Chalk and cheese

Peter Thorold has not written an orthodox history of French and British political cultural and social relations. He sees them through the eyes of Britons who settled in France or tourists who trod its soil for a brief holiday. French aristocrats who had seen their friends’ and relations’ heads stuck on poles and paraded through the streets of Paris sped to Britain. When the Terror passed, they returned to France and showed little propensity to settle in or revisit a cold climate. Most Britons came to stay.

Why did they come? Some were successful economic migrants. Charles Worth, ‘a native of bucolic Lancashire’, came from a ruined middle-class family. As a couturier, he made a fortune, and Paris was the fashion capital of Europe for women’s clothes. Others came because they were in trouble at home. After 1814, a collection of bankrupts descended on Dieppe and Calais in order to avoid prosecution in Britain. They included Beau Brummell, bereft of the patronage of the Prince Regent. In 1838 he was to die in Caen, a penniless ghost of his former self. After the scandal of his trial and imprisonment, Oscar Wilde was a social outcast. Released from Reading Gaol he made for France, where his rowdy parties drew the attention of the French police. After his abdication as King it was impossible for the Duke of Windsor and his deplorable, vulgar Duchess to remain in England. They made for France, where they were notable members of the smart set.

But the majority of Britons who settled in France were not escaping troubles at home. It was more that France offered attractions that England could not match: cheap living and a warm climate, where invalids could recover from diseases like TB, now curable by drugs. The Whig Lord Chancellor, Henry Brougham, brought his invalid daughter to Cannes, buying land at three times the current value to build a chateau. He returned every winter until his death in 1868. The first exclusively British colony was that of Pau, which Thorold examines in some detail. By the 1840s it had become ‘la ville anglaise . . . Victorian England transplanted to the foot of the Pyrenees’ by those ‘dissatisfied with the damp, dark English climate and stiff, dull English society’. They began the long process by which British exported manly sports, including rugby and football, to France. It was at Pau that, in 1866, the first golf course on the Continent was laid out. Unlike the bankrupts of Dieppe, whose attempts to set up a pack of hounds met the fierce opposition of the local peasants, fox-hunters prospered at Pau, where the well-heeled British colony could afford to pay the peasants for damage to their crops.

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