SCOTSMEN AND FRANCE
By JANET ADAM SMITH
WHEN Robert Louis Stevenson was staying at Fontainebleau in 1875, at Siron's inn at Barbizon, he and his cousin, Bob Stevenson, were invited to the christening of Siron's grandson. Late In the celebrations the father of the infant, an Alsatian forest-guard, took the two Scots aside into the garden and said with emotion: "Now, Messieurs, we will weep for the sorrows of France." We cannot say for certain if it was because of their Scottish nationality that the two Stevensons were chosen, of all the guests, to share the Vrenchman's emotion ; but we can perhaps allow ourselves to take the incident as a symbol of Franco-Scottish sympathy. The sorrows then were the sorrows of the Franco-Prussian War ; but on June- 17th, 1940, people all over Scotland—yes, and Scottish soldiers in Normandy and Brittany—wept again for the sorrows of France. At times of crisis old memories recur, old links are recalled ; and on that black day thousands of Scots found themselves re- membering with a new intensity the traditional Franco-Scottish tie that we always speak of as The Auld Alliance.
That Alliance is rooted far back in Scotland's history. The formal agreement, which dates from 1326, was based on the simple pro- position that England was the enemy of both countries, and the treaty stipulated that there should be no separate peace with her. For the three hundred years it lasted the Alliance was the strongest factor in Scotland's foreign policy, and for a short time the two countries had the same Queen. But to us Scots, three and a half centuries after Mary, it is not the political and military history of the Alliance that counts so much as the various other links that the Alliance fostered. When the subject is discussed—and it comes up in quite ordinary conversations, in an Edinburgh tram, a Glasgow tea-shop, an Aberdeen dinner-party—you are less likely to hear about the joint stand made by French and Scots against the English at Verneuil in 1425 than about the traditional Scottish taste for claret. When you get a Scot well embarked on the Alliance, here are some of the things he is sure to mention. He will trace the French influence on Saks law and point out various resemblances between the old Scots Parliament and the States-General of France. He will remind you that Montaigne's tutor was George Buchanan, the finest Latinist of the age, and describe how the King's College of Aberdeen was modelled on the University of Paris. He will explain that the Aberdeen name for a first-year student is "bajan," and that four hundred years ago his counterpart in Paris was a bejaune. This will remind him of other words that Scotland shares with France and not with England—such as the gigot of mutton, where the Englishman would speak of a leg, and the ashet (from assiette), on which it appears at the dinner-table. Then he may talk about architecture—of French workmanship and French ideas in Scottish castle-building, of the tall houses, with a different family on each floor, that make the High Street of Edinburgh so foreign-looking to an Englishman and that conversely make the old streets of Paris so home-like to the Scot.
These are the things that a Scot is likely to talk about, remembering the Auld Alliance ; and he would find it easy to give many examples of individual Scotsmen who have honoured France. There is Bums, who bought four guns from a schooner seized by the Customs and
sent them as a gift to the French Convention. His Scots Wha Has is supposed to represent the words of Bruce before Bannockburn ; but the song, written in 1793, celebrates French liberty as well as Scottish. Less well known are the activities, nearly a hundred years later, of the Glasgow picture-dealer Alexander Reid, one of the earliest admirers of the Impressionists. While Lancashire indus- trialists were buying Leightons and Landseers, they counterparts on Clydeside were being educated, cajoled and bullied by Reid into buying Manets and Sisleys. At a period when they had no market in London he used to bring them back two or three dozen pictures at a tin* from Paris and sell them all—Boudin, with his beaches and boats, was much in demand by the shipping magnates. (Occasionally there were difficulties—as when a customer who had been persuaded to take a Degas called a few days later and asked to make an exchange, saying that no Elder of the Kirk could afford to own a picture with a glass of absinthe in it)
Beyond such particular enthusiasms there is the fact that so many Scots have found France such a congenial country to live in. David Hume, whose genius was recognised so promptly in France, felt himself equally at home in both countries. He wondered whether he should settle in Edinburgh or Paris—never did he contemplate London—and towards the end of his life wrote to a friend that his ideal would be to " retire to some provincial town in France, to trifle out my old age, near a warm sun in a good climate, a pleasant country, and amidst a sociable people." A couple of centuries later another Scottish thinker, Professor Brogan, having written one of the best books in English on modern France, announces with obvious pride that he is an honorary citizen of the commune of La Roche Blanche, to whose mayor and councillors he dedicates his work ; and he shows in his writings the degree of domestic familiarity that enables him to appreciate the finer points of the Depache de Toulouse as nicely as he would those of the Glasgow Herald Graduates of Aberdeen or St. Andrews, going to continue their studies at Poitiers or Bordeaux, have known the same feeling of being at home in France—sometimes more so than their contem- poraries proceeding to England. The accent which may be a liability at Oxford or Cambridge, a mark of provincialism, can be an asset in France ; " the French R is a Scottish R," the Abbe. Dimnet has observed, " and a Scot learning to speak French may sound incorrect, but he does not sound foreign."
There is yet another reason for the instinctive Scottish sympathy with France. Of the two predominant, and conflicting, strains in Scottish history and character, Reason is represented in history by the Reformation, the Union of the Crowns, the Union of the Parliaments ; Passion, by Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite Risings. The national devotion to Queen Mary and Prince Charlie, however absurd and sentimental some of its manifestations are, arises partly from their symbolising a side of Scottish nature that in actuality is often suppressed or ignored. The Glasgow business-man who (like John Buchan's Dickson MacCunn) likes to fancy that, had he lived in 1560 or 1745, he would have come out for Mary or Charlie, is thereby acknowledging the existence of other motives than self-interest, of other standards than the expediency and common sense by which he conducts his daily business. In this tension of opposites England stands on the side of reason, common sense and " getting on in the world" ; while France is deeply associated with the other clement. Mary was Queen of France as well as of Scotland ; to the exiled Jacobites France was a haven, while to those who staved in Scotland it was the " over the water " of their loyal toasts.
France, then, receives some of the emotion that is given to those lost causes which are paradoxically so living an element in the Scottish temperament ; and there is a further tie of sympathy in that, to both countries, a lost war is a nearer experience than it is for England. Scots, for instance, remember that the French lost in Canada not many years after the Highlanders had lost at Culloden, and that one of the consequences of Culloden was that Highlanders, too, went to settle in Canada. No Scot is likely to have read un- moved the Dieppe casualty lists, where names of the Fusiliers Mont- Royal—Dutemple, Lamontagne, Charbonneau—stand beside names from the Highland regiments of Canada, Douglas, Macmillan, Macdonell.
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