Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
You wouldn’t think so from either country’s discourse, but France has been our ally for the better part of two centuries.
The 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale was marked this week by an exceptional military exchange, in which the soldiers charged with protecting their respective heads of state swapped places. A detachment of Republican Guards took part in the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace while an equivalent detachment of the Coldstream Guards returned the favour at the Elysée.
Such ceremonies could easily have become an everyday event. Our two countries have been on the same side in every important war from the twentieth century onwards. But, even now, we can’t completely escape the sense of old foes burying the hatchet.
Perhaps it has something to do with our public architecture. A few years ago, I showed a French politician around Westminster. Every other building seemed to be named after some victory over our neighbours. Monsieur le Deputé gave the impression of taking it all in good heart. But when, on an MP’s wall, we came across a print of a redcoat falling in battle during the Peninsular War, he growled, with great satisfaction, “on l’a eu” (we got him).
During his exile in London, Charles de Gaulle consciously avoided every such memorial – no small feat when the headquarters of the Free French was sandwiched between Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Place. Churchill, aware that the aloof Frenchman would be obliged to follow his coffin should he perish first, reportedly gave instructions that, if he died while the general was still in London, the funeral cortege should detour past every major anti-French monument.
For all de Gaulle’s distrust of Britain – and of the wider Anglo-Saxon alliance which, he deduced, was closer than any friendship between France and an English-speaking power could ever be – he knew that the democracies had to work together against tyranny.
That, fundamentally, was the basis of the Entente. Despite their historic animosities, Britain and France understood that they were two open and liberal societies in a world where such things were rare.
Our last battle (unless you count Allied operations against Vichy-run colonies after 1940, including the tragic sinking of the French fleet at Oran) was in 1815. Since then, we have been on the same side, from the Crimean War to Ukraine. In both those wars, as in the First and Second World Wars, the Suez campaign, and even the Falklands War (where John Nott records in his memoirs that France was more helpful than she appeared in public, and the United States less so), our adversary was an autocracy.
This realisation required a certain mental shift in both countries. The traditional English view of France was of an obscurantist, superstitious, servile despotism. For a visual representation of that attitude, look at Hogarth’s Gate of Calais (1748).
There you will find every British stereotype about our neighbours: the credulous nuns, who fatuously believe they have found the image of Jesus in a skate; the starving Jacobite, paying the price for having lined up with foreigners; the corrupt monk, drooling over a side of beef that the English can afford and the French cannot; and, not least, the hand of the police state, descending on the shoulder of Hogarth himself on the left of the image as he paints the scene.
Naturally, the French had their equivalent prejudices. After the Revolution, they portrayed the British as royal lackeys, repudiating republican virtue. It can take quite an effort to acknowledge that, in a world where arbitrary rulers were normal, our two countries are exceptional in having both protections for the individual and mechanisms to hold the government to account.
British-French friendship began in earnest with, appropriately, a trade agreement. The Cobden-Chevalier treaty of 1860 was the first modern commercial accord, and today’s trade negotiators could learn a great deal from its brevity and simplicity. In a neat demonstration of Cobden’s belief in the power of trade to make peace, that treaty brought down the curtain on 600 years of intermittent war between the two neighbours.
Colonial rivalry indeed persisted after 1860, especially in Africa. But the animosity can be overstated. The two nations shared a belief in what the French called their “mission civilisatrice”, seeing themselves as taking on temporary mandates, to be relinquished once their colonies had enough roads, schools, and clinics to go it alone. This belief took the sting from their territorial disputes.
When the Ottomans permitted Britain to occupy Cyprus in 1878, Lord Salisbury, then Foreign Secretary, anticipated French concerns. Seeking out the French PM, an Old Rugbeian and Cambridge rowing blue called William Waddington, he told him cheerfully: “Prenez Tunis. Carthage ne doit pas rester aux barbares.” (“Take Tunis. Carthage shouldn’t remain in barbarian hands.”)
The last serious dispute between the two powers came in 1898, when a French expeditionary force in Fashoda met a larger British one, both laying claim to southern Sudan. There were alarmed editorials on both sides of the Channel, even mutterings of war. But the troops on the ground comported themselves correctly, the French officers offering their British counterparts champagne and accepting whisky in return. Jean-Baptiste Marchand, the French commander, later described forcing down the Scotch as “one of the greatest sacrifices I ever made for my country”.
The so-called Fashoda Incident ended with a French withdrawal and a sense that the two countries needed to avoid future tensions. France’s ambassador in London was Paul Cambon, who, although he held the post for 22 years, refused to learn a word of English. He insisted on having even the simplest remarks – “yes”, “no”, “thank you” – interpreted into what he called “the only language capable of articulating rational thought”.
Cambon knew Britain was concerned by German revanchism and the Kaiser’s determination to rival the Royal Navy. The last thing the British needed was a pile of unresolved disputes with France. Indeed, the 1904 war between Russia and Japan came horrifyingly close to pulling their respective allies, France and the UK, into a conflict in which neither were interested.
Britain and France realised that they needed to regularise their relationship and prevent future flare-ups. The 1904 Entente Cordiale was a comprehensive settlement of potential colonial flashpoints, delineating borders and settling rights in Africa, the Pacific islands, South-East Asia, and the Newfoundland coast, and placing Morocco in the French sphere of influence to compensate for Egypt being in Britain’s.
It fell short of being an alliance. Indeed, several French commentators fretted that, unlike the Triple Alliance between Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, which was more or less expressly directed against France, the Entente did not commit its signatories to help each other if attacked.
Yet the Entente proved stronger than the Triple Alliance: Italy, one of its members, defected in 1915. Hence Churchill’s reply when Ribbentrop, then ambassador to London, told him that, in any future war, Italy would be on Hitler’s side: “Well, that’s only fair, we had to have them last time.”
In 1914, Britain and France grasped that they were up against a power that had no respect for law or territorial integrity. They were thus fighting for the rights of all nations. The same dynamic pushed them together as the Nazi menace grew, and held them together when the Second World War gave way to the Cold War.
During those years, it seemed reasonable to assume that representative government was in the ascendant. A wave of countries democratised after 1945, and another wave after 1990. But, more recently, that trend has gone into reverse. Every league table – the Democracy Index, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit – tells the same story. After seven decades of steady advance, liberty peaked between 2010 and 2015. Every year since then, more countries have become authoritarian than have moved the other way.
That, in the end, is what makes our alliance last. Each partner sometimes finds the other infuriating (Macron was especially irritating during the Brexit negotiations). Each keeps a tally of the other’s infractions. But, quand les frites sont en bas, there are only so many reliable democracies in the world. We have no option but to work together
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Author: Daniel Hannan
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