Chalk and cheese

In the 18th century British aristocrats on the Grand Tour en route for Italy stopped over in Paris. But it was an elite tourism, and travel was uncomfortable and expensive. What Thorold calls a transport revolution came with the railways in the 1840s and 1850s. Thomas Cook’s guided tours inaugurated tourism as we understand it. It was not merely a quantative shift. Surtees’ hero, Mr Jorrocks, the cockney grocer, took his family to Paris. Ruskin hated trains: ‘All travelling’, he wrote, ‘becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity’. A second revolution, the coming of the motor car in the late 19th century, allowed the intelligent tourist to visit and settle in la France profonde, where Thorold has a house. Rudyard Kipling was a Francophile and a dedicated motorist.

By the end of the 20th century centres of British residents flourished from the Mediterranean coast to Deauville, with its sea-bathing, casino and race course. In the 1930s there were H. G. Wells at Grasse, Somerset Maugham on Cap Ferrat, P. G. Wodehouse at Le Touquet. What never ceases to astonish me is the number of prominent politicians who bought houses in France (Lord Salisbury even bought two) or spent their holidays there, as did both Asquith and Lloyd George.

It was at the height of the British cultural invasion of France that Mary Waddington, the intelligent American wife of the French ambassador to London, concluded that ‘there are no two nations as unalike as the French and the British’. J. S. Mill, the English liberal political scientist, correspondent of de Tocqueville and Auguste Comte, intended to settle in France but died in 1873 before he could do so. He detected a fault-line in the intellectual entente cordiale: the French rejected any institution that was not based on first principles, while the British were pragmatists. Move forward to the Belle Epoque of the end of the 19th century when France was the artistic and sexual capital of Europe. Compare Toulouse Lautrec’s picture of a British top-hatted milord in conversation with two chorus girls of the brilliantly lit Moulin Rouge with Walter Sickert’s sober studies of the English music-hall. They are worlds apart.

Thorold’s learned, lively and eminently readable book deals with those who set foot in France. Hence his concern for those like P. G. Wodehouse and others who failed to escape the lightning advance of the German armies in 1940. Some five million British soldiers fought in the terrible bloody battles of the first world war. Rudyard Kipling, whose son was killed at the Battle of Loos, reflected that ‘the two races had been utterly wearied of each other’s socially enforced society’ through four years of war and that there were ‘a thousand points of friction and disagreement’. These disagreements did not vanish. They may help to explain why the President of France today is an exhibitionist and our Prime Minister a charmless Presbyterian.

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