Entente Infernale: How 300 Years of Anglo-French Rivalry Shaped the World

Why read a long book on Anglo-French relations? Whatever the United Kingdom and France may have been in the past, they are secondary powers today -- character actors rather than protagonists on the stage of world history. And good arguments can be made that even the limited prominence in world affairs that the two countries currently enjoy is transient. The failure of the European Union to thus far develop an effective single foreign policy gives Paris and London and their relationship more prominence than they will have when (or if) the Europeans begin to speak with one voice. With the Soviets gone, the Europeans disunited, and China and India still at a relatively early point on the road to world power, the United Kingdom and France today look more important than they really are and are likely to be in the future.

So is the writing and the reading of That Sweet Enemy, however delicious and well researched the book is, more of an indulgence than a serious project? Instead of reading about foppishly Anglophile eighteenth-century French aristocrats or about bad nineteenth-century English cuisine, should we not be reading about coal production in China, labor-market reforms in India, and bureaucratic progress, or the lack of it, in Brussels today?

The answer is no. While it is true that the long-term absolute decline of both the United Kingdom and France as world powers is unlikely to end, their past still shapes the world today. The Anglo-French relationship -- or, more fully, the relationship between France and the leading Anglophone powers of the last three centuries -- remains an essential subject for the serious student of world affairs. During those three centuries, the Anglophones, or, as the French still say, the Anglo-Saxon powers, have built successive global hegemonies based on the principles of economic liberalism. France unsuccessfully vied for global power against the British from the accession of William III to the English throne, in 1689, to Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo, in 1815. Since then, the French have sought to defend their interests, identity, culture, and economic values in an Anglo-Saxon world of economic liberalism and accelerating globalization.

The interplay between these two societies has done more to shape the geopolitics, economics, and culture of the world today than the relationship between any other two societies on the face of the earth. It is not just that the United States is presently managing (or mismanaging) a world order closely related to the one that the British built during the so-called Second Hundred Years War with France, from 1688 to 1815. It is not just that the proponents of anti-Americanism and antiliberalism today still employ a vocabulary and a set of ideas first developed by the French opponents of Anglo-Saxon power centuries ago. It is that the two forces that continue to dominate the world -- the expansion of an international political and economic order based on the power of the English-speaking world and the complex processes of adaptation, imitation, resistance, and cooperation through which the rest of the world seeks to cope with and profit from that order -- are so deeply rooted in the Anglo-French dynamic. Understanding the history of that dynamic provides a deep understanding of contemporary world politics.

Ideally, this book should be read along with The American Enemy, Philippe Roger's striking history of over two centuries of anti-American discourse in France. As the Tombses point out, Anglophobia and anti-Americanism are deeply linked, nowhere more so than in France. This is not simply a matter of "WASPophobia," an excessive fear of the Anglo-Saxon world; the whole complicated mix of French attitudes toward the Anglo-Saxon world has long focused on the elements that unite British and U.S. politics, culture, and international ambitions. The Tombses do touch on how the French criticize the United States today using some of the same categories and ideas they developed during their competition with the United Kingdom. But a more systematic account of the relationship between French Anglophobia and anti-Americanism remains unexplored. Between them, That Sweet Enemy and The American Enemy outline an important book that has not yet been written: a thorough examination of the French response throughout history to the developing Anglo-Saxon world order. Such a book would look at the simultaneous currents of WASPophobia and WASPophilia that ran through France; at the ways in which French economic, political, and cultural developments were shaped by the need to keep up with the Joneses in the Anglophone world; and at how the French made a relatively comfortable adjustment to a world that so signally disappointed their hopes.

The Tombses would be well qualified to take on this project: he is a well-known British historian; she is French by birth and holds degrees from both British and French universities. They are married and hold dual British and French citizenship. Between them, they combine a rare breadth and depth of historical knowledge with an even rarer ability to find and select the telling anecdote or illustration that illuminates a key point. But until they broaden their focus from the couple infernal of John Bull and Marianne to a ménage à trois that includes Uncle Sam, That Sweet Enemy will have to suffice as an extraordinary introduction to the foundations of the world in which we live.

CHUNNEL VISION