ABSTRACT
This chapter originated in separate pieces of research in both Scottish and French history, while commuting between Paris and Edinburgh, where the bulk of sources are located. Modernism is not a word readily associated with turn-of-the-century Edinburgh It sometimes seems, from reading cultural historians, as if Edinburgh, embedded in respectability, represented in the early twentieth century everything the 'Scottish Renaissance' around Hugh MacDiarmid was against, in his efforts to revitalize Scottish culture in the 1920s. After the First World War, however, Paris was no longer quite so unchallenged either on the European or the world stage. Ottilie McLaren married her composer William Wallace in St Giles in 1905 and his work kept them mostly in London, where John Buchan and Kathleen Bruce also continued to live. The Franco-Scottish society, bolstered by the founding of the French Institute in Edinburgh after 1945, is still a lively group, though not perhaps in the sense that its founders hoped for.
