Symbiotic Entente?
John Ardagh enjoys a survey of Franco-British contact over ten centuries.
Britain and France: Ten Centuries
Edited by Douglas Johnson, Francois Bedarida and Francois Crouzet
(379pp William Dawson and Son Ltd, Folkestone, 1980)
Francois Bedarida, in his 'postface' to this admirable book, writes of 'the quasi-eternal paradox of neighbouring nations which are so near to each other and yet so distant, with so many points of resemblance and yet so radically different in their make-up. This is the enigma of the otherness...'. There has often seemed to me to be something wilful in this failure, or refusal, of the British and French to understand each other, as if they preferred to retain the titillating mystery of this almost sexual 'otherness' - vive la petite difference! And, in the past, the two nations' historians have sometimes been among the perpetrators of the many false myths about each other – compare the school history textbooks so long in use on respective sides of the Channel, where rival nationalisms vied with each other to distort the truth.
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