PINT-SIZED NAPOLEON SHOULD BE CUT DOWN TO SIZE
WORKING as a classroom assistant in a French high school, one of the teachers invited me for dinner. After a typically lavish feast, we were polishing off the wine when the conversation turned to the thorny history of Anglo-French relations.
‘We’ll never forgive you, you know,’ he said abruptly. ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘For the Second World War,’ he said. ‘Winning it...’
I often think about that conversation. For although France’s political and cultural elite are first to boast about how they have buried the grudges of history, their recent actions tell a different story.
There have been two prize examples in the past few days. One came from France’s Minister for European Affairs, Nathalie Loiseau, who said she would rather see Britain crash out of the EU without a deal than accept a compromise that might undermine her beloved single market.
The other came from Emmanuel Macron, who recently told the United Nations that the EU would gladly welcome Britain back if we corrected our historic mistake in a second referendum.
Mr Macron thinks Brexit can be reversed and hopes, by blocking a deal, he can blackmail Theresa May into a second referendum.
The Leave victory, he said recently, was won by ‘liars’ who ‘left the next day so they didn’t have to manage it’.
Actually, the only person who left the next day was David Cameron, who had campaigned for Remain.
Even so, in its haughtiness, condescension and ignorance, Mr Macron’s rebuke shows why he has become an example of everything ordinary Britons loathe in the European political elite.
Threats were bound to put British people’s backs up. If there were a second referendum I would be tempted to vote Leave purely to express my fury at being lectured by this Parisian pygmy — though I voted Remain the first time.
But Mr Macron’s real audience was not here in Britain. He was pandering to the jealousy, resentment and fear with which so many French peer across the Channel.
Perhaps that sounds a bit strong. But, as the Cambridge historian Robert Tombs wrote years ago, many of our Gallic neighbours have never really forgiven us for Agincourt and Waterloo, let alone for our effrontery in standing up to Hitler.
That most pompous of all French presidents, Charles de Gaulle, never forgave us for saving his country during the Second World War. Painfully conscious of the cowardice and incompetence that had disfigured his own country’s war effort, he tried to get his revenge by vetoing our first applications to join the Common Market in 1963 and 1967.
De Gaulle’s successors have invariably tried to copy his example. When Margaret Thatcher tried to win a rebate on Britain’s scandalously excessive contributions to the EU budget in the early 1980s, for example, Giscard d’Estaing tried to block her. At one summit, he started reading a newspaper while she was talking.
OTHER recent presidents have continued the same pattern. When the financial crisis broke in 2008, the first reaction of Nicolas Sarkozy, a moral and political dwarf now facing charges of bribery and corruption, was to blame it on ‘AngloSaxon capitalism’ and demand action against the City of London.
Similarly, no sooner had Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016 than François Hollande insisted that ‘there must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price’, and that Britain must face serious ‘economic and human consequences’.
As for Mr Macron, when he was elected in May 2017 he pretended to be a new kind of president. But if you got a computer to design a classic over-privileged Gallic politician, it would look just like him.
He went to the elite École Nationale d’Administration, which educated three other French presidents and seven prime ministers.
He became Minister of Finance without standing in a single election. Then he set up his own political party, En Marche.
Mr Macron came to power promising tough reforms but has utterly failed to deliver. He parades around like a conquering hero and harangued a teenager who failed to call him ‘Mr President’. Yet he looks more and more like a teenager himself, struggling to cope.
His administration is in chaos and his approval rating stands at a pathetic 23 per cent.
And so Mr Macron has fallen back on the oldest French trick of all: bashing the British.
To Mr Macron, as to so many of his compatriots, Brexit poses a huge challenge. It would be humiliating for France if we made a success of our independence outside the EU while they ploughed joylessly on to ever-closer union.
But if Mr Macron seriously thinks he can blackmail us into falling into line, he is an even bigger fool than he looks. For if he knew anything about history, he would know that nothing infuriates the British people more than a foreigner telling them what to do.
And since Mr Macron clearly models himself on Napoleon, hosting Mrs May this summer at the emperor’s old haunt of Fort de Brégançon, an island retreat off the Mediterranean coast, he should remember what became of his hero.
Let Mr Macron block a deal if he likes, though the consequences would surely be disastrous for his own economy, with its woefully undercapitalised banks and crippling youth unemployment rate.
Let him strut and swagger. Let him enjoy his time in the limelight. It won’t last long.
Britain can take it. After all, we have taken it before — and worse. And if there is one thing guaranteed to unite us, it is that we will never, ever give in to a foreign bully.