Le Camp du Drap d'Or, tableau de Friedrich Bouterwek
The French and the British Problem
Course outline
Cambrigde University
Michaelmas term
1 Introduction and Louis XIV and the Three Kingdoms
2 Travel and cultural contact during the Enlightenment
3 Class: Travel and exile
4 Struggles for empire
5 Trade and finance in the 18th century
6 The American and French Revolutions
7 Class: Imperial rivalry, 1745-1845
8 Befriending the enemy’s enemies, 1745-1798
9 The Revolution and ‘Carthage’
10 Napoleon’s ‘duel with England’
11 The French and Shakespeare
12 Class: Cultural influences, c. 1730-1830
13 The Left and ‘anti-France’
14 From the Restoration to the first entente cordiale
15 The 1848 Revolution and the Second Empire
16 Class: Economic change – ‘the path not taken’, c. 1780-2000
Symposium (30 Nov.): Sarkozy’s reforms
Lent term:
17 Napoleon III, Britain, and Europe
18 Cultural relations, c. 1870-1910
19 Class: cultural exchange since c. 1870
20 ‘The superiority of the Anglo-Saxons’
21 From Rivalry to Alliance, c.1880-1914
22 Class: colonial rivalry, c. 1850-1956
23 The First World War and its memory
24 From Versailles to Munich
25 War and the fall of France, 1940
26 Awkward allies, 1940-45
27 Class: ‘Ici Londres’: wartime relations
28 ‘L’Angleterre est insulaire’: the question of Europe
29 Class: stereotypes and self-images
30 The ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and fear of decline
31 Class: convergence or divergence?
32 Finale, resume, discussion
Please tick the essay topics you think you would like to do: this is to help the arrangement of supervisions.
Sample essay questions:
- What did eighteenth-century French writers admire and dislike about Britain?
(topics on Voltaire, Montesquieu … etc)
- Discuss the effects on France of the Seven Years War
- Why did France intervene in the American War of Independence, and with what effect?
- Explain France’s financial difficulties and their consequences.
- Why did French revolutionaries talk about ‘exterminating’ the English?
- ‘All my wars came from England’ (Napoleon).
- Discuss French reactions to Shakespeare during the 18th century, or Romanticism, or the 20th century.
- To what extent did French critics see Britain as a model of an alternative modernity?
- Why did the first entente cordiale fail?
- To what extent did the 1848 revolution affect Anglo-French relations?
- How did the French respond to British economic primacy?
- ‘Did the ‘Eastern Question’ impact positively or negatively on Anglo-French relations between 1830 and 1870?’
- Why did the French take to certain British sports?
- To what did French critics attribute “the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons” in the 1890s?
- Why was Anglophobia so widespread during the Belle Epoque?
- the development of the Entente Cordiale, 1904-14.
- Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of wartime cooperation.
- Did France and Britain ‘lose the peace’?
- Do you agree that interwar French foreign policy was on the leading-strings of “the English governess”?
- To what extent was Britain responsible for the fall of France?
- Assess the British contribution to French Resistance.
- Why did de Gaulle oppose British membership of the Common Market?
- Have French thinkers been more repelled than fascinated by Anglo-American capitalism since the 1930s?
- Why is the French political elite so sensitive to British influence in the EU?
Lecturers Robert Tombs
NameProf. Robert Tombs
College St John’s College
What is your field of history?
My main area of research has been nineteenth-century French political history in a broad sense, and especially popular political culture. I have been particularly concerned with the Paris Commune of 1871 and with French nationalism from the 1830s to 1914. My most recent work has been on the history of the relationship between the French and the British, from the end of the seventeenth century to the present day, including the cultural and economic as well as the political and military spheres.
I am beginning a new book on the English and their past, but will continue to work and publish on French history and on French attitudes to Britain.
How did you come to specialise in this area?
I became interested as a student in the Paris Commune, and went on from there.
What sort of source material do you tend to use, and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
The kind of source I have used most intensively are court records, especially those of French military courts in the 19th century, which include documents from police investigations, interrogations of prisoners, and witness statements. Their strengths are their closeness to the words and actions of invididuals; their ‘weakness’ (if it is a weakness) is that they are always trying to put a case – for the prosecution or the defence.
Which individuals, events or forces are especially important in your area of history?
Individuals – too many to list; though I wrote a biography of a tricky French politician, Adolphe Thiers; events – revolutions and wars from 1789 onwards; forces – nationalism, democratic struggles, fear of and desire for radical change.
How has your field developed over the course of your career?
It has changed from being excessively influenced by social and economic explanations (especially Marxism) to being – some would say excessively – based on ideas about ‘culture’.
Which areas of your field most urgently need further exploration?
What ordinary people really wanted from politics, behind the big slogans.
What characterises good history?
The willingness to ‘listen’ to what people in the past are saying, and the desire to write about it clearly and vividly.
How did your understanding of history change during your time as a university student?
The best lesson I was taught: that people in the past were at least as intelligent as we are.
Where should somebody interested in your area of history go for further information?
I won’t say read my books; but anyone interested in grass-roots history of nineteenth-century France should dip into the following: Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen or Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals.
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