Frogs and rosbifs

Honni soit qui mal y pense.

By Henriette Walter.

Robert Laffont; 364 pages; FFr139

La Mésentente Cordiale.

By Christine Geoffroy.

Grasset/Le Monde; 400 pages; FFr149

THE mutual fascination of the British and the French—or, more accurately, the English and the French—is hardly a surprise. To mock the “frogs” as posturing, self-interested intellectuals is a staple of the English press, and not just the tabloids. Their French counterparts find it easy to caricature les rosbifs as pink-faced philistines. As both these books point out, the love-hate relationship of England and France has a long, and continuing, history. Indeed, the bookshelves are packed with attempts, scholarly and otherwise, to explain it.

What makes these two particular efforts so fascinating is that the authors analyse the relationship not through the historian's prism of war, empire, economics and so on, but through language. Hence Henriette Walter's clever title (the British royal family uses French to express the motto, “Evil be to him who evil thinks” but misses out one of the “n”s), and the benign subtitle noting “the unbelievable love-story between French and English”.

Indeed. Ms Walter, sketching out an Indo-European linguistic tree whose European branches were both Latin and Germanic, shows how French and English have influenced each other for centuries—despite the protectionist efforts of language purists (notably the Académie Française). The result is that French and English have a greater overlap of shared vocabulary than French and Italian (or, for that matter, English and Italian).

But the two languages also have a number of faux amis, friends so false that they will provoke many an embarrassing misunderstanding. Do not compliment a Frenchman for being “candid”, when for him candide means “naive”, and certainly do not say he is versatile, which he will take to mean either volatile or fickle.

The beauty of Ms Walter's book is that it is so accessible. She is both scholarly and amusing. For example, virtually every article has a quiz to tease the interest while proving her point. Surely Millevaches, a plateau in the Massif Central, is a place where a thousand cows might graze: maybe, but the name is derived from the Celtic “mello” and probably the Latin “vacius”—and so actually means “empty hill-top”.

Christine Geoffroy's book is equally accessible, but not (at least to this Anglo-Saxon reviewer) as much fun. Her “Friendly Disagreement” is subtitled, “a voyage to the heart of the intercultural Franco-English space”, a phrase that sounds perfectly reasonable in French but comic and preposterous in English.

What she means, however, is perfectly sensible (another word which means something quite different in French). A global economy implies multinational companies and a global job-market, which means French employees for English companies and English employees for French ones. But will analysing the reflections of these employees do much to clarify mutual misunderstanding? Ms Geoffroy does a better job with her voyage through history, though when she comes to the present she is less convincing. Her interviewees are individuals, whose experiences may or may not be generally applicable; certainly, the English have a sense of irony that the French often find baffling, but are English bosses really as hierarchical and unapproachable as a certain interviewee, François, maintains? A better observer was the man who said that an Englishman may be hard to convince, but once convinced, will do what he's told; by contrast the Frenchman will agree—but drag his feet for another two years.

Happily, neither author is trapped in the linguistic chauvinism that the English all too often attribute to the French. Indeed, Ms Walter approvingly quotes the observation of H.L. Mencken (admittedly an American) that “a living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small haemorrhages, and what it needs above all is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues.”