WE British have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the French. Yet stand a Welsh hill-farmer next to a French farmer from Auvergne, and you have little to choose between them. The Welshman would have his collie and wear a multitude of different checks; the Frenchman a beret and have a Gauloise hanging from his lower lip. Both are thorns in the flesh of their respective governments.
When the British army went to France in 1914, at the bidding of the entente cordiale, the officers of the respective armies were very different. The British were, more often than not, Anglo-Irish, and only looked good on a horse. The French were over-weight (there had been a scramble among senior French officers at the outbreak of war for the best French chefs to serve upon their staffs) and according to the unhappily named General French, the British commander-in-chief, his French opposite numbers were the sons of shopkeepers and thus "common". They were also, I regret to say, much better at their metier.
The so-called Anglo-French tit-for-tat trade war, which the British press is writing up with such relish, has even made William Hague, the Tory leader and a twerp if there ever was one, more "patriotic" than Tony Blair. Hague has made all the rude noises, while Blair has at least tried to get the French government to see sense.
I am certainly not going to boycott (a good Irish word) French food. Claret may not mean much to William Hague (he is a Ribena drinker) but it does to the English establishment. Pate de fois gras is one of the world's delicacies and it should not be left to the Americans. As for French beef, we hardly eat any.
John Bull has tended to regard the average Frenchman as a fop who would "flanner dans les grands boulevards" in the company of a dog, mistress or wife bearing the unhappy name of Hortense. He was especially fond of offal, brains, tripe a la mode de Caen and sweetbreads, and was an abominable driver of motor cars (incidentally, a French invention). He was a good soldier (if properly led), and according to the Scarlet Majors of the British army, "better at going forward than going back". The Scarlet Majors were generally going back to places like Dunkirk.
The English have always envied the French their women, even the Hortenses of this world. They could carry "a little black dress" like no-one on this side of the Channel, had a chic which was unrivalled, and were good in bed. In the British Victorian Courts of Law, the term "French vices" was used to describe a practice which is now common, even in the west of Ireland. If a French woman had a disadvantage it was her tendency to make a fool of her dogs; the ubiquitous poodle.
The French, on the other hand, have long regarded the English as les barbares. They eat their rosbif lamentably overdone, and cover their lamb in mint sauce. They have an exaggerated respect for their royal family, the French having got rid of theirs (Napoleon III) in 1871. That does not, however, stop the French reading insatiably about the sexual goings-on of the minor British royals. The British, meanwhile, read only cheap literature, and have never heard of Jean Paul Sartre.
GIVEN the centuries of prejudice, from Agincourt to Waterloo (I cannot remember the names of any French victories although I will concede we lost the Hundred Years' War), it is hardly surprising that the popular press, and the more foolish politicians (for example, the Minister of Agriculture, Nick Brown, who has called for a boycott on his own) have joined the fight with relish. The popular press has always been inclined to clamour for attrition, from Jenkins' Ear onwards, even if it means the simple British housewife, who is only at home in her local supermarket, will abandon Golden Delicious for Cox's Orange Pippen, thereby doing her bit to win the war. But I doubt whether she has ever tasted saucisse de Toulouse, les escargots a l'ail, and les cuisses de grenouilles. Any Englishman, or Irishman brought up on a trinity of sauces (red, yellow and brown) will not know what he is missing. We will lose the war and not even know.
Julian Critchley is a writer and former Conservative MP