TRIGGERnometry - Historian Robert Tombs on the 1,000-Year Rivalry Between Britain And France

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00:01:25.980 As a great 19th century French historian said,

00:01:32.220 the French came to realize they were French through fighting the English,

00:01:35.760 both for quite a long time now.

00:01:37.980 Indeed, the French, I suppose since the Battle of Waterloo,

00:01:40.640 have been rather obsessed with the idea that they are nations in decline.

00:01:44.920 The idea of European integration was to make sure that Germany was no longer a danger to France,

00:01:50.860 and secondly, to make sure that France was essentially leading Europe.

00:01:55.760 So that's how France becomes a great power again.

00:01:58.000 Brexit was the way of reasserting our position as a great nation.

00:02:01.800 It's their great national project and has been for a long time now.

00:02:05.960 And therefore, for the British to walk away from it was a kind of slap in the face.

00:02:09.580 But it also meant that the French absolutely want Brexit to fail.

00:02:13.740 In many ways, we respond to the same challenges in opposite ways.

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00:02:42.860 historian robert tombs such a pleasure to have you on the show great to be here it's wonderful

00:02:48.880 to have you there are so many different things that we could talk about we love discussing

00:02:52.860 history with eminent historians like you um the one thing that we wanted to focus is uh something

00:02:58.460 you cover in one of your books which is the england versus france now britain versus france

00:03:03.780 rivalry uh tell us fun book i've ever done i think by a long way

00:03:09.920 And you have personal experience.

00:03:12.340 I think you're married to a French lady.

00:03:14.240 Yes, we were co-authors.

00:03:15.300 Yes, indeed.

00:03:16.180 So the rivalry is injected throughout.

00:03:19.160 Yeah, it's in the book.

00:03:20.200 That's right.

00:03:21.480 Tell us about England and France and the rivalry between these two.

00:03:27.860 I mean, I was about to say countries, but actually it precedes the existence of countries at all, doesn't it?

00:03:32.900 It does, really.

00:03:33.420 In fact, both England originally and France, and to some extent Ireland, Scotland, Wales, developed identities, their own identities through the conflict.

00:03:44.660 The Scots were their alliance with France, us with our long conflict with France.

00:03:49.000 And the French, as a great 19th century French historian said, the French came to realise they were French through fighting the English.

00:03:57.120 This is in the first Hundred Years' War.

00:03:59.720 And you might say, well, why is it still kind of there?

00:04:04.680 And I think the answer's fairly plain.

00:04:07.540 Both France and Britain have had huge influences on world history

00:04:14.040 in the last 300 years.

00:04:15.660 They've been major players on the world stage.

00:04:17.860 And often as rivals, indeed quite often as enemies,

00:04:21.900 sometimes as allies, quite often as enemies.

00:04:24.600 And they got a bit obsessed with each other

00:04:27.220 and like to see each other as opposites, though, in my view, they're in some ways rather similar.

00:04:33.860 And another thing is that both for quite a long time now, indeed, the French, I suppose, since the Battle of Waterloo,

00:04:41.200 have been rather obsessed with the idea that they are nations in decline.

00:04:45.900 We all know that now. And, you know, you go to France, they'll say, you know, nothing works here anymore.

00:04:51.240 And which is what we say all the time. There's a sense of countries in decline and even in crisis.

00:04:57.140 And you might say, well, why does that play into the Anglo-French thing?

00:05:01.700 And I think it's because both are really rather keen that the others should be doing worse than them.

00:05:07.220 So, you know, you look at Le Monde or look at The Times and you see, you know, reports on things happening in France, fires in France, strikes in France.

00:05:15.520 And if you look at the French press, it's often about, you know, unemployment in Britain.

00:05:20.700 Another prime minister goes in Britain. Aren't we well off compared with them?

00:05:24.940 And I think it's quite important in both countries to see themselves as doing at least not as badly as the other one.

00:05:32.080 Although, you know, when we go there, of course, the other reaction is for people who are rather keen on the idea that their own country is in decline,

00:05:40.580 which many people are, to go to France in our case or them to come here and say, wow, you know, we went to wherever.

00:05:46.740 And it was really great. You know, the trains ran on time. The hospitals were great.

00:05:51.300 Why are we so awful compared with them?

00:05:55.400 So this kind of obsession works in all sorts of ways.

00:06:01.540 And I suppose the thing that added to it was obviously Brexit.

00:06:07.300 Because the EU, European integration, is something the French have been working hard at for at least a century.

00:06:14.860 In the 1920s, they first proposed it.

00:06:17.060 And it's really always been a French project and it's something which the French establishment agrees is something which is fundamentally in France's interest.

00:06:27.380 Indeed, it's their great national project and has been for a long time now.

00:06:32.840 And therefore for the British to walk away from it was a kind of slap in the face.

00:06:36.980 But it also meant that the French absolutely want Brexit to fail.

00:06:41.200 You know, it has to fail.

00:06:42.420 Because if it looked like succeeding or even not being a disaster,

00:06:45.800 it would reflect badly on the whole EU project.

00:06:49.140 So, of course, the French want it to fail or at least be seen and be seen to fail.

00:06:53.840 And so this has re-injected a new element into the old story of the rivalry.

00:07:00.540 And what is it about the mindset of the French elites, as you describe it,

00:07:05.480 that makes them think that the European Union is in the interest of France

00:07:09.640 and a good idea more generally?

00:07:11.400 Well, I think essentially it was the conflict with Germany.

00:07:14.980 One shouldn't assume, of course, well, we don't,

00:07:17.100 that any country has an exclusive relationship with another.

00:07:20.960 We and the French, of course, have one,

00:07:22.860 but we also have ours with the Americans.

00:07:25.640 We aspire to a special relationship with the Americans.

00:07:27.680 The French have a similar relationship with Germany.

00:07:32.280 Somewhat checkered historically.

00:07:34.680 After all, it did invade France three times in 150 years,

00:07:38.420 and therefore the European integration project 0.75

00:07:41.980 was essentially to make sure

00:07:44.320 that Germany was never a threat again. 0.80

00:07:46.740 And although, you know,

00:07:47.720 so rather as we do with the Americans,

00:07:49.720 the French are very keen to show

00:07:50.800 how wonderful their relations with Germany are

00:07:53.580 because these fray occasionally, as we know.

00:07:56.500 But lots of gestures about friendship

00:07:58.460 and special friendship and so on

00:08:00.100 because it can't be accepted that this isn't true.

00:08:04.820 and so the EU

00:08:07.940 from the very beginning

00:08:09.880 the idea of European integration was

00:08:11.580 to make sure that Germany was

00:08:13.780 no longer a danger to France

00:08:15.780 and secondly to make sure that France

00:08:17.700 was essentially leading Europe

00:08:19.840 so that's how France becomes

00:08:21.780 a great power again

00:08:22.620 De Gaulle said

00:08:25.060 very shrewdly

00:08:27.400 we have to behave like a great power because we no longer

00:08:29.780 are one and 0.94

00:08:31.360 leading Europe has been the French thing

00:08:33.820 since the 1950s, and nothing that can be allowed to get in the way of that.

00:08:39.800 I see. So if you're no longer a great power, but you sit atop of the European conglomerate,

00:08:46.980 you then are effectively projecting power for 500 million people that live in Europe.

00:08:52.080 So you hope.

00:08:52.960 So you hope, and you are therefore powerful again.

00:08:55.300 Yes.

00:08:56.200 That's really interesting. And of course, coming back to the history of it,

00:08:59.800 my understanding, and do correct me if this is wrong,

00:09:02.400 is one of the reasons there has been this great rivalry

00:09:05.080 between Britain and France many times in history

00:09:07.820 is that Britain's England and then later Britain

00:09:10.680 has perceived its national interest to be to prevent

00:09:14.020 the emergence of a hegemonic power on the continent

00:09:16.360 to which France has repeatedly aspired.

00:09:19.400 And Brexit, you might argue, is yet the latest iteration of that.

00:09:23.140 Yeah, absolutely.

00:09:24.920 Indeed, you know, again, this fits into the story, as you say, 0.97

00:09:27.940 because for the French to make Europe

00:09:32.400 is the reassertion of their greatness as a nation. 0.66

00:09:35.760 For Britain, at least for those who supported Brexit,

00:09:38.160 Brexit was the way of reasserting our position

00:09:40.960 as a great nation, no longer simply part of a block.

00:09:44.940 So in many ways, we respond to the same challenges

00:09:48.340 in opposite ways.

00:09:50.320 So this goes back to the 1950s very obviously

00:09:53.900 when European integration after the Second World War

00:09:56.960 got off to another start.

00:10:00.280 So, and what happened, of course, we all know about this.

00:10:04.340 Well, I'm not sure how many people under the age of 30 do,

00:10:07.480 but we sort of know about the Suez Crisis,

00:10:09.940 in which both France and Britain made an attempt together

00:10:14.360 to assert their power as imperial powers.

00:10:18.140 You know, the last hurrah, if you like,

00:10:20.060 of France and Britain as independent global powers. 0.52

00:10:23.680 And it didn't work because the Americans,

00:10:26.620 and to some extent the Russians, said no.

00:10:30.280 so what happened the french say we must therefore we'll never trust the americans again we must

00:10:37.160 look to europe that is our only in a sense our only real policy and the british on the other

00:10:42.120 hand say we must never quarrel again with the americans and so america and the relationship

00:10:46.600 with america will be our policy so although the british um did join the of course the common

00:10:53.080 market as it then was it was always rather reluctantly and conditionally you know okay

00:10:58.760 this is just a trade bloc. We don't want any talk of federalism. We're not going to go along with

00:11:04.240 the session of sovereignty, etc., etc. Whereas for the French, that was always really the object.

00:11:10.060 It was to make Europe a great power, in a sense with its capital in Paris, to stand up to the

00:11:17.100 Americans. Whereas for the British, it was always how to be nice to the Americans. And as we saw

00:11:21.840 at the time of Brexit, the Americans basically say, we want you to be in this European thing

00:11:27.920 because we'll be sure that you'll be on our side.

00:11:31.620 Or as the French would say, you're our Trojan horse or you're our poodle 0.74

00:11:35.040 and you will do what we say and you'll make sure the Europeans 0.58

00:11:38.180 don't do anything against our interests.

00:11:41.760 Whereas for us, the American relationship was seen as a kind of the major player

00:11:49.080 and the European membership of Europe was really a secondary matter.

00:11:54.400 That's something the Americans wanted and something that would probably be quite good for the economy, though it never really was.

00:12:01.660 But it was not the center of our foreign policy as it was for the French establishment.

00:12:07.220 You know, I'm generalizing, obviously, but insofar as we can generalize about, you know, a consensus view among British politicians, officials, diplomats, we can say the same about the French.

00:12:18.240 And they, well, you might say the Foreign Office tends to take a rather French view of things, at least it has in recent years, but traditionally there's been a clear difference between British and French views of their own national interest.

00:12:34.440 And one of the things that you actually mention about in the book, Robert,

00:12:37.000 which I enjoyed very, very much and I recommend for everyone to get,

00:12:40.260 is when you were talking about Napoleon,

00:12:43.220 Napoleon's vision for Europe was actually kind of similar

00:12:46.040 to the European Union vision, wasn't it, in many ways?

00:12:49.280 It was in a way.

00:12:50.520 I mean, Napoleon was a great moderniser, as he saw it.

00:12:55.460 Indeed, you could say what he really was.

00:12:57.680 He did say at one point there's not enough sameness in the European nations.

00:13:02.380 So a single system of law, single system of administration, okay, an empire, but it was largely a bureaucratic and military empire.

00:13:13.280 It was meant to be something that would sweep away the old distinctions, the old conflicts.

00:13:20.260 And, you know, some things he did, abolishing feudalism, abolishing the power of churches, putting a stop to anti-Semitism.

00:13:28.900 Those were things that, of course, many people in Europe welcomed.

00:13:32.380 The British again saw it differently. We didn't ever want a Europe which would be dominated by

00:13:39.500 Napoleon. And indeed we weren't terribly keen on his idea of what a modern Europe should look like.

00:13:48.220 So for that reason the conflict went on for whatever, however many years it was, 15 years, 20

00:13:55.980 years. And it became a global conflict. And it was one that really set the pattern of power in

00:14:03.180 the world for, well, for more than a century, well, for a century anyway. And before we really

00:14:09.940 focus about Napoleon, because we're obviously going to want to talk about him, it seems as well

00:14:15.300 that his ideas not only were generated through his own vision, but they also came from the French

00:14:21.000 revolution as well didn't they so let's talk about the french revolution why was it so important

00:14:25.960 and what effects did it have not only in france but in europe but also the uk as well yeah great

00:14:31.780 britain at the time well i i take up i'm not sure this is a sort of slightly heretical view but i

00:14:37.040 take a rather reductionist view i mean people talking about the french revolution they go on

00:14:41.300 about the ideas of the enlightenment the ideas about democracy how the french learned from the

00:14:46.680 Americans, life-limited, you know, all that stuff.

00:14:49.920 And therefore, they decided they wanted to have a revolution

00:14:52.620 which would modernize the country and bring it.

00:14:55.380 Well, it seems to me that the French Revolution

00:14:57.080 was essentially a reaction to defeat.

00:15:00.040 The French had lost the Seven Years' War.

00:15:04.280 They won the war of America, the American War of Independence. 0.80

00:15:08.040 That was their great victory, but they got nothing out of it

00:15:10.620 except vast debts.

00:15:12.980 They then found that they were pretty well neutered on the world stage

00:15:18.600 because of their lack of money.

00:15:20.280 Very familiar story.

00:15:22.300 And the revolution came because they almost became a failed great power.

00:15:29.400 Okay, you know, yes, the peasants, the workers, all that,

00:15:32.320 the storming of the Bastille, all that happened, of course.

00:15:35.420 But it was essentially, well, actually, Burke said this.

00:15:40.300 if I can remember it correctly, he said that the French Revolution was not to make France happy,

00:15:45.620 it was to make her powerful. And I think the revolution was really about recreating France

00:15:51.660 as a power. And, you know, you could say, well, people like Robespierre or Danton and so on,

00:15:59.680 they were very keen on the people's rights, weren't they? Yes, they were. They were also

00:16:04.600 very keen on spreading French influence across Europe. And in a way, Napoleon didn't really

00:16:09.640 changed that. What he did was to, as he said, he cleaned it up. He cleaned the mud off the French

00:16:15.320 Revolution and gave it permanent institutions. But the French dominance of Europe was something 0.93

00:16:22.440 that they all agreed on. And it was a concern for Britain at the time, wasn't it, what was

00:16:28.180 happening? And Britain was in a quandary because they were, on the one hand, this was this ancient

00:16:35.800 enemy on the other hand it was kind of better the devil you know with the with the royal family

00:16:40.320 wasn't it well when when the basti fell uh the british ambassador was keen to calm things down

00:16:46.780 he uh this is in the book by the way but it's it's a nice story he he decided that a cricket

00:16:51.700 a cricket tour would be rather a good idea to to calm the french down so he recruited a cricket

00:16:57.600 The power and intellect of British democracy through the ages.

00:17:02.940 Well, Marie Antoinette was supposed to have kept his bat as a souvenir.

00:17:07.140 But cricket didn't catch on in France for quite a long time.

00:17:10.960 But the British first of all thought, wow, this is great.

00:17:14.060 France is turning into a new version of Britain.

00:17:17.320 And if Louis XVI is taken down a peg or two, that suits us very well.

00:17:22.620 France will be weaker and hence we will be stronger.

00:17:25.680 they didn't of course realize at first was that it wouldn't make France weaker it would make France 0.70

00:17:30.660 stronger and Britain went to war with the French Revolution not really because we didn't like the

00:17:36.620 ideas of the revolution because a lot of people did the Whigs did Charles James Fox did all those

00:17:41.940 people thought it was great it was because the French were going to invade Holland and that

00:17:47.780 you know brings you back to the almost the oldest and most permanent part of British European policy 0.99

00:17:55.380 which is we don't want a potential enemy in the low countries

00:17:59.960 because if you want to invade Britain, if you want to invade England at least,

00:18:04.180 if you want to sail up the Thames estuary, that's the place to do it from.

00:18:08.180 It doesn't matter, you can have a navy in Toulon or in Brest,

00:18:13.700 that's a safe distance away.

00:18:16.040 You can't have an enemy navy in Ostend or Rotterdam

00:18:21.080 and that's why we went to war with the French.

00:18:24.200 And also as well, they got involved in Ireland, didn't they?

00:18:27.580 They did, yes.

00:18:28.480 Well, of course, our relations with Ireland, as the late Queen said,

00:18:34.240 have not in every way been what we would wish.

00:18:39.720 And still not.

00:18:42.140 But what the English were particularly interested in Ireland for

00:18:47.480 in order to stop it being used as a jumping-off point for an invasion.

00:18:50.900 that almost that's the only thing that really counted deep down but of course it was it was

00:18:57.700 always potentially the place that the enemy would invade you from if Ireland was was independent

00:19:03.580 is it is it now really independent well it's it's kind of disarmed and neutral that's that's the

00:19:10.040 next best thing I suppose but if Ireland was you know in the past had been a potential ally of

00:19:17.000 Spain, then a potential ally of France. In the Second World War, a potential ally of

00:19:21.300 Germany. These were things that Britain could not accept. And in the Second World War, it 0.86

00:19:29.720 was made pretty clear to the Irish government that they had to be very careful. And they

00:19:35.100 were. De Valera, the president, did, as you probably know, present his condolences to

00:19:41.720 the german legation when poor herr hitler uh met a a sticky end um but uh apart from that they they

00:19:50.360 they didn't they didn't much help the they didn't really help the germans the ira would have would

00:19:55.160 have done if they could have done but they but they didn't get around to it the people who watch

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00:21:20.900 trigger. And so, so the French Revolution happened and then how did that lead to the

00:21:28.980 rise of napoleon because it wasn't instantaneous no no um it's kind of a pattern or at least you

00:21:36.160 can see it as a pattern you know what is a revolution you have a breakdown you know fall

00:21:40.460 of the bastille the storming of the winter palace in russia whatever uh the collapse of the old

00:21:45.520 regime and then you have a period of chaos and everybody says we want our piece of the action

00:21:51.300 so the workers join in the peasants join it the army joins it whatever uh and then sooner or later

00:21:57.620 people say this is awful this is worse than it was before we need somebody to to restore order

00:22:03.460 in the french case it was napoleon in the in the russian case it was well lenin or sports

00:22:08.900 and then stalin uh and you know many people say well okay this isn't what we really wanted or

00:22:14.900 expected but above all we want to get back to living our lives earning our living and we

00:22:21.060 we're willing to accept in fact a stronger and more authoritarian system than we had before

00:22:27.460 So you storm the Bastille, or you get rid of Tsar Nicholas II,

00:22:32.940 but you find you've ended up with a government that is much more powerful

00:22:36.520 and much more oppressive than they were.

00:22:39.460 And most people say, well, thank goodness for that,

00:22:42.720 because we've had enough of all the killing, the violence, the chaos,

00:22:45.560 the poverty, the inflation, you know, all that.

00:22:48.920 And in the book, you actually say that Napoleon was the last Frenchman

00:22:54.540 to transform Britain.

00:22:57.460 Yeah, I suppose he was, really.

00:22:59.520 The last one who's really had a major effect on us.

00:23:06.080 I mean, de Gaulle, not really, I think.

00:23:09.640 But Napoleon is someone who forced Britain to mobilise itself

00:23:16.380 in a way it had never done before in defence,

00:23:19.240 to a quite extraordinary extent.

00:23:23.860 I'm not sure I remember all the figures,

00:23:25.720 But something like 40% of all British men were doing some sort of military service.

00:23:33.040 It's sort of, you know, this is World War.

00:23:35.300 This is 20th century levels of mobilization.

00:23:38.780 And it was done largely by amateurs, by local government, by lords, lieutenants, mayors,

00:23:44.660 all that, vicars, parish councils.

00:23:48.400 And I think that meant you could never really put the cork back into the bottle

00:23:53.760 in the sense that people have seen that they themselves are effectively citizens.

00:24:00.040 And therefore, why do they should have a right to have some say in politics?

00:24:05.500 And after the, it's not the only reason, but, you know, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars,

00:24:10.040 you do have a radical movement that says we're not willing to go back to the system

00:24:15.340 in which a small minority, even if they were quite good, run things.

00:24:21.540 and most people just do as they're told. 1.00

00:24:25.660 Yeah, let's elect idiots to run everything badly. 1.00

00:24:28.100 How well that is working out. 1.00

00:24:31.280 Well, actually, I mean, the 18th century state did work quite well.

00:24:34.980 Well, that's what I'm kind of jokingly looking at.

00:24:37.440 Yes, I know.

00:24:38.400 I was curious about something you keep hinting at

00:24:42.040 in terms of the ideas of the French Revolution and Britain and other countries,

00:24:47.940 because I'm reading between the lines of what you're saying,

00:24:51.240 And it sounds like you're debunking a myth that I had in my head, perhaps, and, you know, feel free to carry on, which I sort of thought, well, you know, the English and the British, okay, you execute a king, you have your own Napoleon in Oliver Cromwell.

00:25:07.500 Yes, exactly.

00:25:08.100 And then you decide, actually, no, we don't want to do this.

00:25:10.880 And you go back to having a royal family, whereas the French really, really go at it.

00:25:16.320 They change the weight system, the measurements. 0.74

00:25:19.380 They do, yes.

00:25:19.860 They get rid of state, all of this.

00:25:22.260 Yes.

00:25:23.040 And I sort of thought, well, you know, there's the British way of doing things

00:25:26.780 and there's the French way of doing things and they're radically different.

00:25:30.040 Yes.

00:25:30.380 You keep hinting that that isn't quite right.

00:25:33.200 Well, I don't think it is quite right.

00:25:35.220 In fact, it's funny that some, there was a school of French historians in the early 19th century

00:25:40.500 who believed that history followed certain patterns.

00:25:43.680 And Britain, in exactly the way you said, had set the pattern. 0.73

00:25:46.860 So you have an old regime, Charles I.

00:25:49.160 Then you have a revolution and you execute the king.

00:25:51.680 And then you have a dictator, Oliver Cromwell,

00:25:54.440 and then you restore the monarchy and you have a parliamentary system.

00:25:57.960 And they said, ah, that's just what's happening in France.

00:26:01.540 We had Louis XVI, we had Robespierre, we had Napoleon,

00:26:04.840 and now we're going to restore the monarchy.

00:26:07.360 And so they restored Louis XVIII.

00:26:09.720 And then that didn't work, so they had another go

00:26:11.560 and they restored Louis-Philippe.

00:26:13.500 So they had two more goes at monarchy.

00:26:15.240 after the revolution. And then they had a third go, which was Napoleon III, another monarchy.

00:26:22.620 So we think, well, 1793 was the end of the French monarchy. Well, it wasn't actually,

00:26:27.380 because it went on until 1870. And indeed, there's no reason to think it wouldn't have

00:26:32.820 carried on had they not been invaded successfully by Germany. It's usually defeat in war that makes 0.95

00:26:40.220 revolutions possible. 0.87

00:26:42.760 Russian revolutions. 0.73

00:26:43.920 Russia is, of course, a classic example,

00:26:46.340 but China too.

00:26:48.480 And Germany and Austria. 0.90

00:26:51.180 It's when 0.97

00:26:51.640 the state is defeated and proves

00:26:54.300 that it's no longer capable of defending the country

00:26:56.320 that it goes.

00:26:58.460 Sometimes it just goes. There's nothing

00:27:00.440 left. Sometimes it's

00:27:02.340 overthrown and then you have a revolution.

00:27:05.180 Well, if you want to say

00:27:06.440 what's the great fact about British

00:27:08.360 history. Well, we have been invaded, we haven't been conquered since 1066. And that is a great

00:27:19.080 reason for having a pretty stable system. You might say, what a pity we didn't have

00:27:24.300 a few revolutions on the way. Well, we had the, as you say, we had 1649. But was it a

00:27:31.140 real revolution? It was a religious war. And it was something that was never really popular. 0.63

00:27:37.860 Most people always supported the monarchy.

00:27:40.280 Indeed, most people on the parliamentary side supported monarchy.

00:27:44.660 They executed Charles I because they felt they had no choice in the matter.

00:27:49.800 But they didn't really want to do it.

00:27:51.800 So, you know, it was a sort of semi-revolution.

00:27:54.720 And as you probably know, the famous levellers,

00:27:57.300 who are often sort of promoted as the inventors of English democracy,

00:28:02.040 they eventually went over to Charles II.

00:28:05.280 Almost everybody wanted a restoration by the end,

00:28:08.540 which wasn't true in France.

00:28:10.760 Or at least if they wanted a restoration,

00:28:12.440 they weren't sure which monarch they wanted back.

00:28:15.760 And that, in some ways, is, you know,

00:28:18.280 if you wanted an explanation of French instability

00:28:20.700 in the 19th century, and even up to now,

00:28:24.540 it's because they've never really wholly agreed

00:28:28.660 on the system of government.

00:28:30.940 So you have to keep trying new ones.

00:28:33.220 So I used to know how many constitutions France has had since 1789.

00:28:38.300 It's quite a lot.

00:28:39.780 And of course, we've never had a codified constitution.

00:28:44.040 So in France, you say, we had an ancient monarchy, which is now gone.

00:28:52.260 Well, A, we have to restore it.

00:28:54.860 Or B, we have to find some alternative.

00:28:56.720 Or C, we have to have a democratic republic.

00:28:59.020 Or D, we have to have an authoritarian system.

00:29:01.500 And that argument has occasionally died down, but it's never entirely gone away.

00:29:07.840 And what you see now was Macron, when he first was elected,

00:29:13.080 saying he intended to rule like Jupiter.

00:29:16.760 He was going to be this great national leader

00:29:20.760 who would not get involved in the dirty details of everyday politics.

00:29:24.200 He would be there as the guide of the nation, a kind of monarch, a Republican monarch.

00:29:27.940 And when that goes wrong, what do the French say? They say, we've got to have a sixth republic then.

00:29:34.260 We're now on the fifth. We'll have to have a sixth because we have to find the system that works.

00:29:39.300 Whereas our reaction, of course, as we have no experience of that kind of constitution making,

00:29:46.060 is to say we have to sort of tweak the system a bit. We have to reform the House of Lords or

00:29:51.140 we have to devolve a bit to the regions. But you don't have anyone saying, what we need is to have

00:29:57.900 a constitutional congress in which we will thrash out in detail exactly how we're going to govern

00:30:03.360 the country in the future. It doesn't really occur to anybody in this country, except maybe a few

00:30:09.180 Lib Dems. One of the things that is interesting to us, we spent a significant chunk of time on

00:30:17.960 the show in previous years, certainly, talking about the kind of woke revolution that was running

00:30:23.680 amok, particularly the Anglosphere, I would argue. And yet there are people who chart

00:30:28.860 some of the origins of the ideas to the ideas of the French Revolution, the sort of radical

00:30:34.780 egalitarianism, the overthrowing of all hierarchy, etc. Is that a fair assessment?

00:30:42.220 Well, I think the French Revolution and the later, I mean, the Paris Commune, which I

00:30:46.940 used to work on in my youth, was a good example. It gives people a kind of vision, which may

00:30:53.280 be a very inaccurate one, a myth, a mythical vision of what the French call, or used to

00:30:58.180 call, le grand soir, which is the great evening. You know, after the revolution has taken place,

00:31:03.800 you can all go out and get drunk and have a great, because this is the end of the old

00:31:08.820 system. And then, of course, you have to wake up next morning and try and do something else,

00:31:14.000 and that's where it tends to go wrong. The hangover tends to be really bad.

00:31:17.760 But, you know, this vision of a revolutionary, a great, you know, it's a very popular, you know, in some states it's entered popular culture with things like Les Misérables.

00:31:30.100 You think, wow, you know, if only we could build a few barricades and wouldn't it all be great?

00:31:35.040 And so the people who, there are people who go for that kind of thing. 0.55

00:31:38.280 And I think it is, the myth is largely down to the French.

00:31:42.520 You know, even if you want to have a Nigel Farage,

00:31:45.460 anti-Nigel Farage T-shirt, you put a guillotine on it.

00:31:49.400 You could put a gallows on it, but somehow that's not,

00:31:52.140 that's a bit cross. 0.99

00:31:52.720 That's the romantic appeal of chopping people's heads off. 0.78

00:31:55.960 And, you know, we talk about heads rolling.

00:31:58.320 It's this kind of myth of...

00:31:59.980 Well, I suppose, sorry to interject,

00:32:02.080 I suppose guillotine is a weapon of the people,

00:32:05.680 whereas the gallows is a weapon of the state.

00:32:07.880 Yes, of course, the people have often strung people.

00:32:09.880 Oh, quite.

00:32:10.660 Yeah, with no gallows whatsoever, a tree branch will do, obviously.

00:32:15.740 And so it's interesting to me that that's...

00:32:18.940 And one of the other things that I've often thought about is

00:32:22.740 we call the American Revolution the American Revolution

00:32:25.020 and the French Revolution the French Revolution.

00:32:27.160 The American Revolution was not a revolution.

00:32:29.040 No, it's funny because the Americans used to call it the...

00:32:31.640 I mean, maybe we've adopted American things as we so often do,

00:32:34.940 but we used to call it the American War of Independence,

00:32:37.260 which is what it was. 0.98

00:32:38.080 Correct.

00:32:38.400 Which is why my point was it's why it was successful versus the French Revolution creating a bloodbath is direct consequence of the fact you're not separating from an imperial power that's, in your perception, keeping you oppressed.

00:32:53.000 You are overthrowing the existing regime, creating a power vacuum, and the bloodletting is inevitably the consequence of that.

00:33:02.180 And it was our glorious revolution, which is in some ways more of a model for the American.

00:33:06.520 You know, you get rid of a monarch whom you say is oppressing you, but you don't allow it to get out of hand.

00:33:13.360 You don't allow the mom to rule. 0.94

00:33:15.140 You basically keep it in the hands of intelligent people like us who will tell the plebs to go back to work and calm down. 1.00

00:33:23.980 That's right. 1.00

00:33:24.840 And one of the things I long underappreciated is just how much the money that the French spent trying to screw over the British 0.81

00:33:33.660 and supporting the American independence 0.79

00:33:36.020 ended up impoverishing them, indebting them

00:33:39.840 and causing the French Revolution.

00:33:41.600 Yeah, well, it basically bankrupted the monarchy.

00:33:45.520 And the reason they had to call a meeting of the estates general,

00:33:50.720 which was the first step,

00:33:52.380 which was effectively the end of the old regime

00:33:54.820 in which the law was what the king said it was.

00:33:59.540 There's a wonderful speech that was made by Louis XV

00:34:03.080 to the Paris Parlement, which was essentially a Supreme Court,

00:34:08.760 in which he said, he more or less said, I am the state.

00:34:12.420 All power resides in me.

00:34:13.660 The law is what is my will.

00:34:15.940 No power can be exercised by anyone apart from outside me.

00:34:19.960 No other institution has any power apart from the power I give it.

00:34:23.320 And that was what the monarchy was.

00:34:27.500 And that collapses.

00:34:29.220 You have to find another way of doing it.

00:34:30.980 But it collapsed when they called the estates general and basically said, you know, gentlemen, we've run out of money.

00:34:38.900 We want you to meet and agree to give us a lot more.

00:34:42.640 And they basically said, that's not what we're going to do.

00:34:45.560 You know, if you want any money, you're going to have to agree to a constitution.

00:34:49.500 We're going to change the whole system.

00:34:50.900 And that's what happened.

00:34:52.140 But it was essentially a response to state bankruptcy, which and the bankruptcy came about through fighting too many wars with Britain.

00:35:00.980 So we won, thanks to the City of London,

00:35:04.280 and being able to raise fabulous amounts of money.

00:35:08.920 And because people thought, I hope they still do think that,

00:35:12.500 that Parliament will ensure that people who buy British guilts

00:35:16.080 will not be ripped off.

00:35:18.660 Whereas in France, you could be.

00:35:21.020 The king could say, well, we're not paying you.

00:35:25.040 Too bad. 1.00

00:35:26.080 I mean, we should never trust the French. 1.00

00:35:27.640 You are correct. 1.00

00:35:28.280 You are absolutely correct.

00:35:29.420 Well, of course, they've got the euro now, so they can't do that anymore.

00:35:34.880 Homer wrote two of the most important books in Western literature.

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00:36:35.880 Let's talk about, because the Napoleonic Wars,

00:36:40.140 because to me that seemed like the last,

00:36:43.740 shall we just say hurrah for France itself,

00:36:46.120 this chance to be a global power.

00:36:48.640 So...

00:36:49.140 In retrospect.

00:36:50.000 In retrospect, absolutely.

00:36:51.860 Because they didn't think that at the time, of course, nor did anybody else, I think.

00:36:55.520 Yes, I think you're right.

00:36:57.320 France at that time...

00:36:58.240 Sorry, I'm interrupting you.

00:36:59.700 No, no, no, no, no, no.

00:37:00.480 You are the interviewee, so you should be talking.

00:37:04.400 We're interrupting you.

00:37:05.300 I mean, France had by far the largest population in Europe, 20 million people.

00:37:09.100 That was double the population of Britain, larger than, you know, Austria, about the

00:37:13.780 same as Russia.

00:37:16.000 General de Gaulle said that he wanted a France of 100 million people.

00:37:19.300 And I think I did a rough calculation once.

00:37:23.140 If the French population from the late 18th century had grown at the same rate as the British, 0.87

00:37:29.100 France would have a population of 180 million, which you might say is sort of natural.

00:37:35.700 You know, it's twice the size of Britain.

00:37:37.880 So if we have 70 million people, the French could certainly have 150 million, but they haven't.

00:37:43.740 But the reasons why are somewhat mysterious.

00:37:47.220 but everybody else was doubling their population

00:37:50.740 and the French stopped having babies

00:37:53.320 or stopped having so many.

00:37:56.520 And that may be an effect of the revolution,

00:37:58.640 may be an effect of the Napoleonic Wars,

00:38:00.240 but whatever the reason it happened. 0.66

00:38:02.760 So France's super power status

00:38:07.200 partly went because for demographic reasons.

00:38:12.320 By 1870, when they fought Germany,

00:38:15.640 Germany had an equal population with France.

00:38:21.440 Twenty years later, it had a much larger population than France.

00:38:24.540 And so France's power, insofar as power depends on people,

00:38:28.960 and in those days, and perhaps even now, to a large extent, it still does,

00:38:33.220 France was evidently in decline.

00:38:36.940 But so you could say that Napoleonic Wars was the last chance for France 0.66

00:38:41.420 to be the global hegemonic power. 0.58

00:38:45.640 If they'd kicked us out of India, which Napoleon wanted, if they'd defeated the Russians,

00:38:52.700 if they'd set up a kind of European imperial federation, then that would have been it.

00:39:00.820 So the old joke says we'd all be speaking French.

00:39:04.880 And France in some ways was a much better place than Britain to be the global, the great

00:39:10.260 global power because culturally it was regarded as superior.

00:39:17.340 The French language in the 18th century was the international language.

00:39:23.220 So why was the 19th century, in a sense, the British century rather than the French century?

00:39:30.540 And it could have been under Napoleon, it could well have been.

00:39:35.220 So why did Napoleon win?

00:39:40.240 Well, I mean, many French people at the time later said, because he tried to do too much.

00:39:46.420 After all, Britain never tried to conquer Europe or indeed conquer the globe.

00:39:50.780 Napoleon, in a sense, tried to conquer everything.

00:39:55.020 You can't do it that way, as the Americans have realized in recent years.

00:40:02.160 So maybe Napoleon did too much.

00:40:03.980 One thing he couldn't do was to invade Britain.

00:40:06.100 had he managed to do that 0.94

00:40:08.800 then he would have won

00:40:10.300 well he was actually talked

00:40:12.900 out of invading Britain wasn't he

00:40:14.480 well he

00:40:15.680 he

00:40:16.660 well if you

00:40:18.760 if we go back to

00:40:20.240 we often think that Nelson

00:40:22.380 at Trafalgar

00:40:24.460 prevented an invasion

00:40:26.120 but in fact he'd already given up the invasion plan

00:40:28.760 by then there was a huge army all along

00:40:30.900 the Channel Coast

00:40:31.800 and he'd built lots of invasion boats

00:40:34.680 barges and so on

00:40:35.860 So he was all ready for this and just said, well, okay, I want the French fleet has to come sailing up the channel and escort us over, you know, it's only 20 miles and then we'll be in London and England will be dead, as he more or less put it.

00:40:51.360 but then the navy never would

00:40:53.340 his navy, his admiral

00:40:55.140 Villeneuve said

00:40:56.900 it's too dangerous, you know, if we try and

00:40:59.340 sail up the channel we'll get sunk so we're not going to do it

00:41:01.560 so Napoleon, you know, sort of peak

00:41:03.260 says alright then, I'm going

00:41:05.440 to go and invade Austria instead 0.93

00:41:06.820 but that was the closest

00:41:09.520 we've ever got

00:41:11.380 to being invaded by the French probably 0.56

00:41:13.380 they came pretty close on quite a number

00:41:15.680 of occasions in the previous hundred years

00:41:17.680 because the point was made to them

00:41:19.620 Was it not that, OK, you can invade England and maybe you might even win, but then what?

00:41:24.440 Yes, that's true.

00:41:25.820 Well, one of his generals, Bernadotte, who's pretty shrewd and who later became king of Sweden,

00:41:31.800 so he was one of those who did well out of the whole business, did say that.

00:41:37.800 He said, if there's an invasion of England, you have to lead it.

00:41:43.260 Because if anyone else leads it, that means they'll be greater than you.

00:41:45.940 So you have to lead it. 0.97

00:41:46.840 But if you lead it and it fails, then that's you, you're screwed.

00:41:50.700 But I think he would have probably given it a try because he was a risk taker.

00:41:55.880 You know, you might say, well, people must have told him not to invade Russia.

00:42:00.280 But he did. 0.89

00:42:01.580 He must have been told it was dangerous to invade Egypt. 1.00

00:42:05.320 But he did that too. 1.00

00:42:06.860 So I think he would have taken the chance. 0.84

00:42:09.800 And what do we know about Napoleon?

00:42:11.500 What do we know about his character, who he was?

00:42:14.180 because there's a lot of mythology that's been written about him

00:42:17.540 and spoken about him.

00:42:18.580 What was that film when you saw it that came out for two or three years?

00:42:21.940 It's not really about Napoleon.

00:42:23.180 It's just big pitch battles and some battles.

00:42:29.380 It's a lot of battles.

00:42:30.340 And then there's him on the island sort of keeling over at the end.

00:42:34.880 I didn't like it very much.

00:42:37.260 It sounded as though you did for all the reasons you say.

00:42:39.620 But the other thing that annoyed me was that everybody was much too old.

00:42:42.500 uh napoleon was what if getting on for 50 or late 40s uh i think robespierre was shown as being about

00:42:52.160 50. these were all men in their in their 20s and 30s explains their behavior

00:42:57.080 yeah it's fascinating when we talk about history just to understand how much we don't understand

00:43:05.480 and how young people were.

00:43:08.220 You know, the American founders, late 20s, early 30s.

00:43:11.660 These great men who founded a nation,

00:43:13.980 just like kids, basically, by our standards today.

00:43:16.540 Indeed.

00:43:17.400 Wellington was the same age as Napoleon.

00:43:19.020 They were both young.

00:43:20.260 Pitt was young.

00:43:21.460 Robespierre was young.

00:43:23.100 Even Louis XVI was fairly young, 30-something.

00:43:26.620 But, yeah, we kind of tend to think of people as older.

00:43:29.640 Well, of course, our leaders tend to be fairly young nowadays.

00:43:32.960 But Napoleon as a personality,

00:43:36.760 one historian said he was a walking laboratory of neuroses. 0.93

00:43:41.520 I mean, he wasn't French. 0.69

00:43:42.900 He was Corsican, of course, as we know.

00:43:44.600 His first language was Corsican, a dialect of Italian.

00:43:49.620 Whether he ever really liked France, I wonder.

00:43:53.200 He was sent to a French military college at a very young age

00:43:56.000 because his mother had slept with the French governor of Corsica, supposedly.

00:44:01.320 And then it turned out that he wasn't really a,

00:44:03.860 he was barely a gentleman in a military college full of aristocrats.

00:44:09.900 I mean, he wasn't very happy there.

00:44:12.240 There's even a story that he was advised he might think of joining the Royal Navy.

00:44:15.600 I mean, our Royal Navy.

00:44:17.940 So, I mean, I think probably, I always feel he regarded the French as a resource to be used.

00:44:25.240 When his son, he made his son King of Rome.

00:44:27.640 you know he wanted to be emperor like the holy roman emperor like charlemagne not not a french

00:44:36.200 not a french ruler really a european ruler so i think you know france was okay big rich country

00:44:44.340 good for his ambitions but not i don't feel it was something that he a country that he felt very

00:44:50.860 strongly emotionally attacked. So he wasn't a French nationalist. He was someone who saw France

00:44:57.600 as a vehicle through which to achieve his personal ambitions. And one of the things you tend to find

00:45:03.060 with people who are very, very good at something is they tend to like to do it a lot. Was the reason

00:45:10.160 that he invaded so many different countries partly because he was a great general and he loved war

00:45:17.720 and he loved winning.

00:45:19.080 He certainly loved winning.

00:45:20.720 He was a very good planner.

00:45:22.320 I think that's what he was mainly.

00:45:25.580 I don't think he was a, I mean, I'm not an expert on this,

00:45:28.240 but I don't think he was a great battlefield commander

00:45:31.380 in a way that Wellington was,

00:45:34.080 though Wellington was also a very good planner.

00:45:36.340 But, you know, there's this saying,

00:45:37.920 amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics.

00:45:41.180 Well, Napoleon was very good at organizing.

00:45:45.020 And at that, he was...

00:45:47.260 Was it not him that said an army marches on his stomach?

00:45:50.020 Supposedly, yeah.

00:45:51.220 That would kind of explain that, right?

00:45:53.120 Yes.

00:45:54.860 But yes, I suppose he was something that was the solution to his problems.

00:45:59.260 Yes. 0.98

00:45:59.840 If you've got a problem, then war is the way to solve it. 1.00

00:46:04.140 So in the case of the British, yes. 0.98

00:46:06.660 In the case of the Russians, yes. 0.66

00:46:07.720 In the case of the Spanish, invade Spain if they're being awkward. 0.94

00:46:11.540 And the assumption is that you will win and that will be the end of your problems. 0.96

00:46:15.600 And I think there may have been something else,

00:46:17.480 which was that although he called himself emperor

00:46:19.600 and although he ate the style of, you know,

00:46:24.500 the archaic style of the Holy Roman Empire

00:46:26.880 and he surrounded himself with real aristocrats

00:46:29.700 and he married a Habsburg, he couldn't do much better than that.

00:46:34.600 I mean, he always knew that he was an upstart. 0.69

00:46:38.920 And I think, at least I sort of guess,

00:46:41.760 this is not a hypothesis based on no particular evidence,

00:46:44.960 that there wasn't really a place where he could stop.

00:46:48.440 He couldn't sort of settle down and say,

00:46:49.920 I'll live the rest of my life as emperor

00:46:52.740 and happily hunting and whatever.

00:46:57.000 He couldn't do that.

00:46:58.200 I mean, he said somewhere,

00:46:59.120 if I'm not feared, then I'm not safe.

00:47:02.500 What's that effect?

00:47:03.980 So I think that there was not,

00:47:05.460 he didn't know how,

00:47:06.640 one of the historians,

00:47:08.900 one of them said he didn't know how to stop.

00:47:11.160 He didn't know how to make peace.

00:47:13.060 And maybe there was no way he could do it.

00:47:14.960 Because as soon as he looked weaker, then he would be overthrown. 0.96

00:47:19.420 You know, he couldn't rely on the, he couldn't be like the Habsburgs or like the Boerwolds 0.91

00:47:23.720 or even like the Hanoverians in Britain because he was only ever there as a, in a sense, as 0.95

00:47:31.240 an expedient.

00:47:34.240 So he wants his son to succeed, never did.

00:47:38.080 His nephew did, which shows that he did have, there was a dynastic, you know, there was

00:47:42.640 a lot of support for a Napoleon but I think he could never be sure that he would survive

00:47:48.000 peace and what would you do with the army you know you could as long as there's a war you can

00:47:55.480 always have the army somewhere else they can be paid for by others what happens when the war ends

00:47:59.820 as we know it made it did destabilize France and it was a war that ultimately defeated him and of

00:48:07.380 course we can talk about the battle of Waterloo which I'm sure we will do but it was also his

00:48:12.100 invasion of portugal wasn't it yeah that was his ultimate undoing really that was big at the

00:48:16.800 beginning of the end well what he called the spanish ulcer you know he invades portugal and

00:48:22.040 he invades spain uh and they well i think this is true um at least i've written it so

00:48:30.500 i'm hoping it's true the french lost as many men in spain as they did in russia

00:48:36.260 What?

00:48:36.780 Over a longer period, of course.

00:48:38.920 Really?

00:48:39.560 Yeah.

00:48:40.620 Like half a million men or something like that?

00:48:42.500 Something like that.

00:48:43.240 Wow.

00:48:44.380 Because, of course, most of the men they lost in Russia were not French,

00:48:47.800 or at least very many of them weren't.

00:48:49.040 They were Poles, Germans, Italians and so on.

00:48:51.620 You know, it was an international army.

00:48:53.620 In Spain, it was largely French.

00:48:56.500 And, you know, they were fighting a very bloody and nasty guerrilla war

00:49:00.180 with the Spanish, as well as fighting Wellington,

00:49:03.120 It was sort of popping out of Portugal to fight a few battles and popping back again.

00:49:08.080 And it was a drain on their strength.

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00:51:10.620 And one of the interesting things in terms of the mythology for our generation

00:51:16.160 and perhaps younger people as well who've not studied history thoroughly,

00:51:20.260 as most of us haven't, partly because of the way history is taught nowadays,

00:51:24.560 is you come away with this sort of, there's this popular idea of the French

00:51:29.660 which is the sort of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

00:51:31.720 This is the kind of phrase that sticks in people's.

00:51:34.880 But, of course, people don't realise that by the time

00:51:37.280 of the beginning of World War II, the French had been the people

00:51:42.160 who'd had one of the most powerful armies in the world consecutively

00:51:45.900 for several wars.

00:51:47.540 Yes.

00:51:47.880 And what happened in 1939 was a colossal shock to everybody,

00:51:53.160 not just others, but the French themselves.

00:51:55.820 Yes, yes.

00:51:57.140 Yeah, I mean, this, you know, this idea which I think many people do have

00:52:00.800 who have a superficial knowledge, which is the French didn't fight in 1939, 1940.

00:52:06.540 It's not true.

00:52:07.260 They did fight and they had large casualties, much larger than Britain did.

00:52:12.540 And, of course, the resistance continued to resist and so on.

00:52:17.900 But, yeah, I mean, France was a military nation

00:52:22.440 and you can still sort of see that to some extent on the 14th of July

00:52:25.740 or the 11th of November when they have parades down the Champs-Élysées,

00:52:29.240 you can see that, a bit like us, we like the idea of military pomp and all that.

00:52:36.980 You might say, well, we've both allowed ours to be rather hollowed up

00:52:39.780 because we don't want to spend the money on it. 0.99

00:52:42.520 But Wellington and so on would never have thought of the French

00:52:47.020 as a non-military nation.

00:52:50.080 In fact, they would have thought of them as, above all,

00:52:53.260 an aggressive military nation.

00:52:55.460 And that's why British politicians were so scared of the French for so long.

00:53:00.140 Right up until the end of the 19th century, they were afraid of France invading.

00:53:06.020 One reason why we didn't build a channel tunnel,

00:53:09.520 and I was told by a director of the Channel Tunnel Company

00:53:11.760 that it was technically feasible to have built a channel tunnel in the 1880s,

00:53:16.420 was that the war ministry in Britain said we can't risk the French invading through a tunnel. 0.94

00:53:23.180 Well, frankly, probably a good decision, given that the Germans could have invaded through that tunnel a few decades later.

00:53:30.180 I was curious about why it was that this great military nation of France was so vulnerable to the German invasion in 1940.

00:53:43.180 In 1940, that's right, not 1939.

00:53:46.440 Because, I mean, there are a few different things.

00:53:48.240 One is the Germans had come up with, you know, they used the radio very well,

00:53:52.600 they used tanks very well, they used mobile war maneuver very well.

00:53:56.580 But another thing that I understand is French society was very demoralized

00:54:01.940 by the internal battle between the communists and the fascists within France.

00:54:06.560 Is that a fair assessment as well?

00:54:08.560 France was more divided politically than Britain was, that's true.

00:54:12.980 They were probably not more divided than Germany was.

00:54:15.780 I remember the great German historian Sir Richard Evans saying that something like,

00:54:21.700 if you think France was demoralized in 1939, you should have seen Germany.

00:54:26.720 I mean, Hitler's power was very, was fragile in 1939. 0.84

00:54:31.440 And it was only because they defeated France that Hitler suddenly becomes the invulnerable great national genius and so on. 0.87

00:54:40.300 And, you know, the army would have kicked Hitler out had there been any reverse. 0.90

00:54:45.060 And Hitler, I think, knew that. 0.81

00:54:46.600 But what about the French?

00:54:48.860 Well, I think there was some demoralization.

00:54:51.980 I think there had been a feeling ever since the First World War

00:54:55.260 that France could not go through that again.

00:54:58.800 You know, the French had had twice the losses that we had in the First World War.

00:55:02.400 And it was demoralizing enough for Britain.

00:55:05.980 You know, the huge peace movements, a lot of pacifists,

00:55:10.140 a determination to appease Germany in order to avoid another war.

00:55:14.480 And therefore, for many people, a kind of terrible acceptance to say,

00:55:18.820 well, we knew this was going to be a disaster, and now it's a disaster,

00:55:23.220 so therefore we have to stop fighting.

00:55:26.860 I mean, there were plenty of people in Britain who would have said that too,

00:55:29.100 had it not been for Churchill, probably what we would have done.

00:55:33.360 But I think it was also that the Allies, and indeed the Germans,

00:55:39.100 were preparing for a repeat of the First World War.

00:55:43.560 One of my colleagues once told me, which I was surprised at, it's always stuck in my mind,

00:55:49.140 the Germans were using more steel for making barbed wire in 1939 than they were for making tanks

00:55:54.500 because almost everybody was expecting a repeat of trench warfare.

00:55:59.880 And that's what the French were doing. That's what we were doing.

00:56:02.060 So they were spread, the army was spread along this line from Holland down to the Maginot line.

00:56:10.780 And the Germans decided, the German army, not Hitler,

00:56:14.400 decided that if there was going to be a repeat of the First World War,

00:56:18.160 it would also be a repeat of German defeat.

00:56:21.180 And therefore, they had to do something that would cut this war short.

00:56:26.460 And that was the so-called Blitzkrieg, which was an improvisation.

00:56:30.420 I mean, they'd almost done it in 1918.

00:56:33.100 So you might think, well, shouldn't people have expected the same thing again?

00:56:38.040 But they didn't.

00:56:39.980 But, you know, the German breakthrough in March 1918 had almost broken the Allied line,

00:56:44.860 had almost forced the British to do a Dunkirk in 1918.

00:56:51.460 And in 1939 or 1940, as you say, they had better tanks, they had radios, they had all that.

00:56:57.780 Whereas the French, who had the best tanks in the world, relied on flags to communicate between them.

00:57:04.760 It wasn't a terribly good idea, but radios often didn't work anyway.

00:57:08.040 But the Germans concentrated their forces in one place.

00:57:12.160 So one French general said, we had 500 groups of three tanks and the Germans had one group of 500 tanks.

00:57:23.260 And so they punched through the line where no one was expecting it, where they thought it was impossible.

00:57:28.360 You know, through the Ardennes forest, tanks can't go through the trees.

00:57:32.860 So we all know that they can't attack there.

00:57:35.200 So they ignored all the warning signs and that's where they did attack. And the Allies, 0.58

00:57:40.320 who could have perhaps bombed them, didn't. Too late. And then they never recovered. 0.60

00:57:47.600 So the French fought, the British fought, but they were always fighting and losing battle.

00:57:52.960 And then, as you say, there were plenty of people in France who said we should never have started

00:57:57.840 this war. You know, the real enemy are the Communists, not the Fascists. In fact, we quite

00:58:02.960 like them so what we have to do is to do a deal with hitler and that of course is what what happened

00:58:11.280 and had it not been for de gaulle and churchill perhaps that's how the whole thing would have

00:58:15.680 ended well it's one of the things i mentioned about the communists and the fascists i mean

00:58:20.000 people don't realize how many fascists there were across europe in the 1930s not just in germany

00:58:27.120 in france in southern southern europe in eastern europe all over the place i mean the start the

00:58:32.320 the factoid i always like about this is i think one of the last divisions defending the reichstag

00:58:37.280 was ss charlemagne which was full of french nazis was it really yeah i didn't know that um

00:58:43.120 and it's interesting to me one question that we've never really talked about in the show which i think

00:58:47.040 would be interesting in the context of france and world war ii is what do you think was the impact

00:58:51.360 of the French resistance on World War II.

00:58:55.000 How significant was it?

00:58:56.500 How damaging was it to the Germans?

00:59:00.840 Not very, except in the sense that it made the Allied invasion less bloody.

00:59:10.640 So the French resistance was able to do a lot of damage in 1944

00:59:14.860 to German communications.

00:59:17.880 To facilitate D-Day? 0.62

00:59:19.100 Yes, facilitate D-Day.

00:59:20.280 and what happened after D-Day and also the invasion of Provence as well.

00:59:26.140 So the maquis had been armed mainly by the British

00:59:30.080 and organized and were ready to come out into the open.

00:59:34.000 So, you know, what they'd been doing before then was good for French morale

00:59:38.420 and perhaps bad for German morale, I don't know.

00:59:42.360 Probably didn't make all that much difference.

00:59:44.200 But, you know, producing underground newspapers, having radio broadcasts,

00:59:49.200 castes, all that helps to keep spirits up. But as somebody said, it doesn't actually

00:59:54.400 kill any Germans. And so what really counted, I think, was the mobilization in 1944. And

01:00:01.940 therefore it saved a lot of Allied lives. And it almost certainly shortened the war

01:00:06.880 a bit. But I don't think you could say it was a major element in the war. But what it

01:00:13.700 certainly did do was to help France to see itself and be seen by others as still a great power and

01:00:23.700 one of the victors. Churchill was very keen on that too. So France gets a permanent seat in the

01:00:29.620 United Nations and has an occupation zone in Germany and so on. So there's this desire to

01:00:36.740 to remake France as a great power as an ally of Britain.

01:00:42.180 And the resistance made that seem plausible.

01:00:47.440 I think that was the important thing.

01:00:49.060 And of course it later on helps de Gaulle to come back

01:00:52.480 and save France from the possibility

01:00:55.020 of another civil war over Algeria.

01:00:58.960 And I think de Gaulle evidently was the great figure

01:01:04.500 of 20th century France.

01:01:06.740 And the resistance was, as I think he probably saw it, was really a vehicle for him to be the saviour of the nation.

01:01:16.080 And people often talk about Vichy France.

01:01:19.620 Yes.

01:01:20.200 What was Vichy France?

01:01:22.620 Was it essentially, it was essentially a Nazi state, but how much support for the Nazis was there? 0.73

01:01:28.320 A lot of trust. 0.89

01:01:29.500 Quite a lot.

01:01:30.120 because

01:01:32.060 Marshal Pétain

01:01:33.920 who was the great French

01:01:36.700 hero of the First World War or one of them

01:01:38.600 is one of

01:01:40.760 those who think we have to do a deal with

01:01:42.580 Germany. We've

01:01:44.600 lost and the patriotic

01:01:46.560 thing is to

01:01:48.080 make the best of your defeat. As I said

01:01:50.720 there were plenty of people in Britain who thought

01:01:52.460 the same. So you can imagine

01:01:54.860 you can sort of imagine

01:01:58.640 if you wanted to write a sort of, you know, historical novel about this, you could imagine

01:02:02.960 the Duke of Windsor coming back as a puppet monarch with David Lloyd George as collaborating

01:02:09.160 Prime Minister and Churchill in exile in Canada or somewhere. And what the French had therefore 0.66

01:02:15.760 was a war hero telling them that they had fought bravely, but they'd lost. And that what they had

01:02:22.560 to do was to make the best of their situation, reform the nation. That was where the fascists

01:02:27.740 came in because reform the nation meant hammering the left anti-semitism and discipline sort of boy

01:02:36.700 scout sort of stuff and the church much of the catholic church was very keen on this too it was

01:02:42.100 indeed a consciously counter-revolutionary movement they didn't have a monarch but they

01:02:48.120 had marshal peter who was the next best thing and a lot of them were people who were monarchists

01:02:52.920 who would have liked to have a monarch in France

01:02:54.720 and who thought that it had all gone wrong in 1789.

01:02:58.960 That's when France had started to go to the dogs

01:03:00.900 and they were going to put France back on the path

01:03:05.380 it should have been on and they never had a revolution. 0.82

01:03:08.680 And if Hitler would help them to do that, then that was fine. 0.68

01:03:12.180 So there were fascists, but they weren't all fascists. 0.73

01:03:15.040 Many of them were old-fashioned reactionary patriots.

01:03:20.120 Of course, some of the old-fashioned reactionary patriots

01:03:21.820 were in the resistance too. So it was often a choice you had to make. If you hated the

01:03:28.360 Germans enough, you would go into the resistance. If you didn't terribly hate the Germans, 0.84

01:03:33.160 you might end up on the side of Vichy. And quite a number of people went from one side 0.52

01:03:37.460 to the other, including François Mitterrand. As you may know, he was, although he ended

01:03:44.340 up socialist president, he had been on the far right in his youth. He was decorated by

01:03:50.560 Marshal Pétain. He was a junior minister, I think, or at least had some sort of official

01:03:55.480 position in Vichy. And then when he realised, you know, honourably, if you like, that they

01:04:03.140 were going to lose, he got in touch with de Gaulle and said, obviously, you're the man

01:04:07.940 I want to do, I want to serve you now. And, you know, I'm putting it in a rather sarcastic

01:04:14.540 way and you're smiling, but it was possible to make that decision in a perfectly honourable

01:04:19.520 way. You could say, I trusted Pétain, and now I realise that that was not the right way to go,

01:04:26.340 and so I'm going to join the resistance. And plenty of people did that.

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01:05:45.460 And what was that watershed moment where people realised, hang on,

01:05:49.620 maybe it's not a good idea to be pro-Vichy?

01:05:52.580 Yeah, well, I think there were probably a number.

01:05:54.540 I mean, the first thing was when Britain fought on,

01:05:56.840 because the Vichy view was Britain would surrender.

01:05:59.680 You know, we had to surrender first, if you like,

01:06:01.480 because otherwise the British would surrender, 0.61

01:06:03.140 and they would be the ones doing the deal with Germany on our backs.

01:06:06.640 That was the widespread view. 0.85

01:06:08.520 You know, they burnt Joan of Arc, they'll screw us again.

01:06:11.040 so the British didn't surrender oh that's that's that's awkward and then of course when the 0.83

01:06:19.960 Americans come into the war you start thinking oh well are the Germans really going to win after

01:06:26.320 all and then when the German attack on Russia gets bogged down you think well after all things

01:06:31.540 are not going terribly well for the Germans and then in in 1942 the Germans invaded unoccupied

01:06:40.020 France and so in that case you think well so what what was the point of this at all

01:06:44.840 okay for most people it's a way you just have to carry on with your life you know not many

01:06:51.740 people are heroes but you know some people do say well this is where we we really have to take a

01:06:58.820 stand and you do find people joining the resistance because also there was a specter

01:07:04.020 of Waterloo wasn't there where I mean they were still quite sore that you know they got their 0.96

01:07:09.640 arses handed to them. Yes, they were. And they were also quite 0.80

01:07:13.660 sore about Dunkirk. Because, you know, here we are, this is the British

01:07:17.760 once again leaving us in the lurch. So, I mean, one 1.00

01:07:21.300 French trope, if you like, is the British leave you in the lurch.

01:07:26.540 You know what? Ungrateful bastards. 1.00

01:07:30.240 What, are we supposed to stand to the last man at Dunkirk? Just because 1.00

01:07:33.680 they got their arses handed to them. 0.99

01:07:35.180 It's typical, is all I'm going to say. 0.94

01:07:39.600 Well, funnily enough, well, I say funnily, not really funny, 0.63

01:07:42.200 but one reason why the French sent their best troops in 1939 up into Belgium,

01:07:49.640 which was the wrong thing to do, as we know,

01:07:51.520 because the Germans are going to attack in a different place,

01:07:53.880 was because they were afraid the British would do a runner.

01:07:57.660 So the commander-in-chief of the French army says,

01:07:59.940 OK, we're going to send our best troops there,

01:08:01.500 because we know what the British nearly did in 1918.

01:08:03.880 they nearly ran away then

01:08:06.560 so they'll run away again

01:08:08.700 so we have to send our best troops to make sure

01:08:10.640 the British don't run away

01:08:12.000 but they did of course 0.84

01:08:14.520 the British did as the French saw it, they did run away

01:08:16.500 they ran away at Dunkirk, the French were

01:08:18.420 heroically holding off the Germans 0.95

01:08:20.060 while the British were 0.98

01:08:21.980 getting on their

01:08:24.660 boats, there's a famous

01:08:26.780 Vichy cartoon that shows

01:08:28.760 a British officer punching a French

01:08:30.860 soldier in the face at Dunkirk to keep

01:08:32.820 him off the boats. It's the British who are getting on the boats, not the French. Of course,

01:08:36.180 that wasn't true. And of course, Brexit for some people is another way in which the British

01:08:42.920 let the French down. You know what? During the interview, you almost brought me to the

01:08:49.480 point of having sympathy for the French, but I think that has rapidly evaporated in the

01:08:54.800 last two minutes. Well, if Dunkirk, the British Army might well not have escaped at Dunkirk

01:09:01.820 had the French not, in fact, sacrifice themselves in holding off the Germans.

01:09:08.920 And I think, so you can imagine why many French soldiers and politicians thought,

01:09:12.860 well, we did our bit and the British didn't.

01:09:16.000 And one of the things that really annoyed them, well, annoyed is not,

01:09:20.500 is that they saw the British as refusing to commit the RAF to the battle in France. 0.53

01:09:26.520 And that, in a sense, is true, though it would have been no good.

01:09:29.940 Well, Churchill knew, though.

01:09:31.160 Churchill knew that France was lost, and he knew Britain had to defend our island.

01:09:37.500 He was told that by the commanders of the RAF.

01:09:42.040 They said, if you send the RAF to France, we're going to lose it, and we'll lose the war.

01:09:47.560 But, I mean, quite a lot of the RAF was sent to France.

01:09:49.740 And after Dunkirk, more troops were sent to France and then had to be withdrawn again.

01:09:56.020 But if you were French, if you were a Frenchman who, let's say, had a few doubts about the British alliance,

01:10:02.140 if you did remember Joan of Arc or all the other stuff, Waterloo, and then you'd say,

01:10:07.060 we knew we couldn't trust the British. 0.81

01:10:10.360 They're willing to fight to the last Frenchman, just as they were in the First World War. 0.82

01:10:14.800 We're not going to do that this time. We're not going to be the mugs this time. 0.99

01:10:18.160 We're not going to get our sons killed for the sake of British prophets or the British Empire. 0.87

01:10:23.540 We're going to do the sensible thing and make peace with the Germans, 0.96

01:10:28.340 who are, after all, not all that bad, not as bad as the British anyway, 0.99

01:10:32.100 because at least the Germans are honourable. 0.99

01:10:35.140 You know, this is not my view, of course. 1.00

01:10:37.040 No, no.

01:10:37.620 I'm speaking of it as a Vichy, as a patriotic, you know, 0.95

01:10:40.760 the Germans are not, because at least the Germans fight fair, 0.95

01:10:43.600 whereas the British are always...

01:10:45.060 Well, actually, the history of World War II doesn't quite bear that statement out.

01:10:48.080 Don't forget we're back in 1939, 1940.

01:10:50.200 Yeah, quite, quite, quite, quite.

01:10:51.400 that's really interesting

01:10:53.720 I suppose the interesting question

01:10:56.300 moving back to the present age

01:10:58.260 is to what extent

01:11:00.080 that Vichy resistance

01:11:02.180 split

01:11:03.640 informs French politics to this day

01:11:06.080 I mean you mentioned it's run

01:11:06.980 I imagine there are hundreds of people

01:11:09.820 sort of on a political level

01:11:11.340 but millions of people further down

01:11:13.240 whose views and ideologies

01:11:15.860 come from that

01:11:18.100 to inform their views today

01:11:20.120 Today, a bit rather less. I mean, we shall see this in a sense at the next presidential election, because the thing that has held back the Le Pen family business, which is the, you know, the Front National, the Rallyment National, is its association with Vichy for many people in France.

01:11:40.960 So, I mean, my wife, my co-author, would say, you know, I would never vote for Le Pen.

01:11:47.300 And if I say, well, why? You know, she seems all right.

01:11:49.240 Because, you know, what her father was, who these people were.

01:11:53.660 These were the people who collaborated.

01:11:56.300 These were the Vichy people, all their grandchildren, all their great-grandchildren.

01:12:00.420 And the French have long historical memories.

01:12:03.900 So I think it does still, so we shall see.

01:12:05.940 If Le Pen becomes president, it will show that the younger generation, which is to say, really, you know, anybody under 40, under 50, no longer thinks of the Second World War as the defining experience.

01:12:19.520 The people for whom it was the defining experience, of course, are largely no longer with us.

01:12:26.240 You know, the people who remember it or who remember their parents remembering it, they're going.

01:12:33.280 So, I mean, younger people are supposed to be much more willing to support Le Pen than older people.

01:12:38.180 And to what extent is your wife's concern understandable instinctively, but inaccurate factually?

01:12:45.920 And to what extent is it factual?

01:12:47.560 You know, being someone's granddaughter doesn't mean, or daughter doesn't mean you have their views.

01:12:52.460 I've got very different views to my parents and grandparents.

01:12:54.900 I mean, when I first went to France, which is now a long time ago, it was still a very clear thing.

01:13:00.900 You know, you could, I had friends who, you know, I had a friend whose aunt had fallen in love with a German airman.

01:13:08.780 And after the war, she'd had to leave Paris.

01:13:12.340 Didn't come back for 20 years.

01:13:14.220 And, you know, they all knew that.

01:13:15.500 The neighbours knew that.

01:13:17.300 And so this was a very present memory.

01:13:19.300 Of course, all that's long gone.

01:13:21.940 But nevertheless, there still are, you know, there are family traditions.

01:13:25.260 There are, one is Catholicism.

01:13:29.320 So Catholics tended to be conservative, 0.65

01:13:33.820 and the Catholic Church tended to support Vichy

01:13:36.460 because of hatred of communism, of atheism,

01:13:40.840 what they saw as the whole revolutionary tradition,

01:13:43.220 which was anti-Christian.

01:13:44.940 That was a big divide, at least until the 1970s.

01:13:49.040 I mean, I think, you know, you could...

01:13:50.760 I used to show my students a map of French election results

01:13:54.420 in the 1970s compared with a map of support

01:13:57.300 for the French Revolution in the 1790s,

01:13:59.560 and they're almost exactly the same.

01:14:01.860 So you could say, you know, for a very, very long time,

01:14:04.840 there were political cultures which affected whole regions.

01:14:09.880 I think that's really largely gone, as it has here, really.

01:14:15.860 But the next election will show it one way or the other.

01:14:18.680 I guess what I'm asking, Robert, sorry,

01:14:20.160 is something slightly different, which is,

01:14:22.640 it's not that you're going on too much.

01:14:24.000 I just want to dig into this thing,

01:14:25.520 because here in Britain and elsewhere around the world,

01:14:30.400 most of us don't understand what's happening in other countries.

01:14:33.320 We just get given this slogan in the newspaper and we go,

01:14:36.340 oh, that's what that is, and we don't know.

01:14:38.640 Is it fair to say that the Front National

01:14:41.620 is the ideological descendant of Vichy France?

01:14:47.760 Ideological? I don't mean lineage biologically.

01:14:51.980 I mean ideologically.

01:14:53.520 Are these the people who would collaborate with fascists today

01:14:56.660 if France was invaded?

01:14:57.960 That's kind of what I'm getting at. 0.99

01:14:58.980 That's a very good question.

01:15:00.680 There is certainly, there is that element, certainly, yeah,

01:15:06.920 which is one that is visible and active in French politics

01:15:14.380 in the way that it's really, the British equivalent

01:15:16.780 is really very, very marginal.

01:15:19.480 At least it was until recently.

01:15:20.800 So there is that element.

01:15:23.520 There's also a traditional Catholic element.

01:15:26.120 But for a lot of people now, it's, as in most, let's say, most countries,

01:15:31.080 it's a question of who you think will be the best government.

01:15:35.480 I mean, a lot of it's now a sort of visceral dislike of Macron,

01:15:39.560 which is odd.

01:15:40.680 I mean, odd in a way.

01:15:42.120 You know, he's a rather annoying chap, I think, for many people.

01:15:46.340 But, you know, he's not, he's kind of politically not very definable.

01:15:52.560 He's kind of colourless politically.

01:15:54.960 He's not right-wing or left-wing.

01:15:57.400 Yet many people in France seem to absolutely loathe Macau.

01:16:00.640 He's like their Keir Starmer.

01:16:02.340 A bit like Keir Starmer.

01:16:03.600 Yeah, but I understand why people would hate someone like that

01:16:05.980 because they see them as presiding over the continued decline of the country

01:16:09.500 without having any of their own views or implementing policies.

01:16:13.920 The reason I'm getting into this, Rob, is just very interesting.

01:16:17.120 If you look at the right-wing populist parties elsewhere,

01:16:20.160 say in Britain, right?

01:16:21.960 Nigel Farage is clearly, ideologically, the descendant of the people who would fight the fascists.

01:16:28.040 Yes.

01:16:28.320 Clearly, right?

01:16:30.280 Marine Le Pen, ideologically, is the descendant of who?

01:16:36.480 Well, I think you'd have to say that the French often talk about political families, which is an odd idea.

01:16:44.280 It's partly because French political parties are very fluid and they're constantly changing their names and so on.

01:16:49.920 But there's this idea that there are political families.

01:16:52.620 And if there is a political family to which Le Pen belongs,

01:16:56.200 apart from her own, the Le Pen family,

01:16:58.700 it does include the people who would have collaborated,

01:17:02.800 largely because of their visceral hatred of communism.

01:17:07.400 Okay, you might say, well, is that still there?

01:17:10.480 No, not necessarily.

01:17:12.140 But, I mean, simply because the communist menace is no longer there.

01:17:16.920 But they're the people who tend to see the solution to problems as authoritarian government, who blame a lot of problems on immigrants.

01:17:30.480 OK, well, a lot of us do. Not all problems, but some problems.

01:17:35.540 But, you know, there's a spectrum between people who say, well, I don't really like to see people publicly praying in the street in Paris. 0.99

01:17:50.380 People are Muslims? 0.67

01:17:52.300 Muslims. I don't like to see Muslims publicly praying in Paris. 1.00

01:17:57.460 But otherwise, you know, I've got Muslim friends and neighbours, I don't mind.

01:18:01.060 And then there are the people who say, these people are the enemies of France. 0.93

01:18:05.080 They should all be expelled or, you know, whatever.

01:18:07.420 There's a whole, as we know, there's a whole spectrum.

01:18:10.080 And a lot of that spectrum all will support Marine Le Pen.

01:18:15.020 It's not only about migration.

01:18:16.600 It's also about, obviously, things like taxation.

01:18:19.620 It's also, as you say, the sense that the country is on the slide and we need somebody.

01:18:26.560 The Farage phenomenon is in some way similar.

01:18:29.120 We need somebody who will break the rules, if necessary, and get things done.

01:18:34.120 The French don't talk about the blob, but there's the same sense of a state that doesn't work.

01:18:41.840 I think, in a way, that Le Pen and her party have tried to normalize themselves.

01:18:49.940 It's not clear whether that will work or not.

01:18:53.380 If it does, then you might see the same sort of thing that you see with Maloney in Italy.

01:18:59.120 In other words, someone who comes to power being accused of being a neo-fascist and then

01:19:04.060 turns out not to be very different from any centre-right politician.

01:19:08.720 So it may be that Le Pen will get elected and will turn out to be not very different

01:19:12.940 from any centre-right politician.

01:19:15.360 The thing that worries me is rather different.

01:19:17.400 My wife, I think, would be viscerally resistant to any thought.

01:19:22.980 How many people in France feel the same?

01:19:25.740 If Le Pen is elected, to what extent will there be violence in the streets?

01:19:30.740 Would there be strikes?

01:19:33.180 Would there be resistance from within the civil service and so on?

01:19:36.280 I think probably to quite a large extent. 0.97

01:19:39.480 That just sounds like France now, Robert. 0.93

01:19:42.640 France all the time. 0.89

01:19:43.940 But much worse. 0.95

01:19:46.200 Much more so.

01:19:47.120 And, you know, we are both in our early 40s,

01:19:49.620 but I think my entire adult life people have been predicting

01:19:53.440 that Le Pen of one form or another is going to be elected.

01:19:59.100 It hasn't happened so far.

01:20:00.940 Do you expect that it will at the next election?

01:20:04.180 I honestly don't know.

01:20:06.000 Because as I said, I think it depends on how people

01:20:08.400 at the very last minute decide to vote in the second round.

01:20:13.960 Whether they're going to say, well,

01:20:15.460 I don't like a lot of this right-wing stuff,

01:20:19.180 but I certainly don't want the left.

01:20:21.080 It also depends on who the other candidate is.

01:20:24.440 If it comes down to a fight between Le Pen and Mélenchon, then...

01:20:30.000 Mélenchon is a communist.

01:20:32.180 Sort of.

01:20:32.920 I mean, he's sort of Jeremy Corbyn multiplied by 10.

01:20:38.800 I think I was right when I said communist based on that description.

01:20:45.640 He's a democratic socialist, as they call it.

01:20:48.000 Yes, exactly.

01:20:49.500 What worries me a bit about France,

01:20:51.080 And about Britain, both two countries, which I feel a strong attachment, is that they're both heading the same direction towards a polarization of politics in between, OK, a right wing coalition, which is almost certainly going to disappoint its followers.

01:21:09.060 And the possibility of a left wing coalition, in our case, Greens, Nationalists, Lib Dems, Labour, who will cause chaos.

01:21:18.900 And in the French case, you could have a Mélenchon-led coalition of the left against Le Pen, with Stop Le Pen as its slogan.

01:21:30.400 And I think in that case, you're heading into very dangerous waters.

01:21:37.120 We've been talking about history and how history reflects on the present.

01:21:42.460 But in an odd way, the histories of France and Britain are so different.

01:21:47.740 And yet we're facing the same sort of political, we seem to be facing the same sort of political future in which the centre is collapsing and polarisation is taking place.

01:22:01.440 But with the polarized parties not at all, let's say, unable to create a sense that they would be capable of tackling the country's problems in both France and Britain.

01:22:18.000 And so what you get, what you might get, is in fact a succession of weak and constantly changing governments,

01:22:26.920 sort of cobbled together, centrist, relying sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right,

01:22:32.160 which we've had in France ever since Macron came to power, really.

01:22:37.200 Robert, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on.

01:22:40.260 Absolutely fascinating. 0.98

01:22:41.520 What it's done is confirmed all our prejudices about the French.

01:22:45.440 So thank you very much. 0.76

01:22:48.000 It's given me a basis for my prejudice.

01:22:51.040 But the final question is always the same.

01:22:52.980 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:22:56.180 Before Robert answers the final question, at the end of the interview,

01:22:59.280 make sure you go to triggerpod.co.uk where you will be able to see this.

01:23:04.200 Why doesn't there seem to be more anger from England towards France

01:23:07.480 for the steady stream of small boats that France lets through?

01:23:12.280 What are the specific cultural traits of French peoples

01:23:14.940 that distinguish them from their Anglo-Saxon and other counterparts.

01:23:18.680 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:23:21.980 Oh, gosh. Well, I think we're talking about it a bit,

01:23:24.740 but I've always been a bit suspicious, a bit, suspicious of rewilding,

01:23:30.740 meaning letting everything go to pot,

01:23:36.780 not looking after land, not looking after anything and saying,

01:23:40.720 oh, well, this is rewilding,

01:23:42.280 but it's just letting all the weeds and the brambles grow.

01:23:44.180 And I think that's what's, I think it's being accepted that that's one of the things that's causing a lot of the, or at least enabling a lot of these fires to spread, that people are not controlling.

01:23:55.600 We have to manage, I think we have to manage the place where we live, we have to manage the countryside.

01:24:00.060 And to just say, well, we're going to let it go back to nature is a recipe, as I think we've seen, for a lot of disaster.

01:24:08.600 It's the same in every country that it's been done, I think.

01:24:11.560 There we go.

01:24:12.700 Robert, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on.

01:24:14.820 Thank you so much.

01:24:16.260 Make sure to join us over on Substack where you get to ask Robert your questions.

01:24:22.840 Professor Toombs is still a supporter of the Conservative Party.

01:24:25.880 How does he square that with their failure, often deliberate, Patrick inserts, to make anything meaningful out of Brexit?

01:24:40.760 We'll be right back.

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TRIGGERnometry - September 23, 2026

Historian Robert Tombs on the 1,000-Year Rivalry Between Britain And France

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