Fighting with the Frogs, Part 1

The British Expeditionary Force’s arrival in northern France on 14 August 1914 marked a striking development in the history of Anglo-French relations. While military co-operation between Britain and France was not wholly unprecedented, never before had the two countries fought side-by-side in a conflict of this scale. For most of their respective histories, Britain and France had viewed their neighbour across the English Channel as rivals at best and outright enemies at worst. Just sixteen years before the outbreak of the First World War the two countries had been on the verge of warfare over an obscure African outpost. Anti-French sentiment had pervaded British society for centuries. Though the Entente Cordiale of 1904 had improved Anglo-French relations, the military alliance that developed as a result of the war represented a noteworthy departure from the historical relationship between Britain and France.

For most of the second millennium, Britain and France had seen each other as enemies. The Hundred Years’ War had been a vital stage in the development of English identity. Its battles continued to be remembered in the early years of the twentieth century. In the numerous conflicts between Britain and France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, France served as an 'Other' against which the British defined a new sense of nationhood. The Crimean War found the two old enemies fighting alongside each other, but even then, at least apocryphally, ‘the British had to be reminded […] not to refer to the French as the enemy’. According to Robert Vansittart, born in 1881, ‘the Victorian England in which I was brought up was almost entirely anti-French’. As historian P.M.H. Bell has written, ‘The antagonism between the two countries had been long and bitter’ and ‘The roots of dislike and distrust of France ran deep, nourished by centuries of warfare and an insular suspicion of foreigners, of whom the French were the nearest’.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the British of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consistently portrayed the French in negative terms. In his study of how Victorian political thinkers perceived France, historian Georgios Varouxakis compiled a damning list of characteristics. The French were:

warlike; volatile; easily excitable; easily susceptible to being seduced by leaders promising them glory abroad; vindictive and envious vis-à-vis the English; unfair and impervious to considerations of justice; not respectful of international treaties, law and conventions; overambitious; inordinately vain, touchy and other such unpleasant things.

The French penchant for revolution frightened Victorian commentators, both Whig and Tory, who looked to stable government, not popular uprising, as the means to achieve progress.

In addition to this general distaste for the French, there were widespread British fears of war with France. Numerous novelists played to these fears. William Laird Clowe’s The Great Naval War of 1887 (1887), Louis Tracy’s The Final War (1893), William Le Queux’s England’s Peril (1899), and Max Pemberton’s Pro Patria (1901) all depicted war between Britain and France. These fictional accounts of war were not without factual basis. Numerous crises found Britain and France near war. A French move against Siam, a virtual British protectorate, in 1893 caused some in Britain to expect war. In 1898, a dispute over Fashoda, a small, mud-brick fort on the Upper Nile, led the two nations to the brink of war. Just a year later, French pro-Boer sentiment and the possibility of Franco-Russo-German intervention on behalf of the Boers further strained Anglo-French relations. In short, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries found Britain and France mutually hostile. In hindsight, the various crises that disrupted Anglo-French relations seem minor and insignificant. Yet the fact that they were met with such grave concern and incited such negative feelings suggests that the British were predisposed to think poorly of the French; diplomatic conflicts merely triggered the expression of latent anti-French feeling.

The Entente Cordiale of 1904 represented a pivotal change in the nature of Anglo-French relations. Just six years after the two nations had been on the edge of war over Fashoda, Britain and France signed an agreement that laid the foundation for their future alliance during the First World War and a century of co-operation between the two. Historians should be wary, however, of investing the Entente with an undue significance. Though the recent centenary commemorations of the agreement suggest that the Entente Cordiale solidified a friendship between the British and the French that would last a century, the realities of the agreement itself cast doubt on the agreement’s role in developing an amicable relationship between the long-time rivals. Bell has described the Entente as ‘a mixed bag of bargains over territory in Africa and Asia and regulations about fishing for bait off Newfoundland’, hardly the stuff of an agreement between valued friends. Reactions to the Entente Cordiale further reveal that the agreement was not the manifestation of any great love between Britain and France. Paul Cambon, the French ambassador to Britain, wrote to French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé that ‘Your task is done and you may pride yourself on having carried to a successful conclusion an enterprise considered impossible’, impossible, no doubt, due to the continuing distaste that characterized cultural relations between Britain and France. The Manchester Guardian made this aversion explicit. ‘The growing friendship between England and France is the most hopeful sign that has appeared in international politics for many a long year, but we deceive ourselves if we pretend that it has its roots in popular sentiment in either country’. Fifty years after the signing of the Entente, Harold Nicolson noted the unlikely circumstances in which it developed. The ‘Entente, in its early stages, was a frail and delicate plant, not rooted in the soil of public sympathy either in France or England, but nursed in a cold greenhouse by M. Cambon, Lord Lansdowne, and his successor, Sir Edward Grey’. As was widely recognized at the time of its signing, the Entente Cordiale was a diplomatic agreement devoted to resolving outstanding colonial disputes, nothing more. The significance later attributed to the treaty by the British was a phenomenon distinct from the treaty itself. Only Britain’s entry into the war in 1914 following Germany’s invasion of Belgium ensured that the diplomatic agreement of 1904 would develop into a military alliance.

It was with this history of antagonism, hardly grounds for optimism or admiration, that Britain and France joined forces in August 1914. Still, evidence from July 1914 reveals that some in Britain had accepted and embraced the Entente Cordiale, with two banquets devoted to singing its praises in a span of two weeks. A willingness to deride France remained, however, with the British press taking considerable delight in pointing out French failings and faults observed in the Caillaux trial. Just before the war the British public had ambivalent views of France: praise in light of the Entente Cordiale and criticism whenever the opportunity presented itself. Beneath the veneer of pro-French sentiment there remained a current of Francophobia.

Once the war began, negative portrayals of France practically vanished and the British press eagerly embraced their new ally. These positive depictions of France developed without obvious pressure from the government and reflect a genuine change in British attitudes towards France. Along with later changes in British perceptions of France, the terms in which the French were described and understood, however, suggest that the improved wartime image of France was more a result of the circumstances of war than any deep-seated admiration for the French people.