The faulty French connection

In his magnificent funeral oration for Charles I’s queen, Henriette-Marie of France, the 17th-century French cleric Bossuet contrasted the stately continuity of French history with the turbulence and violence of English. France — of whose crown Pope St Gregory the Great had proclaimed, already by the end of the sixth century, that it outshone all the others — was ‘the only nation in the universe whose kings have embraced Christianity for nearly 12 centuries’. England, by contrast, was ‘more agitated … than the sea which surrounds her’. Within 150 years, the tables were turned, and the prosperous and stable English became whiggishly dismissive of their unruly and strife-riven neighbours, believing their own political serenity to stretch back to time immemorial.

Alistair Horne does not mention Bossuet in his long history, although he counts as one of the masters of French prose, and this ‘Anglo-Saxon history of France’ certainly does not support that great essayist’s view.