CHAPTER 2

Thinking, Pleasing, Seeing

The art of pleasing seems to be that of the French, and the art of thinking seems to be yours.

VOLTAIRE¹

There is hardly a French cook that is not better bred than most Englishmen of quality, and that cannot present himself with more ease, and a better address.

EARL OF CHESTERFIELD²

The Peace of Utrecht (1713) inaugurated eighty years of cross-Channel scrutiny. Never before or since have the French and British shown such intense interest in each other’s ways of thinking and behaving, and never has the outcome – an intellectual revolution – been so important. This interest was new on the French side. In the seventeenth century, especially after the Stuart Restoration, Britain had been a cultural dependency of France: literature, the stage, art and fashion had been imported or imitated from Versailles. Louis XIV once asked his ambassador whether England had any writers or men of learning.³

Scientific thought acted as the ‘spearhead . . . of English hegemony’.⁴ Bacon and Newton offered a new way of understanding the universe: by observation and reason. Power and politics also changed the perspective. British victories, and the success of the Glorious Revolution in creating the basis for them, suddenly made Britain a subject of envy, interest and even admiration. The bloodbath of the Civil War had given birth to civil peace, however fragile. ‘Science, knowledge, reason, freedom and liberty all became linked in a manner that suggested that the very formation of Britain was a result of the Englightenment.’⁵ Seventeenth-century English political and philosophical writings, above all those of John Locke, came to dominate European philosophy in the early eighteenth century: ideas that seemed to express, and be sustained by, a political system that was proving its worth. Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (translated in part in 1688 and in full in 1700 as Un Essai sur l’entendement humain) was probably Europe’s most widely read work of philosophy, arguing that all knowledge was a product of sensory experience, not predetermined by original sin or innate truths. English writing would influence French thinking on politics, religion and philosophy, and also provide models for ‘tactics, literary genres and styles’, for example the satire of Swift and the verse polemics of Pope.⁶

At another level, Addison’s daily Spectator (1711–14), influenced by the writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury, consciously promoted a culture of ‘politeness’ – a sociable, equable, moderate manner of thinking, behaving and even feeling – that was intended to efface the religious hatred and violent faction of the previous century. The Spectator’s novel mixture of news, moral exhortation, literature, fashion and conversation had an immense influence. Back numbers were republished in book form and in translation. A sample of private libraries in the Paris region in mid-century shows the Spectator to have been the most popular piece of literary prose, and the fifth most widely owned work of any description.⁷ It made English life and letters the model of modernity for a Continental readership, as well as inspiring imitators such as Marivaux’s Le Spectateur Français.

The flotsam and jetsam of conflict – the Huguenots in Britain, the Jacobites in France, displaced soldiers, fugitive politicians, aristocratic exiles – acted as go-betweens. Huguenots did not cease to be French, to purvey French ideas and fashions, and to translate and publish in both languages, including French editions of Locke, Pope, Swift and Defoe. Jacobites established Irish, Scottish, and English presences in French trade,⁸ culture and government, and not least introduced freemasonry, which by the end of the century had become an important channel for cultural and political innovation, with 50–100,000 members, including perhaps one in ten of all French writers.⁹ Many now forgotten exiled writers helped to shape Franco-British perceptions. None did more to create a sense of what Englishness and Frenchness meant than Paul de Rapin, seigneur de Thoyras (1661–1725), who wrote the first major history of England up to his own day, and Anthony Hamilton (1646–1719), who created an enduring ideal of French masculinity.

PORTRAYING THE OTHER:
RAPIN AND HAMILTON

Rapin was a minor Protestant noble from Languedoc who landed with William of Orange and fought in Ireland in 1689. While recovering from a wound at Limerick he developed an interest in history, and after the war ended began a ten-volume Histoire d’Angleterre (1723–7) which dominated the rest of his life. He was the first historian to compose a coherent saga of the whole of English history to his own day, including the Saxons, Alfred the Great, Magna Carta, the history of parliament and the struggle against the Stuarts, culminating in the Glorious Revolution. Rapin was, in short, the pioneer Whig historian, for whom English history was a long and ultimately successful struggle for freedom. Freedom was a deep-seated national characteristic, inherited from Germanic ancestors: ‘The English have been at all times extremely jealous of their liberties.’¹⁰ Written in French, Rapin’s history was widely read on the Continent, for it told those secrets of English success that Europeans were eager to discover, and its themes were echoed in the works of Voltaire and Montesquieu. It was also translated into English and became the standard work during the first half of the century. Although eventually overshadowed by the Scottish historian David Hume’s History of England (1754–62), it shaped popular English understanding of the great events and meanings of their own history and hence their own identity.

Anthony (‘Antoine’) Hamilton was a Catholic who followed the opposite trajectory to Rapin, fighting in Ireland for James II, and then joining the exile court at Saint-Germain. A soldier, courtier and relative of the earls of Abercorn, he settled comfortably into the French nobility, writing a French admired for its ‘purity’, elegance and wit. His masterpiece, the Mémoires de la vie du comte de Gramont (1713), is a picaresque, semi-fictitious history of his brother-in-law’s youthful adventures in France and Restoration England. His Gramont is a soldier, lover, gambler, courtier, joker and wit; willing to cheat those who deserve it, but generous with his winnings; loved by his companions and inferiors; irreverent to his superiors; and always ready to get in and out of scrapes. In short, Hamilton created in Gramont an archetype of French gallantry, not pious or correct, but funny, carefree, fearless and sexy. His popularity extended across the Channel: Horace Walpole published the Mémoires in England in 1772 and had a room in his neo-Gothic house at Strawberry Hill decorated with illustrations of Hamilton’s characters. The book, according to the nineteenth-century critic Sainte-Beuve, became ‘the breviary of the young French nobility’. Hamilton was the literary godfather of generations of swashbuckling fictional heroes.

Voyages of Intellectual Discovery

An English man is full of taughts, French all in miens, compliments, sweet words.
VOLTAIRE’S NOTEBOOK, 1720s¹¹

Don’t you see that these three gentlemen are just back from London? They must, for some months anyway, parade gravity, put on the air and aspect of thinkers.
Mercure de France, 1766¹²

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the first illustrious and involuntary cross-Channel traveller of the 1700s, was a Tory thinker, an influential political exile, and one of the few English politicians more respected in France than in England. Escaping impeachment, he found compensations in exile. Regarded as both a friend of France and a fount of British political wisdom, pensioned by Versailles and married to a wealthy widow, the Marquise de La Villette (at whose chateau at La Source, on the Loire, he created one of the first of France’s many English gardens), he became a magnet for both exiled and native intellectuals. He was a member of the exclusive Club de l’Entresol, the first French society devoted to free political discussion, and the first to use the Anglicism ‘club’. It assembled the tiny elite of Parisian radical thinkers in the 1720s until it was banned for its presumption. He befriended and influenced the two men who did most to make England a model for French reformers: Voltaire and Montesquieu. He introduced into France, especially through his Idea of a Patriot King, translated into French in 1750, a new vocabulary of le patriotisme – the first appearance of the word in France¹³ – which made it possible to speak of political loyalties and duties other than those of mere obedience to a divinely appointed monarch. Thus a Tory ex-minister, opposing a Whig government, introduced ideas that later served a French revolution.

One of Bolingbroke’s admirers was the rising poet François Marie Arouet, self-styled ‘de Voltaire’. Their association decided Voltaire, aged thirty-two, to make a trip to England in 1726. An incident in Paris (there are several versions) precipitated that visit and gave it heightened significance. The Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, scion of a great courtier family, demanded that the commoner Voltaire give up his seat at the theatre. An exchange of sarcasms ensued, and Rohan sent his servants to give Voltaire a public thrashing. Voltaire’s demand for satisfaction led to a spell in the Bastille, followed by banishment from Paris, and he left for London in a frame of mind easily imaginable. London he saw by contrast as a place where thinkers were free, honoured and eventually (as in his own case) prosperous. He made contacts with the literary and theatrical worlds, as well as with political and court circles. He wrote to a friend in 1726 that in England ‘the Arts are all honoured and rewarded . . . there are differences in conditions but none between men save merit . . . one can think freely and nobly without being restrained by servile fear’.¹⁴ The grandiose spectacle of Newton being buried ‘like a king’ in Westminster Abbey in 1727 confirmed his admiration, even if everyday life in London was testing.

Voltaire decided to write his first political prose work to describe this ‘nation of philosophers’.¹⁵ He read industriously, including Rapin, Locke, Bolingbroke, the Spectator, Defoe and Swift. The outcome was Letters concerning the English Nation, in French theLettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises, the only French classic first published in English. Voltaire even implied, falsely, that he had written it in English – chosen for its ‘liberty’ and ‘energy’.¹⁶ The book, mostly written in 1728 and augmented in 1732 after his return to France, took the form of twenty-five letters to a friend, as if merely chatty traveller’s jottings. Short, punchy, accessible and seemingly artless, they are far from being a guidebook or traveller’s diary, however. They contain nothing about the sights, smells, bad food, drunkenness, rough pastimes and eccentricities of England – the staples of a growing French literature. (He did note, however, that the clergy drank – though ‘without scandal’.) Rather, he writes about English ideas: tolerance, liberty and (a novelty for the French) literature and thought, because, he says, it is a place where ‘people commonly think’. The contrast with an oppressive and stultified France is obvious, which does not prevent Voltaire from constantly pointing it out. The tone, as in his later masterpieceCandide, was of a tongue-in-cheek innocence that made his studied insolence all the more funny – and provocative.

Beginning surprisingly with four letters on the Quakers (he had learned English from Quaker teachers) permits Voltaire to note that an Englishman ‘chooses his own road to heaven’. A simplified section on Parliament, which he misunderstood and never attended, refers sonorously to ‘the majesty of the English people’. In England, he claimed, commerce was honoured, and even young noblemen practised it; for it created liberty, wealth and the greatness of the State. At the Stock Exchange men of all religions traded peacefully, and only bankrupts were treated as ‘infidels’. England was open to new and foreign customs, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s introduction of inoculation from Turkey. There are letters on the ideas of Bacon (‘the father of experimental philosophy’) and Locke, and several on Newton, hailed as the ‘destroyer of the Cartesian system’. A paradoxical effect of this attack was to confirm the status of Cartesianism as the quintessence of French thought.

One of the most striking letters was ‘On tragedy’. Alongside Dryden, Otway and Addison, his favourite, Voltaire discussed Shakespeare – a subject that would gnaw at him throughout his life. As a sample, he provided a polished translation – the first into French – of Hamlet’s soliloquy, an attempt to civilize Shakespeare which leaves him sans eyes, sans teeth, sans everything:

Demeure; il faut choisir, passer à l’instant
De la vie à la mort, ou de l’être au néant
Dieux cruels! s’il en est, éclairez mon courage.
Faut-il vieillir courbé sous la main qui m’outrage,
Supporter ou finir mon malheur et mon sort?
Qui suis-je? qui m’arrête? et qu’est-ce que la mort?

Voltaire pronounced ‘a curse on literal translators’, so in that spirit here is our own attempt to give the flavour of his ‘To be or not to be’:

Remain; to choose one must, and in a moment pass
From life to death, from being to nothingness.
Cruel gods! if such there be, enlighten my resource
Must I grow old bowed down by insult’s force,
Endure, or end my pain and my life’s breath?
Who am I? Who restrains me? What is death?

Voltaire formulated what became the standard French judgement: Shakespeare embodied untutored genius, crude and untamed. He therefore epitomized Englishness itself.

The Lettres, ‘one of the major texts of Enlightenment philosophy’,¹⁷ gave not a mere impression of England, let alone an accurate description, but an ideological vision, and a message: England is now superior to ancient Greece and Rome, embodying reason and liberty, and hence enjoying peace, prosperity, power and cultural vigour. This implicit disparagement of France would inevitably cause an outcry. So after his semi-clandestine return to France in 1729, Voltaire delayed completing the manuscript, finally publishing it in English in London in 1733 and in French in both London and France in 1734. The outcry duly came: the authorities seized copies and searched his Paris lodgings for proof of authorship and complicity in the publication. Voltaire went on the run as the Bastille again beckoned. His career as celebrity dissident began. However comfortably protected by aristocratic friends and by his subsequent wealth and fame, he remained in a semi-fugitive state for much of his life, preferring to live within easy reach of a frontier and receiving a constant stream of admiring visitors, including several hundred British. The Lettres were condemned to be torn up and burnt as contrary to religious orthodoxy, morality and respect for authority. On two of those counts they were gloriously guilty.

Persecution was no bar to commercial success. On the contrary. The Lettres were Voltaire’s first and one of his greatest triumphs, comparable with his later Candide. They went through at least thirty-five editions: an authoritative estimate of 20,000 copies sold in France in the 1730s is remarkable in the light of a recent suggestion that the total number of really serious readers was only about 3–5,000.¹⁸ According to the philosopher Condorcet, the Lettres began ‘a revolution’. They made anglophilia not merely fashionable, but essential to an enlightened outlook. One unconvinced Frenchman summed up Voltaire’s ‘miracle’: ‘the surprising metamorphosis of the English . . . This people which had always been known as the most proud, the most jealous . . . the most ferocious . . . is according to M. Voltaire the most generous, magnanimous . . . model of perfection.’¹⁹ By the 1740s, there were sixteen periodicals in France dealing principally with English literature and thought.²⁰ The book also launched Voltaire’s reputation in Britain, where as a historian, essayist and campaigner for liberty, even more than as a poet and critic, he was to become one of the century’s most celebrated, if controversial, authors.

Another epoch-making voyager arrived in England late in 1729, about the time Voltaire left. Although they had common acquaintances (notably Bolingbroke and the Earl of Chesterfield) and may have briefly coincided in London, they seem not to have met. Perhaps not surprisingly. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu,²¹ hereditary president of the Bordeaux parlement, was a vastly more respectable and weighty figure than the subversive Arouet ‘de Voltaire’. Despite his daringly satirical Lettres persanes(1721), which had brought him European notoriety, he was far from being, like Voltaire, a semi-refugee. He was a pillar of the established order, conveyed to British shores from Holland in the ambassador’s yacht. Yet the explosive effect of his writings was at least as great as, and far more durable than, all Voltaire’s squibs.

Montesquieu’s voyage to London was part of an intellectual project to which, having grown tired of the provincial bench, he devoted the later part of his life. His interest in England may have stemmed from his involvement in the claret trade – he owned some of the best vineyards of Graves and Médoc. His interest grew through contact with Jacobite exiles, Bolingbroke and British freemasons, and it focused on the increasingly fashionable subject of England’s post-1688 political system. So he made London the culminating point of a studious grand tour of Italy, Germany and Holland, made with his friend Lord Waldegrave, that lasted from 1728 to 1731. It was a good time to visit. The détente between the two countries meant that Montesquieu’s friendships with Jacobite exiles such as the Stuart Duke of Berwick (governor of Bordeaux) and Irish poets and priests were now no bar to friendship with Whig peers such as Chesterfield and Waldegrave (a fellow freemason in Paris). They presented him to George II, with whose queen he engaged in French political gossip. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, became familiar with literary and political circles, frequented Huguenot intellectuals; and whereas Voltaire had attended the theatre, Montesquieu attended Parliament.

This exposure to English life was seminal. Montesquieu arrived a sceptic, sharing typical French reservations: the English were excessively turbulent, they held extreme opinions, their culture was eccentric, their science dubious, and above all their political system incoherent and on the verge of collapse. This changed. He found a few of the natives friendly and civilized, and, like Voltaire, appreciated the relative freedom and openness of society. He noted in his journal, ‘England is at present the country in the world where there is the greatest freedom. I do not make an exception for any republic.’ On the other hand, ‘money is more important than honour or virtue and the people are coarse, insociable and, worst of all, corrupt’.²²

His stay in London, which lasted until 1731, contributed crucially to the most influential political book of the eighteenth century, and one of the most important of modern times, L’Esprit des lois. He began it in about 1734, aware of the interest in things English aroused by Voltaire’s Lettres but at the same time made cautious by the condemnation Voltaire had incurred. He took more than ten years over the book, mostly at his castle at La Brède. Material was sent by friends at the Royal Society. To escape French censors,L’Esprit was printed and published in Geneva in 1748. Several hundred early copies were destined for Britain, where they were expected to have an eager readership, though Montesquieu prudently dropped the idea of dedicating it to the Prince of Wales – France and Britain had, after all, again been at war.

L’Esprit des lois examined the relation between a country’s laws and its constitution, civil society and physical circumstances. It proceeded by studying the historical origins of laws – in the English case, seen as a Germanic inheritance. In making history and law central to political theory, Montesquieu ‘set the tone and form’ of modern political thought.²³ He discussed two crucial examples, ancient Rome and modern England, but unlike other writers, not least Voltaire, he was not suggesting that they provided ready models for France to imitate. Each nation was unique, and so had to draw on its own circumstances and experiences. Reformers must be prudent, and respect existing institutions, which had deep roots and complex causes – a view eloquently developed in Edmund Burke’s 1790 attack on the French revolution (see below, p. 198). But tolerance and the ability to correct and improve its own workings were essential to all societies, and here Montesquieu identified England’s advantage:

The government of England is wiser, because it has a body that constantly scrutinizes it, and constantly scrutinizes itself. Whatever its mistakes, they do not last long . . . A free government, one that is always agitated, could not maintain itself, were it not open to corrections through its own laws.²⁴

While he agreed with Voltaire that the English system was superior to those of Greece and Rome, he did not share Voltaire’s provocative optimism. The influence of Bolingbroke, Locke and English republican writers, and opposition attacks on the growing power of the Crown and its patronage, as well as the seeming instability of the party system and of parliamentary power, caused him to warn of the precariousness of political freedom. This concern engendered the most famous and enduring feature of his analysis, the idea of the separation of powers. In Book 10, Chapter 6, ‘De la Constitution d’Angleterre’, he defined the freedom of states by the relationship between three powers, legislative, executive and judicial. If all are in the same hands, the State is a despotism; if one of them is independent, it is a ‘moderate’ state; if all are separate, it is a free state. The mingled reflections of a disaffected Tory and a hereditary French judge ‘dignified and rationalized’ what had begun as a party political slogan, ‘linked it to a theory of liberty, and handed it to posterity’²⁵ – above all as the keystone of the future American constitution and all those influenced by it.

Montesquieu was cautious about the future. England was in theory free, but the practice was less certain. If, or when, the executive corrupted Parliament, freedom would be at an end. The survival of freedom would depend on the ‘general spirit’ of the nation – what we would call its political culture – and on the ‘spirit of liberty’ of ‘ordinary people’. While tending towards pessimism, Montesquieu believed that ‘in Europe the last gasp of liberty would come from an Englishman’.²⁶

Montesquieu’s vast learning, power of argument and brilliance of style gave his book unequalled weight as the fundamental handbook of political freedom across Europe; and moreover gave it some protection from authorities who detested its message but were incapable of rebutting it. Critics at the Sorbonne backed down. L’Esprit was soon freely published in France, selling thirteen editions in eighteen months. Though it was placed on the papal index of forbidden books, even Catholic criticisms were minor. Many opponents could not suppress grudging admiration. This was literally a new political language for France: the very words constitution and exécutif were anglicisms. Montesquieu was a loyal Frenchman, but he hailed England as the modern world’s ark of freedom. He was a faithful subject, but his work gave ammunition to those who attacked the Bourbon monarchy as a ‘despotism’.

Not the least offshoot of Montesquieu’s pessimistic analysis of the precariousness of political systems was Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), one of the greatest English historical and literary works by one of the most francocentric of English thinkers, and which David Hume advised him to write in French. Gibbon, familiar with French historiography and philosophy, drew on Montesquieu in his account of Rome’s political decline into despotism. He also paralleled the latter’s secular analysis of history. His account of the greatest of historical epics is not only independent of divine Providence – revolutionary enough – but it depicts Rome’s decline as caused by the very rise of Christianity.

Intellectual traffic was not, therefore, one way. The second half of the century, despite the disruption and resentment caused by successive wars, was a time of deep and fruitful dialogue, in which thoughtful disagreement was as important as emulation. Though visions of modernity came from Britain, France, notwithstanding the capricious workings of censorship and repression, remained Europe’s cultural arena. Thus, for example, Ephraim Chambers in London had the brilliant idea of publishing a Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, in 1728. In the late 1740s a group of French publishers with masonic connections copied the idea, and commissioned Denis Diderot (in prison for his writings) and Jean d’Alembert to direct it. Their Encyclopédiedwarfed Chambers’s model. This mighty product of the French republic of letters, though it depended on a core of writers, finally involved 20,000 people.²⁷ It began to appear in 1751, and over the next twenty years placed a permanent French imprint on Enlightenment culture. Britain, however innovative its cultural life, lacked the infrastructure – libraries, academies, monasteries, universities – for scholarly work on such a scale.

Cross-Channel exchanges inspired two giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and his friend Adam Smith. Hume’s early philosophical work, a non-religious explanation of morality, was influenced by the writings of the seventeenth-century French Jesuit Malebranche. His History of England (1754–62), the first presentation of history as politics, complicated and unpredictable, consciously aimed to supersede the cautious chronicle of Rapin and the racy, unreliable narratives of Voltaire. The francophile Hume returned to Paris in 1763, immediately after the Seven Years War, as secretary to the British ambassador. His religious scepticism made him fashionable, and his affability made le bon David a great social success, attracting the almost obligatory (though in his case probably unwelcome) attention of the philosophe groupie the Comtesse de Boufflers. He greatly regretted the termination of his diplomatic post, and was tempted to live in Paris rather than London, where ‘Scotsmen are hated’.²⁸ As we shall see, he did return to London, and took Jean-Jacques Rousseau with him – a sad mistake.

The visit of Adam Smith from 1764 to 1766 is comparable in intellectual consequence only with that of Montesquieu in the other direction. Smith’s visit, his only ever excursion into the great world, was planned during the Seven Years War – one example among many of how cultural relations sidestepped wars. Hume at the embassy paved the way. Smith was known in France as the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), just published in French. Hume assured him that – despite or because of its being banned – the Marquise de Pompadour, the king’s mistress, and the Duchesse de Choiseul, the chief minister’s wife, had read it. Smith’s Theory explained morality as a product of nature, ‘when she formed man for society’. He had drawn on French thought: his student notes refer to Montesquieu; his title echoed Levesque de Pouilly’s Théorie des sentiments agréables (1747); and his ideas were partly a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755). Travelling as tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, Smith visited Paris, Toulouse and much of the south, met Voltaire several times, and carried out research on French taxation and trade, partly to diagnose the weaknesses that had caused France’s defeat in the Seven Years War. Despite his bad French and what at least one Parisian lady considered extreme ugliness, Smith made his mark in the more intellectual salons. He had many discussions with advocates of economic freedom, principally members of the Physiocratic school, Dupont de Nemours, François Quesnay and the intellectual civil servant and future minister Anne Robert Turgot. Many considered Smith the Physiocrats’ disciple, though in fact he was sceptical of ‘men of system’. These researches and exchanges – ‘the most exciting passage in Smith’s intellectual development’²⁹ – helped to shape his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), not least in that he rejected the central Physiocrat doctrine that agriculture was the sole basis of wealth. He also concluded from his French observations that economic enterprise could survive even incompetent government, and hence that social and economic improvement did not need state direction, but only the rule of law and security for persons and property.

The revolutionary thrust of Smith’s mighty work – the wittiest, if not the only witty, economic treatise – was to make economic freedom the foundation of a peaceful and non-oppressive society. This fulfilled the central Enlightenment ambition of discovering ‘natural laws’ of human behaviour – in this case ‘the obvious and simple system of natural liberty’. The individual instinct for self-betterment would serve the general good ‘in the natural course of things’, as if by ‘an invisible hand’. ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ So economic freedom was not only right, it was also efficient. Oppression and slavery were not only wrong, but also impractical. Even well-meaning state interference was self-defeating: ‘It retards, instead of accelerating, the progress of the society towards real wealth and greatness.’ As all benefited from the labours of all, the only requirement was that ‘every man [should be] left to pursue his own interest his own way’.³⁰

Smith had synthesized important themes of French and British thought. His ideas were taken up by early leaders of the French revolution for a diversity of reasons, and continued to be debated. Yet, as the intellectual historian Claude Nicolet has remarked, Smith’s ideas and those of the Scottish Enlightenment generally, ‘the birth-certificate of modernity’, have not taken root in French political culture.³¹ Smith’s vision was of a constantly changing world without certainty or superior authority. This conflicted with French absolutist traditions of economic control (commonly ascribed to Louis XIV’s minister Colbert), Catholic paternalism, republican patriotism, and later the Bonapartist emphasis on state-directed modernization. It also aroused fears of social upheaval during the long aftermath of the revolution. Hence French distaste for what a recent prime minister, Edouard Balladur, described as ‘the law of the jungle’. Above all, it was the French revolution that repudiated the modern emphasis on individual liberty in favour of an idealized vision of the citizenship of the ancient world. Republicans condemned Britain (‘Carthage’) as a selfish commercial society, and praised France (‘Rome’) for upholding nobler values. Two centuries later, this arguably still marks France off from the Anglophone world. French rejection of the European Constitution in 2005 was in large part a continuation of ‘the old quarrel between the heirs of Colbert and of Adam Smith’.³²

Travellers’ Tales

It is certain that the English are the people of Europe who travel the most . . . Their island is for them a sort of prison.
ABBE LE BLANC, 1751³³

You are not sent abroad to converse with your own countrymen: among them, in general, you will get little knowledge, no languages, and I am sure, no manners . . . Their pleasures of the table end in beastly drunkenness, low riot, broken windows, and very often (as they well deserve) broken bones.
LORD CHESTERFIELD, 1749³⁴

The greatest advantage a sensible Englishman derives from seeing foreign countries is the knowledge he thereby acquires of the incomparable superiority of his own.
JOHN ANDREWS, 1783³⁵

The six decades between Voltaire’s hurried arrival in London and the beginning of the French revolution saw significant numbers of Europeans travelling for pleasure and from curiosity. This was an aspect of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as religious hatreds abated; a form of consumption associated with spreading wealth; an aspect of cultural exchange, in parallel with reading foreign literature; and not least one element in the formation of a sense of national identity through comparing one’s own with foreign ways. Travelling increased everywhere, but cross-Channel travelling, especially by the British, increased most. A surge followed every war, for though war was not an absolute bar, especially for the bold or the well connected, Channel storms were risk enough without the added danger of privateers. Peace – in the 1720s, the early 50s, the mid-60s, the 80s, and in 1802 – saw a rush to visit the former enemy.

Ambivalent feelings spiced the experience. For the French, British victories increased, if not their admiration, at least their desire to understand how perfidious Albion pulled it off. Their reactions often suggest the impoverished aristocrat, innately superior and disdainful of upstart vulgarity. The British resembled the nouveau riche, eager to show off their money and modernity and shocked by dirt and smells. Both sides were quick to take offence, and eager for reassurance. Yet despite wars and religious and political differences, reactions were rarely one-dimensional: admiration and criticism went together, and personal relationships crossed national and ideological boundaries.

There were broad differences between French and British tourists.³⁶ There are no reliable statistics. Contemporary comments on ‘vast numbers’ refer to dozens, not thousands. Several historians accept an annual figure of 12,000 British visiting the Continent in the late 1760s, rising to over 40,000 in the mid-1780s. This suggests that 5 per cent of the population might have travelled abroad, mostly to or through France. This is an impressive figure if true; but French police records suggest that it was an exaggeration – unless the authorities overlooked most visitors.³⁷ Whatever the true total, the British were certainly the most noticeable and numerous element. French observers perceived this as a consequence of the awfulness of British life and the superiority of their own. France had everything, so why bother travelling? Still, the French were said to be the most numerous foreign visitors to London. More of the British were young, dispatched before or after university on a supposedly educational ‘grand tour’. More were women – French women rarely travelled abroad. And the British were more varied: from grandees to people of ‘the middling sort’ hungry for a taste of sophistication:

we went out of England, a very awkward, regular, good English family! but half a year in France, and a winter passed in the warmer climate of Italy, have ripen’d our minds to every refinement of ease, dissipation and pleasure.³⁸

This satirical fiction resembles Hester Thrale’s summary of her family’s real experience: ‘We left Paris – where we have spent a Month of extreme Expence, some Pleasure and some Profit; for we have seen many People & many Things; and Queeny has picked up a little French & a good deal of Dancing.’³⁹ Enjoyment was a larger part of British motivation than of French; for even when education was on the agenda, fun was never far behind. Whereas, proverbially, no Frenchman ever visits England for pleasure. Those of higher rank were often on an intellectual mission, and the list of philosophical visitors is almost a roll-call of the Enlightenment, including, as well as Voltaire and Montesquieu, Helvetius, Buffon, Rousseau, Prévost, Holbach, Raynal and Necker. Those of lower rank went to make rather than spend money. ‘On either side of the Channel there was a career to be made from being a foreigner’,⁴⁰ by cashing in on fashionable stereotypes. The career of Frenchness undoubtedly offered more openings: London had French musicians, dancing-masters, teachers, artists, dressmakers, wigmakers and servants – described by one French observer as unskilled, insolent and immoral.⁴¹ Paris imported bankers and jockeys, whose reputation was no better.

Books about travelling, real and imagined, catered for vicarious tourism among those who were intellectually rather than geographically mobile. As well as providing amusing or shocking anecdotes and practical information, they were full of political and social commentary. The supposedly factual overlapped with the fictional. Gulliver’s Travels inspired not only Voltaire in Candide, but many humbler authors who produced guidebooks brimming with what they hoped was corrosive Swiftean satire.⁴² Existing books were plagiarized by writers who had never set foot in the places they breezily described. Even when they had, their ignorance of the language hampered direct knowledge. This was a weakness of the French (who expected foreigners to speak their language) more than of the British. Thus, Pierre-Jean Grosley had difficulty with ‘Sakespear’/‘Sakhspear’; Madame Du Bocage enjoyed the pleasure gardens of ‘Faxhall’ (Vauxhall) and ‘Renelash’ (Ranelagh). One guidebook provided helpful phonetic versions of English phrases, such as the ingenious il te rince for it rains.⁴³ (This kind of pleasantry is still enjoyed by the French, who know that anglophones express gratitude by saying ‘Saint-Cloud Paris-Match’.) Literary convention, plagiarism and outright propaganda caused themes and stereotypes to recur, which in turn shaped tourists’ expectations. Whether personal experience fitted expectations was therefore a staple of published travel writing and private letters and diaries.

The two travel books that long dominated the French market were Le Blanc’s Lettres d’un François, first published in 1745, and Grosley’s three-volume Londres, of 1770. Grosley’s book was based on a six-week visit to London in 1765. He did not speak English – ‘no man of sense meddles with foreign languages after forty’ – so he depended for information on his cook and the family with whom he lodged. He could only understand a little of the insults (‘French dog’, ‘French b.’) he claimed to have been subjected to at every street corner. A happier memory was of ‘unbridled’ and ‘unconstrained’ English bosoms, which ‘in their growth and development . . . enjoy all the benefits of liberty’.⁴⁴ Le Blanc, frequently re-edited and plagiarized, was one of the best-sellers of the eighteenth century, and, after Voltaire, the most widely read book on Britain.⁴⁵ He was tirelessly supercilious in his efforts to set his compatriots straight and cut the British down to size: ‘In France people think both too well and too ill of the English; they are neither what they say themselves to be, nor what we suppose them to be.’⁴⁶ In short, England was foggy, and its people uncivilized, crude, dull and getting worse. However, because of the damp, the countryside was fertile, and so fruit and vegetables were better and more varied than in France – the main attraction Le Blanc could discern.

LE BLANC’S ENGLAND

Abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc visited England during 1737–8, not for the seven years his publisher claimed. He was an acquaintance of Voltaire and of Hume, whose work he helped introduce into France and some of which he translated. His Lettres appeared during the War of Austrian Succession. He has been described as a ‘moderate anglophile’,⁴⁷ which shows how very moderate anglophilia could be.

It is to the fogs with which their island is almost always covered that the English owe the richness of their pastures and the melancholy of their temperament.

In Paris, footmen and chambermaids often ape their masters in their dress. In London it is quite the opposite; it is the masters who dress like their servants and duchesses who copy their chambermaids – an almost inconceivable absurdity.

Frenchmen enjoy the company of women, Englishmen fear it . . . Our women who love the perfume of amber are little like the women of this country, who relish the scent of the stable . . . It is more graceful for women to speak of hairstyles and ribbons, the play and the opera, than of saddles and horses . . . She who has not the timidity of her sex more often replaces it by vice than by virtue.

England is without contradiction the country with most eccentrics in the world; the English regard eccentricity if not as a virtue, as least as a merit . . . They criticize us for being all the same. Reasonable people are enemies of eccentricity – a fault as rare in France as it is common in England.

Humour [is] a ridiculous extravagance of conversation . . . joking combined with eccentricity.

They relieve boredom with alcohol . . . getting rid of the women and covering the table with mugs, bottles and glasses, even tobacco and pipes . . . I never witnessed the elegant orgies of the Gentlemen of Cambridge and Oxford. I was not brave enough to pursue my research to such extremes.

Nothing is so rare among the English as gentle wit and gaiety of mood . . . They do not know how to enjoy life so well as the French.

Though not all the book is negative – it was regarded by contemporaries as a dispassionate description – its tenor can be gauged from some of the chapter headings: ‘the lack of progress of English eloquence’; ‘English bad taste in buildings’; ‘the pernicious opinions of Hobbes’; ‘the dangerous abuse of the Press’; ‘cruelty in Shakespeare’; ‘on the English taste for violent exercise’; ‘on highwaymen and the negligence of the English police’; ‘the excessive English interest in politics’ etc.

Two of the most popular of many English guidebooks date, like that of Grosley, from the post-war tourist boom of the 1760s. Philip Thicknesse’s Observations on the Customs and Manners of the French Nation (1766) and John Millard’s anonymously publishedGentleman’s Guide in his Tour through France (n.d.) were respectively by an army and a naval officer, which perhaps assured readers of their intrepid ability to cope with whatever France could throw at them. The Gentleman’s Guide aimed at severe and impersonal practicality, concentrating on routes, addresses, prices and practical advice: from the number and types of shirts to take to warnings to be ‘extremely cautious in your amours (if any you propose!)’. Indeed, the need for caution when dealing with the French was a leitmotif. Otherwise, the author’s personality rarely intrudes (he prefers English women and dislikes rich monks), other than to exhort his readers to spend as little as possible ‘in the Country of our natural enemy’, and concluding that if one avoided the ‘follies, vices and fopperies of that vain, superficial people’ one could live for eighteen months on £150.⁴⁸ Thicknesse, comparatively francophile (despite being sometimes ‘miserable for want of tea’), was concerned to rebut Tobias Smollett’s ‘injustice’ in drawing ‘so vile a portrait’ of the French in his controversial Travels through France and Italy (1766). Smollett’s error, he asserted, had been to mix with the common people rather than ‘people of fashion’. Thicknesse was no keener on ‘low-bred rich people’ from Britain making a ‘trip’ across the Channel, where they made a spectacle of themselves and spoilt things for the discerning traveller, such as the author and readers of Observations. He was happy to make a spectacle of himself, however, travelling with his family, guitar and a good supply of opium in the eighteenth-century equivalent of a camper-van, with a liveried monkey riding postillion.⁴⁹

Thus informed and perhaps emboldened, the traveller could set off. Most went via Calais or Boulogne and Dover, the shortest sea crossings. Individual fares were twelve livres (half a guinea) for masters, six for servants. A private boat at three to five guineas could take a whole family plus carriage and horses. This short crossing, however, meant longer and much more expensive road journeys to and from Paris. Via Dieppe and Brighthelmstone (Brighton) was therefore cheaper. But the hazards of a longer crossing musthave been a deterrent for all but the intrepid or hard up. Although in ideal weather the Calais–Dover crossing could be done in three hours on the mail packet, unfavourable winds meant days of delay, and unexpected storms could involve being blown hither and thither for a day or more, wet, seasick, and miserable, landing miles from anywhere, and often in highly dangerous conditions. The writer Madame Du Bocage in 1750 was blown off course to Deal: ‘The captain took me into his arms to help me into the boat, which the waves constantly drove from the vessel, so that a slip which he made upon the ladder obliged him to let go: by good luck, instead of falling into the water, I found myself alone upon this skiff in the midst of the rowers, at the mercy of the waves, and trembling with fear.’⁵⁰ Passengers were at the mercy not only of the elements, but of sailors, boatmen, porters and customs men, all demanding tips.

By the last decades of the century, tourism between London and Paris was as well organized as it could be in the days before steam. An all-in ticket could be bought at the stagecoach office in the Rue Notre Dame des Victoires for 120 livres, including coach, boat, board and lodging, luggage and customs fees. Doing it on the cheap, via Dieppe and Brighton, came to only about forty livres. Coaches between London and Dover left hourly, and cost a guinea (half-price on top), and took sixteen or seventeen hours. Thrifty French visitors were advised not to try walking: it would take several days and so cost more in accommodation. From Calais to Paris was a bigger expedition: three days, with the charges for post-horses and postillions alone about £10. Large inns ran their own coaches, or hired out carriages. Those planning a longer stay often brought their own carriage or bought one second-hand (about 20 guineas), which they would trade in on their return. Some travellers preferred public stagecoaches – ‘like Noah’s ark’ – doubtless for economy, but also because it enabled the gregarious to mingle with the natives; in England, there was usually silence, in France, general conversation.

The seaports were reputed – for good and ill – for their inns. The choleric Scot Tobias Smollett damned Dover in 1766 as ‘a den of thieves’, whose people ‘live by piracy in time of war; and by smuggling and fleecing strangers in time of peace’.⁵¹ Dover had a French inn managed in the 1780s by ‘honest sieur Mariée’ from Calais, which cost 5 shillings for bed and board. The unfortunate Grosley, however, had to fetch his own beefsteak from the kitchen, and was woken at 3 a.m. and told to vacate his room. Yet he noted that in most inns ‘an English lord is as well served as in his own house, and with a cleanliness much to be wished for in most of the best houses in France’.⁵² Dunkirk had the English-owned White Hart. Calais had several that catered for British tourists: most famous was the new Hôtel d’Angleterre (with its own theatre and carriage hire), said to be the finest hotel in Europe.

Once on the road, accommodation was chancier in France. Inn-keepers and postillions were surly and demanding – possibly a symptom of widespread anglophobia, which Thicknesse thought was concealed by the good manners of the upper classes, but betrayed ‘upon most occasions’ by ordinary people. Fleas and bedbugs were endemic – ‘I never shall get over the dirt of this country,’ exclaimed the francophile Horace Walpole.⁵³ Food, however, was sometimes a pleasant surprise. Tourism raised prices and made it prudent to agree on the bill beforehand: ‘The multitudes of English in this country has made travelling as dear as in England’⁵⁴ – especially as they were all assumed to be milords laden with guineas. French roads were reputed safer, thanks to the iron hand of themaréchaussée, the mounted police. English highwaymen gave French visitors a particular frisson. They were a downside of English liberty and misplaced humanity – merely hanging delinquents rather than breaking them on the wheel. Guide books advised carrying two purses – one for the robber – and travelling on Sundays, the highwaymen’s day off.

Travellers’ writings display interesting consistencies. It became commonplace for French visitors to praise the unparalleled beauty of the English countryside, ‘like a vast and magnificent garden’, and to marvel at the prosperity of rural people, the men dressed in broadcloth, the women like shepherdesses in a novel. From this, political conclusions could be drawn about the merits of a free peasantry and equal taxation. Almost all were impressed by the Dover road (although Smollett considered it ‘the worst in England’, with ‘not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had’), and by the coaches, for competition meant lower prices, unlike in France where the hire of post-horses was a state monopoly. They were even more impressed by there being a footpath and occasional seats – a sign of the republican egalitarianism of England where ‘laws are not made only by people in carriages’.⁵⁵ British visitors had mixed impressions of northern France. Some found the inns and people dirty, the towns dingy and gothic churches old-fashioned – though Amiens cathedral was generally admired (and the nearby Bull’s Head provided a decent cup of tea). Others praised the variety of the countryside, marvelled at the profusion of game (hunting being a noble monopoly), and loved the food. First-timers were amazed at the differences that twenty miles could make: ‘Monks could be seen in all the streets . . . with their feet bare or in sandals . . . The carriages, carts, horses and even dogs were different, so that the scene altogether was particularly striking.’⁵⁶ After the hardships of the Seven Years War, many remarked on the poverty that commonly featured in British stereotypes of France, blamed on royal, noble and ecclesiastical rapacity. Both Thicknesse and Hester Thrale were struck by the prevalence of deformity, though the latter blamed it on young girls being forced to wear corsets.

The hazards of travel recall those met with in third-world countries today: accidents (common with horse-drawn transport), arguments over prices and bills, harassment by crowds of would-be guides and porters, over-indulgence in cheap alcohol, occasional crime and intestinal disorders. British doctors were preferred – the French ‘talk such old-fashioned nonsense, even the best of them’. Lady Spencer in 1767 suffered the ordeal of being ‘forced to submit to the manners of the place and . . . squirted with clysters almost incessantly’ and having ‘the whole circle of men [told] how often I have a motion’.⁵⁷ Travellers were alerted to such dangers by the Gentleman’s Guide. Excretion was, and long remained, a matter of the utmost concern to British visitors. The water in Paris caused ‘fluxions’ – a fearsome problem, for ‘no place in the delicate or polite world is so ill provided with Conveniences’, part of the explanation for the ‘beastly custom’ among the French, unanimously deplored by the British, of ‘dropping their daizy’ in the street.⁵⁸

Paris and London, as now, were the main destinations. Here there was considerable agreement not only among compatriots, but even between the two nationalities. Paris was grander, London more modern. Paris had monuments; London had shops. Paris had aristocratic salons; London had public pleasure gardens. Lord Dalrymple (the British ambassador’s brother) wrote in 1715, ‘I have not been long enough here, to know, whether London or Paris is the most diverting town. The people here are more gay, the ladies less handsome, and much more painted, love galantry [sic] more than pleasure, and coquetry more than solid love’⁵⁹ – a succinct statement of views long common on both sides of the Channel.

Smollett was ashamed that French travellers passed through the grimy wastes of Southwark before they found themselves amid the splendours of London and Westminister. This, he thought, damaged British prestige. He need not have worried: the French were not much impressed by London and Westminster either. St Paul’s was at least big, and the best sight in London. The buildings of state – St James’s, the Houses of Parliament – were embarrassingly inadequate. Even the temples of Mammon lacked splendour. As for the Thames, which could have provided a magnificent panorama, it had been fenced off to prevent what the French knew to be the English penchant for suicide (all that fog, beer and melancholy), or else was hidden behind warehouses. It was therefore necessary to go downstream to Greenwich, to admire the naval hospital (at last, a monument!) and gasp at the bustle of the port of London. This French visitors understood: the sea, trade and the navy were the foundations of British greatness. London’s pavements were scarcely less memorable an expression of Englishness: the life and limb of mere walkers was protected against the high and mighty on wheels. The astronomer La Condamine is said to have exclaimed: ‘God be praised! A country where they look after pedestrians.’⁶⁰ Street lights (‘like a ballroom’) and piped water were marvelled at – the latter, claimed Grosley, introduced by a French refugee.⁶¹ The French increasingly admired London parks as the fashionable taste for Nature spread. St James’s was ‘nature in the raw’, with deer and cows. Ladies and their maids, dressed simply in straw hats and white aprons, ‘walked like nymphs’. Some French visitors found the parks too open to the plebs. One of the commonest observations concerned the free-and-easy mixing of British society. Some were amused: ‘It is worth your while to come to England, were it only to see an election and a cock match. There is a celestial spirit of anarchy and confusion.’⁶² Masters and servants, the French found, dressed alike; entertainments seemed open to all; and people of quality appeared happy to mingle with their inferiors:

Nothing is more common than to see in a tavern or café, Milords and Artisans sitting at the same table, talking familiarly about the public news and the affairs of the government. It is the same in the promenades, balls and plays.⁶³

In both cities, visitors were recognizable by their clothes, and many hastened to disguise themselves as natives. British gentlemen – apparently more than ladies – with social ambitions had to kit themselves out: coats, breeches, wigs and hats were one of the largest items of tourist expenditure. Mixing with French society was the object of the visit, and correct style was essential. It would take four or five days for a tailor to run up the necessary. Until then, nothing more ambitious than sightseeing was permissible. Lord Chesterfield in 1750 instructed his son:

When you come to Paris, you must take care to be extremely well dressed . . . Get the best French tailor to make your clothes . . . and then wear them, button them or unbutton them, as the genteelest people you see do. Let your man learn of the best friseur to do your hair well, for that is a very material part of your dress.⁶⁴

Wearing native clothes might not work. Thicknesse warned that ‘an Englishman’s beef and pudding face’ might look silly under a smart little French hat.⁶⁵ The two nations looked, stood and moved differently. French ladies and gentlemen were schooled by dancing masters into what Chesterfield praised as ‘an habitual genteel carriage’.

Typical British mockery of French foppishness, signified by umbrellas, muffs, elaborate wigs, coiffured dogs, and underfed people.

The French feared being insulted in the London streets – a theme of generations of travel books. It is impossible to know to what extent the prevalence of these stories is evidence of English francophobia or of French anglophobia.⁶⁶ Frenchmen dressed more elaborately, and so class resentment as well as xenophobia was a potential cause of hostility. Muffs and umbrellas were foppish giveaways, the motifs of many cartoons. Only one Englishman was known to carry an umbrella in mid-century, James Hanway, philanthropic founder of the Marine Society. His was a splendid tent-like accessory, covered in pale green silk and lined with straw-coloured satin decorated with small fruits and flowers. He seems to have been a tolerated eccentric. Less so were later British umbrella carriers, the fashionable francophile ‘macaronis’, who raised certain suspicions: ‘BRITONS, for shame! Be male and female still. Banish this foreign vice.’ Such associations may have stung the Iron Duke into reprimanding several young guards officers on a rainy battlefield in 1813: ‘Lord Wellington does not approve of the use of umbrellas during the enemy’s firing, and will not allow gentlemen’s sons to make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of the army.’⁶⁷

Both cities had districts where visitors felt more at home. The British could find hotels, English bankers, coffee houses, bread and butter and a cup of tea in the vicinity of the embassy near Saint-Germain-des-Près. The French equivalents were in the lowlier atmosphere of Leicester Fields and Soho. In both cities, travellers staying for some time were recommended on grounds of cost, propriety and society to take lodgings in a respectable private house, or to rent rooms. They should engage a local servant, and, at least in Paris, find a hairdresser for the daily curl and powder necessary for both sexes. In both cities one could order takeaway food; but there were also many eating-houses. The Paris restaurant was in its infancy, and English-style establishments such as Beauvillier’s Grande Taverne de Londres set the trend.⁶⁸ In London, boarding-house meals seem timeless: soup, steak or lamb chops and potatoes. However, the Canon in Jermyn Street and the Sept Etoiles in Eagle Street served French food for a shilling.⁶⁹French visitors were advised to steer clear of the wine, expensive and often ersatz; thirsty visitors should stick to porter, which had ‘a gentle purgative effect’⁷⁰ – helpful in coping with English cuisine. On this, French opinions differed. Some found the ingredients better and more varied than at home, but the meat was revoltingly under-cooked, and the flavour of coal smoke discernible. The water in Paris (drawn from the sewage-rich Seine) had a more drastic laxative effect, but the food was superior. Thicknesse declared that one could dine better in Paris for seventeen pence than in London for seventeen shillings – a combination of indulgence and economy that has beguiled British tourists for three centuries.

There was no denying the superiority of Paris when it came to monuments. British taste favoured the modern: baroque and neo-classical buildings such as the Louvre, the Invalides and the towering new churches of Saint-Sulpice (completed 1736), Saint-Roch (completed 1760), and Sainte-Geneviève (1757–90). Guidebooks listed largely the same sites as they do today: Notre Dame, the Luxembourg, the Louvre, the Place Vendôme and the Place des Victoires (‘See it’). Other attractions have not survived France’s history – the Tuileries and ‘an odd Kind of stone building’, the Bastille (exterior visits only). The Gobelins tapestry works were a special attraction because managed by a British Jacobite.

Indeed, tourist attitudes to the Jacobite and Catholic presence suggest that, at least from mid-century onwards, the British were less bigoted than historians have suggested. Guidebooks pointed out that the bodies of ‘our King James II’ and his daughter could be seen at the Val de Grâce monastery, their coffins unburied and symbolically awaiting return. The nearby English Benedictine monastery was a place to visit, for the monks were ‘very civil to their countrymen’ and would happily act as guides if treated to refreshments and perhaps given a small present. Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale spent a notable part of their trip visiting monks and nuns, and Johnson arranged a visit to Pembroke College, Oxford, for one of his monastic acquaintances.

A teenage visitor who in 1789 described Paris as an ‘ill-built, dirty, stinking town’ was missing the point. Whatever its other odours, Paris simply reeked with class. Italy was still the centre of the arts; but Paris was the arbiter of taste. Although neighbouring palaces – Marly, Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau and of course ‘second to nothing of the Kind in Europe, I mean VERSAILLES’⁷¹ – were the centres of court and government, where royals could be gawped at as they ate, prayed or even dressed, they were not the principal attraction. The British wanted to acquire Parisian gloss. They signed up for fencing and dancing lessons, bought furnishings and sat for portraits. Acquiring style was the aim:

to be well-bred without ceremony, easy without negligence, steady and intrepid with modesty, genteel without affectation, insinuating without meanness, cheerful without being noisy, frank without indiscretion, and secret without mysteriousness; to know the proper time and place for whatever you say or do.⁷²

In France, salons organized by and around women were the centres of cultural activity, and were open to the well connected or the famously talented. The successful ‘blue-stocking circle’ in London could not compete for elegance or prestige. Parisian patronesses – nearly all of the nobility, but not necessarily of the court, and not necessarily conventionally respectable – had European reputations. British intellectuals, including Horace Walpole, David Hume and Edward Gibbon, were among the star guests. Among the most intellectually acute patronesses were the Marquise de Tencin, the blind Marquise du Deffand (a close friend of Walpole) and Madame Geoffrin, on good enough terms with Hume to call him ‘mon gros drôle’ and ‘mon aimable coquin’. Salons gave French culture a characteristic sociability, organized round conversation. Critics said it deprived it of depth: style was more important than substance. Walpole remarked that ‘everyone sings, reads their own works . . . without hesitation or capacity’.⁷³ As everyone realized, it made women, and contact between men and women, central to cultural life:

at Paris, where both women and men are judges and critics . . . conversations that both form and improve the taste and whet the judgment are surely preferable to the conversations of our mixed companies here; which, if they happen to rise above brag and whist, infallibly stop short of everything either pleasing or instructive. I take the reason of this to be that (as women generally give the ton to the conversation) our English women are not nearly so well informed and cultivated as the French.⁷⁴

MRS THRALE AND MADAME DU BOCAGE

Two prominent travel writers and women of letters were Marie-Anne Du Bocage (1710–1802), author of Lettres sur l’Angleterre, la Hollande et l’Italie (1764) and Hester Thrale (1741–1821), author of Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1789). Du Bocage had visited England in 1750, wrote poetry inspired by Milton and Pope, and frequented the Chesterfields and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She became fond of tea and even of ‘the simple cookery of the English, of which we have so bad an opinion (their substantial meat, their plum-pudding, their fish)’. Thrale, accompanied by her family and its formidable adjunct Samuel Johnson, first visited Paris in 1775. They paid the usual courtesy visits to Madame Du Bocage and were invited to dinner (at which their hostess showed her liking for English cuisine by serving ‘an English Pudding made after the Receipt of the Duchess of Queensbury’). But the encounter was not a success: Du Bocage was not greatly impressed with her guests, and they were discomfited by the footman putting sugar in their cups with his fingers, and horrified when, faced with an old teapot that would not pour, the footman and then madame solved the problem by blowing down the spout to dislodge whatever was causing the blockage. This confirmed Thrale’s impression that the French were an ‘indelicate’ people, who moreover ate rotten meat and hawked and spat with abandon.⁷⁵

London attracted fewer French visitors, partly because fewer travelled. Those who did realized that London represented something new. Coffee houses, clubs, theatres, concerts, pleasure gardens, spectacles of all kinds constituted a commercialized and hence relatively open social and cultural scene.⁷⁶ Many deplored this as vulgar and disquieting: one risked rubbing shoulders with the undesirable, people in the streets lacked deference, and they might even insult well-dressed foreigners. Yet the attraction of such public spaces, and of private spaces that were independent of the authorities and the official social hierarchy, can be seen in France after 1760 in the advance of freemasonry, the popularity of clubs and cafés, and finally, in the social and commercial success of the Palais Royal, France’s first centre commercial.

Few places were visited outside the capital cities and the major routes. French visitors sometimes ventured to Oxford or Cambridge, and many British travelled on to Italy. Few were as intrepid as Arthur Young, who crossed France on horseback in the 1780s: decent roads, food and accommodation for visitors were sparse. Fashionable interest did grow in wild romantic nature, epitomized by Scotland, the Pyrenees or the Alps. Pioneers included Lawrence Sterne, who reached Bagnères-de-Bigorre in 1762, despite the Seven Years War. In the summer of 1770, Henry Temple MP (father of Lord Palmerston) spent six weeks in the Alps with the painter William Pars, who displayed his works the following year at the Royal Academy. By then, about a dozen Englishmen visited the glaciers each season.⁷⁷

Men, and sometimes women, of letters also visited out-of-the-way intellectual celebrities. There was a stream of British visitors to Voltaire (including Oliver Goldsmith, Gibbon, the radical politician John Wilkes and Adam Smith) and to the less gregarious Rousseau (including James Boswell, who expressed his admiration for the latter by seducing his long-suffering ‘housekeeper’, Thérèse Levasseur, as a sort of souvenir). Private hospitality when off the beaten track was essential, and for this, personal or academic contacts or freemasonry were invaluable. Constant correspondence kept this European intellectual network together.

Two towering intellectual figures made spectacularly unsuccessful cross-Channel visits despite efforts to smooth their journeys: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Johnson. Rousseau, pursued by both the French authorities and importunate admirers, was persuaded by a well-meaning David Hume to accompany him to England in January 1766. Things started badly when Horace Walpole, as a joke, circulated a spoof letter supposedly from Frederick the Great: ‘My dear Jean-Jacques . . . the French have issued a warrant for your arrest; so come to me . . . Your good friend, Frederick.’ For the hyper-sensitive and paranoid Rousseau, this was the first sign that Hume and his coterie were conspiring to humiliate and discredit him. His suspicions persisted, despite his being fêted in London, offered a royal pension at Hume’s request (which he loftily refused and then changed his mind), and taken by David Garrick to a gala performance at Drury Lane attended by the king and queen, who ‘looked more at Rousseau than at the players’. Rousseau was so eager to be seen that he almost fell out of his box.⁷⁸ When Hume had Rousseau’s portrait painted by Allan Ramsay, the result so displeased the sitter that he decided that making him look ugly was a further move in the plot. A wealthy admirer, Richard Davenport, offered him the use of Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, only a few miles from intellectually ambitious Lichfield. There he retreated with Thérèse (escorted from Switzerland by the assiduous Boswell, who claimed to have had sex with her thirteen times en route). They spent several happy months at Wootton, where Rousseau continued writing his Confessions. The generous ‘Mr Ross Hall’ was popular with the locals, and was made much of by aristocratic ladies and the local intelligentsia. From Lichfield came Dr Erasmus Darwin (future leader of what might be called the ‘Midlands Enlightenment’), who was thrilled to find Rousseau meditating in a cave. It was too good to last. Rousseau accused first Hume and then Davenport of plotting against him, and fled, writing to the Lord Chancellor to demand a bodyguard to protect him from assassination.⁷⁹ Finally, he locked himself in the cabin of a ferry from Dover and returned to France in May 1767. Hume, at first bemused and then angered, perhaps unwisely decided to publish their correspondence, to the morbid fascination of literary Europe.

Rousseau by Ramsay: Rousseau thought this portrait so unflattering that he suspected a conspiracy to ridicule him.

Dr Johnson’s visit to France eight years later could hardly have been as extravagantly disastrous, but it was disappointing. He had long wished to go, but only in 1775, at the age of sixty-six, thanks to his wealthy friends the Thrales, did he do so. Unable to speak French, though he could read it, he fell back on Latin, by now an archaic eccentricity. This prevented sparkling conversation, and his failing hearing and eyesight made things worse. He did converse with the writer Fréron, who planned to translate one of his books, and met his young son, later a leading Jacobin Terrorist. He spent much time in libraries and with English monks, or unenthusiastically sightseeing. According to one contemporary, he made an absurd spectacle with his ordinary brown London suit and dark stockings, so he bought white silk stockings (de rigueur for all but peasants), a wig and a hat – this at the time when Benjamin Franklin was cleverly playing on his own similar (and wigless) appearance to create an image of rustic wisdom. Unlike Franklin, who became a social celebrity, Johnson was ill at ease. He only visited the Court as a tourist, and expressed his regret that France, unlike Britain, had no ‘tavern life . . . where people meet all upon a footing, without any care or anxiety’.⁸⁰ He turned this into a general conclusion about French society, reiterating in his notes and subsequent letters that ‘In France there is no middle rank.’

This was far from being a drawback for those who went to learn noble manners. Many young gentlemen – among them sixteen-year-old Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington – went to the Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers or other military academies in the Loire valley, where the purest French was reputedly spoken, to learn the language, and perfect elegant styles of horsemanship, fencing and dancing:

your dancing-master is at this time the man in all Europe of the greatest importance to you. You must dance well, in order to sit, stand, and walk well; and you must do all these well in order to please.⁸¹

Wellesley retained excellent French and a life-long respect for France. Impecunious young Captain Horatio Nelson made do with a boarding-house in Saint-Omer when trying to learn French in 1783. William Pitt, twenty-four-year-old ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, did the same with two university friends in Rheims that same year – though when he went to see the sights at Fontainebleau he was treated as a celebrity, meeting the royal family and ministers. Though Pitt never returned to France, he retained a few words of French and the realization that if the French had no political rights, they enjoyed much social freedom. Some of that freedom was enticingly risky: gambling and gallantry. To be willing to play and lose at such English imports as ‘wisk’ (whist) and ‘creps’ (dice) were necessary for admission to high aristocratic and court circles. This had been John Law’s entrée early in the century, and had ended with him gambling with the wealth of the whole country. As for gallantry, young men hoped to be initiated by experienced women, not only or even mainly sexually, but in the manners of elegant flirtation. No doubt the advice of fathers and mothers conflicted here. Lord Elgin’s mother urged him ‘for God sake keep free of mistresses, for besides the immorality . . . they always turn out the most expensive petts in the world both of health and purse’. But even she countenanced polite gallantry: ‘love is quite a la mode en francois, you may railly the pretty-girls as far as is consistent with spirit & good humour that they may not call you le ensencible’ (sic).⁸² Chesterfield wanted his son put more thoroughly through his paces: ‘A propos, are you in love with Madame de Berkenrode still . . . ? Un arrangement honnête sied bien à un galant homme. In that case I recommend to you the utmost discretion and the profoundest silence.’⁸³ Discretion was not always the rule, especially with women of lower rank: showing off with famous dancers from the opera, for example, was much of the fun. Press comments were usually disapproving, though occasionally expressing pride at this further extension of British conquest. There was a price: gambling losses and venereal disease often left scars that never healed.⁸⁴

From the middle of the century, new and less frivolous interests developed among travellers to Britain. Wealth had always meant power; but now it had new sources, and Britain had an astonishing ability to create it. Perceptive observers realized that something unprecedented was happening, and they visited places and learned lessons that would never have occurred to Voltaire or Montesquieu. Every traveller complained about coal smoke, but one of the first to realize that coal was the foundation of a new kind of economy was an inspector of manufactures, Ticquet, in 1738. He reported on new iron-making techniques using coal in the Midlands, and noted the high living standards of the workers. Over the next half-century, the French, more than any other nation, sent a succession of official and semi-official observers – several of them frankly spies – to discover methods, acquire machinery and recruit workers. They aimed both at economic advantage and at military applications. The Marquis de Blosset, at the embassy, acted as head of intelligence, providing contacts, money and papers, and lending the embassy chaplain, Fr MacDermot, as an interpreter. In the 1760s Gabriel Jars, a mining inspector, was sent to investigate mining techniques and discover whether iron could really be smelted with coal and ‘what the English call “coucke”’. He was also to report on a perennial question: ‘why industry is pushed ahead very much further than in France, and whether this difference arises, as there is every reason to think, because the English are not hindered by regulations’. Bonaventure Joseph Le Turc, a professional spy who combined a taste for excitement with patriotism and self-advancement, in the 1780s smuggled out a range of dismantled textile machinery and samples of manufactured goods from stockings to chamber pots, some of which he intended to copy. His great success, following a commission from the navy minister Marshal de Castries – the navy was persistently involved in espionage – was in bringing back techniques for mass-producing pulley blocks (see below, page 260). He was protected by being given diplomatic status, and was rewarded with a decoration and a pension, but was ruined by the revolution.⁸⁵

These efforts were very successful at one level. The great innovations of the Industrial Revolution – spinning jennies, blast furnaces, steam engines – were brought to France within a few years of their invention. A succession of British businessmen and workers responded readily to French approaches. Some had particular reasons – the Holkers were Jacobites, and the Birmingham hardware manufacturer Michael Alcock had run off to France with one of his young female employees – but for most it was simply business. Most of it was legal, and what was not was rarely repressed, even in wartime. The export of a new type of cannon to France for testing was done with official permission in the 1770s. Yet some activities sailed close to the wind, and required concealment, bribery or string-pulling. The most blatant was an agreement by the brilliant and grasping Wilkinson brothers to build the navy a cannon factory near Brest using recently patented techniques in 1777–8, just in time for the American war. The French realized that William Wilkinson – ‘activated solely by that spirit of gain which is all too common in that nation’ – had to be brought over before hostilities began, else ‘he would not be able to come here without being . . . held guilty of felony’. The great engineers Matthew Boulton and James Watt connived in acts that ‘amounted to a gross lack of patriotism, even treason’.⁸⁶ At a time when techniques could only be taught face to face, skilled workers also had to be recruited, and although some in the early days were Catholics or Jacobites, high wages and a wish to get on were usually sufficient motives – a foreman might get a £40 golden hello. The numbers were small – a few dozen businessmen and a few hundred workers over the century – but the impact in shaping French industrial development was significant. Alcock set out to make Saint-Etienne ‘Birmingham in France’, and development at Le Creusot was initiated by Wilkinson. Both towns became important industrial centres in the nineteenth century.

In the short term, however, the results were disappointing: iron, steel, coke and glass works all failed expensively and humiliatingly. French agents rarely understood the full complexity of industrial processes. France lacked the infrastructure of roads and canals; it was short of vital raw materials, especially different varieties of coal, ore and clay; it lacked skilled labour and a network of workshops able to make tools and parts and repair machinery. Imported British workers were often men who could not succeed at home, insubordinate, obstreperous and drunk. Le Turc’s block-makers discovered the joys of cheap wine and were managing five bottles a day.⁸⁷ In short, as a later generation might have put it, ‘Failed In London Try Honfleur’. Yet this was also one symptom of a broader cultural difference. The intense nineteen-year-old François de La Rochefoucauld came across it when in 1784 he studied modern agriculture in Norfolk and Suffolk, and realized that more was involved than just planting turnips. He was amazed by the confidence of ordinary farmers – mere peasants! – who could talk knowledgeably and enthusiastically about their methods, meet in clubs to exchange ideas, mix with gentlemen on equal terms when fox-hunting, and even spontaneously invite a duke’s son like himself to lunch. This was a different world from the Normandy he knew. Another 1780s traveller found the English ‘determined to rise above their station’. The liberal economist and businessman Dupont de Nemours was irritated by imported English workers – ‘haughty, quarrelsome, risk-takers and greedy’. But all this showed independence, self-confidence and a remarkable readiness to face change.⁸⁸ Contemporaries could not fully grasp what would only retrospectively be dubbed ‘la révolution industrielle’ by a French economist in the 1820s. But some did diagnose economic dynamism as being part of a deeper political and cultural revolution, seen as characteristically British:⁸⁹ freedom of enterprise and of information; security of persons and property; a less hierarchical society; more rational and equal taxation; and social gregariousness. In short, liberty, equality, fraternity. Whereas Voltaire and Montesquieu had admired a society that was good for intellectuals, that same society was now seen as being good for farmers, manufacturers, and even workers.

No one was more eager to spread this message than the self-appointed apostle of agricultural modernization, Arthur Young, an agronomist whose accounts of his travels gave him European celebrity. He explored France in the 1780s, and found little to praise. Poverty, archaism and oppression dogged his every step. It is easy to dismiss some of Young’s triumphant comparisons – and those of his French disciples such as La Rochefoucauld – as rose-tinted and one-sided. Certainly, poor regions such as Brittany compared badly in terms of productivity with Norfolk; but so did much of Britain. And of course, there were losers as well as gainers from modernization. But we should not redress the balance too far by imagining eighteenth-century England as a Hogarthian hell of gin, gibbets, prostitutes and starving poachers. By the standards of the Continent, ordinary English people were less poor, freer, more equal, and had vastly more political say. The reiteration of that comparison spread the idea that France’s political and social systems – absolutism and vestiges of feudalism – were holding it back. Young warned that the Old Regime was on the edge of the abyss. Ironically – seeing that he became a fierce critic of the French revolution – the translation of his Travels became official propaganda for the revolutionary regime, which bought 20,000 copies for distribution to every region of France.

Fashionable Feelings: The Age of Pamela and Julie

The vapours of the bogs of Albion have engendered a philosophical epidemic, which kills genius, agitates minds and produces anti-national taste.
RIGOLEY DE JUVIGNY, 1772⁹⁰

Our women, our horses, and dogs . . . are sure to be admired through all parts of France.
The Gentleman’s Guide in his Tour through France (c. 1765)

The prevailing cultural wind had always blown from France. In many areas of fashion and manners, this remained so. At the Drury Lane theatre, for example, plays with a French theme, including many adapted from Molière, were a staple of the repertoire.⁹¹The eighteenth century saw a shift: the new and the challenging came from Britain, and France came to represent majestic conservatism. From the 1740s, Britain came to be seen as a source not only of novelties in science, philosophy and politics, but also of new ways of feeling, and therefore of behaving and appearing. This was reflected powerfully back, above all in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to Britain.

Origins of these new ways of feeling could be traced back almost indefinitely. The idea of the English as a tempestuous and melancholy race because of their island situation and weather was expressed in a famous memoir by an ambassador, the Duc de Sully, early in the seventeenth century. Spleen and suicide were seen as the characteristic English distempers, induced by fog, beef and beer, which ‘give rise to a chyle, whose vicious heaviness can transmit none but bilious and melancholy juices to the brain’.⁹² The unwitting alchemist who convinced the French that this might have positive aspects, namely emotional depth, was Samuel Richardson, in his hugely admired (and scarcely less mocked) novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–41). This story of the trials and tribulations of a girl who defends her virginity and is rewarded by marriage, became an international craze, translated and copied all over Europe. That Richardson was a self-taught printer, the son of a joiner from Derby, added to the sense that this was something fresh, ‘sentimental’ (a new word, and a term of praise), a source of true emotion, and an authentic exploration of human virtue and vice. Immediately translated by the anglophile Abbé Prévost (who found asylum in London in the 1730s after absconding from the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés), Paméla became one of the most popular novels of the century. Richardson’s darker and even longer Clarissa (1748–9), which dealt with desire, sexual violence and remorse, translated as Clarisse Harlowe(1752), had a stunning impact, deeply influencing Rousseau and the philosophes. Rousseau wrote in 1758 that ‘no one has ever written in any language a novel that equals or even approaches it’. ‘O Richardson!’ exclaimed Diderot in 1761, ‘were I forced to sell all my books, you would remain to me on the same shelf as Moses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles.’⁹³

The popularity of English novels among French readers at this time has never been equalled. A study of the contents of 500 private libraries belonging to nobles, clergy and professional men in and near Paris in the middle decades of the century shows that three-quarters of the fiction consisted of translations from English, albeit abbreviated, gallicized and purged of anything ‘inappropriate’. Three of the four most widely owned novels were Paméla, Tom Jones and Clarisse Harlowe. Other novels by Richardson and Fielding, novels featuring English plots, and Oronoko (presumably a translation or adaptation of Afra Behn’s older work) were all among the most popular twenty works of fiction. The Marquis de Sade, when in the Bastille for his sexual delinquencies, had Richardson, Fielding and Smollett to keep him amused.⁹⁴ English novelists, male and female, led France and Europe in what Roy Porter has called ‘the enlightened voyage into the self’.⁹⁵

Richardson’s influence on French writers such as Laclos, Marivaux, Restif de La Bretonne and Sade was evident in style, subject and even the names of characters. But his impact on Rousseau was infinitely more important. As with Bolingbroke and Montesquieu, the pupil far excelled the master. Rousseau’s great novel of love, separation and virtue, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) – although Jane Austen and her family laughed at it later – marked a new era in European cultural history. The cultivation and expression of elevated, sincere emotion – endlessly analysed, talked about and relived – became the aim of art, indeed of life. The natural purity of the mountains now assailed the corrupt cities of the plains.

British poetry too became popular for the first time in France, not least because it was seen as possessing characteristics of sentiment, naturalness, moral elevation and affecting melancholy. Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) is the sole example widely known today, but it was only part of a wider vogue for introspection, nocturnes, death and rural elegies, including James Thompson’s The Seasons (1726–30) and Edward Young’s funereal Night Thoughts (1742–5). Translated into French in the 1760s and 70s, they spawned Saisons, Nuits, Jardins, Poèmes champêtres and Idylles galore in the 1770s and 80s. James Macpherson published Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in 1761, purportedly a translation of the ancient bard Ossian, which had huge success in France, making Scotland at least as much as Rousseau’s native Switzerland the source of pure mountain hot air. Shakespeare too gained hugely in stature (see below, page 108).

Literary influence was not confined to works by British authors. British characters and settings (sometimes as a place of liberty for star-crossed lovers, or as a place where fortunes could be made) were important features in dozens of novels. Abbé Prévost pioneered the trend for English settings in the 1730s with Le Philosophe anglais, ou Histoire de M. Cleveland, fils de Cromwell. In Rousseau’s Julie one of the leading characters is the virtuous, passionate and melancholy Milord Edouard Bomston, and the frustrated hero Saint-Prieux goes off round the world with (the real life) Admiral Anson. The fashion took off in the 1760s in a stream of novels with characters named Fanni, Jenny, Sidnei, Wuillaume, Nency and Betsi, and populated by numerous milords, miladys and sirs (including a ‘sir W. Shittleheaded’). Even approximate authenticity was not indispensable: the main characters in one popular ‘English’ novel are called Warthei, Hinsei and Zulmie.⁹⁶ What mattered was the image of England as the home of ‘sensibility’, freedom and exotic novelty – tea drinking, horse racing, boxing. Horace Walpole, who wanted the French to stay French, lamented their taste – ‘could one believe that when they read our authors, Richardson and Mr Hume should be their favourites?’ and he ‘blushed’ at Garrick’s ‘insufferable nonsense about Shakespeare’.⁹⁷

Gardens were the most elaborate expression of fashionable sensibility. The ‘English garden’, designed to look picturesquely natural, owed much to the imagined landscape paintings of Claude Le Lorrain, always popular in Britain. To possess an English garden, a place where the sensitive spirit could be refreshed by nature and simultaneously shown off to one’s friends, became an expensive Continental craze, inspiring several treatises and serious attention in the Encyclopédie. Its more ambitious examples became ‘total art . . . embracing philosophy, literature, architecture, sculpture, painting, sport and music’.⁹⁸ The trendsetter was the Marquis de Girardin at his magnificent chateau of Ermenonville, north of Paris. The garden was planned in 1763 and finished in 1773; Scottish gardeners did the lawns. Girardin, a devotee of Rousseau, had discovered his ideal of nature near Dudley, at the Leasowes, house of the minor poet and country squire William Shenstone, the author of, among other things, an influential essay on ‘landskip gardening’. Built in the 1740s and 50s in a hilly landscape, Shenstone’s garden contained woods, lakes, rills and rustic bridges, as well as a temple of Pan, a ‘ruined priory’, and a hermitage. Although less famous than Kew or Stowe, it became a model for connoisseurs, including Rousseau, who criticized Stowe as overdone.⁹⁹ In 1777 Girardin wrote a book on the composition of landscapes in which he rejected the geometrical style of the traditional French garden, and praised the Leasowes.¹⁰⁰ Cross-Channel celebrity seems to have caused Shenstone misgivings:

Trembling I view the Gaul’s illusive art
That steals my lov’d rusticity away.¹⁰¹

On a grand scale, Ermenonville emulated his topographical features and constructions designed to evoke philosophical, literary and aesthetic reactions: a dolmen, a waterfall, an altar to dreaming, a grotto of the Naiads, and a Temple of Modern Philosophy, purposely unfinished, inscribed with the names of contemporary thinkers. At the foot of an obelisk, Girardin inscribed in English:

To William Shenstone
In his verses he displayed
His mind natural
At Leasowes he lay’d
Arcadian greens rural.¹⁰²

Girardin acquired the ultimate feature in 1778: Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself, who briefly pottered about the garden, died and was buried on a lake island. Ermenonville became the shrine to this saint of nature and sensibility, visited by pilgrims from across the European world, including Marie-Antoinette, various monarchs, Benjamin Franklin, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre and Napoleon. The Leasowes had a less illustrious fate: engulfed by the Black Country, it is now part golf course, part slightly sad municipal park.

Not to be outdone in fashion, the Duc de Chartres commissioned in 1773 a lavish jardin à l’anglaise for his house at Monceau, on the northern edge of Paris, part of it now one of the city’s prettiest parks. His intention – or that of the artist Carmontelle who designed it – was to surpass the English, whose unimaginative monochrome lawns he thought insufficiently amusing for Parisian taste. Every fashionable feature was packed into a space that the busy metropolitan could walk round between social engagements: Chinese gate, Dutch windmill, minaret (with camel and turbaned attendant), coloured pavilions, winter garden, pyramid, grotto, medieval tower, ruined temple, vineyard with statue of Bacchus, gothic building (housing a chemistry laboratory), white marble dairy, lake, rustic bridge, flock of sheep with rustic shepherd, island with pillars, etc. Some thought this excessive, not least the duke’s financial advisers. The austere Scot, Thomas Blaikie – ‘the Capability Brown of France’ – pronounced it ‘a confusion’, and was commissioned to tone it down. Blaikie also designed a garden for the Comte d’Artois’s little folie, ‘Bagatelle’. The result made Blaikie’s name: ‘disordered like a coquette en negligée whose dress apparently put together in a haphazard way is really a work of art; but art so realistically disguised that Nature herself would be taken in by it’.¹⁰³ Marie-Antoinette took him to show her round Ermenonville. She built her own garden at the Petit Trianon at Versailles, with its famous, or notorious, ‘hamlet’, including sheep, cows and dairy, in the later 1770s. The last, and biggest, English garden of the Old Regime, begun in 1785, was that of the financier the Marquis de Laborde, at Méréville, which included a memorial to Captain Cook. Work was still going on when Laborde was arrested and guillotined in 1794. Even this was not the end: revolution and war notwithstanding, the Empress Josephine stocked her lavish garden at La Malmaison with 19,515 francs’ worth of English plants and seeds.¹⁰⁴

The Duc de Chartres’s garden was to contain every fashionable feature and outdo all its rivals.

While English visitors to Paris, as we have seen, hastily dressed up in French styles, some of the French elite began from the 1760s onwards to wear English clothes in France – an affectation that persisted for over two centuries. Until then, French fashions had dominated in both countries, and continued to do so for highly formal occasions – with French milliners (at least milliners with French names) supplying the London market, and dressed dolls imported as patterns of the latest Paris styles. But English clothing styles for men and women reflected different cultural trends: informality, naturalness, sport and the country. They were influenced too by the relatively classless sober style of London, and by children’s clothes. So for men, stronger, rougher materials (wool and even leather rather than silk), less embroidery and lace, shorter and less voluminous cut, plainer colours, shorter wigs or natural hair, boots, hats (‘à la jockei’) and coats suitable for riding, such as the redingote (from ‘riding coat’) and frac (from ‘frock’, a loose overcoat). For women, lighter materials (Indian muslin rather than brocaded silk), paler colours for summers out of doors; suppler yet tighter shapes, with fewer layers and less ornamentation; riding clothes; much less make-up; and most startling of all, their own hair and hats (including in straw) for the sun. The hat was originally a rural accessory which upper-class French women did not wear in town because of their huge artificial hairpieces. As the Courrier de la Mode put it in 1768, English fashion was ‘more picturesque and less stiff . . . every day we move towards beautiful simplicity’.

All this stood for activity, youth (‘from 15 to 50’¹⁰⁵), informality and freedom. It was rebellious. It was also sexy. So it caused outrage. Men and women looked alike, lamented some, all dressed in ‘the colour of London soot’. The writer Fougeret de Montbrun attacked those who had the ‘indecency’ and ‘dirtiness’ to ‘show themselves shamelessly in the most respectable places, wrapped in an ugly great jacket, mudsplashed to the shoulders, their hair pulled up by a comb under the hat’. Other writers condemned noblemen who ‘without embroidery, without braid, with a thick cane, a thick cravat, want absolutely to pass as London bourgeois’, and regretted that ‘people want to be English at any cost, and this pretention wipes out our national spirit . . . our fashions, our customs, to become like our neighbours whom we hate’. Lord Chesterfield agreed about the inferiority of British dress and behaviour: ‘with the manners of footmen and grooms, they assume their dress too; for you must have observed them in the streets here, in dirty blue frocks, with oaken sticks in their hands, and their hair greasy and un-powdered, tucked up under their hats of an enormous size’.¹⁰⁶ Louis XVI, though he introduced English water closets to Versailles, was irritated by English fashions, and ‘anglomaniacs’ risked disfavour. He remarked to the Marquis de Conflans (who was ‘wearing a plain frac with hair cut like a jockey, without powder or pommade’) that he ‘looked like a locksmith’, and told the Duc de Lauzun that if one was so fond of the English one should go and live among them.¹⁰⁷ Some compromise was reached: the habit à la française and the habit à l’anglaise coexisted and the informal frock-coat was produced in both its plain English form and in a more decorative French version.¹⁰⁸Marie-Antoinette, a revolutionary at least in fashion, launched the chemise de la reine, a muslin dress combining English, Indian, Rousseauesque and neo-classical influences, first launched in England by the Duchess of Devonshire. A portrait of the queen thus dressed, painted by Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, had to be withdrawn from the 1783 salon as too indecorous. Versions of this style, after the queen’s demise, came to typify the society of the late Republic and Napoleonic empire.¹⁰⁹

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

Louis xvi’s brother, the Comte d’Artois (later Charles x), overdoing the English country-gentleman look: note the jockey cap.

Engravings by Hubert Bourguignon, known as Gravelot, helped to spread English fashions in France. Son of a Parisian tailor, he stayed for almost twenty years in England – among other things he gave lessons to Gainsborough and produced illustrations forPamela. Returning to France in 1744, ‘he introduced . . . the taste for innocent looking straw hats, plain gowns and white stuffs’.¹¹⁰ From 1760, magazines blossomed with a cross-Channel exchange of engravings: The Fashionable Magazine or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Monthly Recorder of New Fashions, being a compleat Universal Repository of Taste, Elegance and Novelty for Both Sexes appeared in London, including illustrations that reappeared several months later in Le Magasin des Modes Nouvelles Françaises et Anglaises.¹¹¹

‘Chapeau à l’anglaise’: though ladies’ hats were an English import, here it is greatly elaborated for urban French taste.

‘Anglomania’ was both emulation of and rivalry with the English. The arch-anglomaniac was the Duc de Chartres, heir to the duchy of Orléans. The d’Orléans were the junior branch of the royal family, eager to seek popularity by distancing themselves from their Bourbon cousins and from the stuffiness of Versailles. Anglomania made them appear modern, open, and, however vaguely, linked with liberty. It was also smart and fun. In the 1770s Chartres, along with cronies such as the Comte d’Artois (Louis XVI’s wild youngest brother), Lauzun, Conflans and Fitz-James, set up a horse-racing and gambling coterie, with imported mounts and jockeys. They hoped to create a ‘French Newmarket’ at Sablons, just west of Paris, where the first French horse races had taken place in 1766. Courtiers deplored their mingling with raffish English hangers-on ‘of base extraction’ whom they took along to Versailles to dine, ‘their elbows on the table and in the most free and easy manner’.¹¹² They ran highly publicized races in the presence of Marie-Antoinette, who, if she detested English politics, could not resist the tyranny of fashion, and had English middle-class friends, the Swinburnes.

Clothes, carriages, horses, dogs, portraits, furnishings, food and drink (‘le plumpouding’, ‘le ponche’, etc.), gardeners, jockeys, friends and mistresses were imported from Britain during the 1770s and 80s. The American war, in which several anglomaniacs participated, was hardly even an interlude. As hostilities loomed, Chartres got permission to bring over eight horses and twenty hounds to tide him over. No less prized a filly was Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a blonde Scottish adventuress painted by Gainsborough (and the subject of a recent film by Eric Rohmer). She was the mistress of Artois and then of Chartres, with whom she remained friends. The most extraordinary import, however, was Pamela.

THE OTHER PAMELA

At Easter 1780, at the height of the American war, a horse dealer brought the Duc de Chartres ‘the prettiest mare and the prettiest little girl in England’.¹¹³ The latter had been sent by his English friend and agent, Nathanial Parker Forth, who had been asked to search the London foundling hospital for a pretty brunette of about six, who ‘must absolutely not have too big a nose or know a word of French’. Chartres wanted a playmate for his daughters so that they could grow up speaking English. Anne (‘Nancy’) Sims, from Christchurch in Hampshire, was probably born in Newfoundland, the illegitimate daughter of Mary Sims or Syms, whose father was in the salt cod trade. Fashionably renamed Pamela, ‘the little angel’ was an immediate success, and was brought up as an adored member of his highly unconventional household by Chartres and a former mistress (now governess to his children), the Comtesse de Genlis.¹¹⁴ She, an intelligent self-taught bohemian, was, as one might expect, a devotee of Richardson and a disciple of Rousseau, whose Emile provided her with ideas to apply to the Orléans children and Pamela. Indeed, the vogue for Rousseau had made the adoption of children for pedagogical experiments alarmingly fashionable. In 1785 she took Pamela on a long-anticipated trip to England. They made a pilgrimage to Richardson’s garden, where Madame sat with her flesh-and-blood Pamela on the very bench where the original Pamela had been written. Pamela’s adventures were far from over. Fleeing the revolution in 1792, she married Lord Edward Fitzgerald, radical scion of Ireland’s grandest family, en route. He became one of the leaders of the United Irishmen and was killed by the British. Pamela sought refuge in England, then Hamburg, briefly married the American consul there, and seems to have lived subsequently with a number of men. The childhood playmate who became Duc d’Orléans, and then in 1830 King Louis-Philippe, kept her at a distance, but paid for her funeral in 1831. In 1880 her remains were reburied in England by her descendants.

‘Pamela’ in later life: Lady Edward Fitzgerald with her daughter.

Partly to defray the costs of his extravagant hobbies, and partly as another sign of modern-mindedness, the Duc d’Orléans (as Chartres became in 1785) developed the family’s Parisian seat, the Palais Royal, into a commercial enterprise inspired by London pleasure gardens such as Vauxhall. ‘So,’ sneered Louis XVI, ‘you’ve become a shopkeeper.’ After a shaky start, the Palais Royal gardens, surrounded by galleries of coffee houses, the new ‘restaurants’, clubs of varying levels of respectability, and shops crammed with English goods and advertisements, became the lodestone of Paris fashion and dissipation. ‘They call it the capital of Paris . . . a little town of luxury enclosed within a greater.’¹¹⁵ Protected by the Orléans royal privilege, it also became a centre of political discussion and pamphleteering. For the duke, this success brought profit and popularity as a defender of freedom. It was from the garden of the Palais Royal that the attack on the Bastille was launched on 14 July 1789.

By then, English manners and fashions had become familiar. Copying British styles did not, of course, necessarily mean liking British ideas or people. The Seven Years War and the American war had hardened resentments, and a determination that if Britain was to be copied, it was with the intention of overtaking it. Fashionable anglomania had little in common with the sort of political interest that Voltaire and Montesquieu had shown. Nevertheless, many observers were struck by its visibility, even in wartime. An American envoy was astonished to see shops all over Paris advertising ‘English Goods just imported’.¹¹⁶ A diplomat returning from Turkey in 1782 wrote:

I had not been to Paris for fifteen years: in arriving, I thought I was in London. In the streets I met only English carriages, containing women wearing elegant hats, a fashion from England; English-style cabriolets driven by young gentlemen in riding-coats with double, triple or quadruple collars turned down like capes, with little round hats; horsemen dressed and mounted in English style; pedestrians in the same accoutrement . . . shops stocked with all sorts of English merchandise and entitled Magasins Anglois, with English punch advertised outside innumerable cafés.¹¹⁷

Young Antoine Santerre (who later presided over the execution of Louis XVI) made one of the biggest and quickest fortunes in Paris by brewing pale ale. Anglomania was no longer confined to the aristocracy: ‘a financier’s son . . . a business clerk, wears the long narrow coat, the hat well down on his head . . . Nevertheless, none of them has ever seen England, neither do they understand one word of English.’¹¹⁸ As anglomania raged in Paris, ‘Macaronis’ remained the cynosure of fashonable London and a gift to cartoonists, wearing, despite their name, largely French-inspired fashions – which for men included umbrellas, muffs, tall hairpieces and tight breeches – and displaying profound admiration for all things French. In large cities, it was asserted, ‘everything is à la Française’.¹¹⁹The interior of the Prince of Wales’s new Carlton House was largely decorated and furnished by French artists, showing his ‘close identification with the style and splendour of the Bourbon court’.¹²⁰ Amusingly, when the Duc d’Orléans at last obtained Louis XVI’s permission to visit London in 1783 (he had taken a house in the new Portland Place), he was praised in the London press for his sober and unaffected (English-style) dress, in contrast with the (French-style) foppery of the Prince of Wales.

The Englishman who copies dress, hairstyle and deportment from ‘Monkey Land’ – where everyone copied each other.

A French cartoon, presumably for an English public, satirizing not only French fashions, but also the contrast between the rich and the poor children in clogs.

Love, Hate and Ambivalence

A Frenchman who, with a fund of virtue, learning and good sense, has the manners and good-breeding of his country, is the perfection of human nature.
EARL OF CHESTERFIELD, 1747¹²¹

We are the only nation in the universe the English do not despise. Instead, they pay us the honour of hating us as heartily as possible.
FOUGERET DE MONTBRUN, Préservative contre l’anglomanie, 1759¹²²

All I object to is their quitting their own agreeable style, to take up the worst of ours. Heaven knows, we are unpleasing enough.
HORACE WALPOLE, 1765¹²³

Several recent books have stressed the importance of conflict between Britain and France in shaping the two national identities. Popular xenophobia was said by some contemporary writers to be stronger in Britain than in France, and many modern historians have accepted this. If the British were indeed more vocal and extreme about the French, the obvious reason is that they were more vocal and extreme about everything: there was no French equivalent of Gillray until after the fall of the Bastille, that deterrent to impertinence. In Britain, francophobia expressed fear of absolutism and resentment of snobbery. When London artisans jeered at ‘French dogs’ in the street, their victims were as likely to be overdressed Englishmen. Francophobia waxed and waned with the seriousness of the French threat, and it seems to have subsided after mid-century, until revived in an entirely different form in the 1790s. In France state-sponsored anglophobia was virulent from the time of the Seven Years War, and it remained a staple of conservative political discourse. French desire for revenge which, as we shall see, marked the 1770s and 80s, combined with a wishful belief that Britain was in decline, meant that its political and social systems were frequently denounced. On both sides of the Channel, polemicists regarded themselves as representing superior values.

Religion was important. French champions of Catholicism stigmatized the British as ‘heretics’ and ‘sectarians’, turbulent and violent, as evidenced by their ultimate political crime, the regicide of Charles I. British defenders of Protestantism attacked the Bourbon monarchy as the enemy of religious and political liberty, and the manipulator of superstition – the strategy summed up as ‘Popery’. However, religion was not the basic cause of cross-Channel polarization. The British were always more afraid of Versailles than of Rome. Moreover, Catholics and Protestants were themselves bitterly divided. French Jansenists, followers of a devout but unorthodox tendency within Catholicism, saw their enemies as the Jesuits, the church hierarchy and the Crown, not Protestants; and they looked to England as a model of religious liberty. Anglicans and Scottish Episcopalians, faced with troublesome Dissenters, could for their part see merits in French Catholicism. One Tory Archbishop of Canterbury early in the century advocated unity between the established Anglican and Gallican (i.e. French Catholic) churches, if the latter would finally sever its tenuous links with Rome. Fear of Popery diminished in Britain after the defeat of the Jacobite threat in 1745, and religion ceased to be ‘an important factor’ in British foreign policy.¹²⁴ In France, although Catholic conservatism revived during the Seven Years War, the rising theme of anglophobia was not Protestantism but commercialism. Britain was denounced as ‘Carthage’ – materialistic, insatiable and duplicitous.

It would be wrong to assume that cross-Channel rivalry created two nations united in their hostility to ‘the Other’. In Britain, the struggle ‘opened up internal tensions’ – political, ethnic and religious – ‘as often as it resolved them’.¹²⁵ In France too, attitudes towards England reflected internal differences. Anglophilia always implied a certain dissidence from, and even outright criticism of, religious and political absolutism. Anglophobia meant support for royal and ecclesiastical power and resistance to social change. Fashionable anglomania in the 1780s began as elite alienation from the ‘sad and barren’ political and cultural establishment of Versailles – a trend that also included a vogue for Italian and German music.¹²⁶

Antagonism, therefore, is not the sole key to Franco-British relations. If each nation helped to form the other’s sense of itself, it was also through self-criticism, discussion, admiration and emulation. Both sides eagerly read, applauded, disagreed with, copied and responded to each other in a constant exchange. Both were tending towards the view that they were the joint leaders of civilization, even if they were trying to lead it in different directions. Wars did not poison personal relations. Remarkably, officers of the armed forces wore their uniforms when visiting the ‘enemy’ country – guidebooks advised it – as it guaranteed a polite reception and permitted them to dine at the messes of their opposite numbers. Reactions to two well-known books on France – Smollett’sTravels through France and Italy (1766) and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) – reveal the mood of the British reading classes well. Smollett’s curmudgeonly criticisms – construed as xenophobic, although his grumpiness was universal – were regarded as in poor taste. Sterne’s simpering charm met the mood of the moment. Gentle monks, wise innkeepers, coy nuns, pretty chambermaids and flirtatious ladies all won his heart, and composed just the picture of France the British sought: good food, good manners and a hint of erotic adventure.

A central theme – or rather, variations on a theme – emerged from this century of dialogue: that Britain stood for freedom, and France for order. Or, especially during the second half of the century, that Britain stood for nature, and France for civilization – in Garrick’s pithy summing up, France meant stiff stays and fruit out of season. This was so pervasive an idea that it shaped experience, and so in a sense became true. It accommodated a range of positive and negative interpretations: for it is striking how admirers and critics agreed about the essence of what they judged so differently. Hence, British freedom, or naturalness, could explain violent crowds, drunken boorishness, coarseness of taste and dullness of conversation. But it also accounted for Newton, Locke, Shakespeare, political participation, tolerance, relative social equality, liberty of speech and writing, openness to change, prosperity, sincerity, sensitivity and kindness. It could explain extremes of both good humour and melancholy; the affecting beauty of Pamela and the cloddishness of ‘Jack Rosbif’. The connexion with thepolitical system seemed obvious: ‘It is not surprising that a people that is ceaselessly told that it is free, that it is only subordinate to the laws, is proud and insolent.’¹²⁷

French order and civilization similarly encapsulated ecclesiastical and royal oppression, downtrodden peasants, persecuted Protestants, censorship, effete repressed culture, the foppish ‘effeminacy’ and strutting conformism of Versailles. Many on both sides of the Channel felt the French were too polite, too contrived and too enslaved to convention and fashion: the manners of the dancing master, or (as they were often caricatured) the imitativeness of the monkey. But this also explained their elegance, urbanity, wit, cultural sophistication, intelligence, fashion, gaiety, courtesy, hospitality, safe highways, and the courtesy of ordinary people. France’s calm, order and authority attracted many British visitors who basked in the deference of the lower orders, the gradations of distinction, and the non-commercial cultural world of the salons. Lord Ferrers paid an undeniably sincere tribute to this ideal when, condemned to death in 1760 for the murder of his steward, he defied the egalitarianism of the sentence by turning out to be hanged in his embroidered white silk habit à la française.

DRAWING A LESSON

If one could sum up a vast range of language and imagery, it would be that the British either admired or laughed at the French, and the French either envied or sneered at the British. The British admired French superiority and mocked French (and French-style) pretentiousness, foppishness and the careful pose taught by the dancing master. The French envied British liberty and wealth, and disdained British crudeness and lack of savoir-faire.

One of many cartoons showing the French and British as opposites – clothes, mannerisms, diets, body shapes, even dogs. Gillray, typically, mocks both.

Drunkenness has long been seen by the French as a characteristic English vice.

GARRICK’ S FRENCH DANCERS

Although eighteenth-century wars impinged surprisingly little on other activities, 1755 was not the best moment for Franco-British cultural exchanges. In December, the actor-manager David Garrick brought over a troupe of ‘French’ dancers (led in fact by a Swiss, Noverre, renowned at Versailles) to perform at Drury Lane. This led to several nights of uproarious, exciting and sometimes bloody rioting between the noble patrons in the boxes, who insisted that the dancers should perform, and the more plebeian occupants of the pit and gallery, who were determined that they should not. As a French newspaper reported,

All the My Lords leaped into the Pit, some with staves others sword in hand, and descended upon a group of demonstrators . . . the English Ladies, far from being affrighted by the horrible scuffle . . . pointed out to them the people to be knocked out . . . The ballet begins, the stage is covered with several bushels of peas mixed with tacks. The milords sweep the stage with their hats, more peas are thrown; the milords jump once more into the Pit, the doors of which are forced open by a troop of butchers . . . hitting right and left at the demonstrators.

Magistrates and troops tried to stop the trouble in the theatre and the surrounding streets, where Garrick’s house had its windows smashed.

This event is often cited as proof of brutal English xenophobia. It was widely reported in France, causing the Marquis d’Argenson to note in his journal, ‘What a nasty people, as ferocious as they pretend to be philosophical.’ Given that fighting had already started in North America and the press was reporting French preparations for an invasion of Britain, some francophobia is not surprising. Moreover, the interruptions were at least partly fomented by out-of-work actors, the managers of rival theatres, and Huguenot exiles. There were paid toughs on both sides. What is truly remarkable is that the milords in the audience were so eager to defend the French dancers, and that the King and Queen attended the first night (he was reported to have ‘laughed very heartily’ at the tumult). Francophilia and francophobia have always had class connotations. There were no hard feelings: Noverre returned for a less turbulent season a few years later and his brother (who had almost killed a rioter) made a career as a dancing master in Norwich.¹²⁸

‘Philia’ and ‘phobia’ are misleading suffixes if they are assumed always to signify polarized attitudes. In the paintings and caricatures of Hogarth, Gillray and Rowlandson, British and French are both mocked, just as in the writings of Voltaire or Montesquieu both societies are praised and criticized. French guidebooks warned their readers that they might be robbed by highwaymen, jostled by the London mob, and snubbed by haughty milords; but also led them to expect efficient transport, comfortable beds, pavements, and clean, well-lit streets. English travellers were on the lookout for lazy monks, officious bureaucrats, and famished peasants; but also for good food, universal courtesy, intellectual sparkle and metropolitan polish. Whether they liked what they found – accident aside – was largely a matter of prejudice, in the sense that some deplored what others admired. Samuel Foote’s popular farces The Englishman in Paris and The Englishman Returned from Paris amused 1760s audiences by caricaturing familiar prejudices, and also the suddenness with which they could change. His typical English ‘hero’, Squire Buck, arrives in Paris annoyed that streets are called Rues, gets into a fight with a Frenchman who ‘turn’d up his nose and called me une Bête’, and complains that ‘the Men are all Puppies, mincing and dancing, and chattering, and grinning; the Women are a parcel of painted Dolls; their food’s fit for Hogs’. By the time he returns to London, he speaks an elegant Franglais and proclaims that ‘the French are the first People of the Universe; that in the Arts of living they do or ought to give Laws to the whole World, and that whosoever would either eat, drink, dress, dance, fight, sing or even sneeze, avec Elégance, must go to Paris to learn it’.¹²⁹

Central to social perceptions were the contrasting role and behaviour of women, artlessly summed up by one travel writer: ‘I should prefer a French woman for a mistress, but an English woman for a wife.’¹³⁰ In both countries women were prominent, in comparison with some other parts of Europe, in economic activity and cultural life. In England, more women were famous as writers, and in France, more as patrons through their salons, even if this might mean being ‘self-effacing facilitators’.¹³¹ Much discussed was what this showed about the two societies. It was a common complaint of French visitors that Englishwomen, though often beautiful, athletic and virtuous, lacked charm, confidence, conversation and flirtatiousness; in short, were froides. Here again, the ‘nature’/‘civilization’ contrast appears. Many agreed that France was more civilized because more sociable, and that women were the creators of that sociability, and the bearers of that civilization. ‘Lively, cheerful, witty, facetious, their disposition fits them naturally for company; the communicativeness of their temper, and the engagingness of their behaviour, beget reciprocal harmony, and circulate a spirit of pleasure that is the principal delight and merit of conversation.’¹³² But many British visitors found French women alluringly (and/or shockingly) bold. Some were titillated, others repelled, by the sophisticated artificiality of fashion. Smollett as usual was ‘Disgusted of Dumbarton’:

fashion in France prescribes to all ladies . . . the fard, or white, with which their necks and shoulders are plaistered [and] the rouge, which is daubed on their faces, from the chin up to the eyes . . . [This] renders the aspect really frightful . . . their heads are covered with a vast load of false hair . . . compleately whitened.¹³³

One English visitor was delighted when visiting Versailles to see the naturally ‘lovely appearance’ of two English women ‘who without patch, paint or powder rivall’d all the French dolls.’¹³⁴ But young Lord Nuneham was ‘fonder of rouge well put on than ever . . . to me the finest pale face, the finest shape ill dressed is nothing’.¹³⁵

British culture appeared more masculine, more physical, and arguably more brutal – again, the antithesis of a civilized and ordered society. Several aspects were repeatedly noted by French observers. The English theatre was violent. Garrick noted in his journal that ‘the French can’t bear Murder upon ye Stage but rack Criminals for small thefts’.¹³⁶ This was missing the point (and the core of French objections to Shakespeare): that the theatre should be a protected civilized space. The French were also shocked by the popularity of boxing and the frequency of street fights, and even more by the willingness of gentlemen to watch and even take part. Chivalrous duelling between gentlemen was one thing; the brawling of gentlemen with the plebs quite another. In London, wearing swords went out of fashion in the 1720s, and duels became increasingly frowned upon by the 1770s; what is more, ordinary passers by intervened to stop them.¹³⁷ If this was seen in Britain as an advance in civilized values, by French standards it was a decline. Sport was another manifestation of indecorous physicality: that a nobleman could play cricket with his servants was even more incomprehensible than that an adult should wish to play games at all. This kind of egalitarianism was utterly different from the familiarity of the French with domestic servants – a familiarity so sensationally subverted by Beaumarchais’s Figaro. Instead of bowing and curtseying, the British kissed or shook hands (‘taking one’s man by the arm and shaking enough to dislocate the shoulder’). Marie-Antoinette was dumbfounded when the British ambassador shook hands with one of her ladies. This habit, revealingly, became more French when it became more formal. In food too – always a crucial topic – the British were a ‘bleeding dish’ nation, disgustingly close to nature for the French, who were a civilized ‘sauce nation’, where food was transformed and disguised.¹³⁸

In both Britain and France, fears that ‘effeminacy’ was corrupting male ‘republican’ virtues led Patriots to denounce the cultural and social mores of a degenerate aristocracy. Its hallmarks were the influence of women, excessive interest in feminine matters such as fashion, and a consequent lack of interest in public affairs: ‘what we might gain in Delicacy and Refinement, we might lose in Manliness of Behaviour and Liberty of Discourse; the two Pillars of which the Edifice of our national character is mainly supported’.¹³⁹ Questions of fashion, sociability and the place of the sexes were given serious moral and political importance. Some British commentators suspected a Bourbon plot to undermine the nation. Silly though this was, it was in some form widely held.¹⁴⁰The equivalent view in France was that the importation of cruder and more egalitarian British styles was undermining traditional French values, which conservatives hoped did indeed promote contented apolitical loyalism. As one song, entitled ‘Caractère de la Nation Française’, defined it

As in the old days
Loyal, frank and courteous
Respecting our laws
Adoring our lovelies
Loyal to our kings
Always in love, always faithful subjects.¹⁴¹

The writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier, despairing in the 1780s that ‘we shall never adopt anything from the English save their dress’, sarcastically urged his compatriots to return to French styles: ‘wear your lace . . . stick a little hat under your arm’ because ‘wearing other people’s clothes will not provide . . . brains and character’.¹⁴²

Two stock figures that represented and summed up these perceptions of difference are the French dancing-master and the English jockey. The former inculcated order, urbanity, elegance, self-control and tradition – in short, les bienséances (the proprieties). But critics dismissed this ‘politeness’ as mere external show. The jockey was a symbol of daring, physical prowess and modernity, but equally, said critics, of coarse manners and rustic pastimes. The anglophile La Rochefoucauld, amid his notes on farming practices, felt it worth recording that in England ‘both sexes dance equally badly, without the least grace or step or rhythm; they make no study of dancing as we do. The women hold themselves badly . . . The men dance with their knees bent . . . in short they present a most unpleasing appearance.’¹⁴³ Hester Thrale, on the other hand, mocked French incompetence at horse racing.¹⁴⁴ Mercier deplored jockeys as ‘libertines in the bud . . . I should need Solomon’s pen to give a true description of the harm that jockeys, and riding coats, and public betting . . . have done.’¹⁴⁵ Of the many uses of ‘dancing master’ as a term of abuse, the most famous is Samuel Johnson’s dismissal of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters as teaching ‘the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master’. The second half at least of the judgement was perfectly true.

Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was a lucid admirer of French civilization, and his mid-century letters to his half-French son on manners and society constitute, according to the leading French cultural historian Marc Fumaroli, the ‘moral testament of French Europe’.¹⁴⁶ Their antithesis is Emile, ou de l’éducation (1761), a novel by the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This epoch-making manifesto about ‘nature’ and liberty was deeply influenced by Locke and by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. So fundamental is the conflict between civilization and nature, Fumaroli believes, that ‘the century, and not only the century, the history of Europe, turn on the hinges’ of Chesterfield and Rousseau.¹⁴⁷

Both are about educating a young man. For Chesterfield, the human brute had to be civilized. Social success and power could only be gained by mastering les bienséances, and by constant self-control to create the appearance of relaxed naturalness: ‘Take particular care that the motions of your hands and arms be easy and graceful.’ For Chesterfield, the hallmark of success was to pass as French – ‘to make the French say, qu’on diroit que c’est un François’. As Rousseau put it, ‘The man of the world consists wholly of his mask . . . What he is means nothing to him, what he appears to be means everything.’ For Rousseau, natural instinct had to be preserved from distortion and corruption, and sincerity and individual self-expression cultivated. ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Creator: everything degenerates in the hands of man . . . He wants nothing as nature has made it, not even man; he has to be trained like a circus horse, twisted like a tree in his garden.’ Emile would ‘follow nature’, breast-fed, unswaddled, growing up in solitude, and learning by experience, with only one book – Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau’s model.¹⁴⁸

Dancing was important for both. Rousseau regarded dancing as good in itself, whereas Chesterfield considered it ‘ridiculous, though at the same time really important’ as training. Both refer to the same famous dancing master, M. Marcel. ‘Apply yourself now to Marcel’s lectures,’ instructs Chesterfield; ‘desire him to teach you every genteel attitude that the human body can be put into.’ But Rousseau declares that ‘If I were a dancing master, I would not do all Marcel’s monkey tricks . . . I would take [my student] to the foot of a rock . . . to tread the steep paths lightly . . . I would make him copy a mountain goat rather than a ballet dancer.’¹⁴⁹

Where Chesterfield and Rousseau meet is in their desire to dominate. Chesterfield subjected his unfortunate son to 400 letters of intimidating advice over thirty years. Rousseau, in spite of his praise of freedom and nature, makes Emile’s upbringing wholly contrived and regulated by a wise, all-seeing and ruthlessly benevolent tutor – an idealization of himself. Rousseau won the debate: when Chesterfield’s letters were published in 1774, they were attacked as both old-fashioned and immoral: true ‘politeness’ must be sincere and natural.

The contest between nature and les bienséances echoed across Europe – certainly as far as 1760s Lichfield. Thomas Day, one of the local devotees of Rousseau, picked an eleven-year-old girl from Shrewsbury orphanage to train as a model wife, renaming her ‘Sabrina Sidney’, and subjecting her to a course of reading, lectures, a trip to France, and training in Spartan fortitude. But she showed little sign of ‘ability that should, one day, be responsible for the education of youths, who were to emulate the Gracchi’. He gave up, and decided to seek a wife by more conventional means. In effect abandoning Rousseau for Chesterfield, he tried to make himself more eligible by going to France for a year in 1771 to learn ‘the military gait, the fashionable bow, minuets and cotillions’. He even had his knock-knees painfully splinted into elegant straightness. Alas, Staffordshire was cruelly provincial, and on his return his ‘studied bow on entrance, the suddenly recollected assomption of attitude, prompted the risible instead of the admiring sensation’.¹⁵⁰ But all was not lost: eventually he married an heiress.

Towards the end of the century, many thought France was moving in a British direction, or at least in the direction of ‘liberty’ and ‘nature’. The parlements were claiming to represent the nation. Commerce was expanding. The salons were giving way to more public and male-dominated cafés, clubs and lodges, as political debate pushed aside pleasurable ‘effeminate’ conversation. Eventually, the French revolutionaries, following Rousseau, were to banish women from politics, ostracize ‘aristocrats’ of all classes, and assert the values of ‘nature’ over those of a corrupt civilization. The British found themselves on the other side. If they never quite mastered les bienséances as Chesterfield prescribed, Britain nevertheless became the citadel of eighteenth-century politeness against stern republican virtue.

THE FRENCH AND
SHAKESPEARE: The Age of Voltaire

Shakespear has quite a good imagination, thinks naturally, and expresses himself with finesse; but these good qualities are overshadowed by the
rubbish he mixes into his plays. First recorded French comment on Shakespeare, 1704¹⁵¹

Shakespeare has been a weathervane for French attitudes to English culture. Since Voltaire had introduced him to a large readership in the Lettres philosophiques (1734), he was regarded as the quintessence of English genius – ‘a powerful, fruitful genius, natural and sublime, without a spark of good taste or the least knowledge of the rules . . . the English poetic genius dies if forced and pruned like a shrub in the gardens of Marly’. From the beginning, the English ‘genius’ was explicitly seen as the antithesis of the French. Hence, to judge Shakespeare was also to judge French culture. So Voltaire, while praising Shakespeare’s primitive virtues, also underlines his primitive vices: vigorous but lacking in les bienséances; original but unsophisticated; profound but incoherent; with moments of sublime poetry spoiled by squalid lower-class characters, crude horseplay, gratuitous violence and generally des sottises. His successes had damaged the English stage by ingraining bad habits, thought Voltaire; and besides, the English language was probably now in decline.

No doubt Voltaire regarded his own plays on Shakespearean themes, such as his popular Mort de César (1733) and Zaïre (1732), inspired by Othello, as more successful than their models, and sufficient to rejuvenate the French theatre by a moderate transfusion of Shakespearean vigour. He wrote in 1750, ‘T’is true we have too much of words, if you have too much of action, and perhaps the perfection of the Art should consist in a due mixture of the french taste and english energy.’ He always considered French literature superior, and hence preferred Addison to Shakespeare, because Addison wrote like a Frenchman, with elegance, polish and correctness. Voltaire’s judgements, accepted in France, were widely shared in England, proof of the continuing prestige of French classicism – including his own plays, sixteen of which were produced in London. On both sides of the Channel Shakespeare was censored and cleansed, even by his great champions Samuel Johnson and David Garrick. His vocabulary was made more poetical, his plots more comprehensible and his endings more cheerful.

The vogue Voltaire initiated soon far outran his condescending approval. A later generation of writers and philosophes admired Shakespeare precisely because he ignored the classical conventions: ‘the genius of poetry has an independent spirit, too jealous of its liberty to suffer being confined by that multitude of Rules’.¹⁵² The francophile yet patriotic Garrick (son of a Huguenot) performed extracts from Shakespeare in Paris salons in the 1750s and 60s, while also reintroducing him to the British stage as the national bard, the champion of English drama.

Exalting Shakespeare slighted the classical tradition of Corneille and Racine, of which Voltaire himself was the leading contemporary exponent. He decided to cut his posthumous rival down to size. Vanity and political expediency animated his hostility, which had begun in the 1740s, when he had described Hamlet as ‘a coarse and barbarous piece which would not be tolerated by the lowest populace of France or Italy’.¹⁵³ But more was at stake than vanity. French classical drama was philosophical (turning on moral dilemmas), Shakespeare’s was psychological (exploring the development of character – hence the impact of Garrick’s ‘pantomime’, using facial expressions and bodily movements, rather than merely declaiming the verses). French drama was based on poetic description of unseen events, Shakespeare on their staging (including distasteful ones such as fights and killings). The former was concentrated and ordered (observing the unities of time, place and action), the latter diffuse, complex, even incoherent. The former was moral and usually optimistic, the latter amoral and frequently pessimistic. The former appealed to an educated elite, the latter to a diverse audience. For Voltaire, the former was simply a higher form of art created by a more advanced civilization; the latter, whatever its power, was infantile and crude: ‘It is certainly more difficult to write well than to put on stage murders, gallows, witches and ghosts.’¹⁵⁴ Voltaire is rather like the patrician music critic who deigns to recognize merit in the songs of the Beatles, but is horrified when people start saying that Paul Macartney is better than Schubert. Or, in this case, better than Voltaire. He lamented that, ‘I had wanted to liven up the theatre a little by including more action, but now everything is action and pantomime . . . goodbye to fine verse, goodbye to heartfelt sentiments, goodbye to everything.’ He repented to a friend, ‘The worst of the calamity is that it was I who first mentioned this Shakespear [and] showed the French the few pearls I had found in his enormous dung-heap.’¹⁵⁵

The Seven Years War created an anglophobe climate, just as British cultural influences seemed to be challenging France’s ascendancy. In 1761 Voltaire (claiming to be fighting for ‘la patrie’) published an appeal ‘to all the nations of Europe’. This was his declaration of war on English culture.¹⁵⁶ Shakespeare now became ‘the village clown’, ‘the barbarous mountebank’, ‘the drunken savage’. He gave a deadpan summary of the plot of Hamlet, with paraphrases of some of the speeches, making it sound absurd, crude and stupid. Its success he explained by the lack of distinction of English society, in which violence, comedy and the grotesque on stage was an entertainment for ‘porters, sailors, cabbies, shop-boys, butchers, and clerks’, who set public standards which ‘revolt people of taste throughout Europe’.

Garrick raised the stakes by organizing a patriotic Shakespearean jubilee in 1769, and they rose again in 1776 when Pierre Le Tourneur began publishing a translation of Shakespeare’s complete works, in twenty volumes. His version was intended to be read, not performed, and so aimed at greater fidelity than stage conventions would allow. Nevertheless, ‘mean and vulgar’ language was ennobled. In Othello, the ‘black ram . . . tupping your white ewe’ became ‘a black vulture’ and ‘a young white dove’. The merely commonplace was poeticized: a dog also became a ‘vulture’, a cricket an ‘insect of the hearth’, and so on. Le Tourneur’s edition was amazingly successful, with members of the royal family and leading politicians (including the anglophobe Duc de Choiseul) among its subscribers – a remarkable sign of Shakespeare’s reputation and the prestige of English culture even when the two countries were on the brink of war. In a preface addressed to the king, Le Tourneur declared that ‘no man of genius has ever penetrated the human heart so deeply’ or created characters ‘entirely resembling those of nature’. Voltaire was furious that ‘this impudent imbecile’ should insult France by hailing Shakespeare as ‘the only model of true tragedy . . . trampling under foot the crowns of Racine and Corneille’. He wrote a letter to the French Academy denouncing Shakespeare’s obscene language and ‘infamous turpitude’, which some ‘dared to oppose to the majesty of our theatre’.¹⁵⁷ This was read to the Academy by d’Alembert in August 1776, in the frowning presence of the ambassador Lord Stormont and the no less formidable Elizabeth Montagu. She had written a stinging rebuttal of Voltaire’s earlier attacks, an Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets – one of many retorts that thundered back across the Channel.

The French literary world split in a contest between ‘genius’ and ‘taste’. In Montagu’s words, ‘genius, powerful genius only, (wild nature’s vigour working at the root!) could have produced such strong and original beauties’.¹⁵⁸ Genius won – though not untamed. As in England, Shakespeare was house-trained. Jean-François Ducis, who knew little English and worked from translations, made him ‘bearable’ for French audiences, slashing indecorous action and disturbing plots, and adding ballet.¹⁵⁹ His unabashed reworkings – Hamlet and Roméo et Juliette were the most popular – drew thousands of spectators in the 1770s and 80s. Remarkably, the first performance of Le Roi Lear (in a Ducis adaptation, with a happy ending) was performed at the Court of Versailles in 1783 – while France and Britain were still at war. The best was yet to come: in September 1793, with the two countries again at war and the revolutionary Terror at its height, a musical version of Roméo et Juliette was successfully produced in Paris.