'The Noisie' Empty, Fluttring French': English Images of the French, 1689-1815

English antipathy towards the French is traditional and has been as alive in recent decades perhaps as at any time in the past. Folk memory has established a long list of alleged criminal French misdeeds against the English from the 'Norman Yoke' to the 'non ' of de Gaulle or the Common Agricultural Policy of the EEC. History indeed has a lot to answer for in its impact on Anglo-French relations, but historians can at least seek to explain and evaluate the reasons for the long-established hostility. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there were signs that rivalry was giving place to co-operation, but they were short-lived. In the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a peak of Francophobia was reached in which a picture of France and the French was built up in the theatre, in literature and in prints and caricatures that created a feeling that a Frenchman was an alien animal: one who was openly abused and even assaulted on the streets of London. In their dress, in their mannerisms, in their food, in their political and religious practices, the French were painted as unnatural; as un-English; as a race apart.