British Official Perceptions of France and the French, 1936–1940

Abstract

British official opinion of France and the French in the early 1920s was probably best summed up by Sir Warren Fisher, the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, in July 1923: ‘while I admit that the French between 1870 and 1914 had their tails well down and therefore assumed a veneer of moderation, during the rest of their centuries-old existence, they have played the part of bullies … and they are doing so now’.¹ The papers of British politicians, officials and military leaders were full of comments of this kind about the French. Nor did the early 1930s bring any change in the British attitude towards France and the French. In 1935 relations between the two countries reached their nadir over their different responses to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, where French reluctance to support the half-hearted League sanctions against Italy promoted by Britain created serious tensions within the Entente. The Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, described French behaviour in November 1935 as ‘disloyalty and treachery in its dirtiest and blackest form’.² The debacle of the subsequent Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Mussolini the bulk of his territorial demands in Ethiopia, and which was leaked to the press, outraging British press and parliamentary opinion, worsened the atmosphere between the two countries.

This article is based on my book British Establishment Perspectives on France, 1936–40 (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave, 1999).