century as the peasantry: this was reflected in British cartoons showing France as a peasant girl rather than as a soldier. As racial theories grew in importance, it was accepted that the British were essentially Germanic, with ancient liberties inherited from the Teutonic tribes. The French were seen as predominantly Celtic and Latin – ‘Gallo-Roman’. The essential France was seen as Mediterranean, although most of its population undeniably lived in the cool damp north. As Latins they were supposedly civilized and socially stable, while the Celtic element was discerned more in social egalitarianism, cultural freedom and general bloody-mindedness than in political liberty – it was commonly said that they liked authority. The leading critic Paul Bourget pronounced in 1891 that ‘there is between an Anglo-Saxon and a Gallo-Roman a mutual incomprehensibility, an invincible diversity of mentality and feeling’.7
Religion, Immorality and Perfidy
The contrast of Protestantism and Catholicism always seemed significant. Until the late nineteenth century, Protestantism was seen as the basis of freedom and individualism, while Catholicism meant authority and hierarchy. This idea was brought up to date at the end of the century by the influential nationalist Charles Maurras, who praised Catholicism as the pillar of national unity and classical culture, France’s unique inheritance. He blamed the French revolution on Luther and ultimately on Abraham – spreaders of individualism and revolt. Protestantism was also seen as joyless and repressive, and this view became prominent as parts of France became more openly irreligious during the late nineteenth century. Then, France seemed more ‘free-thinking’, more ‘pagan’, and more frankly hedonistic than puritanical, repressed and hence hypocritical Britain. The old label ‘perfidious Albion’ – originally a reproach for its infidelity to Rome – came to signify the gulf (as perceived by the French) between the Victorian show of piety and the reality of vice, both in politics and in private life. Just as in the eighteenth century, Catholic monks were a symbol of despotism and Frenchness, by the late nineteenth the Protestant pasteur symbolized Britishness, foisting bigotry, cotton frocks and capitalism on free and happy natives, after having imposed inspissated gloom at home. ‘The Protestant missionary is always a pure businessman,’ the Senate was told in 1895.8
The British tended to agree with at least part of this analysis: that is, they criticized (and sometimes admired) the French for flagrant libertinism. France, particularly Paris, became in British eyes (though, of course, not only theirs) the epitome of sexual licence. This had not been so before 1850. It is in part a consequence of anti-Bonapartist criticism of Second Empire Paris as the corrupt ‘New Babylon’ (combining political oppression and moral decadence), followed by the cultural and moral libertarianism of the Third Republic. A disillusioned Matthew Arnold thundered in the 1880s against French worship of ‘the great goddess Lubricity’. ‘French’ came to be used in colloquial English to mean sexually explicit.
Nature versus Civilization
Another basic contrast was the idea, inherited from the eighteenth century, that Britain stood for nature, and France for civilization (see above, page 100). This continued to be applied to culture, social conventions, and even politics. The ‘rough practicality’ of the British, as one early twentieth-century French writer put it, produced a feeling of difference that was ‘in our bones.’9 The British valued ‘facts’, the French, ‘theory’; the British favoured domesticity, the French, sociability; the British had ‘humour’, the French, ‘wit’; the British ‘ate’, the French ‘dined’; the British valued the ‘practical’, the French the ‘elegant’, and so on. Visual imagery expressed variations on this theme. The British were ‘bulldogs’; the French (in British imagery), ‘poodles’, decorative, unnatural and impractical. Hyppolite Taine analysed the symbolism of John Bull, significant because it was the image chosen by the English themselves, and hence the ‘essence of national character’. He was a ‘bulldog’, a ‘cattle dealer’, having ‘a few limited ideas’, yet ‘sensible’, ‘energetic’, ‘good-humoured’, ‘honest’, ‘determined’ – characteristics that made a man successful and ‘if not likeable, at least useful’.10
There is hardly an area of life to which the distinction between nature and civilization, and its range of vocabulary and imagery, were not applied. We might think of art and literature (British ‘genius’ versus French ‘taste’), with Shakespeare still the touchstone. Thus Matthew Arnold, though a francophile, decided that French drama could never attain the level of Shakespeare because of the ‘incurable artificiality’ of Alexandrine verse.11 French classicists argued the very opposite: blank verse could not produce the highest poetry because it was too much like natural speech. French critics could not accept Dickens as a great novelist because, typically English in his exuberance and spontaneity, he was unsophisticated, vulgar, prudish and sentimental. Education, the matrix of culture, became one of the most thoroughly debated areas of difference. English schools were said to be modelled on the ‘natural’ institutions of home and family, and hence to encourage individual development. French schools were modelled on the ‘artificial’ regulated environments of the regiment or the convent. The schools themselves – which often did broadly conform to the stereotypes, as in the 800-page regulations of Ursuline convent schools – and the debates about them did much to confirm and perpetuate contrasting views of the two nations.12 Were the French cultured and clever, or just conformist and superficial, having ‘dabbled in everything and being able to write and speak about everything’? The English, ‘practical and energetic’, were not ‘mere scholars’.13But were they mere philistines, ‘polished barbarians’?
Masculinity and Feminity
Related to the nature/civilization contrast was the significance ascribed to the role, character and treatment of women. In societies run by men, women were objects of devotion, luxury commodities, the bearers of higher values and the epitome of civilization. The supposed differences between French and British women are endlessly reiterated both seriously and satirically as symbols of difference – and, no doubt, as an effective way of delivering insults. French (particularly Parisian) women were accepted on both sides of the Channel as embodying the best and worst of French civilization: elegance, wit, sociability, charm and sophistication; but also superficiality, luxury, fickleness, immorality. British women were characterized as sincere, modest, religious, serious-minded and independent; and conversely, as naïve, prudish, unsociable, inelegant, indecorous and masculine.
The importance of women as symbols of civilization explains the virulence of French attacks on British women, found not only in anglophobe propaganda but in serious analyses too. Though part of this may be associated with women’s changing roles, it long predates the rise of feminism and the suffragettes. Since the eighteenth century, the ugliness and lack of sartorial taste of English women were reiterated themes. Teeth become an amazingly insistent leitmotif. Even the beautiful Trilby has ‘big British teeth’. The scholarly Taine noted British women’s ‘protruding carnivorous jaws’14 – or, in the phrase still current, les dents qui courent après le bifteck. These featured in satirical drawings of Britannia, and were still present in caricatures of Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher a century later. Scarcely less common are other masculine characteristics such as large hands and especially feet. This is explicit in one cartoon (below, page 451), whose caption explains that ‘the body of the English woman is serious, without those frivolous and indecent attractions which are the sad lot of the French woman’.15
British women were unfeminine because Britishness was masculine. Conversely, Frenchness was feminine. This distinction was commonplace as early as the eighteenth century. ‘For better or worse France has been and remains a feminine nation: not effeminate or cowardly, but containing within herself a preponderance of the virtues and vices of woman, from mother to courtisan.’16 Symbols were often gendered, most obviously in John Bull and Marianne. Symbols of France become not merely allegorically female, but alluringly feminine, compared with frigid Britannia or butch Germania. Characteristic British activities were seen as masculine – whether heavy industry or sport (in which women’s participation was a sign of ‘mannishness’). Many characteristically French activities, most obviously cooking and the manufacture of fashion goods, had feminine connotations. In the greatest nineteenth-century industry, textile manufacture, France exported woollens and silks for women to Britain; Britain exported wool for men’s clothing to France. Male fashions were predominantly British; female fashions were overwhelmingly French. Characteristics ascribed to French men – most obviously foppishness – were seen as effeminate. This was accentuated by the increasing disparity of power between the two states during the nineteenth century – painfully underlined by the failing French birthrate, seen on both sides of the Channel as proof of flagging national virility. French unhappiness with such ideas can perhaps be seen in common assertions of English sexual inadequacy or aberration, far from extinct in present-day French folklore, especially concerning the Royal Family, the symbol of the nation.17 Homosexuality was declared a British speciality, and it was a common theme of French literature that British heterosexual relations were repressed, hypocritical and bizarre – in contrast with the vigorous orthodoxy of the French.
English women are a favourite target: the sexless and big-footed nude; and the two ugly tourists absurdly worrying about Frenchmen’s advances.
Materialism, Exploitation and Greed
Linked with both the Protestant/Catholic and the nature/civilization contrasts is the French idea (shared by others) of the British state as a materialistic conspiracy aiming at economic domination. The historic mission of France was to lead world resistance against the power of English gold. The ‘Carthage’ or ‘nation of shopkeepers’ theme, powerful before 1815 as we have seen, was adopted by the mid-nineteenth-century French Left, and inherited by late-nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalists. As early as the 1830s it was linked with anti-semitism and anti-Americanism. One of Capitaine Danrit’s English villains gives the game away in 1902:
The Fatherland, the flag! These are prejudices from another age . . . But today, with our civilization, we have means of transport and communication that link the most distant nations together . . . today the word border has no sense! There is now only one human race seeking the greatest well-being possible through the application of science. And what is the universal key to this well-being? It’s money! . . . Because France opposes all these new ideas despite all our propaganda . . . France is doomed!’18
Even writers and politicians less rabid than Danrit took it for granted that the British state, using the power of the navy and (a later bugbear) the Intelligence Service, was merely an agent of the City. Anything Britain did that might appear disinterested was merely hypocritical cover for economic self-interest. France – whether royal, imperial or republican – was the opposite, pursuing an altruistic mission to civilize and liberate. In the words of one of the most widely used school textbooks, ‘A noble country like France does not think only of making money.’19 That these perceptions are still going strong was shown in French reactions to the award in July 2005 of the 2012 Olympic Games to London rather than Paris, which commentators and politicians blamed on British cheating, international capitalism, Anglo-Saxon solidarity, and even the Intelligence Service.20
During the nineteenth century British visual images of France became both less visceral and less vivid, whereas in France the opposite is true. This doubtless reflects the changed balance of power, jealousy and fear, as well as Victorian inhibitions. Unlike in Hogarth, Gillray or Rowlandson, with their preening fops and famished peasants, there is little that is essentially ‘French’ or inherently hostile in mid or late-nineteenth-century British imagery, which in order to identify nationality often falls back on uniforms or other conventional symbols. The most common French types are the soldier (especially the exotic colonial Zouave) and, after 1871, the pretty female in republican Phrygian bonnet and/or peasant clogs. Though there were hostile portrayals of French revolutionaries in 1848 and 1871, they are far tamer than the equivalents by Gillray or indeed by contemporary French artists. French satirists, in contrast, developed a range of pungent British types comparable in verve and vitriol to Gillray’s Frenchmen, and even now instantly recognizable. They are evidently drawn from observation of British tourists, who are then caricatured and systematized to fit anglophobe beliefs, teaching the French public how to interpret what they saw. Tweeds become a symbol: ‘the regulation check suit . . . of the middle-class Englishman when travelling on the Continent’ and sometimes a ‘cricket cap, with the peak turned the wrong way round’.21 As in the eighteenth century, casual sports clothes were seen as an affront to French elegance and decorum. But what to many seemed uncouth and insolent could equally be admired – a perfect example of the ambivalence of stereotypes. Demolins was so impressed to meet a tweedy English headmaster who made him think of ‘a pioneer, a squatter of the far west’ that he described him in detail: ‘tall, spare, muscular . . . grey tweed jacket . . . knickerbockers, thick woollen stockings folded under the knees, big strong boots . . . a Tam o’Shanter cap’. He was the antithesis of the musty French schoolmaster in ‘long, dark frock-coat’ and ‘an extraordinary amount of dignity’.22 This encapsulated the contrast of two cultures as clearly as in the days of Rousseau – the new, vigorous and ‘natural’ versus the stale, conventional and ‘civilized’.
The climax of French hostility was the period of Fashoda, the Boer war and the visit of Edward VII. The most outspoken publications were nationalist or anarchist. Two important themes, illustrated here,23 are the cruelty and rapacity of perfidious Albion; and the sheer nastiness of the English as people, especially when they come to France.
Willette’s 1899 panorama shows perfidious Albion in procession: dandified soldiers (including an alluringly mini-kilted Scot), vapid Salvation Army bigots (doubly disturbing, because outraging feminine decorum, but in the name of conservative morality) juxtaposed with child prostitutes; a grim parson peddling bibles, gunpowder and samples, a brutal John Bull with rifle in hand and money-bag under arm, plague in their wake, Boers dangling from telegraph poles, and a flag whose battle-honours go from Joan of Arc via Napoleon to the Transvaal.
Tralala, tralala, voilà les Anglais . . .
The typical Englishman: ‘Un monsieur qui gêne les autres chez lui, mais qui ne se gêne pas chez les autres.’
The untranslatable caption means that he makes visitors feel awkward at his house, but makes himself too much at home at theirs: the uncouth, vacuous male, hairy, unkempt, and above all too relaxed, insultingly careless of proper behaviour and manners – an old French theme. A popular novel published in 1908 asserted that ‘everywhere the Englishman goes he is detested for his disdainful haughtiness, his total lack of tact and manners. Excessively polite in his own country, he believes that when he’s abroad he does not have to bother and makes himself at home with an impertinent disregard for others.’24
‘La loge du Président de la Répioublique, please’: the contrast between the civilized French and the ugly and absurd English, badly dressed in tweed travelling clothes, speaking bad French and demanding privileged treatment, is another favourite theme. A popular music hall song concerned an Englishman at the Opéra who refused to remove his hat from a Frenchman’s seat.
‘Separate rooms with a communicating door’: hypocrisy and a hint of sexual oddity involving a (for once) pretty but typically vacuous and naïve English girl – the type defined by Taine as ‘simple babies [sic], wax dolls with glass eyes empty of any idea’.25
Mock advertisements for British goods typifying hypocrisy: the ‘hermetic salvation shirt’ for Protestant clergy; the abortion pills for Salvation Army women; and telegram boys ‘for all needs’ – a reference to the notorious Cleveland Street scandal fourteen years earlier.