Hitchens on Anglo-French relations

The wonderfully grumpy Peter Hitchens has a bone to pick with all of the French bashers out there.

"French Military Victories

I am so irritated by the stupid supposed joke on Google, where a search for 'French Military Victories' produces the response "Your search did not match any documents" and asks 'Did you mean 'French military defeats'?' Oh, ha ha. How unimprovably witty and trenchant. And, since the origin of the jape is almost certainly American, how very ignorant and stupid.

The single most important French military victory in history was of course at Yorktown (accompanied by the related naval battle of the Chesapeake), where the Comte de Rochambeau on land (aided by the Marquis de La Fayette) and the Comte de Grasse by sea defeated British forces and so secured victory for the American colonists, changing the history of the entire world forever. The United States would not even exist if these victories had not happened. Do Americans really not know this stuff any more?

My irritation is partly because I rather like France, and about which American neo-conservatives are especially absurd. For some reason 'right-wing' people are supposed to abominate France and foreigners in general. I have never really understood this. Since the moment I first set foot in France in 1965 ( via the old 'Golden Arrow' that then still ran between London and Paris, steam-hauled by an enormous black locomotive with a surprisingly effeminate whistle, from Calais to Amiens) I have looked on it as a place from which Britain can learn a great deal about the arts of life.

And there are of course plenty of other French military victories, from Valmy, Jena, Marengo, Friedland, and Austerlitz to the clashes that drove the Austrians out of Italy and the great battles on the Marne which stopped the Germans in 1914. And partly because, just at the moment, I am deep into a book 'That Sweet Enemy', which describes the curious relation between two of the world's longest-enduring nations.

The book, wittily and enjoyably written by an English historian and his French wife (Robert and Isabelle Tombs) has the charm of a lot of oblique history. Seen from a slightly different angle, events which you thought you knew about suddenly look different and often more interesting.

It is as if, after growing used to what you thought was a superb view of an ancient and fascinating city from a northerly hilltop, you one day travelled to the opposite side, and saw it for the first time from the south. It is the same place, but lit up and arranged in a way which makes you realise you had missed half the point before."