Best of enemies: divided by 20 miles of water, France and England are old friends, neighbours and rivals …

For A Change, June-July, 2000 by Andrew Stallybrass

Sixty years ago, the English writer GK Chesterton wrote, `If an Englishman has understood a Frenchman, he has understood the most foreign of foreigners. The nation that is nearest is now the furthest away.'

We even measure the distance that separates us differently--for them it's kilometres, whereas the trusty old mile is still good enough for the English. From time immemorial, we have carried on a complicated love-hate relationship across La Manche--the English Channel. The Channel Tunnel, opened in 1994, has created the first permanent link between us since the ice age, but has it brought us any closer to understanding?

There are those who might say it doesn't matter: we don't have to love our neighbours, only live next to them. What does it matter if we quarrel from time to time about beef or apples? We manage to complete aerospace projects ensemble, and our wars are now fought out on the sports field, in newspaper headlines and committee meetings, surely that's progress enough?

But travel in Africa, and you are forced to recognize the divisions that we have forced on other parts of the world. Travel, telephones and mail, communications of all kinds still all too often pass through London and Paris even between next-door neighbours. Europe as an entity is going through something of an identity crisis, and any sense of vision beyond national interest is sorely lacking. And we have seen our differences and tensions undermining our ability to deal coherently with crises such as that in the Balkans.

The popular press, especially on the English side, often stirs up antagonism. The Sun even ran an anti-French joke competition. (Example: Why are French roads ranged with poplars? Answer--so that German armies can walk in the shade!) The serious Le Monde newspaper ran a counter-offensive. (Example: What's the difference between an accident and a catastrophe? An accident is when a liner full of English people sinks. A catastrophe is if they can swim!)

I am British--but I have lived in France, speak French at home with my Swiss wife, live less than a mile from the French border, and love France. Qualifications perhaps for a light-hearted--and serious--look at the relationship between these two great peoples and countries, so close in geography, linked by so long a history.

More British war dead lie buried in France than anywhere else on earth after the two titanic wars fought as allies in the first half of the 20th century. Contemplate the long list of names on the war memorial in a little French village, and imagine the decades of suffering, loss and loneliness--and the rivers of blood--that unite us.

The French think they know best. The English know they know best. There is the story of the Frenchman who admits to the Englishman, `You know, if I wasn't French, I think I'd like to be English,' and the Englishman who replies after a moment's reflection, `If I wasn't English, I would want to be!'

We English love France--perhaps that's why we found it so hard to leave it to the French. They may not welcome British beef in France, but more and more British farmers are buying farms there, according to Farmers' Weekly--to say nothing of the popularity of second homes and holidays. More than 100,000 French work in London. And who knows how many Brits have followed in Peter Mayle's wake to his rosily glowing Provence?

Our two national identities were largely forged against each other, through the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc, through the Napoleonic Wars, through the competitive race for colonies. The Norman Conquest was, after all, the last successful invasion of England. `Before the English learn that there is a God to be worshipped, they learn that there are Frenchmen to be detested,' maintained JL Fougeret de Montbron in 1747.

The new Luc Besson film on Joan of Arc shows her witnessing the murder and rape of her sister by pillaging English soldiers. A pure invention of the filmmaker, but one hardly designed to provoke understanding and harmony between our peoples.

Beyond irritations about how the high-speed Eurostar train from Paris has to slow down when it emerges on English soil and quips about central heating more for visual effect than warmth, three of the French friends I consulted for this article referrred to Fashoda--an incident in 1898 in Sudan that brought Britain and France close to war and where the British forced the French to back down. How many British readers have even heard of Fashoda?

Alain Tate, a French former banker with an English father, pleads for a bit of historical psychoanalysis, to bring these unhealed hurts to the surface. He suspects that they go back even further than St Joan--to the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. But he also recalls Churchill's amazing offer to the French government in 1940, at the moment of defeat, to form one government, one country.

Tate notes that an Englishman can appear phlegmatic and proud, but prove to be sentimental and vulnerable, while a Frenchwoman can appear humble and warm, and yet prove to he hard. Inside every Englishman, there is, I suspect, a well-hidden Italian trying to get out. Anne Wolrige Gordon, an Englishwoman living in Scotland, thinks the French and the English get on badly, if we do, because we come at every issue from a different angle. This should be a help, in order to perceive the whole picture. She adds, `The Scots prefer Europeans, including Germans, to the English.' And for the French, there is indeed a certain blurring between the terms `English' and `British'.