The entente cordiale

A sneaky submarine deal has torpedoed our friendship with France. We’ll live to regret it, argues James Hawes

Why does Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who bears the particule de noblesse, and speaks excellent French, insist on insulting France by pretending he doesn’t? Taken in tandem with his stoking of an insignificant dispute over fishing licences, done knowing that Macron—facing an election—will have to respond, the whole act might look designed to trash our most important alliance, the entente cordiale.

Acting is the mot juste, for Johnson is working from a script. He has been saying “donnez-moi un break” for decades: the shtick of a posh English chap pretending he can’t speak French goes back to Shakespeare. Henry V had perfect French, but Shakespeare has him claim barely to speak it. Why? To please the groundlings.

A er 1066, the English were ruled over by a French-speaking elite. Even when they stopped using French on all public occasions (around 1400), they still, like Johnson, learned it from earliest youth. To this day, if you don’t understand that someone has a certain je ne sais quoi, you’re not really comme il faut over here. Which is why pretending you can’t speak French—when everyone knows you can—works. It says you are posh yet choose to side, in this ancient English culture war, with the monoglot commoners. Who roll over in delight.

Fun on stage. But with the French enraged about the submarine deal with the Americans and Australians that cut out Paris, playing to the gallery threatens to spill over into international relations. France is Europe’s only other nuclear power, a friend we haven’t fought since 1815, and with whom, when fighting side by side, we have never been defeated.

Cross-channel war had historically been almost standard, but in 1844 Queen Victoria announced what she called the entente cordiale. Ten years later, the “western powers” managed the impossible: beating a Russian Czar into submission on his own territory. In 1864, Disraeli gave the Commons this prescription for peace in Europe (a precondition, he knew, for Britain to thrive): “I lay this down as a great principle… If there is... a cordial alliance between England and France, war is most difficult.”

If we had stuck publicly and fully to

Disraeli’s line a er 1887, when Europe lined up for a France-Russia vs Austria-Germany war, the most bone-headed Prussian general could have done the maths. But our leaders clung too long to the myth of an empire insulated from Europe, and when we rebooted the entente in 1904, our commitment was too weak—and secret—to act as a deterrent. In August 1914, the plan for a modest expeditionary force to aid France was unknown even to many Cabinet ministers. We paid in blood and treasure, twice over, and the New World took over from the bankrupt and bloodied Old.

In extremis in 1940, Churchill proposed an “eternal union” of Britain and France. Johnson, by contrast, treats the relationship as another plaything in his endless quest to persuade the ordinary English that he is a good laugh and just like them, particule de noblesse and all. But for an island already dri ing once again away from the continent, the consequences of failing to keep up the entente might be anything but cordial. Donnez-moi un break, indeed.

James Hawes’s “Shortest History of England” is out with Old Street Publishing