Earlier this week, the CSMCH hosted one of its own steering committee members – Peter Jackson of the University of Glasgow. Peter has recently been awarded a major AHRC grant to explore the impact of stereotypes on Franco-British relations and we were lucky enough to learn more about this exciting area of research. You can read Fraser Raeburn’s summary below or listen to the full lecture by clicking on the audio link.
How is history marshalled to meet the needs of the present?
This fundamental question lay at the heart of Peter Jackson’s talk to the CSMCH on Franco-British relations in the aftermath of the First World War. In pointing to history – or, more precisely, diplomats’ and politicians’ understandings of history – as the root cause of the collapse of the Entente Cordiale after the war, Peter’s paper ventured from the Hundred Years’ War all the way to Brexit in search of answers.
This approach borrowed heavily from recent work in memory studies, positing that the past is inherently malleable, endlessly reconstructed in the present based on changing needs, contexts and expectations for the future. In particular, Professor Jackson pointed to the importance of anxieties in shaping policy, depicting history as a reservoir from which answers might be found to solve future dilemmas. History, in this depiction, forms part of a decision making chain, where previous experience and future expectation are in a constant, often self-perpetuating cycle.
The Franco-British (or, more aptly, Anglo-French) relationship provides fertile ground to observe the ongoing influence of history in understanding the present. Particularly for a certain breed of traditionalist thinker, Anglo-French rivalry and animosity is very much a live trope.
France is portrayed as culturally and strategically other – incomprehensible, fickle and untrustworthy, very much a historical enemy, not least in battles from Trafalgar to Agincourt that are constantly refought in popular representations and memory. France is Napoleon, Louis XIV, the constant continental power whose potential for dominance implicitly threatens British interests. This ignores, of course, that France and Britain have been at peace for two centuries, and have fought several major wars as close allies in that time. In the grand, sweeping view of history, these are exceptions to a longer rule.
While there is certainly reciprocity at play – French views of England and Englishness do occasionally revert to somewhat accurate stereotype – Peter pointed to their particular salience in British official thinking after the First World War to explain the rapid divergence in perceived interest between the two victorious powers. While French policymakers, Clemenceau in particular, were forced by the experience of invasion and occupation to address hard questions about their future security and plot a new way forward, British policymakers reverted to earlier ways of thinking with astonishing rapidity.
Key to understanding this divergence is each sides’ view of history. For France, this history centred on 1870, and the sudden loss of continental pre-eminence. German invasion was the existential threat of the future, as it had been twice before in living memory. This led to a two-pronged approach to security – the strengthening and support of new Eastern and Central European powers as a counterweight to Germany on the continent, and the forging of a trans-Atlantic democratic bloc. Britain, it was now clear, was essential to future French security.
For British policymakers, however, the view was different. Germany, shorn of its fleet, was no longer an imperial threat, but rather a valuable potential economic partner. Rather, France assumed its age-old role as Britain’s nearest imperial rival, the strongest continental power on land, sea and air.
Moreover, the needs of imperial defence, and the increasingly independent security demands of the Dominions, mitigated against continental security commitments. The underlying motivations of French security demands were therefore treated with suspicion. Would enabling an ascendant France, able to dominate the continent, simply be inviting a new challenger to imperial hegemony?
As Peter pointed out, this historical view of France as a British rival had little to do with the present. France was exhausted by war, and painfully aware that German industrial and demographic potential outstripped theirs. This was an imagined threat, and one that needs to be treated with some scepticism, given that the armed forces were forced to protect their budgets in the aftermath of demobilisation, and cast around for new threats to defend against. Yet it is still telling that France could so easily be cast in the role of strategic rival, and that they – not Japan or the United States – were the most convincing new rival.
Commentary was ably provided by Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby, through the medium of Edinburgh’s own Dr David Kaufman, who also demonstrated considerable familiarity with Foreign Office documents and personalities alongside clear fondness for 1980s television.
Fraser Raeburn is a PhD student in History. He works on interwar Europe and Britain, ideological confrontation and the history of foreign fighters. His thesis examines the involvement of Scots in the Spanish Civil War. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.