The Goddams and the snail-eaters

A French journalist writing in 1999 was succinct: ‘The English hate the French. Who reciprocate … A purée of prejudice on a bed of inherited loathing. The French consider the English to be arrogant islanders, eating boiled lamb with mint, and not knowing how to be seductive. The English consider us talkative, arrogant, dirty, smelling of sweat and garlic, flighty, cheating and corrupt.’ ‘Inherited’ may be the most telling word in that outburst, and it is Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ keynote in this magisterial study of the on-going love-hate relationship between the British and the French over three centuries.

The relationship, as they point out, is unique: it has lasted longer than that between any other European or American nations; and it has affected not only the countries’ political systems, but their economies, their cultures and, not least, their views of themselves as well as of each other. It created the ideas of France and Britain as nations, as each country defined itself by what it was not. Further afield the struggle — and, later, the alliance — between the two countries shaped large swathes of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

When the French and the British first confronted each other France, under Louis XIV, had a population of 20 million. The Three Kingdoms had 8 million; its revenues were 20 per cent of those of France, its army a quarter that of Sweden. After 1660 its monarchy was financially dependent on France and it seemed logical that, united as the countries were by their shared enmity with the Dutch, these islands should become a small satellite orbiting the glory that was France. Instead, the ‘second Hundred Years’ War’ began, to last until 1815: six wars between France and Britain that reduced France to an economic basket-case, while the Three Kingdoms became the United Kingdom and the world’s first global power.