The author is a former British career diplomat who has been a francophile from birth.
Two historians, one British, one French, Robert and Isabelle Tombs, have produced an admirable account of the last 300 years of Franco-British relations. The title of their work, “That Sweet Enemy” (Pimlico; 780 pages), reflects their assessment that this has been what the British term “a love-hate relationship”. The details of their story do not fully bear that out: at a popular level instances of love have been rare, and dislike has been more common than hatred.
During the first part of the period surveyed the British and French were frequently at war. Since 1815 war between Britain and France has become unthinkable, but a close friendship has failed to develop. The meeting of minds and the loyalty that are necessary for friendship to blossom have proved elusive.
The Tombs’s account suggests at least four distinct phases since 1688 when Frenchmen helped compose the multinational force which evicted the Stuart James II from the English throne, to the benefit of the Protestant William of Orange. The first phase ran to 1815, the second to 1904, and the third to 1956.
Intellectual and cultural relations were intense during the first phase, interspersed though it was by many years of warfare. The fruits of the English and Scottish Enlightenments impressed French intellectuals. British industrial processes were studied and replicated by French visitors. English gardens and English novels became fashionable in France. The British gentry sought to imitate the elegant “art de vivre” of their French counterparts. British tourists flocked to France, and prolonged exposure to French civilisation became part of the education of the British “milord”. The French revolutionaries had a fervent minority following in Britain.
The Tombs characterise the second phase (1815-1904) as one of “coexistence”. Their account of these years conveys an impression of two nations living side by side, but turned away from each other. The British were intent on developing and exploiting their position as the world's leading manufacturer and as a global trading power; the French focussed primarily on Europe, yearning for the leading role in European affairs they had earlier enjoyed, and on the Mediterranean. Yet under Louis-Philippe and Napoleon III political relations between the two countries were generally good - certainly good enough for both of these leaders to find refuge in England when the need arose. Britain and France fought as allies against Russia from 1854 to 1856. Trade flourished. The British established colonies in Pau and elsewhere. British novelists and poets influenced the French Romantic movement.
The third phase (1904-1956) is in many ways the most dramatic. The Entente Cordiale could have opened the way for the blossoming of a warm relationship. Such a partnership never materialised. In 1956-7 the French turned away from the British, disillusioned and disappointed by their perfidious neighbours.
The first years of the Entente went well, the British twice acting loyally to neutralise German attempts to undermine the French position in Morocco. But from 1914 British betrayals (in French eyes) accumulated. At the start of August 1914 the British government hesitated before committing itself to fight alongside France, causing one of the architects of the Entente, Paul Cambon, to experience “the darkest moments” of his life and to ask bitterly whether “the word ‘honour’ should be struck out of the English vocabulary”. In 1916 the British refused to bring forward their Somme offensive to relieve German pressure on Verdun. In 1918 the British tried to modify their wartime agreement to French protectorates in Syria and the Lebanon, arguing that France’s contribution to the defeat of Turkey had been negligible. In 1919 Lloyd George persuaded Clemenceau to drop his insistence on a separate Rhineland state by offering a British guarantee against German aggression, in the confident expectation that the US Congress would provide a pretext to withdraw the offer. In the 20s and early 30s British attempts at conciliating Germany by concessions on reparations and German disarmament seemed in France to be made at French expense. In 1935-6 British public opinion forced the government to renounce the Hoare/Laval pact, depriving France of an opportunity to draw close to Italy as the threat from Hitler’s Germany grew. 1940 was the year of Dunkirk and Mers-el-Kebir, symbols of mutual incomprehension.
Despite these disappointments, French governments under the Fourth Republic continued to look on Britain as France's closest ally. In September 1956 an anglophile French premier, Guy Mollet, revived the proposal the British had made in extremis in June 1940, for a Franco-British union. Two months later, however, the British unwittingly brought this phase of the relationship to an end. Without consulting their French ally, they caved in to a US ultimatum and agreed to a ceasefire in the Suez Canal zone. When Britain's prime minister, Anthony Eden, presented Mollet with this fait accompli, by telephone, Mollet’s foreign minister, Christian Pineau, was with Mollet. He sensed that “for such a convinced partisan of the Franco-British alliance, abandonment in such conditions was a bitter blow”. The West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was also in the room. “Europe”, he comforted Mollet, “will be your revenge”.
And so it has proved. In the fourth phase France has succeeded in forging a special relationship with Germany, based on a shared commitment to European integration. The British were punished for their perfidy by their exclusion from this European enterprise till after de Gaulle’s final retirement. The Franco-British relationship that has evolved since 1973 is one of tepid friendship, wary cooperation and discreet rivalry, punctuated by bitter quarrels. Germany remains France’s privileged partner. Displays of cross-Channel amity have tended to look contrived.
Was such an outcome inevitable? Perhaps. It is tempting to see the difficulties that arose during the third phase of the relationship as symptomatic of underlying incompatibilities and antagonisms.
Between the Wars Britain was still a global power, by instinct averse to Continental commitments. Its strategic priorities were preserving its empire and nurturing its trading and financial relations with the countries formed by the British diaspora. De Gaulle later diagnosed this as a preference for “le grand large”. With this went a long-standing belief that European entanglements should only be contemplated when the balance of power on the Continent was threatened.
Moreover British policy-makers harboured suspicions of French ambitions in Europe well into the 20’s, if not beyond, despite the rise of Germany in the 1860s and the greater intimacy with French leaders ushered in by the Entente. In 1919 the British charge d’affaires in Paris suggested that if the French held the Rhine, “they will have Germany at their throats for all time and, feeling themselves absolute masters of the Continent, they will turn round on us”. These supposed French ambitions were incompatible with the British interest in a Continental balance of power, and they jarred against the League of Nations idealism that coloured much British thinking on international affairs between the Wars. This discouraged giving greater priority to preserving or deepening the relationship than to other factors (as, for instance, Britain did, to the benefit of the US, in 2002-3, when faced with hard choices on Iraq).
After 1945 Britain’s “special relationship” with the US largely supplanted these inter-war reservations as an obstacle to a special partnership with France, as the Suez episode illustrates.
On the French side neither the Entente, nor the shared ordeals of the Great War nor Britain's contribution to the liberation of France in 1944 fully dissipated the resentment that Britain’s eclipse of France on the world stage had caused. De Gaulle was not unique in allowing bitter memories of historic defeats to prejudice him against the British. Within the French elite fear of Germany was probably a more common motive for cultivating British friendship during the third phase than anglophilia.
Though popular feelings need not be a determinant of foreign policy in the short run, it is hard to see how Britain and France, both democracies in the 20th century, could have formed a long-term relationship that was at odds with each nation’s prevailing sense of the other. One of the many merits of the Tombs’s work is that its focus goes well beyond the intergovernmental. Their account of key military and diplomatic developments is interspersed with anecdotes and quotations that shed light on how each nation has tended to view the other. These suggest a prevalence of dislike during most of the last 300 years.
Also among the incompatibilities were differences of outlook on economic principles, although the extent to which these created difficulties for the relationship during the third phase is not fully clear. In the 18th and 19th centuries the British became, for the most part, devotees of capitalism, lightly regulated markets and free trade. The French have long deplored the excesses of capitalism, doubted whether markets are as effective as government direction, and seen virtue in protecting French producers from foreign competition. From these divergent philosophies, a frequent source of bilateral friction in recent decades, have emerged two models that compete for the economic soul of Europe.
The Tombs wisely refrain from speculating about the future course of the relationship. They draw no inferences from the fact that hundreds of thousands of French men and women have found employment in Britain over the last decade, and a still larger number of British have acquired houses in France. It seems improbable that these phenomena will be entirely without consequences for one of the richest and most complex of inter-State relationships. But what these consequences will be, history cautions against hazarding.
