Professor John Keiger is the former research director of the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. He is the author of France and the Origins of the First World War.
In this the 115th anniversary week of the Entente Cordiale, the French president and the British Prime Minister will meet twice, today at the Elysee Palace and tomorrow at the European Council in Brussels. But neither of those meetings will be to celebrate their countries friendship. When May goes to Paris and then to Brussels,
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
In 1919, a 31-year-old Tommy from Bristol, named George Robertson – fresh from fighting alongside French troops on the Somme – married Suzanne Leblond in Abbeville, northern France. In 2017, George Robertson’s great grandson, Emmanuel Macron, became French president. Macron embarked on a policy that, while acknowledging Franco-British friendship, sought to ensure that Britain did
In 1919, a 31-year-old Tommy from Bristol, named George Robertson – fresh from fighting alongside French troops on the Somme – married Suzanne Leblond in Abbeville, northern France. In 2017, George Robertson’s great grandson, Emmanuel Macron, became French president. Macron embarked on a policy that, while acknowledging Franco-British friendship, sought to ensure that Britain did not prosper
In France, discontent has been brewing for years. Emmanuel Macron managed to set it alight by embarking on a series of reforms that sparked the gilet jaunes movement. In Europe it has been brewing too, and now Macron seems to be repeating the trick. Here the antipathy is from populist governments opposed to his ideas,
Almost 50 years before Brexit, there was a ‘Frexit’: France shocked her allies in March 1966 by giving notice of her withdrawal from an international community of largely European states (plus the USA and Canada), of which she had been a member for 17 years, on the grounds that she wished to regain her national
