Europe's Most Influential Love-Hate Relationship.

AuthorBohlen, Avis
PositionBrief article - Book review

That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present By Robert and Isabelle Tombs Alfred A. Knopf Press, 2007, 816 pages

The ancient rivalry between France and Britain is, as recent events remind us, the most enduring and influential relationship within Europe. Overshadowed during most of the cold war by the crucial Franco-German tie, the motor which drove European construction, the Anglo-French quarrel exploded with full force during the bitter run-up to Iraq in 2003. The enlargement of the European Union and the defeat of the Constitutional referendum in France in 2005 spelled the end, at least for now, of a certain idea of Europe which France supported and Britain opposed. At the heart of both debates are long-standing Franco-British differences about the relationship with the US and the future shape of Europe. But the bitterness and animosity of these debates are hard to explain without reference to the past.

The history of that rivalry and of the many strands--political, cultural, sociological--that go to make it up are the subject of That Sweet Enemy, a splendid book by two historians, one French, one British, married to each other and mostly, though not always, in agreement. Their rich and enthralling narrative takes us from 1688--the year the Glorious Revolution established England once and for all as a Protestant nation governed by a parliamentary monarchy--up to the present. Based on superb scholarship, their text is informative, entertaining and immensely readable for all its 700 pages.

When the story opens, the France of Louis XIV is dominant in Europe--politically, culturally, demographically while England under the Stuarts is little more than the Sun King's client state. The slow leakage of France's ascendancy over the 18th century, the parallel rise of England to global dominance, is a familiar story, but not often as compellingly and authoritatively told as here. Throughout this century, the two countries were almost continuously at war. Money, trade and command of the seas proved decisive. France--richer, larger, more populous but cash-poor and less creditworthy thanks to its rickety public finances--was never able to match Britain's command of resources; nor, though its army was far and away the best in Europe, was the French navy able to compete with the British.

The story is naturally of interest to Americans since North America was at once prize and locus of the struggle. Act I (known somewhat parochially to Americans as the French and Indian War but to the rest of the world as the Seven Years War) expelled France from North America. In Act II, the French had their revenge by subsidizing American independence in the revolutionary war--a revenge that proved short-lived, for the cost of bankrolling the...

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