Britain and France in Two World Wars

Truth, Myth and Memory

Robert Tombs, Emile Chabal

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441130396
• eBook ISBN: 9781441166197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

France and Britain, indispensable allies in two world wars, remember and forget their shared history in contrasting ways. The book examines key episodes in the relationship between the two countries, including the outbreak of war in 1914, the battles of the Somme and Verdun, the Fall of France in 1940, Dunkirk, and British involvement in the French Resistance and the 1944 Liberation. The contributors discuss how the two countries tend to forget what they owe to each other, and have a distorted view of history which still colours and prejudices their relationship today, despite government efforts to build a close political and military partnership.

PART ONE

The First World War

Introduction

Gary Sheffield

Building and maintaining a coalition, and fighting a coalition war, is difficult, complex and demanding. This reality is the context in which the three chapters under discussion need to be set. The problems highlighted by John Keiger, William Philpott and Elizabeth Greenhalgh were not unique to France and Britain in the era of First World War. Similar if not identical challenges can be found in the histories of many other coalitions. The same themes emerge time after time. Coalitions are often marriages of convenience, marked by acute suspicion of partners. The Second World War relationship between Britain and the Free French stands out as an example of a particularly awkward alliance, and the relationship between the Britain and Prussians during the 1815 Waterloo campaign demonstrates that such situations were not a purely twentieth-century phenomenon. Some coalitions are only held together by shared hostility to a third party, and collapse when the enemy is defeated. The sheer speed with which what Churchill termed the ‘Grand Alliance’ of the UK, USA and USSR against Nazi Germany broke into the two hostile camps of the Cold War is an extreme example, but there are plenty of others, including the disintegration of the anti-German coalition at the end of the Great War.

As Paul Kennedy has observed, coalitions are not friendships. They are business arrangements in which the interests of individual states often come into conflict. Likewise national interests and the interests of the wider coalition are sometimes incompatible. Such problems can only be overcome by negotiation and compromise, hammered out at endless meetings. It is not surprising that the papers of senior figures within a coalition are full of the details of such assemblies.¹ Fighting in coalition is rarely, if ever, a smooth process. We know a very great deal about the Anglo-American coalition of 1941–45. It has had its wirings laid bare, and historians have pitilessly exposed the tensions and disputes between the partners. Reading some of the work on this coalition, it sometimes takes an effort to remember that it was highly successful in delivering victory. Much the same could be said about the Franco-British coalition of 1914–18.

John Keiger reminds us that Britain and France formally became allies only in September 1914, when the war had already been going on for a month. That it took so long to formalize the alliance, after French and British troops actually began to fight along each other against a common enemy, is symbolically appropriate, given the complicated Anglo-French relationship from the Entente Cordiale of 1904 onwards. This is sometimes erroneously referred to as ‘an alliance’, but it fell well short of that. Keiger describes this relationship as ‘a dialogue of the deaf’, characterized by ‘misunderstanding of each other’s policies, strategies and perceptions’. The essential mistake was the French belief that the loose agreement of 1904 could be converted into a fully fledged alliance with the British. Underpinning this belief was the assumption that Britain equally shared France’s fear of Germany and would therefore be amenable to ‘an insurance policy’.

This mutual incomprehension led to the situation on 2 August 1914, which would have been ludicrous had it not been so serious: Paul Cambon (the French ambassador in London) was outraged by his belated realization that the Asquith government did not regard Britain as having an obligation to support France, while the British cabinet, despite the existence of military agreements of which many of its members had until recently been unaware, continued to maintain that it had a free hand in foreign policy. The impasse was, fortunately for the two countries’ relationship, broken by the Germans, whose invasion of neutral Belgium gave the British a cause to rally behind, and no less importantly posed a significant threat to British maritime security.

There is little doubt that John Keiger’s analysis is correct, and further that what he calls ‘cultural crossed wires’ were at the root of these misunderstandings of what the Entente was actually for. So, in some cases, were personalities. Of the critical figures in the British decision-making elite, neither Sir Edward Grey nor H.H. Asquith ever fully appreciated what their French counterparts wanted out of the agreement, or, more importantly, what they believed the British were committed to. On the French side, Paul Cambon, a key figure in the creation of the Entente Cordiale, never quite understood the country to which he was ambassador from 1898 to 1920, or the people with whom he dealt. Cambon believed that London, like Paris, was motivated by the search for security against German aggression. In his case, a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. He appreciated that Britain had, historically, sought to oppose powers that sought hegemony in Europe by participating in a coalition to restore the balance of power. Since 1688, successive French regimes – especially that of Louis XIV, the Revolutionaries of the 1790s and Napoleon – had been the object of British suspicions. Indeed, during the period 1793–1815 Britain had been Revolutionary and Napoleonic France’s most constant foe. Cambon assumed that the emerging threat of Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century fitted neatly into this pattern, and he was right – in theory.

Keiger, however, points to Britain’s nuanced view of the advantages of an agreement with France, not least that it might lead to an agreement with France’s ally Russia, which would be advantageous in Imperial terms; that for many in the post-1906 Liberal governments, domestic concerns had priority over the international scene; and Cambon failed to understand the nature of British cabinet government, which meant that the pro-neutrality views of key ministers in the Liberal administration carried real weight. Cambon and other French leaders read far too much significance into the military and naval negotiations between the two states, although one can hardly blame them for doing so.

One might broaden Keiger’s critique. France, not Germany, was regarded by many as Britain’s natural enemy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The memory of a state of almost constant war between 1688 and 1815 could not be effaced overnight, and if the Crimean War of 1853–56 was an example of a military alliance between Britain and France, that had rapidly been succeeded by the ‘panic’ of 1859 in which fear of invasion by Napoleon III had prompted the formation of the Rifle Volunteer movement. If Franco-British rivalry in Europe, and naval rivalry, had gradually declined, it intensified elsewhere: Fashoda had occurred only 6 years before the signing of the Entente Cordiale.

Religion was also perhaps a factor in the idea of France as Britain’s natural enemy. Linda Colley’s work on the creation of a British identity, which convincingly argued that war against Catholic France was a factor in bringing together Protestant England and Scotland, is of relevance here.² By contrast, Germany (or at least Prussia) was regarded as Protestant. Moreover there were intimate family ties between the Royal families of Britain and Germany, while republican France had an alien political system (and a recent history of political instability). In contrast to long-standing British suspicions of France, Germany had been regarded as a friendly state until very recently. Arguably, although the undoubted growth of antagonism with Germany was serious, it had failed to displace France completely from its privileged, if unwanted, position of Britain’s hereditary enemy.

From many perspectives the pre-1914 Franco-British entente was unsatisfactory. It has even been suggested that it contributed to the outbreak of war by failing to send a strong, deterring signal to Germany that Britain would stand by France in the event of a general war. In truth, the entente was about as much as the British market would bear. Senior French figures, especially Cambon, must take a share of the blame for failing to understand this, and for only hearing what they wanted to hear. Senior British figures, especially Grey, must also take a share of the blame for failing to understand French beliefs and desires concerning their relationship with London. It would not have taken much for the Franco-British agreement to have collapsed in August 1914, and if that had occurred, the consequences would have been of the utmost gravity.

If anything, once France and Britain began actively to cooperate in alliance, the challenges increased, and the two stimulating papers by Elizabeth Greenhalgh and William Philpott bring some clarity to the debate. Over the last few years, these two historians have made major contributions to our understanding of the Anglo-French military relationship, and the role of the French army more generally, in First World War. Their exchanges in the pages of War in History helped to ignite a previously largely dormant debate. Dr Greenhalgh’s books on coalition warfare, and Foch, and Prof Philpott’s books on the Franco-British relationship and the Somme have done much to correct the Anglocentricism that undoubtedly existed in the literature. Other scholars of the Western Front who do not work on the French dimension, including this author, have benefitted greatly from their analysis and archival work. Indeed, along with American scholars Robert Doughty and Michael Neiberg,³ Greenhalgh and Philpott can justly claim credit for a quiet revolution in the Anglophone historiography of First World War. It is indeed interesting, as Philpott comments, that it is Anglophone rather than French historians that have been putting in the spadework on the French army.

In some ways, what they have done is remind us of what the British chose not to remember. As Philpott reminds us, the reality was that in 1914–15, when Britain was raising and training a mass army and, in his dry phrase, ‘adventuring against Turkey’,⁴ French soldiers were fighting and dying in very large numbers on the Western Front. Verdun is probably the only ‘French’ battle to have any resonance among lay people in Britain.⁵ The popular success of Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory, published in 1964 during a boom in popular writing on First World War, possibly has something to do with that. British efforts in 1915 were small scale, but it is Loos, and not any of the major French offensives, that survives in the British popular memory. Such national chauvinism is not unique to First World War. For all the efforts of both scholarly and popular authors in recent years, the importance of the Soviet Union and the Red Army in determining the outcome of Second World War is consistently underplayed in Britain and the United States.

The presence of Marshal Foch’s statue outside Victoria Station in London, unveiled in 1930, is testimony to one-time popularity in the United Kingdom of the generalissimo of 1918. So is the fact that when in the 1920s the popular novelist P.G. Wodehouse chose to put into Bertie Wooster’s mouth words of praise about a plan, he said that ‘Foch might have been proud of [it]’. Foch, note, not Haig; and this was at a time when the British Field Marshal’s reputation was riding high.⁶ While in the years after his death in 1928 Haig’s standing collapsed to such an extent that it is comparable to the fate suffered by Neville Chamberlain’s reputation in 1940, Foch was simply forgotten.

Two reasons (at least) suggest themselves as explanations for this British historical amnesia, and the reshaping of memories. The first is an understandable, if regrettable, tendency to concentrate on ‘our boys’. The fate of the British soldier in the Great War has been a national fixation, certainly since the 1960s, and it has been the role of both allies and enemies to be reduced to supporting actors in this drama of a supposedly futile war. Second, the French nation and army of 1914–18 are condemned to live in the shadow cast backwards from 1940. Philpott refers to a British ‘image of France as a womanly nation, weak, decadent, in decline and a drain on, not a support to, its British ally’ (p. 8). This transformed over the years into an Anglo-American image of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ and imputations of cowardice when France refused to participate in the 2003 Iraq War. This is in sharp contrast to the image of France before 1870. Under Napoleon, France was, as the leading military power in Europe, a national embodiment of aggressive militarism; and as suggested above, even under the less impressive leadership of his nephew, Napoleon III, France was regarded as a threat to Britain. Perhaps the defeats in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 began the process of change in attitudes, but British fears of French power into the late nineteenth century suggest that we should not push that argument too far.

The suddenness of the French defeat in May–June 1940, combined with the supposedly ‘miraculous’ escape of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk and Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’ which began immediately afterwards, powerfully reinforced a sense of French decadence. Traditional anti-French feeling, never very far below the surface, reappeared in a different guise. Neither the effectiveness of Juin’s French Corps in Italy nor the considerable French army that took the field from late 1944 onwards was able to efface this ‘womanly’ image. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Dien Bien Phu and later the loss of Algeria reinforced Anglo-American prejudices. While interwar Anglophone historiography began marginalizing the French effort in the Great War, 1940 and what followed powerfully reinforced it.

Given the important work by Anglophone historians in recent years, there is...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Editors
• ‘Two Great Peoples’
• PART ONE The First World War
• PART TWO The Second World War
• PART THREE Remembering and Forgetting
• Index