FOREWORD

It’s a long story of love. Of course, as in all love stories, we could have hated each other. But that’s because we loved each other so much! And though England had only a small piece of island to offer Napoleon when he was expelled from France, the whole of England opened its arms to all those who were forced to choose exile: Chateaubriand and the future Louis XVIII, Victor Hugo and, paradoxically, Napoleon III. As for the Stuarts, it was in France that they found refuge, as the partisans of the Paris Commune did in England. Cross a narrow stretch of water, and you are elsewhere: this channel is more radical than a frontier, and has a totally different significance. That is why, a century later, the Entente Cordiale seems so natural. In point of fact, all that had to happen was the wiping clean of Fashoda; but a century later, the symbolism is so much richer.
From the Mémoires du comte de Gramont at the beginning of the 18th century to Sterne’s Sentimental Journey at the end, with Voltaire as cornerstone, the age of enlightenment marked the beginning of a mutual fascination: England, land of liberty for the French; France, home of a certain savoir vivre for the English. Naturally it was more complicated than that, but every love story needs points of reference and, over the last century, these have multiplied.
As a student preparing for the academic competition which would lead me to spend nine years in London between 1960 and 1970, I had met, a few years earlier, a venerable English lady. In the wake of J.M. Keynes, she had laid the foundations of a system of cultural administration just after World War II. Together, the old lady and the student dreamed up the idea of writing for British television three dozen short films to teach France and French to British schoolchildren. Our own love story began with the four young heroes of these films. Since then, we have never parted – if I may put it like that. We learned to know England first through true lovers of England – Valery Larbaud and even André Maurois, why not – and often it was through a double play of mirrors that we rediscovered France. In the past, Raymond Mortimer shed more light on Gide than anyone else, just as Painter gave us many early insights into Proust in his monumental tribute. Likewise Anthony Sampson and John Ardagh showed us France as seen from the other side of the Channel, with such truth that we often believe in it even now! Not to mention Theodor Zeldin, who continues to watch us out of the corner of an eye, ironically, subtly, telling us even more about ourselves.
Nearly ten years spent in England were a formidable apprenticeship for the study of France. The perspectives of Terry Kilmartin of the Observer, and Harold Hobson’s view of Claudel, taught one to stand back from what one loved – or hated! – back home. But our histories are so closely intertwined! Shakespeare’s kings spoke French, and how many British soldiers died on the Somme? Anglomania is a French disease not easy to cure. As for the current invasion of Perigord or Provence, not to mention Brittany, by whole cohorts from Great Britain, it is colonisation at its most agreeable. And we shall never forget that during the summer of 1940, England received on her soil all the men from Sein Island.
England: we say England, but we must not forget the Auld Alliance which has united France and Scotland for so many centuries. Between France and the United Kingdom as a whole, countless links have been forged. Henry Seymour, known as «Milord l’arsouille» or «the debauched Lord», and a certain Prince of Wales in love with Paris, have reflected the grateful daydreams of Chateaubriand in London. Berlioz: we French have loved him so poorly. England knew to listen to him during his lifetime, opening her concert halls to his music when Paris would not. Again, a hundred years after his death, Colin Davis and David Cairns were the first to rediscover him to the world. Today, Philippe Mansel describes better than anyone (Paris, capital of Europe 1814 – 1852) the empathetic movement of one people towards the other: immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, it pushed the French into wild admiration of British political and economic society, and made the British flock in thousands to France, to live according to a moral and artistic code that did not exist at home. In the same period, Byron was perhaps the most widely read poet in France, and Walter Scott the most popular novelist, while French publishers brought out quantities of volumes on British history and the British economic model. During this time, Guizot boasted of having two homelands and Vigny translated Othello.
We are of course touching on history here, but mainly we are talking about friendship, admiration, mutual advantage, quite simply love. Love: we want to repeat it. The Entente Cordiale set the foundations of a love match, not before a magistrate or a priest, but before all those who understood long ago that none of us, British or French, has ever ceased to become richer through our very differences: language, first (oh, the bowling greens become «boulingrins», and the Route du Roi that fetches up in Rotten Row, at Knightsbridge), and politics, and literature, and the gardens! We have loved these differences so much that we love them still, in a different way.
This is why a bibliography that illustrates this reciprocal passion seemed to us indispensable. But the works about one or the other nation published in both languages and/or translated into the one or the other are countless. To go back to the beginning, there was A.J.B. Defauconpret who translated, between 1815 and 1828, no less than 422 volumes, not counting his own works! I have in my library at least three of these, all concerned with London around 1817. And since then…
One can get lost in such a bibliography. And so many works have been lost. Who remembers L’Humour anglais, published more than thirty years ago in the famous collection ‘Que sais-je?’ at Presses Universitaires de France by the excellent Tony Mayer? He organized concerts of French music at the Wigmore Hall and kept open house in Eaton Place. How Franco-British culture shone in the interchanges between Benjamin Britten and Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Francis Bacon!
It is to guide us through these last ten years that the Association pour la Diffusion de la Pensée Française and the Book Section at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have undertaken to publish this (relatively) fat little book. Social science, history and literature are all examined in an exploration of two-way perspectives exchanged on these subjects between those from here and those from elsewhere, to understand the elsewhere seen from here, and the here seen from elsewhere. And working together on such a project, wanting it and making it happen, is also a proof of a solid and cordial entente. We needed that proof, as well as the friendship it implies.




Jean-Pierre Angremy
de l’Académie française
of the Académie française

traduit en anglais par / translated by Polly McLean