Between 1689 and 1815 incalculable suffering was caused by the Franco-British struggle, not the sole cause but the fuel for fifty-six years of multinational conflict. Estimates of direct military deaths are difficult, but the total for all the combatants runs into millions – probably approaching 6 million, equal to the total population of England in the 1750s. Two-thirds of these died between 1792 and 1815, when 1.4 million French and over 200,000 British lost their lives – comparable in proportion with the First World War. Roughly one-third of French boys born between 1790 and 1795 were killed or wounded.1 The maimed soldier reduced to beggary was a familiar sight in both countries. To these must be added civilian death, anguish, hunger, disease, family breakdown and economic disruption, including the enormous ‘collateral damage’ done to people on every continent dragged into the conflict or made to help pay for it. What Kipling bluntly called the ‘Puppets that we made or broke to bar the other’s path – Necessary, outpost-folk, hirelings of our wrath’ included Indian states and armies, German mercenaries, slave soldiers, Iroquois warriors, Spanish sailors and Portuguese guerrillas. Almost forgotten in the background: famished peasants from Bengal to Portugal, dead babies, enslaved Africans, raped women and their unwanted offspring. In discussing the outcomes, this should never be forgotten. It was not only blood, to quote Kipling again, that was ‘the price of admiralty’.
The idea that 1689–1815 constituted a ‘second hundred years war’ is an arresting one.2 Was it a single struggle? In important ways, clearly not. Conflict was not always about the same territories, interests or ideas. Conflict was not unremitting, nor was there blank enmity. Mutual admiration and emulation are as characteristic as hatred. Never, before or since, have the two societies found each other so fascinating. Knowing that the other had dangerously attractive qualities gave the rivalry extra intensity. At least until the 1760s, Britain represented liberty and modernity in Europe – relative religious freedom, representative government, political tumult, social fluidity and ‘commercial society’. Thereafter – at least in the eyes of its many enemies – it stood for conquest and economic exploitation, and even the Bourbons, during the American war of independence, became defenders of freedom. The revolution, caused above all by the financial and ideological strains of global war, transformed the nature and meaning of the Franco-British antagonism: France now embodied change, while Britain stood for stability and tradition.
It is commonly stated that in both France and Britain their conflict was crucial in creating national identity.3 Patriots in both countries were imbued with a sense of unique and contrasting destiny. Several British and American historians have emphasized that conflict with France created a new sense of Britishness, contrasting in religion, manners and politics with the Popery, frogs’ legs and absolutism across the Channel. This is true to some extent, for example in promoting greater solidarity between Scots and English, and in spreading a range of symbols and stereotypes. But there was no serious attempt to create a single British identity at the expense of English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. French historians have paid less attention to British influences in the making of their own national identity, although François Furet notes that ‘like other European peoples, and perhaps par excellence among them, the French were accustomed to define themselves in relation to an enemy.’4 But which enemy? As we have noted, there was asymmetry across the Channel. France was Britain’s great enemy from the 1670s; but Britain was only one of the pack of lesser breeds snarling at France’s heels. Imperial Austria was the detested ‘natural enemy’, and only from the 1750s did perfidious Albion come to the fore. Ideologically alien, the core of hostile alliances and the model of a coarse commercial society, Britain before, during and after the revolution was the foil – the ‘anti-France’ – both to royalist and republican patriotism.
The creation of identities was only part of the story, for the long struggle simultaneously created divisions. Both sides underwent revolutions and civil wars. The French repeatedly opened up ideological and ethnic divisions among their island enemies, some of which never closed. A British nation previously seen as spanning the Atlantic broke apart, and British-Irish relations were permanently embittered. France underwent not merely a violent political revolution and civil war, but a traumatic cultural transformation. In the last phase of the struggle, many in France saw Britain as an ally and a model; many in Britain saw France as an example and Napoleon as a hero. In both countries, the political divisions of the nineteenth century owed much to the ideological and economic consequences of their long struggle.
What above all gives unity to this century-long struggle is that it became the first-ever contest for global power, and thus it began a new era in world history. Britain, for geopolitical and ideological reasons, opposed the domination of the Continent by France, the only state whose geographical position and size threatened its home security and its interests in the Low Countries, Germany, the Mediterranean, and on the oceans. Several Continental states also feared France, but all were at times coerced into acquiescence or tempted into complicity. But France could not coerce or tempt Britain, whose intractable opposition was dangerous because of its naval and financial strength, which enabled it to interfere everywhere and with disproportionate effect. Bourbon France tried to project power overseas to oppose British colonial and commercial expansion and claim its own share. From the 1750s onwards, France even had at crucial moments to reverse its priorities by making European politics subordinate to the global struggle, culminating in Napoleon’s impossible effort to dominate the sea by conquering the land. The link between European and world power made the Franco-British struggle very difficult to compromise. Only for a few months, in 1803, did it seem that stalemate had been reached, with Britain abandoning the Continent, and France the oceans – a solution unpalatable to both.
Though geography and economics provide the raw material for the struggle, neither the course of the conflict nor its outcome were predetermined. Beliefs, fears, ambitions, prejudices, calculations and choices began, continued and ended it. If any one of France’s invasion attempts had succeeded, the story might have finished very differently.
These descriptive comments are as much as a French and a British author can be expected to agree on. What follows shows how we disagree.
Origins
IT: Taking the ‘hundred years war’ as a whole, its taproot is British aggression. The commercial and financial interests linked to the City of London supported the ‘Patriotic’ cause and colonial aggrandizement in Asia and the Americas, and this made conflict inevitable. As three recent historians put it, ‘In England the throne was surrounded by merchants and bankers . . . England spoke the language of account books, France that of the warrior thirsty for honour and supremacy.’5 British aggressiveness was expressed through the notorious francophobia (indeed general xenophobia) of British culture, what a leading French historian calls a mixture of ‘paranoia’ and ‘anti-Catholic hysteria’ that was ‘deep-rooted, constant, intense and influential’.6 It was noted by many contemporaries and is stressed even by British historians such as Linda Colley and Paul Langford. This culture made colonial aggression and even Continental war against France acceptable and popular. France, even under Louis XIV, was essentially on the defensive, concerned with the consolidation of its frontiers, satisfied with its position of diplomatic and cultural primacy in Europe, and determined only to resist an aggressive British monopoly of colonial trade – a stand supported by other countries. It was British money that repeatedly fomented coalitions against France, culminating in the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. French continental hegemony was ‘the consequence and not the cause’7 of wars fomented by Britain.
RT: It is true that the hoariest clichés about Britain survive. They rest on assumptions about ‘the rise of capitalism’, rather than on empirical research. Foreign policy was not in fact determined by commerce. Even under Pitt the Elder (the politician closest to City interests and Patriotism) decisions were made by a small royal and official elite concerned with diplomatic influence and above all security. Moreover, public opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to Continental wars. British statesmen saw France as a threat, not as a soft target to be despoiled of its colonies. In India and North America, it was the French who repeatedly took the offensive. Religious prejudice played no part in British policy: it was willing to ally with a variety of sovereignties and systems, from Calvinist republicanism to papal theocracy. As for British or English xenophobia, facile assertions about its uniqueness are meaningless in the absence of comparison with other countries, and have been implicitly disproved by recent research on France. British francophobia was an expression, however crude, of opposition to despotism, religious oppression and extreme social privilege. French anglophobia was at least as virulent, and often more sinister. The real origin of the conflict is that France, by far the most bellicose state in Europe for 250 years, sought to impose a European, and eventually a global, hegemony. As for coalitions, British money made them possible, especially at the end of the period; but all the gold in the City could not create them. It was French aggression that did that.
Culture
IT: The eighteenth century, the century of Enlightenment, was the French century. Its tendency was towards the voluntary unity of European intellectual life in a ‘republic of letters’ extending from Philadelphia to St Petersburg, communicating in French, and aiming at the rational improvement and modernization of society. The British victory over France had a fundamental effect on European culture, going far beyond the substitution of Shakespeare for Racine and the gradual ascendancy of English. The contest, argues Marc Fumaroli, was ‘metaphysical’: would the Enlightenment swing towards the commerce-driven ‘empiricism and utilitarianism of rapacious England’, or the ‘classical, Christian and aristocratic presuppositions’ embodied by France – ‘beauty and truth loved for themselves’?8 Britain laboured to divide Europe politically and intellectually, and prepared the ground for the warring cultures of the age of nationalism. Only now, after two centuries of conflict and fragmentation, is Europe attempting to rebuild and protect its common culture – still against ‘Anglo-Saxon’ invasion.
RT: This surely gives too exclusive an importance to the Anglo-French quarrel. Resistance to French cultural hegemony appeared independently in the ‘Romantic’ rediscovery of native cultures, especially in Germany. As for vulgarizing culture through commerce, British historians such as Roy Porter have proudly pleaded guilty: the Enlightenment came largely from that very source, and it is what made the modern world. The ‘classical, Christian and aristocratic’ French culture was regarded as stuffy and outmoded even at Paris and Versailles.9 I’m happy to agree that something precious was lost when the Old Regime was destroyed. Let’s forget the censorship and persecution, and agree with Talleyrand that ‘those who were not alive around 1780 have not known the pleasure of living’ – an upper-class douceur de vivre of tolerant hedonism and cultivated intelligence rarely equalled in history. But it was Robespierre who wrecked that, not George III. By the way, it is amusing that French intellectuals who condemn ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural predominance today tend to praise that of France in the past.
Politics
IT: British apologists claimed to stand for liberty: it was easy, because true, to point out that they stood for oppression in Ireland and India. One might excuse their opposition to Louis XIV – though he sought no quarrel with Britain – but the culmination of the Franco-British struggle is Britain’s war against the revolution. However one criticizes Jacobin excesses (any worse than those of the English in Ireland and India?), the revolution stood and still stands for a new universal concept of human rights, equality, the end of privilege, and democracy – in short, modern politics. France had the support of leading intellectuals and the most progressive elements in every country – even Britain – and the revolution still remains an inspiration everywhere. The French proclaimed democracy in 1789. Britain, formerly a model for Europe, rallied to king and church. Loyalists smashed Joseph Priestley’s scientific instruments – what a symbol! From 1793 to 1815, Britain fought against the revolution: it became the ally of absolutism, aristocracy, the Spanish inquisition, serfdom, fanatical peasants, the ghetto. Its own domestic politics became increasingly reactionary. It crushed United Irishmen and English radicals with as little compunction as Nelson allowing the massacre of Neapolitan patriots to please Emma Hamilton’s royal cronies. Napoleon gave ordinary soldiers medals and promotion; Wellington flogged his and called them scum. Thanks to Britain, organizer and paymaster of counterrevolution, Europe rebuilt its Bastilles.
RT: British critics of the revolution – Burke and Wordsworth are good examples – were conscious of their own country’s misdeeds (though one might note that oppression in Ireland and India was directly connected with the French threat), and those of the Bourbon monarchy. But they believed the remedy was worse than the disease. Your selective and idealized version of the revolution stresses the rhetoric and overlooks the reality – a trick practised by the revolutionaries themselves, as François Furet observes.10The revolution was not attacked by a reactionary coalition led by Britain: it was a nationalist dictatorship that attacked and subjugated its neighbours. It was a ‘despotic democracy’ that exterminated opposition, as peasants in the Vendée knew. If ‘modern politics’ is to be credited to the revolution, the balance sheet must show not only today’s placid welfare-state democracy, but movements inspired by the mystique of violent revolution, including Communism and Fascism. If Britain found itself the ally of the Inquisition, the French revolution adopted the methods of the Inquisition; if Britain was the ally of serf owners, Napoleon imposed a military serfdom all over Europe. Napoleon indeed gave his soldiers medals, and then led them to the slaughter without turning a hair. Wellington called his scum, but was sparing of their lives and wept after Waterloo. Britain defended the sovereignty of European states, warts and all, against unfettered force; but it used its influence to encourage liberalism and suppress the slave trade. If some of Europe’s thinkers supported the French cause, its people rejected it. Britain’s victory over Napoleon gave them what they most wanted: peace, security, and stability. This really was ‘earth’s best hope’.
The Economy
IT: Britain’s victory was made possible by, and was the instrument of, a predatory, expanding, globalizing capitalism, whose full effects would be seen in the century after Waterloo. This is what British domination most importantly created, the basis, for good or ill, of modern world organization. The ‘Industrial Revolution’, overheated by war, damaged the social fabric and the environment, leaving permanent physical and cultural scars. The French economy, more agricultural, and changing more gradually, did less harm to its own society, and French victory would have enabled more balanced and healthier economic development for the world.
RT: France was no less predatory in the eighteenth century: its leading role in the slave trade shows that. It is true that the struggle with France catalysed the Industrial Revolution, and that French victory would probably have slowed economic, and hence social, change. Some aspects of the Industrial Revolution were damaging – though it introduced the system that gives most human beings their livelihood. And one should not idealize pre-industrial agricultural society, which, as still in many parts of the world, meant unremitting toil, poverty and early death.
Europe
IT: Many historians, both British and French, accept that France, especially after 1789, had a European vision that foreshadowed the European project of today – one reason why the French took a leading role in it from the start. Napoleon removed boundaries, ended discrimination, extended a modern legal code and an administrative system over western Europe – much of which survived him – and abolished archaic and oppressive political units, paving the way for Italian and German unification in the nineteenth century and for integration in the late twentieth. Progressive elites all over Europe welcomed this, and after Waterloo it was these defeated allies of France who spearheaded liberal and democratic movements from Portugal to Poland. Byron mocked Wellington as ‘“saviour of the nations” – not yet saved, and “Europe’s liberator” – still enslaved’. Dominique de Villepin points out that ‘history has vindicated [Napoleon’s] vision of a “great European family” of the future,’ and this is echoed even by a conservative English historian, Andrew Roberts: ‘although Wellington won the battle, it is Napoleon’s dream that is coming true’.11
RT: The analogy with contemporary Europe is not flattering. Napoleon’s Europe was an alliance of self-interested elites who despised popular wishes, silenced opposition, and had no clear purpose other than power, advantage and the aggrandizement of the system that provided them: ‘we would have settled our interests among ourselves without asking the peoples’.12 The liberating rhetoric of the revolution soon became a cloak for conquest and exploitation; besides, ‘No one loves armed missionaries’, as even Robespierre realized. To treat Napoleon’s St Helena propaganda as truth is disingenuous. That some of the European elites served France because it was in their interest is not surprising: every occupier finds collaborators, including idealists. As Paul Schroeder argues, what contribution Napoleon made to Europe’s future was unintended, and negative: he carried power politics to such an intolerable extreme that Europe had to find another form of international relations. This could only happen when he had been overthrown.13 More important to Europe’s future, and the condition of its unprecedented nineteenth-century peace and prosperity, was the agreement among the victors of Waterloo, led by Castlereagh, to maintain peace. The sincerest tribute was paid unwittingly by Napoleon himself: ‘Castlereagh had the Continent at his mercy . . . And he made peace as if he had been defeated. The imbecile!’14
The World
IT: Britain’s defeat of France meant domination of the globe. Britain came to rule 20 per cent of the world’s population, transforming their economic lives and affecting their cultures, and it had a major impact on the other 80 per cent. The most obvious sign is that English became the language of the Empire, and, gradually, the second language of Europe, and hence, the first world language – a process consolidated by the succeeding ascendancy of America. Was this to the world’s benefit? Had France been victorious, it would not have become the great colonial power; indeed, its nineteenth-century imperialism was largely a defensive response to that of Britain. Moreover, because France had not the same economic greed and demographic pressures, its relationship with the indigenous peoples of North America and India was one of coexistence, not displacement or genocide, and this would have been so in the nineteenth century. It might have been a more humane and civilized world.
RT: British global dominance, with all its consequences, happened. We cannot say what would otherwise have happened – though there were certainly worse possibilities, above all global anarchy. Nor can we say what France would have been like had Louis XIV, Louis XV, Robespierre or Napoleon triumphed. Had France defeated Britain, French ideology, society, the economy, and even population growth would have been very different. A victorious France’s conduct in the world is therefore unpredictable – but surely not, on its record, less aggressive or imperialistic. Imagining different outcomes is amusing, but pure fantasy: a ‘French century’, French as the world language, the Code Civil universalized, a ‘Pax Gallicana’ with royal governors or Napoleonic prefects ruling ‘Bengale’ and ‘Nouvelle Zélande’ – culminating, perhaps, in a great Franco-American war in the twentieth century? Such fantasies at least remind us that no outcome was predetermined. Would French victory have meant a more humane and civilized world? Perhaps. But if so – given that France consistently stood for greater centralization, power, regulation and uniformity – also a less free and less creative one.
What we can agree is that 1815 set the course of world history. India was now largely under British domination, providing a base for Asian hegemony. The Spanish and Portuguese empires were in turmoil, and the metropolitan countries would never recover. The United States, having had Washington burnt in 1814 by British troops fresh from the Peninsula, painted the Executive Mansion white to cover the scorch marks and kept out of Europe’s quarrels for 100 years. Britain’s victory came from its ability to call on global resources, mobilizing the world against the Continent, and not until the twentieth century would another Continental power, Germany, attempt to challenge the outcome. Global resources had revolutionized power relations, as the French knew. Napoleon never imagined that he had been defeated on the playing fields of Eton, but he did say that Waterloo had been lost on the plains of Plassey, in India, half a century before. He could conscript and tax Poles, Germans and Italians. But Britain, through the world clearing-house of London, could harness the labours of Bengali peasants, Gujerati weavers, Chinese tea-planters, African slaves, American settlers and Mexican miners. It could profit from the spending of consumers on every continent to finance not only its own ships and regiments, but Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Austrian and German armies too. Perhaps whales will always dominate elephants in the end. Defeat after a century of struggle, concludes François Crouzet, left France ‘a weak, poor, backward, wretched and unhappy country’.15