London, Paris have a lot in common

The British and the French form “un couple infernal.” The two nations coexist in close geographical proximity and are bound together by a long history of affection and aversion. The aversion part is more widely noticed than the mutual respect. A 1980s TV sketch, featuring the comic Rowan Atkinson, showed him wearing a black beret and striped Maillot top and declaring, “We haven’t forgotten Agincourt or the Eurovision Song Contest.”
The same jokes would land today because a tetchy sense of mutual misunderstanding is vital to the Anglo-French relationship.
And yet, as the delicate dance of the recent Brexit trade talks revealed, the British are in many ways more similar to the French than to their linguistic cousins, the Germans. Even Paris’s harsher Brexit positions mirrored those of
London. Both governments insisted on numerous red lines. France denied the UK access to European programs such as the Erasmus student-exchange scheme and the Galileo satellite project, while Boris Johnson’s government demanded the end of free movement by European Union citizens. You could tell it mattered more to these two traditional sparring partners than it did to Berlin.
In both countries, the painful loss of empire hasn’t expunged global pretensions. The two nuclear nations have seats on the United Nations Security Council and outsized ideas of what they can do by projecting their commercial might and military heft. This makes them different from their respective American and German allies (the former has genuine power and the latter could have it but doesn’t want it).
Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Emmanuel Macron are seeking to consolidate a relationship at the heart of the EU by strenuously inventing traditions of “l’amité,” but this doesn’t alter the real dynamics.
The big picture, as ever, is dominated by transatlantic power politics and financial clout. France has long thought the British too servile to the American hyperpower, while the British see the French as supplicants to the mighty German economy. Having minor roles doesn’t make the cross-Channel jostling for advantage any less vigorous.
In soft-power terms, France has long won the battle for affection among Britain’s affluent middle class. The latter love French style, cuisine and aspire to houses in the Luberon, not
in Baden-Wurttemberg. The French Lycee in London is oversubscribed by Francophone British nationals. The German School is not.
The bilingual French elites (including the arch-“enarque” Macron) are less enamored of the Brits, but they come to London anyway to make money in the City away from the restrictions of home. The restaurants are often better too, though that may be a contentious view. Macron envies London’s financial muscle and wants Paris to supplant it.
Despite his halting English, the last French ambassador in London spent as much time wooing British bankers and hedge funds as he did glad-handing Westminster politicians. The narrative until recently was presumed to be one of fading national rivalry and growing friendship in the bosom of the EU. Now, with the UK’s departure, the
keyboards of British tabloid journalists rattle to clichés about battles from the distant past.
—Bloomberg