Struggling to understand the ways of the French, the francophile Winston Churchill reflected whimsically in 1942:
‘The Almighty in His infinite wisdom did not see fit to create Frenchmen in the image of Englishmen.’
And yet today, the Almighty would struggle to create two more similar states in international terms than Britain and France. Similar geographies on the northwest European continent, similar populations (66 and 67 million), economies (5th and 6th by GDP), colonial histories, 3rd and 4th nuclear powers, two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, leading members of Nato and, until 2019 (probably), equally prominent members of the European Union. The similarities continue to trip off the tongue: the Commonwealth and Francophonie; trade patterns characterised largely by trade surpluses outside the European Union; historical communications and undersea cable networks dating from empire that still dominate international traffic; and a military-industrial partnership second to none.
Churchill summoned the aid of the Almighty to understand the French, but the German journalist Friedrich Sieburg went further, wondering in his 1929 book ‘Is God a Frenchman?’ Whereas his contemporary, the English writer R.F.
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