We have tried to tell the story of the relationship between the French and British over more than three centuries. We believe that this relationship is unique in the modern world, not only for its duration and the breadth of its cultural, economic and political ramifications, but also for its global consequences. By all these measures it is more important than any other relationship France or Britain has had – with Germany, for example, or America. We would go further and say that it has been heavier with consequences than any other relationship between two countries in modern times. It is scarcely possible to imagine what each might have been like without the other. Their political systems, their economic characteristics, the size and composition of their diverse populations, their ideas and national sentiments have all been profoundly altered and shaped by mutual contact since the 1680s. Rudyard Kipling rightly said that the task of each had been ‘to mould the other’s fate as he wrought his own.’ Asia, Africa and the Americas were also deeply affected by their struggles.
When we began this book, we were far from sure that this really was a single story. Would it turn out merely to be a succession of episodes linked only by geography and whatever narrative coherence we could contrive? Could there really be meaningful threads stretching from the Sun King to Tony Blair? A French historian has recently observed that ‘even though after Waterloo there was never again armed conflict between the two countries, in a way the struggle is still being pursued today’.1 Could he be right, or is this an illusion sustained by political propaganda, the press, and a surfeit of history books? Many commentators – not least French anglophiles and British francophiles genuinely distressed by the ‘frog-bashing’ of the tabloids – do consider ‘the struggle’ an illusion, which should be dispelled by argument, positive reporting and goodwill. Until recently, it was commonplace to claim that it was only a British, or English, obsession – silly xenophobia which the French regarded with lofty indifference.2
At first sight, it might seem plausible that present-day friction is merely a lingering echo of a violent past. Repeated conflicts created a feeling of underlying difference, even of hereditary enmity, and so contributed to that over-used concept, ‘identity’. In the mid nineteenth century, the great historian Michelet wrote that ‘the struggle against England has done France a very great service by confirming and clarifying her sense of nationhood. Through coming together against the enemy the provinces discovered that they were a single people. It is by seeing the English close to that they felt they were French.’3 From the mid eighteenth century, and particularly during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Britain – or l’Angleterre – came to be seen as the arch enemy, representing not only a rival power, but a contrary set of values: commercial, unstable, and individualistic. Britain was ‘Carthage’ challenging Rome, and like Carthage, it had to be destroyed. A similar phenomenon has been identified in Britain. Linda Colley believes that the United Kingdom, and British identity (as opposed to the separate identities of the island nations), were products of the eighteenth-century conflicts with France. Hence to be, or feel, British involved feeling anti-French.
But there is a counterbalancing Franco-British story, which is not about conflict, but about mutual fascination, amusement, admiration, exchange and imitation. Ideas, art, fashion, sport, food, and literature, backed by tourism, job-seeking and residence, have caused such intermingling over three centuries that it is often difficult to see at first sight what began as British and what began as French. There are long continuities, reflected in some remarkably durable stereotypes, many of which were accepted on both sides. The French tended (tend?) to see Britain as culturally detached, eccentric, unpolished, and therefore the origin of the new and unusual – often amusing, always disturbing. The British saw (see?) the French as highly civilized, the hallmark of sophisticated taste and manners, whether in dress, food or art. More British have always come to France to admire, experience, and enjoy. The French have been happy to accept this tribute without reciprocating it. Rather, they have learned and imported things from Britain, and travel there has generally been for practical and limited purposes – often to earn money. Counter-intuitively, the prevailing cultural current has been from north to south – at least in the sense that novelty came from England, even if it was transformed (like cycle-racing, rugby, beefsteak, Monet’s fogs or Coco Chanel’s suits) into things quintessentially French. The consequence is that few countries have such intermingled cultures. Amusingly, they like to think of each other as opposites.
If the Franco-British conflict, however formative, in reality ended in 1815, it must follow that whatever survives consists only of fading myths, transmitted by stories, books, pictures, and what the French call ‘places of memory’, such as Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides and Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, both dating from the 1840s. Many enjoy the Napoleonic novels of Patrick Rambaud or Patrick O’Brien, but the old chauvinistic traditions, occasionally resuscitated by unscrupulous politicians and journalists, remain only in a few dark corners. Linda Colley’s prediction was that without the Protestant militancy, the imperial rivalry, and the superior prosperity that underpinned the eighteenth-century conflict with France, Britishness, and the British state, had no purpose, and logically would dissolve into both smaller and larger entities, such as Scotland and Europe. The same argument could be applied to France, abandoning ‘Jacobin’ centralization (a war-making system) in favour both of the rediscovery of Corsica, Brittany, Occitanie and so on, and of integration into Europe.4 Yet both Britain and France are old nations (and unions of nations), old in their unity as well as in their diversity. Reports of their demise seem exaggerated.5
Should one connecting theme of our story, therefore, be the transformation from eighteenth-century enmity to twenty-first-century friendship, and from aggressive patriotism to pacific cosmopolitanism? Yes, at one level – though the process has never been straightforward. Love and hate were always excitingly simultaneous, rather than alternating – we form what the French call un couple infernal. Intellectual and cultural relations were never more intense than during the merciless struggles of the ‘second hundred years war’. Even in wartime, French intellectuals tried to think like the English; the British gentry tried to behave like the French; and anglomaniacs and Macaronis vied in fashionable imitation. After 1789, British radicals and French conservatives found themselves supporting the enemy. In the nineteenth century, the open conflict was finished, and although both sides loved sneering at the other, French politicians and British artists looked across the Channel with fervent admiration. In the twentieth century, the two countries were allies, but rarely friends, and both looked elsewhere for novelty and cultural stimulation. But in times of deadly danger the two peoples experienced a closeness rarely paralleled in history. During the First World War, hundreds of thousands of British men lived and died in France. During the Second, London became the capital of Free France. French soldiers, sailors and airmen fought to defend Britain. British men and women, in uniform or in secret, risked their lives to liberate France. Finally, the twenty-first century, despite incorrigible sourness, produced a historic surprise: more than ever before, crowds of people swarmed across the Channel to seek a new life in the country of the other.
But there are obvious problems if we want our story to be simply that of fading national rivalry and growing friendship. Why, after two centuries of peace, entente and alliance, do British and French governments follow policies over fundamental issues that conflict not merely occasionally, but predictably and systematically? Their citizens continue to feel and express considerably less affection towards each other than towards most other nations. Well-meaning commentators often blame the London tabloids. But despite the non-existence of a French Soleil or Courrier Quotidien the French are cooler towards the British than the British are to them. Just as two centuries ago, Britain is seen as a challenge to French values.
It is important to understand this Franco-British difference, and not dismiss it as mere prejudice. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may ignore history, but history doesn’t ignore you. The beginning was Britain’s enrolment into the Continental struggle against Louis XIV. This developed into a conflict primarily between France and Britain, because Britain, through naval power, trade and finance, could increasingly mobilize world resources for European contests. The crucial time was between 1750 and 1815. Both states were forced into a conscious struggle for predominance, to control the connections between Europe and the outside world. France, bigger, stronger, and combining land and sea power, seemed better placed than Britain to dominate the globe. Had it been able to knock Britain out – for example in one of its repeated attempts to invade – there is every reason to think that it could have become the global power. But it failed to land the decisive blow. Even its victory in 1783, though it created the United States of America, did not reduce Britain to impotence. The effort bankrupted the Bourbon monarchy and led to the revolution. The open warfare resumed in 1792 and culminated in Napoleon’s fatal effort to control the sea by conquering the land. France’s defeat meant that she ‘missed her rendezvous with the ocean’ (see above, page 148), while Britain kept ‘Neptune’s trident, the sceptre of the world’.
The consequences for both countries were, and still are, momentous. In the nineteenth century Britain followed a commercial, imperial, globalizing path, its economy specializing in mass production, exporting manufactured goods and capital throughout the world, increasingly importing its food from distant producers, dependent on income from services and investments, and pressing endlessly to open up new markets. Its population boomed, and migrated to every continent, becoming ‘an association of insular and emigrant peoples’.6 France lost its eighteenth-century colonial trade, and its coastal regions declined. Wealth creation now took place in the north and east, not the west and south. France still nursed global ambitions. Like Britain, it believed it had the right, and duty, to create an empire and pursue a ‘civilizing mission’ in the world. Its parliament was told in 1846 to prepare ‘for a time unknown when, on the great battlefield of the sea, we shall have to contest the influence’ of Britain. But that ‘time unknown’ never came, and the French even stopped thinking about the world as a whole: there were no influential French writers on geopolitics, as there were British, German and American. France focused on Europe and the Mediterranean. It tried to absorb its main colonies into the metropolis, making Frenchness the universal model. Yet one leading politician complained that the only thing about their empire that interested the French people was the belly dance; and many of the white settlers in Algeria came from Italy and Spain. Its colonial trade and investment remained marginal. It could not compete with Britain as a maritime power or as an industrial mass producer. Instead, its livelihood came from perfecting traditional industries and methods, and selling high-quality goods in Europe. Britain, Germany and Russia were its main economic partners. Most of its governments, supported by popular opinion, protected the domestic economy against external competition, preferring social stability to economic dynamism. There was an extraordinary slowing down, most strikingly in population. France remained a society of small towns and villages, with a large population of land-owning peasants, and many small businesses. Few people moved far, and few went overseas. This constituted much of its charm for the urban British: it was unspoilt, quaint, cheap, seemingly less obsessed with making money, and it preserved traditional cultural values.
The above descriptions, allowing for general technological change, apply as well to the 1930s as to the 1830s. But meanwhile there had been a new, though connected, development. In the briefest terms, the end of France’s maritime conflict with Britain, and the consequent redirection of its main ambitions towards becoming again the leading power on the Continent, led to successive wars with Russia, Austria and Prussia, ending in 1871 with Prussia’s defeat of France and creation of a new German Reich. Britain, occupied with its global interests, stood aside. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany seemed to be following France’s earlier path, aiming at Continental predominance as a means to world power. For France first and then Britain, Germany became the national enemy. This brought France and a hesitant Britain together as allies in 1914 and 1939, with Britain, as 200 years earlier, at the centre of successful coalitions against the Continental threat. But how different the outcome was.
Undoubtedly the Second World War ended an era. Britain and France were diminished. Western Europe was no longer the world’s hub. The Cold War meant the forty-year hegemony of the two Superpowers. Colonies were liberated, or liberated themselves, and the 1956 Suez crisis gave both France and Britain a painful lesson in reality. At the same time, Britain, France and their neighbours underwent a period of rapid economic, social and cultural change. For France in particular, the Thirty Glorious Years from 1945 to 1975 were a transformation.
Yet the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientations not only persisted after 1945, they were reinforced. France’s political and economic attention was more than ever focused on the Continent. Though it fought harder than Britain to keep fragments of empire, and to invent post-imperial networks, the loss of its biggest colonies was soon shrugged off. Its trade was with its neighbours. It also had to ensure that no German threat revived. Hence its participation in supranational plans to regulate and protect Western Europe. As in the nineteenth century, its economy and political system seemed fragile, and so modernization proceeded, as in the past, under the direction and protection of the State, aiming to manage change and maximize security and stability. It succeeded: the State acquired unprecedented economic, fiscal, and social powers, and created a complex system of rights and privileges in which most people had a stake. Britain’s position was quite different. Its governments still worked consistently to reduce world trade barriers and maintain global contacts. The huge importance of Commonwealth and American trade, and of the City of London, meant that this was not mere nostalgia. World competitiveness, rather than adaptation to a regional trade bloc, was always accepted in Britain as imperative. Its systems of state welfare and state economic intervention aimed to cope with misfortune rather than create felicity. Membership of the EEC, which in the 1970s seemed a complete change of direction, proved only a bend in the road: by 2005, less than half of British trade was with its European neighbours, and the proportion had been falling since the early 1990s. This was broadly the same as in 1900, or indeed 1800. But two-thirds of France’s trade was European – also about the same as in the 1900s.7
Long-accumulated differences have a profound effect: they have been summed up as constituting an ‘eccentric’ (British) and a ‘concentric’ (French) type of society; while anthropological studies have suggested that French behaviour in economic life is more hierarchical, cautious, and ‘feminine’, and British behaviour more egalitarian, risk taking, and ‘masculine’.8 These differences can partly be explained by the long-established importance of commerce and finance in British life, and of agriculture and small business in French. There are also ancient differences of view concerning the legitimacy of individual compared with general rights. As noted earlier, Adam Smith has never convinced the French. So when France and Britain applied starkly opposite remedies to their economic decline in the 1980s – the former, trying to resist world economic pressures, the latter, to embrace them – they were reaffirming the divergent courses set during their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rivalry. People crossed the Channel in ever greater numbers seeking what they could not find at home – proof not of increasing similarity, but of continuing difference.
In politics, divergence was most visible in attitudes towards Europe and America. France had enjoyed some success in turning European integration into a vehicle for its own security, interests, ambitions and even fantasies. There grew up a powerful political consensus that the solution to all difficulties was (in Mitterrand’s slogan) ‘Always more Europe’. It was a conception of Europe – as can be seen from endless articles and books on European history, ideas and politics – from which Britain was explicitly or implicitly omitted. France’s attitude to the United States, the new Carthage, grew out of traditional anglophobia, as habitual French use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ shows.9 It was not mere whimsy that some in France saw ‘Europe’ as a vindication of Napoleonic ambition: the Continent united under French leadership against le grand large. Patriotic Frenchmen were even willing to merge France itself into this new creation that carried its genes. Hence the real trauma, culminating in the 2005 referendum, when they began to suspect that Europe might not after all be their offspring. Underlying the political disagreements with Washington or London, there is a fundamental pessimism about the perceived decline of French language, culture and values.
British attitudes to ‘Europe’ are the counterpart of French attitudes to ‘America’, and are equally rooted in the eighteenth-century divergence. Unlike in France, there could be no idea in Britain that integration into Europe was the fulfilment of its historic destiny. On the contrary, it was seen as the crestfallen abandonment of a unique world role, and a penitent acceptance of reduced status. This for many was its political and emotional attraction: commitment to Europe meant rejection of a detested imperial past – ‘cutting Queen Victoria’s umbilical cord’.10 But such rejection was not universally approved. Nor, of course, could the British welcome Europe as a defence against the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world, from which EEC membership meant partial separation. So from the beginning of European integration, British governments laboured to ‘bridge’ the two worlds – or, as many French see it, to act as a Trojan horse for the chaotic and philistine forces of globalization. De Gaulle saw this very well: he called Britain ‘insulaire’, but realized that this meant not isolated, but connected.
Britain – with what de Gaulle called its ‘great convoy’ of overseas partners – was a global entity trying to be European. France was a European entity trying to be global. Politicians in both countries hoped that Europe would provide a post-imperial pedestal for enhanced international status. That they both, alone in modern western Europe, retained the aspiration and to some extent the capacity to play an overseas political role backed by armed force was a significant element in drawing them towards ‘Europe’ and, warily, towards each other. Their strategies, however, remain different. Britain, through closeness to America, tries to be more than it seems. France, through proclaiming its independence, tries to seem more than it is – as de Gaulle put it, behaving like a Great Power precisely because it no longer is one. Britain’s position seems to the French to be subservient; France’s, to the British, to be posturing. Their attitudes towards European defence and foreign policy manifest this difference. The irony, of course, is that cherished ambitions could be served if they acted together, but they could only act together by giving up cherished ambitions.
Events inside and outside Europe in the 1980s and 90s gave French and British ambitions new urgency. Economic globalization, competition from other continents, the end of the Cold War, German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet empire woke the European Community from torpor. Britain, its economic potency amazingly revived, was the main supporter of the Single Market, and it consistently supported the accession of new member states. France pressed for political and monetary union. Europe was pulled simultaneously in opposite directions which were officially stated to be complementary: towards liberalization and eastern enlargement (potentially the ‘vaste zone de libre-échange’ detested by de Gaulle) and towards economic and political integration (potentially the ‘superstate’ denounced by Thatcher). Squaring this circle became the EU’s task, and the resulting 2004 Constitution made some decisions inescapable by forcing referendums on embarrassed governments. Few expected that it would be the French who in 2005 halted integration for the foreseeable future by saying No to a constitution that they feared embodied a ‘British vision of Europe’.
French anglophiles long urged Britain to embrace a European destiny – in other words, to become more like France. It may be that Britain will encourage France to widen its horizon again to le grand large – not least by learning English. The threads of our story – of which Voltaire and Shakespeare are as much a part as Marlborough or Napoleon – would thus be neatly connected. At least until history’s next surprise.