ABSTRACT
The historical development of England and France, as François Crouzet has recently reminded us, has had much in common.1 Early examples of nation states, both subject to violent internal revolutions and sharing a common pool of political ideas, they were also leading imperial powers blessed with a comparatively high degree of prosperity. Yet their interlocking evolutions have aroused as much suspicion as amity on both sides of the Channel and no one familiar with both cultures can doubt that the divergences are often more striking than the similarities. The English experience of living in large cities and working in large factories has produced rhythms of work and patterns of behaviour far removed from the culture of a country which into the twentieth century remained a nation of peasants and artisans. Even today this social terminology has a usage and resonance in French life and politics whilst it means nothing in the British context. Similarly, the long endeavour to impose centralised forms of government on a highly disparate amalgam of provinces has nurtured both a fondness for and an antipathy to bureaucratic solutions whilst the relative homogeneity of English society fostered (until the Thatcherite onslaught on the autonomy of civil institutions) a much less tense relationship between national and local government, the central state and its subordinate elements. Significant differences in social and political evolution have been further compounded by divergent religious traditions which have left their mark on a range of phenomena such as attitudes to work, the family, education and the relationship between church and state. Above all, the wealth generated by industry and empire made possible a degree of domestic comfort and provision of public services in Britain that the French state was, until the rapid transformations of the last thirty years, either unable or unwilling to sustain.
