Regarding Anglo-French relations.

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Tarquin O’Flaherty, as a young man.

I recently re-discovered a reference by the writer of the Musical Dispatches from the Front, (published in this blog on Saturdays) to a book written by Stephen Clarke with this wonderful title 1000 Years of Annoying the French.  After reading this review I asked the team if any of them had read the book.  Tarquin O’Flaherty came back with this splendid response.

Regarding Anglo-French relations.
There’s a pretence in England, a blind unshakeable belief that some sort of ‘Entente Cordiale’ exists, and has always existed, between the English and the French, that somehow an unbroken chain of kinship has always existed between the two of them. This is (not to put too fine a point on it) exquisite bollox. The reality is that, since Henry  destroyed the monasteries, butchered the monks, stole all their money, then appointed himself head of the (no Popery) Church of England, the English (like all barbarians) have regarded their (Catholic) French neighbours as, well… weird. To begin with, those awkward Frenchies stubbornly refused to become Protestants (how dare they?) even when it was as plain as the nose on your face that it was an increasingly profitable thing to do. Henry the Eighth, for example, became as rich as Croesus by the ludicrously simple expedient of destroying forever some of the greatest medieval examples of perpendicular architecture ever to grace the face of England. Why couldn’t the French do the same? What the hell was the matter with them?frog 3
The French, by contrast and to this day, remain as poor as church mice, though their own perpendicularities, most notably those at Rouen, Rheims and Notre Dame, stubbornly refuse to follow the English pattern and become, as in England, architectural graveyards.

Besides hating the French (for both being French and not speaking English) England also hated them for the French Revolution. For certain sections of the community, things had been ‘absolutely super’ in England for centuries. Then the tedious French poor, ‘Les Miserables’ took to the streets,  the Guillotine went to people’s heads and the entire apple-cart was upset frightfully. Suddenly, in England, there was the terrifying possibility that the British lower orders might actually take exception to being treated like dogs and take to behaving abominably, in the manner of the French. This wouldn’t do at all. The English aristocracy, it would seem, had even less enthusiasm for decapitation than their French cousins.  Absolutely against their better judgement, but grudgingly aware of the lack of alternatives, they granted the vote to selected members of the new English middle class, a cut-throat rabble of moneyed factory owners and employers who, immediately on assuming power, implemented laws to control the lower orders!frog 1

Now you can plainly see quite how much difficulty the French Revolution had caused the long suffering British aristocracy. If the French had simply held their nerve and killed a few people, much as the English had done, then all would have been well, and normal levels of exploitation might have been resumed without difficulty. But, oh dear me no. Those pesky French…. Is it any wonder the English look upon them with mind-boggling incomprehension?

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Stephen Clarke

Of course there is one thing more, one simple thing that really contributes to the English hatred of the French and that is their confounded superiority. The French are past masters of this art and the English truly hate them for it.  The Poms try hard, I’ll give you that, but it’s a pathetic show, a pale imitation. The French are superbly, scintillatingly superior. They can do it with a panache, a Gallic flair that leaves the Brit grovelling in the dust. By contrast, the English, in their misguided attempts to compete, have wholly misread French elan to the degree where they believe that ‘Gallic flair’ is a French pair of trousers.

Essentially, the difference between the two is virtually irreconcilable and may be summed up in the following anonymous observation:

A Frenchman would rather eat well than own a house.

An Englishman will own a house even if he has to starve to get it.

Reservoir,

Brock L. Lee.