In January a government document was discovered in the National Archives that,
according to The Guardian, “shocked historians”. This was the note, dated
September 28, 1956, of a meeting in London between the British prime
minister, the Conservative and Francophile Anthony Eden, and his French
equivalent, the Socialist and Anglophile Guy Mollet — one of those rare
encounters when two premiers spoke each other’s language both fluently and
willingly.
Their more important business was to prepare the correct duplicities to
justify the Anglo-French invasion of Suez. However, at this rare moment of
concord, Mollet suggested that the two countries unite; or, if not that,
then at least France join the Commonwealth.
The reaction on both sides of the Channel to this rediscovered story is more
interesting than the story itself. The British treated it as a joky what-if,
speculating on amalgamated football teams and the possibly improved quality
of croissants in British shops. The French reacted with a sober downplaying:
Mollet’s proposal seems to have been made on the spur of the moment and is
not corroborated by any known French government archive. But some were
outraged. “If this had been suggested more recently,” said a Sorbonne
professor of contemporary history, “Mollet might have found himself in
court.”
If the French were more sensitive it was not just because Mollet had been the
supplicant, but because his approach tapped into a sempiternal French
response to Albion. Since Britain first challenged French power more than
three centuries ago the two countries have, despite occasional challenges,
been the two pre-eminent European powers, fighting for control of their own
territory — the continental mainland — and the known world beyond.
Each has been suspicious of the other to the point of paranoia, irritated to
the point of contempt, superior to the point of smugness. Yet there is one
sure dividing line between the countries.
When the British are doing badly, they very very rarely, if ever, look to
France: their models of improvement are more likely to be Germany or the
United States. When things go badly for France, they look across the Channel
and wonder, with a mixture of embarrassment and queasiness, if it isn’t time
to follow the British model; if the cold shower of economic liberalism must
finally be endured to wash off a few layers of protectionism, inertia and
top-heavy bureaucracy.
After a 30-year period from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, during which
France was ahead of Britain in all the fields where statistics and
indicators can be relied upon — so leaving out factors such as happiness and
cultural achievement — France currently feels itself to be behind, a verdict
the British are never eager to correct.
I was recently having dinner in Paris with a retired French businessman who
was bemoaning the state of his country: “What we need is five years of
Thatcher followed by five years of Blair.” My instinctive response was,
“Then you would have invaded the Falklands as well as Iraq,” to which he
replied gloomily, “Well, at least you won in the Falklands.”
But I should have said, “Well, now you have both on offer.” In today’s
presidential election the likely run-off will be between Nicolas Sarkozy, a
hardline Thatcherite deregulator, and Ségolène Royal, whose leftist campaign
began in a manner entirely reminiscent of Blair’s in 1997: media-savvy,
youth-flattering, policy-lite.
The mood in France at the moment is certainly depressed. Why are we doing so
badly, a visiting writer is frequently asked; even the less loaded question,
“Why is British literature currently stronger than French?”, manages to
imply that this too could be fixed if France finally acknowledged Adam
Smith.
Not that Sarkozy and Royal are the only two French models on display. Until
the Socialists sorted themselves out it seemed that Sarkozy’s more immediate
challenger might be the incumbent prime minister Dominique de Villepin, “a
decorative, aristocratic-sounding career diplomat with political ambitions
and Napoleonic nostalgia”. For de Villepin the sacrifice of Napoleon’s
imperial guard at Waterloo inspired the “spirit of resistance” embodied by
Charles de Gaulle and still nourishes “the French dream”. This is of “an
authoritative state, contempt for parties and compromise, a shared taste for
action, obsession with . . . the grandeur of France . . . refusal to bow to
the inevitable, and dignity in defeat”.
Then there is President Jacques Chirac. His Elysian manner, to this English
eye, is approaching that of de Gaulle, whose televised press conferences 40
years ago resembled less events in the modern world than court announcements
from a ruling Bourbon. Chirac, for his part, represents two aspects of
French power the British find least appealing: the whiff of corruption and
the unearned hauteur.
Over the course of centuries, the French and the British have found many
distracting differences to complain about in one another: French personal
hygiene, British froideur, French frivolity, British joylessness. Britain
was seen as Carthage, a place of boundless materialism, France as Babylon, a
place of insatiable pleasure.
Beyond and beneath all this the fundamental character traits each nation
deplores in the other are the same: arrogance, cruelty and a desire for
dominance; selfishness, duplicity and hypocrisy; cowardice and betrayal.
Did the British hold the key German attack on the Somme in the spring of 1918
and then make the thrust that ended the war? Or did they collapse in
shameful panic and have to be rescued by French reinforcements? Was Dunkirk
an example of British heroism? Or was it a further demonstration of the
traditional British willingness to fight to the last Frenchman and then
decamp?
Queen Victoria thought the French “incurable as a nation though so charming as
individuals”. Part of their incurability expressed itself in political
instability. Every century or so a new wave of exiles would arrive from the
Channel ports. The traffic in the opposite direction was far more meagre.
The French sought refuge for political reasons, the British to escape
scandal: for the upper-class bankrupt, bigamist, cardsharp or homosexual,
France was the place to go and continue their disapproved of ways.
Most French came to Britain to make money; most British went to France to
spend it. This has been the pattern since the 18th century and it still
holds at a time when there are more French working in Britain than
vice-versa.
The French come to enjoy deregulation and lower taxation: the British go in
search of a bucolic fantasy that is sometimes still attainable and to escape
certain specific aspects of modern Britain. I recently met an English couple
in the Pyrenees who gave as their main reason for exiling themselves as
“congestion”. Not of the heart, but of the traffic.
For the French, money was what we were always after. Money, trade, ships,
empire, more money. Whereas French expansion, whether royalist, Napoleonic
or republican, was part of a civilising mission. The British naturally
judged their own civilising mission as the more civilised and the benefits
of Napoleonic conquest a mere exchange of servitudes.
Napoleon’s dream of an open, French-dominated Europe haunted the British
unconscious and was not entirely forgotten by the time the Common
Market/European Economic Community/European Union came along. Many Britons
regard its operation as the palest possible version of a democratic system
driven by the French and run by an unelected commission.
A British Euro joke tells of a meeting of officials from various countries who
listen to a British proposal, nodding sagely at its numerous benefits; the
French delegate stays silent until the end, then taps his pencil and
remarks, “I can see that it will work in practice, but will it work in
theory?”
But de Gaulle was probably right to deny the British entry to Europe, however
personal his motive. They always carried too much baggage — in Commonwealth
and Anglo-Saxon ties — and had a radically different view of Europe. What de
Gaulle most feared — that the EU would become merely a free-market zone — is
precisely what the British have always deemed its main advantage; the true
F-word in their vocabulary is federalism.
Our joint history is a looped tape of mistrust, grudging admiration, overt and
covert rivalry.
Not that harmony is to be wholly wished for. A national friendship needs an
edge of occasional incomprehension and surprise.
One diplomatic drama I would have enjoyed witnessing occurred during an
official visit to Britain by de Gaulle. The regular assassination attempts
on the former French president meant he always travelled with a bag of his
own blood in case a transfusion was required. When he arrived at Harold
Macmillan’s house in Sussex his entourage handed the blood to Macmillan’s
cook and instructed her to put it in her fridge. She declined, with the
enduringly English explanation: “It’s full of haddock.”
A longer version of this article appeared in The New York Review of Books
