Historian Robert Tombs on the 1,000-Year Rivalry Between Britain And France

26:53Sometimes it's overthrown and then you have a revolution. Well, you know, if you want to say what's the great fact about British history? Well, we haven't been successfully, well, we have been invaded. We haven't been conquered since 1066. and that is a great reason for having a pretty stable system. You might say, what a pity we didn't have a few revolutions on the way. Well, we had the, as you say, we had 1649, but was it a real revolution? It was a religious war and it was something that was never really popular. Most people always supported the monarchy. Indeed, most people on the parliamentary side supported monarchy.

27:36they executed Charles I because they felt they had no choice in the matter. But they didn't really want to do it. So, you know, it was a sort of semi-revolution. And as you probably know, the famous levellers, who are often sort of promoted as the inventors of English democracy, they eventually went over to Charles II. Almost everybody wanted a restoration by the end, which wasn't true in France. Or at least if they wanted a restoration, They weren't sure which monarch they wanted back. And that, in some ways, is, you know, if you wanted an explanation of French instability in the 19th century, and even up to now, it's because they've never really wholly agreed on the system of government.

28:22So you have to keep trying new ones. So I used to know how many constitutions France had since 1789. It's quite a lot. And of course, we've never had a codified constitution. So in France, you say, we had an ancient monarchy, which is now gone. Well, A, we have to restore it, or B, we have to find some alternative, or C, we have to have a democratic republic, or D, we have to have an authoritarian system. And that argument has occasionally died down, but it's never entirely gone away. And what you see now was Macron, when he first was elected, saying he intended to rule like Jupiter. He was going to be this great national leader who would not get involved in the dirty details of everyday politics.

29:16He would be there as the guide of the nation, a kind of monarch, a republican monarch. And when that goes wrong, what do the French say? They say, we've got to have a sixth republic then. We're now on the fifth. We'll have to have a sixth. because we have to find the system that works. Whereas our reaction, of course, as we have no experience of that kind of constitution making, is to say we have to sort of tweak the system a bit. You know, we have to reform the House of Lords or we have to devolve a bit to the regions. But you don't have anyone saying what we need is to have a constitutional congress in which we will thrash out in detail exactly how we're going to govern the country in future.

29:56It doesn't really occur to anybody in this country. Except maybe a few Lib Dems.

30:03Francis Foster:And one of the things that is interesting to us, we spent a significant chunk of time on the show in previous years, certainly talking about the kind of woke revolution that was running amok across particularly the Anglosphere, I would argue. And yet there are people who chart some of the origins of the ideas to the ideas of the French Revolution, the sort of radical egalitarianism, the overthrowing of all hierarchy, etc. Is that a fair assessment? Well, I think the French Revolution and the later, I mean, the Paris Commune, which I used to work on in my youth, was a good example. It gives people a kind of vision, which may be a very inaccurate one, a myth, a mythical vision of what the French call, or used to call, Le Grand Soir, which is the great evening.

30:54You know, after the revolution has taken place, you can all go out and get drunk and have a great, because this is the end of the old system. And then, of course, you have to wake up next morning and try and do something else, and that's where it tends to go wrong. The hangover tends to be really bad. But, you know, this vision of a revolutionary, a great, you know, it's very popular. In some cases, it's entered popular culture with things like Les Miserables. You think, wow, you know, if only we could build a few barricades and wouldn't it all be great? And so there are people who go for that kind of thing.

31:30And I think the myth is largely down to the French. You know, even if you want to have a Nigel Farage, anti-Nigel Farage T-shirt, you put a guillotine on it. You could put a gallows on it, but somehow that's not, that's not the romantic appeal of chopping people's heads off. and we talk about heads rolling. It's this kind of myth of...

31:52Francis Foster:Well, I suppose, sorry to interject, I suppose guillotine is a weapon of the people whereas the gallows is a weapon of the state. Yes, of course the people have often strung people. Oh, quite. Yeah, with no gallows whatsoever, a tree branch will do, obviously. And so it's interesting to me that that's... And one of the other things that I've often thought about is we call the American Revolution the American Revolution, and the French Revolution the French Revolution. The American Revolution was not a revolution. No, it's funny because the Americans used to call it the... I mean, maybe we've adopted American things as we so often do, but we used to call it the American War of Independence, which is what it was.

32:30Francis Foster:Correct. Which is why my point was it's why it was successful versus the French Revolution creating a bloodbath is a direct consequence of the fact you're not separating from an imperial power that's, in your perception, keeping you oppressed, you are overthrowing the existing regime, creating a power vacuum, and the bloodletting is inevitably the consequence of that. And of course our glorious revolution, which is in some ways more of a model for the American. You get rid of a monarch whom you say is oppressing you, but you don't allow it to get out of hand. You don't allow the mob to rule. You basically keep it in the hands of intelligent people like us who will tell the plebs to go back to work and calm down.

33:16Francis Foster:That's right. And one of the things I long underappreciated is just how much the money that the French spent trying to screw over the British and supporting their American independence ended up impoverishing them, indebting them and causing the French Revolution. Yeah, well, it basically bankrupted the monarchy. and the reason they had to call a meeting of the estates general which was the first step, which was effectively the end of the old regime in which the law was what the king said it was. There's a wonderful speech that was made by Louis XV to the Paris Parlement, which was essentially a supreme court in which he said, he more or less said, I am the state.

34:04all power resides in me. The law is what is my will. No power can be exercised by anyone apart from outside me. No other institution has any power apart from the power I give it. And that was what the monarchy was. And that collapses. You have to find another way of doing it. But it collapsed when they called the estates general and basically said, you know, gentlemen, we've run out of money. We want you to meet and agree to give us a lot more. and they basically said, that's not what we're going to do. You know, if you want any money, you're going to have to agree to a constitution. We're going to change the whole system, and that's what happened.

34:44But it was essentially a response to state bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy came about through fighting too many wars with Britain. So we won, thanks to the City of London, and being able to raise fabulous amounts of money, and because people thought, I hope they still do think that, that Parliament will ensure that people who buy British guilts will not be ripped off. Whereas in France, you could be. The king could say, well, we're not paying you. Too bad. I mean, we should never trust the French. You are correct. You are absolutely correct. I'm not going to one cap now. Of course, they've got the euro now, so they can't do that anymore.

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36:47Yes, I think you're right. France at that time, sorry, I'm interrupting you. No, no, no, no, no. You are the interviewee, so you should be talking. We're interrupting you. I mean, France had by far the largest population in Europe, 20 million people. That was double the population of Britain, larger than, you know, Austria, about the same as Russia. General de Gaulle said that he wanted a France of 100 million people. And I think I did a rough calculation once. If the French population from the late 18th century had grown at the same rate as the British, France would have a population of 180 million, which you might say is sort of natural.

37:27You know, it's twice the size of Britain. So if we have 70 million people, the French could certainly have 150 million, but they haven't. But the reasons why are somewhat mysterious, but everybody else was doubling their population and the French stopped having babies or stopped having so many. and that may be an effect of the revolution, may be an effect of the Napoleonic Wars, but whatever the reason it happened. So France's super power status partly because for demographic reasons. By 1870, when they fought Germany, Germany had an equal population with France. Twenty years later, it had a much larger population than France.

38:16And so France's power, insofar as power depends on people, and in those days, and perhaps even now, to a large extent, it still does. France was evidently in decline. But so you could say the Napoleonic Wars was the last chance for France to be the global hegemonic power. After all, if they kicked us out of India, which Napoleon wanted, if they defeated the Russians, if they'd set up a kind of European imperial federation, then that would have been it. So, you know, the old joke says we'd all be speaking French. And France, in some ways, was a much better place than Britain to be the global, the great global power, because culturally it was regarded as superior.

39:08The French language in the 18th century was the international language. um so why why was the 19th century the the in a sense the british century rather than the french century and it it could have been under napoleon it could it could well have been uh so why didn't napoleon win uh well i mean many many french people at the time and later said because he was trying he tried to do too much after all britain never tried to conquer europe or indeed conquer the globe. Napoleon, in a sense, tried to conquer everything. You can't do it that way, as the Americans have realized in recent years. So maybe Napoleon did too much.

39:56One thing he couldn't do was to invade Britain. Had he managed to do that, then he would have won. Well, he was actually talked out of invading Britain, wasn't he? Well, he, he, well, if you, you know, if you, if we go back to, we often think that Nelson at Trafalgar prevented an invasion. But in fact, he'd already given up the invasion plan by then. There was a huge army all along the Channel Coast. And he'd built lots of invasion boats, barges and so on. So he was all ready for this and just said, well, okay, I want the French fleet has to come sailing up the Channel and escort us over. you know it's only 20 miles and and then we'll be in London and England will be dead he more or less put it but then the Navy never would his Navy his his Admiral Villeneuve said it's too dangerous you know if we if we try and sell up the channel we'll get sunk so we're not going to do it so Napoleon you know sort of peak says all right then I'm going to go and invade Austria instead but that That was the closest we've ever got to being invaded by the French, probably.

41:05They came pretty close on quite a number of occasions in the previous hundred years. Because the point was made to them, was it not that, OK, you can invade England and maybe you might even win. But then what? Yes, that's true. Well, one of his generals, Bernadotte, who was pretty shrewd and who later became king of Sweden. So he was one of those who did well out of the whole business, did say that. He said, if there's an invasion of England, you have to lead it. Because if anyone else leads it, that means they'll be greater than you. So you have to lead it. But if you lead it and it fails, then that's you, you're screwed.

41:42But I think he would have probably given it a try because he was a risk taker. You might say, well, people must have told him not to invade Russia. But he did. He must have been told it was dangerous to invade Egypt. But he did that too. So I think he would have taken the chance. And what do we know about Napoleon? What do we know about his character, who he was? Because there's a lot of mythology that's been written about him and spoken about him. What was that film? I don't know whether you saw it that came out.

42:13Francis Foster:I did. Two or three years ago. It's not really about Napoleon. It's just big pitch battles and some battles. It's a lot of battles. And then there's him on the island sort of keeling over at the end. I didn't like it very much, and it sounded as though you did, for all the reasons you say. But the other thing that annoyed me was that everybody was much too old. Napoleon was what? Getting on for 50 or late 40s? I think Robespierre was shown as being about 50. These were all men in their 20s and 30s. Explains their behavior. Just partly. Yeah, it's fascinating when we talk about history just to understand how much we don't understand how young people were.

43:00Francis Foster:You know, the American founders, late 20s, early 30s. These great men who founded a nation just like kids, basically, by our standards today. Indeed. Wellington was the same age as Napoleon. They were both young. Pitt was young. Robespierre was young. Even Louis XVI was fairly young, 30-something. I think. But yeah, we kind of tend to think of people as older. Well, of course, our leaders tend to be fairly young nowadays. But Napoleon as a personality, well, one historian said he was a walking laboratory of neuroses. I mean, he wasn't French. He was Corsican, of course, as we know. His first language was Corsican, a dialect of Italian.

43:41Whether he ever really liked France, I wonder. He was sent to a French military college at a very young age because his mother had slept with the French governor of Corsica, supposedly. And then it turned out that he wasn't really a, he was barely a gentleman in a military college full of aristocrats. I mean, he wasn't very happy there. There's even a story that he was advised he might think of joining the Royal Navy. I mean, our Royal Navy. So, I mean, I think probably, I always feel he regarded the French as a resource to be used. When he made his son king of Rome, he wanted to be emperor like the Holy Roman Emperor, like Charlemagne.

44:27Not a French ruler, really, a European ruler. So I think France was a big, rich country, good for his ambitions, but I don't feel it was a country that he felt very strongly emotionally attached to.

44:44Francis Foster:So he wasn't a French nationalist. He was someone who saw France as a vehicle through which to achieve his personal ambitions. Yes, I think so. And one of the things you tend to find with people who are very, very good at something is they tend to like to do it a lot. Yes. Was the reason that he invaded so many different countries, partly because he was a great general and he loved war and he loved winning. He certainly loved winning. He was a very good planner. I think that's what he was mainly. I don't think he was a, I mean, I'm not an expert on this, but I don't think he was a great battlefield commander in a way that Wellington was, though Wellington was also a very good planner.

45:28But, you know, there's this saying, amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. Well, Napoleon was very good at organizing. And that he was...

45:39Francis Foster:Was it not him that said an army marches on his stomach? Supposedly, yeah. That would kind of explain that, right? Yes. But yes, I suppose he was something that... That was the solution to his problems. Yes. If you've got a problem, then war is the way to solve it. So in the case of the British, yes. In the case of the Russians, yes. the case of the Spanish, invade Spain if they're being awkward. And the assumption is that you will win and that will be the end of your problems. And I think there may have been something else, which was that although he called himself emperor, and although he ate the style of, you know, the archaic style of the Holy Roman Empire, and he surrounded himself with real aristocrats, and he married a Habsburg, he couldn't do much better than that.

46:26I mean, He always knew that he was an upstart. And I think, at least I sort of guess, this is not a hypothesis based on no particular evidence, that there wasn't really a place where he could stop. He couldn't sort of settle down and say, I'll live the rest of my life as emperor and happily hunting and whatever. He couldn't do that. I mean, he said somewhere, if I'm not feared, then I'm not safe towards that effect. So I think that there was not, he didn't know how, one of his, one of the historians, one of them said he didn't know how to stop. He didn't know how to make peace. And maybe there was no way he could do it.

47:07Because as soon as he looked weaker, then he would be overthrown. You know, he couldn't rely on the, he couldn't be like the Habsburgs or like the Boerwals or even like the Hanoverians in Britain because he was only over there as a, in a sense, as an expedient. So he wants his son to succeed, never did. His nephew did, which shows that he did have, there was a dynastic, you know, there was a lot of support for Napoleon. But I think he could never be sure that he would survive peace. And what would you do with the army? As long as there's a war, you can always have the army somewhere else. They can be paid for by others.

47:50What happens when the war ends? As we know, it did destabilize France. And it was a war that ultimately defeated him. And of course, we can talk about the Battle of Waterloo, which I'm sure we will do. But it was also his invasion of Portugal, wasn't it? Yeah. That was his ultimate undoing, really. That was the beginning of the end. Well, what he called the Spanish ulcer. He invades Portugal and he invades Spain. And they, well, I think this is true. at least I've written it, so I'm hoping it's true. The French lost as many men in Spain as they did in Russia. What? Over a longer period, of course.

48:30Really? Yeah.

48:32Francis Foster:Like half a million men or something like that? Something like that. Wow. Because, of course, most of the men they lost in Russia were not French, or at least very many of them weren't. They were Poles, Germans, Italians and so on. You know, it was an international army. In Spain, it was largely French. and, you know, they were fighting a very bloody and nasty guerrilla war with the Spanish, as well as fighting Wellington, who sort of was popping out of Portugal to fight a few battles and then popping back again. And it was a drain on their strength. I'm going to be honest with you. I used to think grilling was simple.

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51:02Francis Foster:And one of the interesting things in terms of the mythology for our generation and perhaps younger people as well who've not studied history thoroughly, as most of us haven't, partly because of the way history is taught nowadays, is you come away with this sort of, there's this popular idea of the French as the sort of cheese-eating surrender monkeys. This is the kind of phrase that sticks in people's. But of course people don't realise that by the time of the beginning of World War II, the French had been the people who'd had one of the most powerful armies in the world consecutively for several wars.

51:39Francis Foster:Yes. And what happened in 1939 was a colossal shock to everybody, not just others, but the French themselves. Yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, this idea which I think many people do have who have a superficial knowledge, which is the French didn't fight in 1939, 1940. It's not true. They did fight and they had large casualties, much larger than Britain did. And of course the resistance continued to resist and so on.

52:11But yeah, I mean France was a military nation and you can still sort of see that to some extent on the 14th of July or the 11th of November when they have parades down the Champs -Élysées. You can see that a bit like us, we like the idea of military pomp and all that. You might say, well we've both allowed ours to be rather hollowed up because we don't to spend the money on it. But Wellington and so on would never have thought of the French as a non-military nation. In fact, they would have thought of them as above all an aggressive military nation. And that's why British politicians were so scared of the French for so long.

52:52Right up until the end of the 19th century, they were afraid of France invading. one reason why we didn't build a channel tunnel. And I was told by a director of the Channel Tunnel Company that it was technically feasible to have built a channel tunnel in the 1880s, was that the war ministry in Britain said we can't risk the French invading through a tunnel.

53:16Francis Foster:Frankly, probably a good decision, given that the Germans could have invaded through that tunnel a few decades later. I was curious about why it was that this great military nation of France was so vulnerable to the German invasion in 1940. That's right, not 1939. Because, I mean, there are a few different things. One is the Germans had come up with, you know, they used the radio very well. They used tanks very well. They used mobile war maneuver very well. But another thing that I understand is French society was very demoralized by the internal battle between the communists and the fascists within France.

53:58Is that a fair assessment as well? France was more divided politically than Britain was. That's true. They were probably not more divided than Germany was. I remember the great German historian Sir Richard Evans saying that something like, if you think France was demoralized in 1939, you should have seen Germany. I mean, Hitler's power was fragile in 1939. And it was only because they defeated France that Hitler suddenly becomes the invulnerable great national genius and so on. And, you know, the army would have kicked Hitler out had there been any reverse. And Hitler, I think, knew that. But what about the French?

54:40Well, I think there was some demoralization. I think there had been a feeling ever since the First World War that France could not go through that again. You know, the French had had twice the losses that we had in the First World War. And it was demoralizing enough for Britain. You know, the huge peace movements, a lot of pacifists, a determination to appease Germany in order to avoid another war. And therefore, for many people, a kind of terrible acceptance to say, well, we knew this was going to be a disaster. and now it's a disaster. So therefore we have to stop fighting. I mean, there were plenty of people in Britain who would have said that too, had it not been for Churchill.

55:22Probably what we would have done. But I think it was also that the Allies and indeed the Germans were preparing for a repeat of the First World War. One of my colleagues once told me, which I was surprised at, it's always stuck in my mind, the Germans were using more steel for making barbed wire in 1939 than they were for making tanks because almost everybody was expecting a repeat of trench warfare. And that's what the French were doing. That's what we were doing. So the army was spread along this line from Holland down to the Maginot Line. And the Germans decided, the German army, not Hitler, decided that if there was going to be a repeat of the First World War, it would also be a repeat of German defeat.

56:13And therefore, they had to do something that would cut this war short. And that was the so-called Blitzkrieg, which was an improvisation. I mean, they'd almost done it in 1918. So you might think, well, shouldn't people have expected the same thing again? But they didn't. But, you know, the German breakthrough in March 1918 had almost broken the Allied line, and almost forced the British to do a Dunkirk in 1918. And in 1939 or 1940, as you say, they had better tanks. They had radios. They had all that. Whereas the French, who had the best tanks in the world, relied on flags to communicate between them.

56:56It wasn't a terribly good idea. But radios often didn't work anyway. But the Germans concentrated their forces in one place. So one French general said, we had 500 groups of three tanks, and the Germans had one group of 500 tanks. And so they punched through the line where no one was expecting it, where they thought it was impossible, through the Ardennes forest. Tanks can't go through the trees. We all know that they can't attack there. So they ignored all the warning signs, and that's where they did attack. And the Allies, who could have perhaps bombed them, didn't. Too late. And then they never recovered.

57:39So the French fought, the British fought, but they were always fighting and losing battle. And then, as you say, there were plenty of people in France who said we should never have started this war. You know, the real enemy are the Communists, not the Fascists. In fact, we quite like them. So what we have to do is to do a deal with Hitler. and that of course is what happened. And had it not been for de Gaulle and Churchill, perhaps that's how the whole thing would have ended.

58:08Francis Foster:Well, it's one of the things I mentioned about the communists and the fascists. I mean, people don't realize how many fascists there were across Europe in the 1930s, not just in Germany, in France, in Southern Europe, in Eastern Europe, all over the place. The factoid I always like about this is, I think one of the last divisions defending the Reichstag was SS Charlemagne, which was full of French Nazis. Was it really? I didn't know that. And it's interesting to me. One question that we've never really talked about in the show, which I think would be interesting in the context of France and World War II, is what do you think was the impact of the French resistance on World War II?

58:47Francis Foster:How significant was it? How damaging was it to the Germans?

58:53Not very, except in the sense that it made the Allied invasion less bloody. So the French resistance was able to do a lot of damage in 1944 to German communications. To facilitate D-Day. Yes, facilitate D-Day and what happened after D-Day. And also the invasion of Provence as well. So the Maquis had been armed mainly by the British and organized and were ready to come out into the open. So, you know, what they'd been doing before then was good for French morale and perhaps bad for German morale. I don't know. Probably didn't make all that much difference. But, you know, producing underground newspapers, having radio broadcasts, all that helps to keep spirits up.

59:44But as somebody said, it doesn't actually kill any Germans. And so what really counted, I think, was the mobilization in 1944. And therefore it saved a lot of Allied lives. And it almost certainly shortened the war a bit. But I don't think you could say it was a major element in the war. But what it certainly did do was to help France to see itself and be seen by others as still a great power. and one of the victors. Churchill was very keen on that too. So France gets a permanent seat in the United Nations and has an occupation zone in Germany and so on. So there's this desire to remake France as a great power as an ally of Britain.

1:00:34And the resistance made that seem plausible. I think that was the important thing. And of course, it later on helps De Gaulle to come back and save France from the possibility of another civil war over Algeria. And I think de Gaulle was the, you know, evidently was the great figure of 20th century France. And the resistance was, as I think he probably saw it, was really a vehicle for him to be the saviour of the nation. And people often talk about Vichy France. Yes. What was Vichy France? Was it essentially a Nazi state? But how much support for the Nazis was there? A lot at first. Quite a lot.

1:01:23Because Marshal Pétain, who was the great French hero of the First World War, or one of them, is one of those who think we have to do a deal with Germany. We've lost. and the patriotic thing is to make the best of your defeat. As I said, there were plenty of people in Britain who thought the same. So you can imagine, you can sort of imagine, if you wanted to write a sort of historical novel about this, you could imagine the Duke of Windsor coming back as a puppet monarch with David Lloyd George as collaborating Prime Minister and Churchill in exile in Canada or somewhere. And what the French had, therefore, was a war hero telling them that they had fought bravely, but they'd lost.

1:02:13And that what they had to do was to make the best of their situation. Reform the nation. That was where the fascists came in. Reform the nation meant hammering the left, anti-Semitism, and discipline. Sort of Boy Scout sort of stuff. And the church, much of the Catholic church, was very keen on this too. So it was indeed a consciously counter-revolutionary movement. They didn't have a monarch, but they had Marshal Pétain, who was the next best thing. And a lot of them were people who were monarchists, who would have liked to have a monarch in France, and who thought that it had all gone wrong in 1789.

1:02:50That's when France had started to go to the dogs, and they were going to put France back on the path it should have been on, and they never had a revolution. And if Hitler would help them to do that, then that was fine. So there were fascists, but they weren't all fascists. Many of them were old-fashioned reactionary patriots. Of course, some of the old-fashioned reactionary patriots were in the resistance too. So it was often a choice you had to make. If you hated the Germans enough, you would go into the resistance. If you didn't terribly hate the Germans, you might end up on the side of Vichy.

1:03:27And quite a number of people went from one side to the other, including François Mitterrand, as you may know. Although he ended up socialist president, he had been on the far right in his youth. He was decorated by Marshal Pétain. He was a junior minister, I think, or at least had some sort of official position in Vichy. And then when he realized, you know, honorably, if you like, that they were going to lose, he got in touch with de Gaulle and said, Obviously, you're the man I want to serve you now. And, you know, I'm putting it in a rather sarcastic way and you're smiling. But it was possible to make that decision in a perfectly honourable way.

1:04:12You could say, I trusted Pétain and now I realise that that was not the right way to go. And so I'm going to join the resistance. And plenty of people did that. I never thought I'd be the man to change your mind about underwear. And yet here I am on a politics podcast about to do exactly that. I'm talking about sheath. S-H-E-A-T-H. Sheath.com. It's underwear built around a dual pouch system. What that means in plain English, everything stays where it should be. No sticking, no chafing, no shifting around mid-sentence while trying to maintain an air of gravitas. The fabric breathes, the design separates.

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1:05:26First pair comes with a full money-back guarantee, so there's no reason not to try them. Sheath.com. Once you sheath, you won't go back. Sheath.com. And what was that watershed moment where people realised, hang on, maybe it's not a good idea to be pro-Vichy? Yeah, well, I think there were probably a number. I mean, the first thing was when Britain fought on, because the Vichy view was Britain would surrender. You know, we had to surrender first, if you like, because otherwise the British would surrender and they would be the ones doing the deal with Germany on our backs. That was the widespread view.

1:06:00You know, they burnt Joan of Arc. They'll screw us again. So the British didn't surrender. Oh, that's that's that's awkward. And then, of course, when the Americans come into the war, you start thinking, oh, well, are the Germans really going to win after all? And then when the German attack on Russia gets bogged down, you think, well, after all, things are not going terribly well for the Germans. And then in 1942, the Germans invaded unoccupied France. And so in that case, you think, well, so what was the point of this at all? OK, for most people, it's a way you just have to carry on with your life.

1:06:43You know, not many people are heroes. but some people do say well this is where we really have to take a stand and you do find people joining the resistance. Because also there was a spectre of Waterloo wasn't there where I mean they were still quite sore that they got their asses handed to them. Yes they were and they were also quite sore about Dunkirk because here we are, this is the British once again leading us in the lurch. So I mean one One French trope, if you like, is the British leave you in the lurch.

1:07:18Francis Foster:You know what? Ungrateful bastards. What are we supposed to stand to the last man at Dunkirk? Just because they got their asses handed to them. Typical, is all I'm going to say. Well, funnily enough, well, I say funnily, not really funny. One reason why the French set their best troops in 1939 up into Belgium, which was the wrong thing to do as we know because the Germans are going to attack in a different place was because they were afraid the British would do a runner. So the commander-in-chief of the French army says okay we're going to send our best troops there because we know what the British nearly did in 1918.

1:07:57They nearly ran away then so they'll run away again so we have to send our best troops to make sure the British don't run away. But they did of course the British did as the French They did run away. They ran away at Dunkirk. The French were heroically holding off the Germans while the British were getting on their boats. There's a famous Vichy cartoon that shows a British officer punching a French soldier in the face at Dunkirk to keep him off the boats. It's the British who are getting on the boats, not the French. Of course, that wasn't true. And of course, Brexit, for some people, is another way in which the British let the French down.

1:08:38Francis Foster:You know what? During the interview, you almost brought me to the point of having sympathy for the French, but I think that has rapidly evaporated in the last two minutes. Well, if Dunkirk, the British Army might well not have escaped at Dunkirk had the French not, in fact, sacrificed themselves in holding off the Germans. and I think so you could imagine why many French soldiers and politicians thought well we did our bit and the British didn't and the thing one of the things that really annoyed them well annoyed is not is that they saw the British as refusing to commit the RAF to the battle in France and that in a sense is true though it would have been no good.

1:09:21Francis Foster:Well Churchill knew though Churchill knew that France was lost and we were gonna he knew Britain had to defend our island. He was told that by the chief of the, you know, the commanders of the RAF. They said, if you send the RAF to France, we're going to lose it and then, and we'll lose the war. But I mean, quite a lot of the RAF was sent to France. And after Dunkirk, more troops were sent to France and then had to be withdrawn again. But if you were French, if you were a Frenchman who, let's say, had a few doubts about the British alliance, If you did remember Joan of Arc or all the other stuff, Waterloo, and then you'd say, we knew we couldn't trust the British.

1:10:02They're willing to fight to the last Frenchman, just as they were in the First World War. We're not going to do that this time. We're not going to be the mugs this time. We're not going to get our sons killed for the sake of British prophets or the British Empire. We're going to do the sensible thing and make peace with. The Germans were, after all, not all that bad, not as bad as the British anyway. because at least the Germans are honourable. You know, this is not my view. I'm speaking of it as a Vichy, as a patriotic. You know, the Germans are not, because at least the Germans fight fair, whereas the British are all...

1:10:37Well, I'd say the history of World War II

1:10:38Francis Foster:doesn't quite bear that statement out. Don't forget we're back in 1939, 1940. Quite, quite, quite, quite. That's really interesting. I suppose the interesting question, moving back to the present age, is to what extent that Vichy resistance split informs French politics to this day. I mean, you mentioned it around. I imagine there are hundreds of people, sort of on a political level, but millions of people further down, whose views and ideologies come from that to inform their views today. Today, a bit rather less. I mean, we shall see this in a sense at the next presidential election, because the thing that has held back the Le Pen family business, which is the Front National, the Rallyment National, is its association with Vichy for many people in France.

1:11:32So, I mean, my wife, my co-author, would say, you know, I would never vote for Le Pen. And if I say, well, why? You know, she seems all right. Because, you know, what her father was, who these people were. These were the people who collaborated. These are the Vichy people, all their grandchildren, all their great-grandchildren. And the French have long historical memories. So I think it does still, so we shall see. If Le Pen becomes president, it will show that the younger generation, which is to say really anybody under 40, under 50, no longer thinks of the Second World War as the defining experience.

1:12:11The people for whom it was the defining experience, of course, are largely no longer with us. You know, the people who remember it or who remember their parents remembering it. They're going. So, I mean, younger people are supposed to be much more willing to support Le Pen than older people.

1:12:30Francis Foster:And to what extent is your wife's concern understandable instinctively but inaccurate factually? And to what extent is it factual? You know, being someone's granddaughter doesn't mean or daughter doesn't mean you have their views. I've got very different views to my parents and grandparents. I mean, when I first went to France, which is now a long time ago, it was still a very clear thing. You know, you could, I had friends who, you know, I had a friend whose aunt had fallen in love with a German airman. And after the war, she'd had to leave Paris. Didn't come back for 20 years. And they all knew that.

1:13:07The neighbours knew that. And so this was a very present memory. Of course, all that's long gone. But nevertheless, there still are, you know, there are family traditions. There are, one is Catholicism. So Catholics tended to be conservative, and the Catholic Church tended to support Vichy because of hatred of communism, of atheism, what they saw as the whole revolutionary tradition, which was anti-Christian. That was a big divide at least until the 1970s. I mean, I think, you know, you could, I used to show my students a map of French election results in the 1970s compared with a map of support for the French Revolution in the 1790s.

1:13:51And they're almost exactly the same. So you could say, you know, for a very, very long time, there were political cultures which affected whole regions. I think that's really largely gone, as it has here, really. But the next election will show it one way or the other.

1:14:10Francis Foster:I guess what I'm asking, Robert, sorry, is something slightly different, which is, it's not that you're going on too much. I just want to dig into this thing because here in Britain and elsewhere around the world, most of us don't understand what's happening in other countries. We just get given this slogan in the newspaper and we go, oh, that's what that is. We don't know. Is it fair to say that the Front National is the ideological descendant of Vichy France? Ideological. I don't mean linear biologically. I mean ideologically. Are these the people who would collaborate with fascists today if France was invaded?

1:14:49Francis Foster:That's kind of what I'm getting at. That's a very good question. There is certainly, there is that element, certainly, yeah,

1:15:01which is one that is visible and active in French politics in a way that it's really, the British equivalent is really very, very marginal. At least it was until recently. So there is that element. There's also a traditional Catholic element. But for a lot of people now, it's as in most, let's say most countries, it's a question of who you think will be the best government. A lot of it's now a sort of visceral dislike of Macron, which is odd. I mean, odd in a way. He's a rather annoying chap, I think, for many people. But he's kind of politically not very definable. He's kind of colourless politically.

1:15:47He's not right wing or left wing. Many people in France seem to absolutely loathe Macau.

1:15:52Francis Foster:He's like Keir Starmer. A bit like Keir Starmer. Yeah, but I understand why people hate someone like that, because they see them as presiding over the continued decline of the country without having any of their own views or implementing policies. The reason I'm getting into this is just very interesting. If you look at the right wing populist parties elsewhere, say in Britain, Right. Nigel Farage is clearly ideologically the descendant of the people who would fight the fascists. Yes. Clearly. Right. Marine Le Pen ideologically is the descendant of who? Well, I think you'd have to say that the French often talk about political families, which is an odd idea.

1:16:36It's partly because French political parties are very fluid and they're constantly changing their names and so on. But there's this idea that there are political families. And if there is a political family to which Le Pen belongs, apart from her own, the Le Pen family, it does include the people who would have collaborated, largely because of their visceral hatred of communism. Okay, you might say, well, is that still there? No, not necessarily. But, I mean, simply because the communist menace is no longer there. But they're the people who tend to see the solution to problems as authoritarian government, who blame a lot of problems on immigrants.

1:17:22Okay, well, a lot of us do. Not all problems, but some problems. But there's a spectrum between people who say, well, I don't really like to see people publicly praying in the street in Paris.

1:17:42Francis Foster:People are Muslims? Muslims. I don't like to see Muslims publicly praying in Paris. But otherwise, I've got Muslim friends and neighbors I don't mind. And then there are the people who say, these people are the enemies of France. they should all be expelled or whatever. As we know, there's a whole spectrum. And a lot of that spectrum will support Marine Le Pen. It's not only about migration. It's also about obviously things like taxation. It's also, as you say, this sense that the country is on the slide and we need somebody. The Farage phenomenon is in some ways similar. We need somebody who break the rules if necessary and get things done.

1:18:26The French don't talk about the blob, but there's the same sense of a state that doesn't work. I think in a way that Le Pen and her party have tried to normalize themselves.

1:18:42It's not clear whether that will work or not. If it does, then you might see the same sort of thing that you see with Maloney in Italy. In other words, someone who comes to power being accused of being a neo-fascist and then turns out not to be very different from any centre-right politician. So it may be that Le Pen will get elected and will turn out to be not very different from any centre-right politician. The thing that worries me is rather different. My wife, I think, would be viscerally resistant to an ethos. How many people in France feel the same? And if Le Pen is elected, to what extent will there be violence in the streets?

1:19:22Would there be strikes? Would there be resistance from within the civil service and so on? I think probably to quite a large extent. That just sounds like France now, Robert. France all the time. But much worse. Much more so.

1:19:39Francis Foster:And, you know, we're both in our early 40s, But I think my entire adult life people have been predicting that Le Pen of one form or another is going to be elected. It hasn't happened so far. Do you expect that it will at the next election? I honestly don't know. Because as I said, I think it depends on how people at the very last minute decide to vote in the second round. Whether they're going to say, well, I don't like a lot of this right wing stuff. But I certainly don't want the left. It also depends on who the candidate is. If it comes down to a fight between Le Pen and Mélenchon, then... Mélenchon is a communist.

1:20:24Sort of. I mean, he's sort of Jeremy Corbyn multiplied by 10. Yeah.

1:20:32Francis Foster:So I think I was right when I said communist based on that description. Yeah. He's a democratic socialist, as they call it. Yes, exactly. Yes, the communists. What worries me a bit about France and about Britain, both the two countries to which I feel a strong attachment, is that they're both heading in the same direction, towards a polarisation of politics between a right-wing coalition, which is almost certainly going to disappoint its followers, and the possibility of a left-wing coalition, in our case, Greens, Nationalists, Lib Dems, Labour, who will cause chaos. And in the French case, you could have a Mélenchon-led coalition of the left against Le Pen with Stop Le Pen as its slogan.

1:21:22And I think in that case, you're heading into very dangerous waters. We've been talking about history and how history reflects on the present. But in an odd way, the histories of France and Britain are so different. And yet we're facing the same sort of political, we seem to be facing the same sort of political future in which the centre is collapsing and polarisation is taking place. But with the polarised parties not at all, let's say, unable to create a sense that they would be capable of tackling the country's problems in both France and Britain. And so what you get, what you might get is in fact a succession of weak and constantly changing governments, sort of cobbled together, centrist, relying sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, which we've had in France ever since Macron came to power really.

1:22:29Robert, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. Absolutely fascinating. What it's done has confirmed all our prejudices about the French. So thank you very much. It's given me a basis for my prejudice. But the final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

1:22:48Francis Foster:Before Robert answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you go to triggerpod.co.uk where you will be able to see this. Why doesn't there seem to be more anger from England towards France for the steady stream of small boats that France lets through. What are specific cultural traits of French peoples that distinguish them from their Anglo-Saxon and other counterparts? What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Oh, gosh. Well, I think we're talking about it a bit, but I've always been a bit suspicious, a bit, suspicious of rewilding, meaning letting everything go to pot, not looking after land, not looking after anything and say, oh, well, this is rewilding.

1:23:34It's just letting all the weeds and the brambles grow. And I think that's what's, I think it's being accepted that that's one of the things that's causing a lot of the, or at least enabling a lot of these fires to spread, that people are not controlling. We have to manage, I think we have to manage the place where we live, we have to manage the countryside. And to just say, well, we're going to let it go back to nature is a recipe, as I think we've seen, for a lot of disaster. It's the same in every country that it's been done, I think. There we go. Robert, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on.

1:24:06Thank you so much. Make sure to join us over on Substack, where you get to ask Robert your questions.

1:24:14Francis Foster:Professor Toombs is still a supporter of the Conservative Party. How does he square that with their failure, often deliberate, Patrick inserts, to make anything meaningful out of Brexit.