Neighbours become good friends?
M. R. D. Foot FRANCE AND BRITAIN, 1900-1940 by P. M. H. Bell Longman, £38, £12.99, pp. 275 This book gives an entertaining, judicious overview of 40 years of our relations with our nearest continental neighbour; a tale well enough known to historians, and Philip Bell is a professional to his fingertips, yet well worth recounting in English so pure and so easy to follow that it is bound to appeal to that elusive creature, the Common Reader.
In 1898 the two countries, secular enemies, had faced the prospect of war yet again, in the Fashoda crisis that the English have forgotten (because they won), and that the French still bitterly recall. Relations got no better during the Boer War, when French newspapers teemed
with anti-British cartoons. Yet a few years later, as a German menace to both coun- tries emerged, two skilled diplomats Lansdowne and Cambon — began talks to settle some long-standing colonial disputes, and the francophile tact of Edward VII made an impact on society in Paris. When France's old ally, Russia, and England's new ally, Japan, went to war with each other in 1904, France and England hastily concluded an Entente Cordiale, which solidified during the next ten years, through a series of gentlemen's agreements about army and fleet locations, into an obligation that (with the timely aid of the guarantee to Belgium) brought the British Expeditionary Force into line on the French left at the outbreak of the Great War. • Twice during that war the old antago- nisms almost flared out again, when the commander of the BEF contemplated withdrawal to the sea, instead of standing by his ally; and those of the old officer class, at least, in Great Britain who sur- vived the war did so in the belief that the French had let us down — that mutinies in the French army in 1917 had caused the BEF to expend itself in the marshes round Ypres.
At the peace congress that resulted in the Treaty of Versailles the French, bent simply on revenge, kept feeling themselves outwitted by the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, 'an underhand con- spirator, who could have lasted a round or two with Machiavelli', and Franco-British relations never quite returned to an even keel before the next catastrophe. The French thought the British hypocritical, the British thought the French immoral. Neither nation's statesmen wholly trusted the other's, and they pursued divergent policies towards the menace of growing United States commercial power in the 1920s, as well as the menace of revived German military power in the 1930s.
Philip Bell shows skilfully how misunder- standing and mismanagement combined, in 1935, to deepen the gulf between the two countries in their attitudes to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), so that neither was in a strong enough frame of mind to attempt • to block Hitler's re-occupation of the Rhineland the follow- ing spring. Thereafter came a downhill slither into the next world war, for which neither power had made adequate prepara- tion; the early summer of 1940 left France prostrate, while England hung on by the skin of her teeth.
This is like an account, by a friend of both sides, of a marriage that went sour: quarrel, reconciliation, passionate devotion punctuated by tiffs; worse tiffs; estrange- ment; mutual disdain. A further volume, reaching towards the present day, is likely to be equally fascinating.
Previous page
