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Love & loathing across the Channel

Hasan Suroor

FORGET THE 100-year-old legacy of entente cordiale; forget the spirit of European unity; and forget the Britons' love for French wine and those sun-kissed summer villas in the south of France. The truth is that the Brits are Brits and the French are French — and the twain shall never meet. Their mutual rivalry, suspicion, and prejudices run too deep for them to see each other in terms other than those of the excited "little Frenchman" and the "perfidious Albion."

And if anyone were looking for proof, the combative French President, Jacques Chirac, himself stepped forward to provide it when he walked out of a summit of European Union leaders in Brussels last week as a French business leader started to speak in English. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was seen to wince as President Chirac, accompanied by three of his cabinet colleagues, stormed out of the meeting furious that a Frenchman should have chosen to speak in English.

"I was deeply shocked to see a Frenchman express himself in English at the [EU] Council table," President Chirac thundered making it clear that he would not stand by and watch while English, which he once dismissed as the "language of Shakespeare," took centre-stage at a European conference — never mind if English has the same official status in the EU as French.

Bemused British critics said it was not the first time that the French President had made a "public spectacle" of himself over English.

"At one U.N. summit where there was no [French] translation, President Chirac pretended not to understand questions in English and demanded that Tony Blair, who speaks French, act as his interpreter," The Times recalled.

On another occasion, President Chirac insisted on speaking to U.S. President George W. Bush in French forcing the latter to call for an interpreter. This despite the fact that the French leader is said to speak English fluently, having lived in America as a young man.

Outbursts against English

Gallic outbursts directed against the English language, in particular, and the Anglo-Saxon mores in general, are commonplace. Last year, President Chirac poured scorn over English food calling it unpalatable and among the worst in Europe. "We can't trust people who have such bad food," he reportedly joked at a meeting with German and Russian leaders.

Britain is routinely ridiculed in France for all manner of things — from its food and language to its politics and public services — and the compliment is as routinely returned by Britons: driving in France is a "nightmare," French laws are "outdated," French farmers are "greedy," and there is something about the French that puts their back up.

Even where the French clearly have an edge, there is only a grudging acknowledgement from Britons. Ask them about the delights of French cuisine and Britons would hum and haw: well, it's good but nothing to beat the international flavour of "our" multicultural fare (where's the French equivalent of Chicken tikka masala?)

And French wine? "What about it?" they would ask pointing out that some of the wines from Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and South Africa are as good — not to mention that "we" too are getting there.

And, as for the beachside villas, well there are better and sunnier places in Spain and Italy. Why go to Breton when Tuscany is beckoning?

French-bashing makes good copy, and the tabloids simply love it. There was a rash of clever headlines recently when the Tory MP Boris Johnson gleefully blamed a "bewildered" French tourist for causing a road accident in which he (Mr. Johnson) fell from his bicycle and hurt himself. "God, it had to be a Frenchman!" he suggested in a tongue-in-cheek newspaper story.

Meanwhile, there is now a whole new book on the love-hate relationship between Britain and France. That Sweet Enemy: the French and the British from the Sun King to the Present, jointly written by a British historian Robert Tombs and (ironically) his French wife, Isabelle, also an academic, chronicles the bitter history of cross-Channel exchanges.

The book, said to be a response to a clutch of anti-Anglo-Saxon titles circulating on the other side of the Channel, is likely to infuriate the French with its claims that they owe some of their most cherished eating and drinking habits to the Brits.

"I think we've had a lot of influence on French eating habits without realising it," Mr. Tombs told The Guardian, which described the book as an account of a relationship of "continual misapprehension and occasional affection."

His wife, speaking with the zeal of a convert, insisted that the "bashing of the British is more serious in France" than vice-versa. The British were seen as "cold, calculating, snake-like," she said.

But the couple did not rule out the possibility of the two nations eventually embracing each other because, as the interviewer Stuart Jeffries noted: "It is after all a thin line between love and hate."

Whether that happens or not, certainly it cannot any get worse.

And, in any case, as the French are fond of saying, the more it changes the more it remains the same.

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