It is a fair bet that anyone visiting this website has had occasion to give more than a passing thought to Franco-British relations and how it is that, while many of us get on well together, others on both sides regard one another with suspicion, distrust or even downright hostility. The Tombs are particularly – perhaps even uniquely – qualified to analyse these matters. He is English, she French, both are historians, both have studied in both countries and both have dual French and English nationality.Their researches into the origins and causes of what seems to have become a love-hate relationship have been exhaustive. The result is a massive work – what might be called a veritable Tombs’ tome of a book – in which over three centuries of European history are examined for every occasion which added a reason or a nuance to the accumulating funds of either mutual respect or recrimination. The story starts with Louis XIV on the throne of France and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in Britain. Though the French had provided a place of exile for the Stuarts during the Commonwealth, the countries were destined to carry out a succession of on and off wars until the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The Tombs show how the hostilities built up over this period provided a foundation for prejudice and stereotyping on both sides that linger to the present day. This despite the fact that Britain and France have not fought one another since 1815 and, indeed, have fought alongside one another in two world wars.
The negative aspect of each foreign stereotype tends to be the other side of the coin of domestic self-image. Thus while the British saw themselves as a people of merchant princes, bringing the fruits of travel and exploration to the markets of Europe, in the French view they were obsessed with trade and profit – ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ in Napoleon’s contemptuous phrase. France saw itself as a centre of culture, in which philosophy and the social arts were highly regarded. As the heirs of previous civilisations, the French were, in their own view, a modern Rome, contrasted with the barbaric and materialistic Carthage represented by Britain. Across the Channel, these pretensions were dismissed as ‘the follies, vices and fopperies of that vain superficial people’.
It is hardly surprising that the period from the 17th century to the present day (the last quotation is as recent as 2006) provides a mass of material, even when it is viewed through the relatively narrow focus of cross-Channel relations. This creates a problem of structure. The Tombs’ solution is to divide their book into four main sections: Struggle covering 1688-1815; Co-existence 1816-1904; Survival 1904-1945; and Revival 1945 to the present. That this does not entirely work is the result of further dividing up these sections into chapters on different aspects of the relationship – political, cultural and so on – each of which has its own timescale. One effect of this is that, having reached the end of one examination, one finds oneself abruptly catapulted back in time to examine another aspect which does not exactly parallel the timescales of the ones before or after: rather disorienting for the reader.
Moreover, these dislocations are further confused by the insertion of shorter passages about a point of detail that the Tombs find interesting, symptomatic or simply appealing to their sense of humour. These passages are distinguished from the main text by being contained within rules top and bottom and by changes of type-size and style, but they are dropped into the middle of chapters in a strangely arbitrary way that does nothing to help the overall coherence of the book. On the other hand, given the space to take a sequence of events at a run, the Tombs’ mastery of succinct narrative is impressive. Thus the conduct of the First World War is recounted in little more than 30 pages but with greater clarity than in many much longer versions.
One of the many pleasures of this very readable book comes in the vast number of carefully selected contemporary quotations that illustrate the attitudes of the times. Because there are so many of these, their derivations cannot be accommodated on the page but are all together at the end, which makes for inconvenience (and possible cramp of the finger keeping the place), since speakers are not always identified in the text. However, this is a work of scholarship and one should not cavil at the thoroughness of the research required, especially when it unearths such curious facts as the reason why the Barnsley Miners’ Club is the world’s largest consumer of Benedictine.
The attitude of the authors to the ongoing love-hate relationship is one of sad resignation, typified by this passage:
‘The year 2004 combined the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day and the centenary of the entente cordiale. On both sides, ceremonies great and small proclaimed friendship and recalled what the two countries had survived together. Yet an opinion poll showed that among the words the French most commonly chose to describe the British were isolated, insular and selfish. The British, though somewhat less negative, commonly described the French as untrustworthy or treacherous and nearly one in three considered them cowardly – doubtless a distorted echo of 1940. How sad that when our two peoples want to feel proud of themselves they need to slight each other.’
Given that sentiment and the razor-sharp way in which the Tombs identify such prejudices and expose both their causes and their partial or total lack of justification, one aspect of this book seems particularly odd. This is the unusual way in which each of the four sections is capped with Conclusions & Disagreements. In these concise parts, the conclusions are those drawn jointly by the authors and the disagreements are their individual interpretations. Here we find both of them largely reviving some of the myths and prejudiced views that they have appeared to have exploded together in the foregoing text. As the Tombs themselves might comment, how sad.
Published in paperback by Pimlico 780pp ISBN 978-1-84951-08-5 £14.99
