Professor John Keiger is the former research director of the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. He is the author of France and the Origins of the First World War.
In his broadcast to the nation ten days ago, president Macron tub-thumped his war campaign on coronavirus. Six times he repeated the word ‘war’. Yesterday, he visited the front: Mulhouse in Alsace, on the Franco-German border, where France’s largest virus cluster is overwhelming the region’s hospitals. Live TV saw him, masked up, in an army field
In France there is a palpable sense of administrative and political panic in how to deal with the coronavirus epidemic. As I write from Perpignan on the French-Spanish border on the morning of 24 March, France has 19,856 coronavirus cases and 860 deaths; Britain 6,650 and 335. After Italy and Spain, France is the third worst affected
The European project was built on the idea of rendering future war among European states impossible. The EU is programmed to avoid armed conflict among its member states, a situation that would blatantly undermine its very essence. But who could have predicted that an epidemic would shake its foundations. In the space of a couple
‘At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words to silence.’ Albert Camus, The
The glaring difference between the EU and British negotiating goals has been brought into plain sight. In readiness for the upcoming Barnier-Frost negotiations, the French senate produced for the French government a set of requirements that Michel Barnier should work to in the negotiations. Those recommendations, which it published on 6 March, are extremely hardline.
Looming behind the Frost-Barnier negotiations is a battle between London and Paris as financial centres. After the June 2016 referendum, the French failed miserably to seduce City institutions away from the UK. There was no exodus from London, and of those few relocations to the continent, most avoided Paris, preferring to scatter widely from Dublin
‘I’d rather have lucky generals than good ones’, Napoleon – or Eisenhower – was supposed to have said, ‘they win battles’. Emmanuel Macron is a good general, but not a lucky one. Since he stood for the presidential election in May 2017, he has demonstrated strategic ability in identifying the reforms France needs to modernise its
What would Disraeli make of Brexit? His advice to ‘read no history; nothing but biography, for that is life without theory’ is a useful starting point. Brexit has been – and continues to be – a hotch-potch of biographies where human weaknesses, strengths and foibles chafe and collide. The upcoming clash between the EU’s chief
In the excitement/misery of leaving the EU at the end of January many overlooked a touching note written by President Emmanuel Macron to the British people. It was a ‘love letter’ of sorts, a mixture of déclaration d’amour and regretful confession, which bore all the hallmarks of a note from the jilted to the jilter,
Since Boris gained his 80-strong majority in the Commons, a chasm has opened up between what the French reckoned they would be able to extract from Britain in the post-Brexit EU negotiations and what Emmanuel Macron will now prioritise. A number of other events have also chastened the French (and Brussels) beyond the election result,
Winston Churchill’s comment about France has lost none of its piquancy. Churchill famously said of the difference between Britain, France and Germany: ‘In England, everything is permitted except what is forbidden. In Germany, everything is forbidden except what is permitted. In France, everything is allowed, even what is prohibited.’ France’s debilitating national transport strike, now
Emmanuel Macron’s 2020 ‘to do’ list is nothing if not challenging. Starting with the domestic it offers no respite in its international agenda. Nation-wide transport strikes opposed to the President’s root and branch pension reform have been paralysing France for 23 days, now longer than the legendary 1995 strike that forced President Chirac to withdraw
Boris Johnson’s big election win means the Tories have taken back control of Parliament. The PM’s majority ensures that he can deliver on Brexit and also push through his party’s agenda for government. One of the more eye-catching policies planned is a shake-up of Whitehall and the British civil service. Without a radical change, policy implementation
What will happen if Jeremy Corbyn wins? Will it be a nightmare on Downing Street, as Liam Halligan suggests in this week’s Spectator? Or might Corbyn not be as bad as his critics fear? Helpfully, France provides a useful parallel of what prime minister Jeremy Corbyn might mean for Britain. And it doesn’t make happy
If Boris Johnson wins a clear majority on 12 December, it could mark a big turning point in British history. The brakes will be off for the United Kingdom to formally leave the European Union by 31 January 2020. Then the new Tory government will decide how radical its future relationship with the European Union
This week is seminal for Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. Boris, in Watford, is hosting one of the most important Nato summits for years. Its significance is not because it marks the Alliance’s 70th anniversary, but because of President Macron’s ‘disruptive’ and trenchant criticism of the Atlantic Alliance as close to ‘brain dead’, which has touched
What was Emmanuel Macron playing at when he threatened to veto a second EU Brexit extension in October? Few would contest he was attempting to pressure British MPs to vote through Boris Johnson’s newly negotiated withdrawal agreement. He failed. But it’s also worth asking another question: why did Macron stick his neck out for Boris Johnson, a
Armistice day this year marks one hundred and one years since the guns were silenced on the western front. Four years of commemorations of the ‘seminal catastrophe’ of modern times, the calamity from which other calamities sprang, has also meant a wave of ‘new’ accounts of varying quality, none more so than for the causes
The death today of the Fifth Republic’s fifth president, at the age of 86, is also the passing of its most romanesque character. Tall and debonair, Jacques Chirac’s charms worked their magic with the ladies at a higher rate than even the standard operating procedure for most French presidents. Chirac’s social and political ascension bears the
‘France has a German policy, she has no other’, remarked the seasoned observer of international affairs and future editor of Le Monde André Fontaine in 1952. With a British withdrawal from the EU she is again confronted by an old demon dating from 1871 : management of a dominant Germany on the continent of Europe.
