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

Much of what readers may think they know about the Anglo-French relationship turns out to be wrong. English food, for example, has not perennially been considered a disaster by the French. In the eighteenth century, English country-house food was often considered as good as what the French ate, and French verdicts on English food were much more mixed than they would later become. There are even signs of English influence on French cuisine. What no less an authority than Roland Barthes has described as "the alimentary sign of Frenchness," le steack-frites, was brought to Paris by Wellington's victorious army. "French fries" could in fact be called "freedom fries" without committing violence to the historical record. The founder of modern Parisian couture, who also popularized the term "chic" and was largely responsible for the establishment of Paris as the center of the world's fashion industry, was Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman. The United Kingdom was less repressed and France was less sexually tolerant than people in both countries have assumed. Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine fled to London when their sexual relationship along with their political views made it advisable to decamp from Paris; Rimbaud, for one, thought that British debauchery made Paris look provincial. Before the French Revolution, the French were astonished by the egalitarianism of British life; one bemused French observer wrote about frequently seeing "milords" and "artisans" amiably chatting about politics at tavern tables.

The two countries have also had an immense influence on each other. It was in the face of French power that the United Kingdom introduced the system of funded national debt known as Dutch finance in the late seventeenth century and forged a durable consensus around the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Similarly, the French have the British to thank for their revolution; the fiscal crisis that forced Louis XVI to convene the States-General in 1789 was due to French participation in the American Revolution. The popularity today of deconstructionism and other fancy forms of French thought is only the latest episode in the long-running flow of ideas over the English Channel. Voltaire brought the ideas of the British Enlightenment to France, and French politicians and financiers continually looked to the United Kingdom for inspiration. Meanwhile, generations of British writers and artists found Paris to be their muse. Matthew Arnold was proudly Francophile, and novelists and poets such as George Eliot and William Butler Yeats were profoundly influenced by French literature. When Virginia Woolf famously wrote that "On or about December 1910 human character changed," she was referring to the effects of the opening of a show of postimpressionist French art in London arranged by the British painter Roger Fry. (The Tombses cannot resist marveling at the "odd mixture of cosmopolitanism and insularity" behind this remark.)

National stereotypes loom large in the book -- and in the minds of the citizens of both countries. For centuries, the French have tended to see the United Kingdom as "culturally detached, eccentric, unpolished and therefore the origin of the new and unusual -- often amusing, always disturbing." For an equally long period, the British have seen the French as "highly civilized, the hallmark of sophisticated taste and manners whether in dress, food or art." The French have long felt that Englishmen do not like women, are bored or frightened in their presence, and turn to drink as a substitute for female company. They suspect that the custom of educating British boys in single-sex public schools has something to do with this and find a certain sadism in various aspects of British life (boxing, fox hunting, and, in past centuries, cock fighting) that hints at darker vices. The British have felt that Frenchmen like women too much, or in the wrong way, and believe that the French are constantly involved in extramarital affairs. The Englishman is a boor, the Frenchman a fop. Since the eighteenth century, the British have traveled to France for pleasure, and the French have come to the United Kingdom to learn or make money. This pattern persists today: the French are coming to London in record numbers to study and start careers, and the British are buying ever more second homes in the French countryside. The antagonism between the two countries has also persisted, although today poll results indicate that the French dislike the British more than the latter do the former.

The durability of these stereotypes and these neighbors' persistent dislike for each other should discourage globalization enthusiasts who believe that closer communication will lead to better global understanding and harmony. The French and the British have been in more or less instantaneous communication since the first cable and telegraph wire connected Paris and London in 1850. It does not seem to have helped.