A take on English-French ,French-English dislikes
English Historian Timothy Gordon Ash has written that European history of the last thousand years is essentially influenced by the antagonism between England and France.
I too, have made the observation that there is such a thing between England and France:the list of Anglo-French wars is loooong
http://www.historyguy.com/anglo_french.html. There is an ongoing cultural war: Condoms in England are sometimes called “French Letters”, the French call them “Chapeau anglais”(engl. English hat), just to give an example.
Gordon Ash also thinks that the English aversion to the French has expanded and now includes continental Europe as a whole and that the French aversion to the English has carried over to English-speaking America.
I tend to agree and it seems also that the English not only have exported the English language, Queen Victorian Puritanism (body fluids, anyone?) and the English-Welsh law school to America, but also a dislike for the French.
So today, there is an antagonism between the Anglosphere and France and also between USA and continental Europe which is seen as too “French”: weak, morally degraded, doomed, on the the brink of collapse.
What is the stance here of the guy in class that no one can stand, Germany, apart from Schadenfreude?
Historically, the German tribes were closer to the English than to the French. The Germans are the Teutonic cousins of the English, so to speak: The Royal house of Windsor has some “German” origin and cousinhood. During world war 1, Georg V. changed the German name “Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha” (royal dynasty Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha) which the royal family carried since 1840 into “Windsor” as it is known today. Queen Elisabeth II decided in 1960 that the familiy name from then on would be “Mountbatten-Windsor”.
Mountbatten is an Anglicisation of the German family name “Battenberg”.
Battenberg - Mountbatten, you get it? The Brits have a black sheep in the family.
Now over to the French: In the past, the Germans were a bit obsessed about the French. This had to do with the occupation of the German territories under Napoleon. A famous German French-hater back then was Prince Blücher, nicknamed “Marschall Attack”.
After he was beaten again by Napoleon at Ligny in 1815, he did not retreat back home, but instead marched to the north and arrived just in time to help the Brits and other allies who were a bit unhinged, to win the battle of Waterloo. The Brits made him an honorary citizen of London and awarded him a Dr. h.c. in Oxford for his late but not too late appearance on the Waterloo battlefield.
Prince Blücher had an obsessive idea: He always wanted to blow up the bridge "Pont d'lena” over the river Seine in Paris to revenge the dishonour of the Prussian defeat of 1806 against Napoleon. When the allies entered the Paris of Napoleon for the second time, he railed: “How many more times do we have to occupy this -censored- place?”
The German tribes, like e.g. Prussians and Bavarians, could not stand each other but were united in dislike for the French, at least. So in order to unite the German tribes into one German nation state, Bismarck started the German-French war 1870/1871 which was won because the joint German tribes simply outnumbered the French. The balance of power had shifted onto the German side.
The founding of the German nation state was then declared in the hall of mirrors at Versailles, on French soil. The “humiliation of Versailles” happened again in 1918 when Germany had to surrender and signed the peace treaty of Versailles and another time when France had to surrender to Hitler at Versailles. After 2 world wars France and Germany are now looking for things they have in common.
Already in the past, Germany has proven that it has the ability to bring together French and Brits and Americans, and even Americans and Commies, WW 1 and WW 2, and as such it is probably qualified to act as a middleman between France and England and France and USA. ROFL