UK and France: Friends or Foes? (Trans) cultural and legal unions and disunions

Geraldine, Elizabeth Gadbin-George, Gibson-Morgan

• Publisher: Éditions Le Manuscrit
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9782304047813
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geopolitik

At a time of major changes in the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent in France, induced by the proposed Brexit process, this collective work – composed of thirteen chapters from highly experienced academics and specialist professionals from both sides of the Channel – examines their consequences on the French and British relationship in a range of institutional, political, legal, economic, cultural but also strategic and defence-related fields with an emphasis on comparative and/or European points of view.The two editors are respectively Associate Professors at Panthéon-Assas and Tours universities. Geraldine Gadbin-George is an English solicitor, a former avocat at the Paris bar and a former French judge. Elizabeth Gibson-Morgan is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King's College London in the Department of Contemporary History.

Part 1.
Historical aspects of the relationship between France and The United Kingdom

Chapter 1.
Partnerships and Perfidy; the Entente
in War and Peace 1904 - 2020

Kenneth O. Morgan

The Entente Cordiale between the United Kingdom and France, like that other cliché of British foreign policy, the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States, is an elusive idea, part reality, part legend. It is not obviously an entente nor has it been especially ‘cordiale’. It emerged unexpectedly at the start of the 20th century after a century of quarrels from the Napoleonic war to the Boer War1. Both countries felt themselves to be diplomatically isolated with no stable European ally. The British increasingly felt that Splendid Isolation was no longer splendid or desirable. The French foreign minister, Theophile Delcasse, felt the need for a remedy for France’s continental insecurity, after the debacle of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 – 1 which had seen the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. France’s recent ally, Czarist Russia, could offer relatively little help in Western Europe and was shortly to be heavily defeated by the Japanese navy in 1905. Britain and France had had a series of imperial confrontations, most recently at Fashoda in the Sudan in 1898. The Entente negotiated in 1904 was at best an understanding not an alliance. It was a clearing-up across the globe. Its most important features were that Britain was given a free hand to promote its interests in Egypt, while France in return received the same privilege in Morocco. There was the tidying up of boundary disputes in Siam (Thailand) in south-east Asia while, across the Atlantic the needs of French fishermen fishing in the waters of Newfoundland were covered in a rough and ready fashion. It was a pot-pourri not a partnership, although private talks between British and French chiefs of staff after a crisis in Morocco and the subsequent Treaty of Algeciras in 1906 began to give it more practical substance.

When war began in August 1914, it came as an unpleasant and unexpected shock to the majority of Asquith’s Cabinet, who were anti-war, to discover what the implications were for joint defence. After all, the British government and the foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey had insisted that ‘there should be ‘no war for the sake of the Entente’ and no steps were taken to mobilize the British Expeditionary Force so that it could fight in a continental war. The dispute of far-away Serbia with the Austrians after the assassination at Sarajevo in late June seemed unlikely to trigger off hostilities. The note of Asquith for his Cabinet on 1 August 1914 looked both ways to placate both wings of his Cabinet, the pacific majority including Lloyd George, and the more militant pro-French minority including Grey and Churchill (and in fact Asquith himself). But on Sunday 2 August came a most unwelcome surprise2. With looming threats of a German invasion into Belgium, just across the channel, the Cabinet after a long debate agreed that the British navy, still all-powerful, would if necessary give a defence guarantee to France. And on 4 August, after a remarkably disingenuous explanation by Grey, the Commons voted by a large majority to declare war in the interests of national self-defence, coloured by an argument that it was to be waged on the moral basis of defending ‘gallant little Belgium’ against German aggression. So the Entente with France, greeted with much enthusiasm from King Edward VII downwards led to the bloody horrors of the First World War. The next four years, scarred for ever by tragic bloodbaths such as Verdun and the Somme were spent in trying to work out what the international implications were. The next hundred years were spent by historians in trying to explain it more fundamentally.

The Entente was embodied in a series of partnerships in which British and French leaders tied to forge a meaningful relationship. The first was a partnership of winners – David Lloyd George and George Clemenceau, the Goat and the Tiger. They were both independent politicians, with limited affection for the ties of party3. Lloyd George became prime minister in December 1916 after a political coup with the Unionists and a minority of Liberals which ousted Asquith from No. 10 Downing Street. Clemenceau became prime minister the following year after being an independent non-party politician in the early part of the war. They should have got on well, since each had a deep-rooted regard for the other’s nation. Lloyd George was perhaps the most pro-French prime minister ever. He admired France intensely for its democratic, revolutionary and republican traditions since 1789. He expressed this in eloquent terms in a passionate speech at Verdun in 1916. A romantic realist, an early hero of his was Napoleon. His favourite author was Victor Hugo and his favourite. book Les Miserables. He enjoyed holidays in Nice where he could enjoy looking at beautiful French women walking along the Promenade des Anglais. Two recent episodes had increased his enthusiasm for the French republic – the eventual acquittal of Dreyfus, a target for anti-Semitism and nationalist mendacity (he was a man whom Clemenceau also strongly supported), and the disestablishment of the French Church in 1905, a huge source of gratification to a Welsh Baptist nonconformist who campaigned for a similar act of liberation in his country Wales.

Clemenceau, a more intellectual figure and a close friend of Monet, was inspired by English Liberalism, especially Gladstone and John Stuart Mill. He went to the United States in the latter stages of the Civil War (admiration for Abraham Lincoln was a strong link with Lloyd George and helped to unite them against the Southerner Woodrow Wilson at the Paris peace conference in 1919)4, (4) married an American woman (briefly) and learnt to speak English well. In French elections his supposed anglophile views led to his being pursued by cries of ‘Aoh, yes!’. As time went on, like Lloyd George he became increasingly wedded to more social versions of Liberalism like the New Liberalism current in Britain. In 1917 – 18 the great crisis of the war, Lloyd George and Clemenceau worked together intimately and successfully – it was perhaps the high point of the Entente Cordiale in his hundred years of history. They agreed totally on military measures necessary to rebuff the great German offensive around Amiens in April 1918, and on unity of command on the western front with the leadership of the Frenchman Field Marshal Foch. After all, for Lloyd George, Foch’s becoming overall commander was a serious blow to one of his major wartime enemies, the British commander, Field Marshal Haig. Lloyd George later declared that in Foch he at last found the ideal leader on the front just as his hero Abraham Lincoln in the period after Gettysburg alighted on General Ulysses Grant. The Entente under their leadership made both men world famous. Clemenceau was hailed as Pere la Victoire and a statue placed in the Champs Elysees in 1938. Lloyd George for a time was ‘the man who won the war’ though significantly, he did not have his statue placed in Parliament Square until seventy years later. The commemoration of the war in the centenary years of 2014-18 astonishingly ignored him, perhaps because he was not an Englishman.

But immediately after the Armistice, the partnership soured, no longer a close relationship of allies but a partnership of enemies. Their personal relations in the Paris conference were good and positive – Lloyd George commented that they got on better with each other than with President Wilson, a baffling mixture of elements, ‘badly mixed’. But the priorities of the two allied leaders proved to be very different. Clemenceau was determined to prevent another 1870 or 1914. His priority was the national security, of France, which had now regained Alsace and Lorraine, notably through the long-term military occupation of the west bank of the Rhine, as indeed happened temporarily later on in 1923. Lloyd George wanted reconciliation with the defeated enemy to rebuild Europe economically and politically. He strongly opposed occupation of the west bank of the Rhine or any British participation in it, although he did offer a guarantee of British support if France was invaded from the east. He set out these views in February 1919, very early in the Fontainebleau memorandum, drafted with close aides like Sir Maurice Hankey, Philip Kerr and General Sir Henry Wilson, along with background advice from General Smuts of South Africa. It called for moderation in the imposition of reparations on Germany and also much caution in placing German-speaking populations under foreign rule such as the Sudetendeutsch in Czechoslovakia and the artificial Polish Corridor on Germany’s eastern frontier5. These infuriated Clemenceau who saw these proposals as a betrayal of his country, while there were also quarrels over the Middle East (where oil in Mesopotamia (Iraq) was a new objective of great-power rivalry), and in policy towards Turkey where Clemenceau saw Lloyd George, with some reason, as infatuated by claims made by Greece to Asia Minor. Lloyd George was by no means insensitive to French concerns over national security, and floated the idea of a ‘continental guarantee’ by Britain which might commit. British forces to a long-term engagement on the European continent for the first time since the Peninsular War in Spain against Napoleon. There was for a brief period a more amiable phase of the Entente between the Welshman Lloyd George and Clemenceau’s successor the ‘Breton’ (actually from Nantes), Aristide Briand6. In a conference at Cannes in January 1922 when both prime ministers made a determined effort to pursue Lloyd George’s long-term aspiration of the revision of the peace treaties (for which he received new acclaim from his former stern critic, Maynard Keynes). Lloyd George also produced a more substantial plan for a British “continental guarantee”. But this proposal was destroyed (or perhaps stymied) in the unlikely location of the Cannes golf course. Briand was a...

Table of contents

• Collection Auctoritas edited by Jorge Cagiao y Conde
• Scientific Committee
• Introduction
• Part 1. Historical aspects of the relationship between France and The United Kingdom
• Chapter 1. Partnerships and Perfidy; the Entente in War and Peace 1904 - 2020
• Chapter 2. “We are with Europe but not of it”: Churchill’s legacy in Britain’s attitude to “Europe”.
• Part 2. Constitutional aspects of the relationship between France and The United Kingdom
• Chapter 3. Rule of Law and “État de Droit”: comparing British and French concepts of Law
• Chapter 4. Brexit and the destabilisation of the United Kingdom constitution
• Part 3. Political questions on the relationship between France and The United Kingdom: security and defence
• Chapter 5. What will be the impact of Brexit on the Defence and Security of Europe?
• Chapter 6. “Counterterrorism and intelligence sharing in a post Brexit world?”
• Chapter 7. Defence and Security Cooperation after Brexit: Towards a Redefinition of Franco-British Relations?
• Part 4. Economic and social issues of the relationship between France and The United Kingdom
• Chapter 8. Is the effective enforcement of European-wide social and economic values possible after Brexit?
• Chapter 9. Origins, Development and Future of the ERASMUS programme
• Chapter 10. The healthcare issue during and after the In/Out EU referendum campaign of 2016
• Part 5. Relationship between France and Nations with devolved powers
• Chapter 11. Wales v France: Sports foes but political and economic friends
• Chapter 12. A Democratic Critique of Referendums in France and in the United Kingdom:
• Chapter 13. A new alliance against an auld foe? Scottish paradiplomacy in France and in Europe