The British in France: Visitors and Residents since the Revolution, by Peter Thorold
Peter Thorold has not written an orthodox history of French and British political cultural and social relations. He sees them through the eyes of Britons who settled in France or tourists who trod its soil for a brief holiday. French aristocrats who had seen their friends’ and relations’ heads stuck on poles and paraded through the streets of Paris sped to Britain. When the Terror passed, they returned to France and showed little propensity to settle in or revisit a cold climate. Most Britons came to stay.
Why did they come? Some were successful economic migrants. Charles Worth, ‘a native of bucolic Lancashire’, came from a ruined middle-class family. As a couturier, he made a fortune, and Paris was the fashion capital of Europe for women’s clothes.
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