That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present

This encyclopedic study explores the degree to which England and France were culturally integrated as a result of their conflicted entanglements. Beginning with the reign of Louis XIV and ending with current relations, Robert and Isabelle Tombs provide students of the long eighteenth century with shrewd analyses of political movements, imperial fortunes, economic trends, and cultural exchanges.

For the Tombs, William of Orange’s invasion of England on November 5th 1688 is the event marking the rise to international stature of British and French relations. This event challenged France’s dominance in Europe and heralded the formation of Britishness. By 1688, Louis XIV was the grandest ruler in Europe: its cynosure, he imposed military ambition, professional administration, and religious uniformity on his nation through absolute power. His wish to keep England subject to internal conflict led him to encourage James II’s pro-Catholic actions. Yet, he did not impede the Dutch invasion because he was at odds with James and more concerned with Mediterranean enemies who were fighting the Turks. William’s need for financial resources to fight on the continent altered the constitution: hereditary monarchy gave way to parliamentary sovereignty, and religious toleration became a political force. The Tombs charge that Louis began the Second Hundred Years’ War by upholding Jacobitism and landing James in Ireland. The latter’s flight after the Battle of the Boyne stopped France’s concerted attempts to re-establish him on the throne. The label–the Second Hundred Years’ War–is less instructive than side-bars about the Huguenots in London and the Jacobites in France. That Irish refugees were ennobled for serving in the French army exemplifies population exchanges that tempered ethnic and national allegiances.

Following the outlines of political and military history, the authors conclude that the Irish campaign confirmed the Anglo-Dutch alliance against France and that the War of Spanish Succession was the first real World War. This second label reflects the need to shape their voluminous research. They only implicitly admit the tensions between political and cultural history. Although France, after the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, recovered imperial ambition faster than Britain, the War of Austrian Succession, in extending rivalries to North America, reveals that the Jacobite Invasion of the Young Pretender in 1745 exposed conflicted motives on both sides of the Channel. French confusion reduced the invasion to a distraction of Britain from Europe, if it allowed France to negotiate the 1748 Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle vigorously. However, France failed to undo England’s Glorious Revolution, as it had intended. Far from recapturing Louisburg, it lost more sailors to scurvy off the Canadian coast than soldiers at Culloden. Despite their label of the Second Hundred Years’ War, the Tombs admit that England was not France’s chief concern in 1748.

Throughout, the Tombs put military into the context of economic history. In war, Britain outspent France by using five times more of its Gross National Product. Between 1689 and 1815, it raised taxes 1,600% and increased government borrowing by 24,000%. How, the Tombs ask, did it manage to increase taxation faster than economic growth? Firstly, unlike France, it was a political, legal and administrative unit that offered no regional or corporate tax privileges. Secondly, the Crown’s dependence on Parliament obviated tax revolts, and the land tax was exceeded by consumer taxes gathered by an even-handed bureaucracy. Thirdly, public debt was generally acceptable: in 1815, 60% of tax revenue went to interest on the national debt. London, the major market for capital, credit and insurance, inspired financial innovations that stalled in France after the collapse of Law’s bank. France’s tax system was corrupt and opaque, international capital distrusting its arbitrary cancelling of debt.

While distinct economic systems explain the competition between the two nations, intellectual exchanges show how they came together. Rapin, a French Protestant, wrote the first Whig history, and Hamilton, a Jacobite, in Memoirs of The Count Grammont defined French gallantry. In exile Bolingbroke, besides marrying a marquise, expounded his non-monarchical ideas of patriotism to Montesquieu and Voltaire. The latter’s promotion of Locke and England’s constitution boosted an anglophilia also manifest in the sixteen periodicals which in the 1740s promoted English culture. Montesquieu upheld Britain’s separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, becoming a major influence on Gibbon, the most ‘franco-centric’ of British authors. Intellectual reciprocity was not stemmed by war. Adam Smith visited France during the Seven Year’s War. His criticism of the Physiocrats’ belief that agriculture is the basis of wealth proved foundational to his Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations. Smith synthesized English and French ideas, although his sense of individual economic freedom was inimical to French absolutist tradition.

Improved transportation brought Britain and France closer because it facilitated travel and established cultural comparison as a perennial occupation of tourists. By the late 1760s 12,000 Britons a year went to France; by the mid-1780s, that number was 40,000. Travellers’ prejudices are historically important resources. To the French, England represented anarchy and urban ugliness; to the English, Paris represented lack of sanitation and fun. English gentry went to Paris for social polish, gallantry and sexual initiation. French travellers visited England to spy on the Industrial Revolution, and English industrialists, like Wilkinson, Boulton and Watt, sold France munitions in war-time. But the iron, steel, coke and glassworks exported to France failed from lack of infrastructure and economic enterprise. By the 1780s, English agriculture and industrialism was acknowledged to more advanced. Young’s travels led him to predict the end of the Ancien Régime, his critique becoming official propaganda in the Revolution which, ironically, he attacked.

English sensibility was registered in France before the Seven Years’ War. Richardson’s novels influenced Rousseau, and English characters appeared in French literature. English gardens and clothes were imitated by anglomanes. The mode for plain, rural, sporty dress reflected a taste for English informality that reversed the trend in which English gentry imitated formal French styles. English carriages, hats, riding-coats and shops became the rage in Paris. This consumerism created hostile reactions which defy claims that national antagonism defined the identity of the two countries. Rather, hostile reactions exacerbated internal divisions. If such stereotypes as feminine French refinements versus masculine English naturalness abounded, trend-setters resisted such thinking: Chesterfield upheld refinement, Rousseau naturalness. The complementary ways in which Shakespeare was censored and praised on both sides of the Channel illustrate this complexity.

Internal division pervaded both countries at the outset of the Seven Years’ War.

Anti-aristocratic movements were common in England. In France, food riots were repressed harshly. The political leaders, Pitt and Choiseul, fostered distinct kinds of patriotism. The main repercussion of the war, say the Tombs, was the increasing success of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. 70% of its woolens and hardware were exported, confirming it as a global power. If Britain’s victory was short-lived, given the War of American Independence, France’s defeat was permanent. While the two nations explored the South Seas, as rivals and collaborators, superior technology propelled Cook’s success, rendering him a hero in France. As explorers, the British had a stronger sense of diaspora than the French. Ironically, the French language came to dominate diplomacy just when the state was about to decline.

Each country spied on the other. Under Choiseul, French spies prepared an invasion of Britain the failure of which was caused by inept naval leadership. More generally, France did not count the cost of advancing American independence and enabling non-royalist patriotism. The incompetency of both sides in America was aggravated because the French, while disliking American incivility, feared an Anglo-American alliance founded on Americans’ urging the English to take back Florida from the Spanish. The economic boom in Britain between 1783 and 1801 was spurred by trade with America that was re-established in peace-time. Whereas Britain quickly reduced its military indebtedness, France, basking in victory’s prestige, refurbished its navy without being able to cover its interest payments. It went deeper into debt by investing in large make-work projects, such as Le Creusot, projects which failed given the absence of a technical environment. The Eden Treaty of 1783 intensified France’s economic problems; it ruined manufacturing, threw 200,000 citizens into unemployment, and caused the state to withdraw from continental and global commitments. The Crown’s wish for revenge against Britain led it to undo itself by turning to the Estates General for financial counsel.

Initially, Britain hoped that the Revolution would cause France to adopt a constitution like its own. In the Revolution’s early years, British tourists still visited France which imported British food, even as anti-British sentiments mounted. Resistance to Britain’s mixed constitution led politicians to favour the ideology of Cromwell. Politically, the nations reversed their roles–France rejecting the past and Britain upholding tradition. British supporters of the Revolution were Dissenters opposed to state religion and those who accused George III of absolutist intentions.

While Burke’s organic theory of political community critiqued extremist thinking in both countries, 2,000 loyalist societies were formed in Britain. If French spies overstated the degree of British support for the Revolution, hate-mongering in the Convention led in 1794 to the arrest of British subjects and the banning of English imports. British radicals who supported the Girondins were driven out or killed by the Jacobins. Between 1792 and 1802, 60,000 to 80,000 French refugees sheltered in London where they were treated sympathetically, despite protests. The élites fraternized, but the government did not trust the reactionary émigré leaders. France did not respect Ireland’s wish for independence; it treated the Irish as pawns, captured French soldiers happily fraternizing with the Anglo authorities rather than fighting to transplant the Revolution. By the same token, the British did not heed calls for help from opponents of the Revolution in South-West France. The confusion and factionalism among rebels and loyalists enabled Napoleon to rise to power. Less committed to revolution than to personal glory, he was ineffectual politically and economically. His wish to establish an overland trading route to India and the Orient was thwarted by Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. After the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, France dominated the continent, but Napoleon was more interested in cultural plunder. One unintended consequence of his quest for power was to oblige Britain to act globally. Obsessed with English mercantile aristocracy and intent on curbing criticism of himself in the British press, Napoleon aspired to retire as a country gentleman in England. Ironically, fear of Napoleon’s arrival in Britain saw a huge rise in men volunteering for the militia. By 1805, 800,000 had committed themselves, that is, 20% of the male population by contrast to 7% in France. Following the stalemate after the battles of Trafalgar and Austerlitz, Britain invested hugely in its navy which became the most expensive, professional and complex of public institutions. In 1799, Pitt the Younger had created income tax to fund naval operations which involved blockading French ports and inland cities to cause unemployment and undo Napoleon’s re-legalization of slavery. Napoleon’s counter-measures failed totally, partly because of smuggling networks. The increase in Britain’s national debt incurred by 1815 required loan and subsidies that were not paid off until 1906.

My digest aims to illustrate how thoroughly this study advances comparative historiography. This reviewer has only minor criticisms. The authors emphasize internal political conflicts in Britain more than in France, making little of the gap between official and unofficial external relations widened by Louis XV’s secret spy network that undercut his ministers. The authors focus on capital cities, but current research will likely show that Britons resided in several major cities and that British businesses, managers, workers and servants were more numerous than the Tombs indicate. One group of visitors that is ignored is itinerant British language teachers. Moreover, while visitors such as Young criticize economic backwardness, they admire the sociability and ingenious creativity of ordinary citizens. A final word: the excellence of this pioneering study is conveyed by its full and wide-ranging bibliography.