He is the son of professionals in the public sector. He worked in finance before leading the country. He was born at the turn of the 1980s. (A cohort of men to be honored for their fine minds and amazing looks, I think.) He turned on his political boss en route to the top. He “presents” himself as a metropolitan but grew up far from the capital. Her marriage attracts attention.
Here is Rishi Macron. And Emmanuel Sunak. No wonder they get along.
Yet there must be more to Anglo-French relations than a personal relationship between two individuals of the meritocratic overclass. I am more and more certain that there are.
Britain and France have much more in common than either with a third country. You will cite here the Anglo-American or Franco-German counter-examples. But these are well maintained relationships. This does not mean that each side resembles the other in its internal characteristics. It often means the opposite.
The ‘special relationship’ and the ‘engine of Europe’ are so worked up, so agitated, precisely out of fear that the natural state between the two sides is divergence (or worse). Britain remembers with a shudder American abstention from the first phase of the two world wars. The French fear of a too strong Germany dates back at least to 1870. Never again, etc.
It follows that the Anglo-French feuds continue, in part, because both sides are relaxed about their underlying compatibility. To an odd degree, France and Britain resemble each other in terms of population (67 million) and production ($3 billion). The manufacturing sector accounts for the same 9% share of their economies.
Their armed forces are comparable. Both have built and lost empires outside of Europe and now hold roughly equal weight in global affairs. One joined the European project early on, the other delayed and eventually quit, but neither believed that the nation state and hard power were forms of Oldthink. (Look at their nuclear arsenals.)
The parallels multiply as you go back in time. England and France became single entities the better part of a millennium before, say, Italy. Each was central to the Enlightenment, although the British emphasized empiricism and the French reason. Each has experienced more or less contemporary revolutions: one literal, one industrial. Everyone has developed a non-ethnic idea of citizenship, so you can become British or French.
The British elite looked to France for cultural clues: in the visual arts, in mores. The French elite, including Voltaire and Montesquieu, looked to Britain to escape absolutism.
And even that – their co-author of much of liberal modernity – fails to capture the one practical fact that sets Britain and France apart from their peers.
Each nation has a monstrously dominating capital. Politics, media, finance and culture are concentrated in one city. No European nation of comparable size – not Spain, not Italy, not Germany – does this. No more than the United States, Australia or Canada. Japan either, given the cultural weight of Kyoto. Strip countries below 20mn, and France and Britain are exceptional in the rich world in their top-heaviness. (Seoul’s influence in South Korea is close.) Île-de-France accounts for about 30% of national production.
The result is two countries with similar distortions. Many democracies have angry hinterlands, but in few the populist rage is so concentrated against one place. The vastness of their capitals also gives Britain and France a false image of their geopolitical weight. Britain has a fifth of America’s 330 million people, but the capital, where its elites live, is as populous as the largest city in the United States. When you struggle to explain the British illusion, remember this.
Last week, I spent an evening in American, French and British company on American soil. Why, given the language factor, wasn’t it more difficult to connect with the French than with my English-speaking colleagues? Football as a common point? Or self-selection? (It was a financial crowd, therefore almost post-national.) Or, given the French presence in London, and the British colonization of southern France, a world of shared references?
All these things. But also, I think, an implicit feeling that we were in the same boat: citizens of middle and perhaps declining powers in the lands of the global colossus. This creates a certain irony. To be British or French is to hear often enough that your best days are ahead of you, and to forgive the lie.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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