By Stuart Jeffries (THE GUARDIAN, 25/03/06):
Even before we get down to talking about the always intense and troubled relationship between the British and the French, the Cambridge history don Robert Tombs manages to have a run-in with the French waiter. "How would you like your lamb?" "Rare, please," says Tombs. There is a pause while the waiter digests the gastronomic barbarism of these words. "You should not have lamb rare, because it upsets the stomach," says the waiter. "But I have a strong stomach," says Tombs, slightly abashed. The waiter doesn't give a Gallic shrug, but makes a moue that eloquently expresses just what he thinks about that. It isn't Napoleon v Wellington or Churchill v De Gaulle, but it does seem to incarnate an ancient culture clash. He retreats, making notes.
The waiter doesn't know who he's dealing with. Robert Tombs is a specialist in French history, a self-confessed francophile who, with his French wife, Isabelle, also a historian, has just written a book called That Sweet Enemy: the French and the British from the Sun King to the Present. At a time when books that cunningly exploit that cross-Channel loathing - such as José-Alain Fralon's new Help, the English Are Invading Us! (Au Secours, les Anglais Nous Envahissent!) and A Year in the Merde and Merde Actually by Stephen Clarke - are proving lucrative, That Sweet Enemy sets the frogs v rosbifs rumpus in its historical context.
The book is published in the same week that Jacques Chirac walked out of an EU summit because a fellow Frenchman chose to address the meeting in English, arguing it was the European language of business. That meeting was ostensibly about European cooperation. But the point remains: there is nothing so galling to a Frenchman as to suggest that those mucky rosbifs across the Channel and their ugly language might have the upper hand.
The Tombses' tome (816pp) fills a gap in the literature, tracing a relationship of continual misapprehension and occasional affection. It's entertaining, but doesn't tell the whole story. How could it? There are more centuries of Franco-British hatred than a single volume can reasonably cover. As a result, That Sweet Enemy doesn't relate how the Normans put an arrow in the eye of the English king in 1066, how English archers taunted the French with their two-fingered salute at Crécy in 1346, how England beat the French at Agincourt in 1415 and how a few years later Joan of Arc sought to "bouter les anglais hors de France".
Why did the Tombses decide to exclude such juicy incidents from their book? "We didn't write about the Norman conquest or the hundred years war because the book would have been too large," says Robert. "And also those periods are finished. We're essentially writing about a period that hasn't finished." Isabelle adds: "We also thought this is the period in which Anglo-French relations shaped the world."
The book ends on the poisonously poignant moment when the French voted down the EU constitution on the grounds that it was too Anglo-Saxon. You can almost hear the couple savouring the irony when they write: "Supporters of the constitution pointed out that the offending phrases had been in all past European treaties. In vain: much of the French electorate, at least by implication, now rejected the very basis of the original Common Market."
There is a great deal about food in the book. For instance, the great French penseur Roland Barthes contended that steak-frites was "the alimentary sign of Frenchness", but the Tombses write that, in fact, this national dish was imported by Wellington's army. "The same is true of cognac," says Isabelle. "It isn't French at all. Well, it is now, in fact it's more French than French - it's a symbol. But actually it was you who invented it." "Well, the Irish Jacobites," says Robert.
"And your late granny," Robert says to Isabelle, "gave us a cookbook called Cuisine et Vins de France which listed a Frenchman's favourite dinner which includes leg of lamb, which is quintessentially English really. And smoked salmon, which isn't French. Their favourite drink is whisky! I think we've had a lot of influence on French eating habits without realising it." That is the book's grand theme: in Kipling's words, approvingly quoted towards the end, the task of each nation has been "to mould the other's fate as he wrought his own".
The waiter's reproof has not been forgotten. "I like my lamb rare," Robert says, still disconcerted. It is wonderful, I suggest to the couple, who are sitting across the table from me at La Poule au Pot in London's Belgravia, how rude the British can be about the French, but even more amazing how the French, without even trying, manage to get under the skin of the British. To demonstrate the former, I show them British newspaper cuttings assailing greedy French farmers.
'The Sun is always bashing the frogs," says Isabelle. "In a sense the bashing of the British is more serious in France." There is great resentment of the Anglo-Saxons, which includes Americans. "Various polls suggest that the French hate the British more than vice versa," adds Robert. "There was a programme on TV5, subsidised by the French government, which was called Tous Fichés [File on Everybody] about how observed we are when we use credit cards and send emails. And who is holding the file? Well of course it's you with the Americans - every movement they make is spied on by the Anglo-Saxon. It's perfidious Albion again!" That is the other great theme of the book: how the English are, in Isabelle's words, "cold, calculating, snake-like".
The Tombses met "many years ago" in Paris. Now Isabelle works for the Foreign Office in London, teaching diplomats French, while he teaches at St John's College, Cambridge.
Isabelle was not able to co-write the last two chapters of the book because the material is too sensitive for an FO employee. This is a shame, because they cover gripping material. Especially the Iraq war. I ask the couple which country behaved worse during the debacle. Robert diplomatically fields the question. "I think British policy was reckless and French policy was contemptible," he says. "As historians, what we are doing is tracing why particular actions are part of a particular mindset. So I think French actions in Iraq were probably corrupt but also very much determined by a whole French view of their role in the world. And the British seem to me to be very much the same, whatever you say about Blair and errors and dossiers. In the end Britain comes down on the side of America as usual." And this is what happened over Iraq? "Yes, but I'm not sure that the British know what they're doing. You can see these incredible consistencies of policy over generations, as if they're sleepwalking without quite realising that they're following a tradition."
What are the prospects for these two feuding nations? Are they doomed to become the minnow and the flea? Isabelle fears so, unless they get into bed together. But surely that won't happen? "It could be that the Iraq war has weakened the British relationship with America," says Robert, "and it could be that the realisation that Europe is not going to be a French empire has made the French less sure of Europe. So there's a certain logic that the two should go together. It's a possibility."
Perhaps like Isabelle and Robert, France and Britain may arrive at some mutually rewarding embrace. It is, after all, a thin line between love and hate. But, given the history of hostility recorded in That Sweet Enemy, such an intimate alliance seems unlikely.
Tête à tête
In 2004, the British and the French celebrated the 100th anniversary of the entente cordiale. When the party was over, we went back to doing what we do best - hating each other. Some recent examples:
· Last February about 100 people in the Breton village of Bourbriac burned estate agents' brochures in protest against rosbifs driving up property prices. It was described as the first serious French demonstration against British "colonisation".
· "We can't trust people who have such bad food," President Jacques Chirac reportedly scoffed to his German and Russian counterparts on July 3 last year. Britain's only contribution to European agriculture was mad cow disease, he said. The Sun's headline: Don't talk crepe, Jacques.
· Three days later, Lord Coe and Tony Blair won the Olympics for Britain, beating the favourite, Paris. One theory is that Chirac's remarks about food made the difference.
· "Not only have you stolen 'our' Olympic Games, you are also shamelessly occupying our towns and countryside," complains José-Alain Fralon, in his new book Help, the English Are Invading Us.
· Earlier this month, the ban on British beef exports to the EU was lifted. "How disgusting," one Parisian meat dealer told the Guardian. "The British totally screwed the whole of Europe by bringing us their mad cow disease."
· But the British can be just as horrible. Think of our reaction to the French outbreak of avian flu last month. The Sun again: "Grasping French farmers wasted no time in demanding up to £650m compensation - despite only one confirmed case."