My enemy, my friend

MANY travelers in southern England have seen and wondered about the squat, round bastions along the coast. The English built about 75 of these Martello towers after 1800 as a defense system against invasion from France during the Napoleonic Wars.

Today, they symbolize the long, testy relationship between two countries that have been locked in battle -- or yoked together as unwilling allies when threatened by a common enemy. That relationship has given birth to countless unflattering cliches and ill will sometimes comical, sometimes earnest.

“That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British From the Sun King to the Present,” by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, an Anglo-French couple, studies that relationship. It was published in the spring in England; an American edition is scheduled to be released early next year by Alfred A. Knopf.

As a traveler, I am interested in international relations, especially between two countries I love equally but for different reasons. And as an American living in Paris, I thought learning why the French have despised the English for the last 300 years would make me feel better.

So I read “That Sweet Enemy,” then had a long telephone chat with Robert, a history scholar at Cambridge, and Isabelle, who teaches French at the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

“There is clear admiration for things French on the part of the British, even if they don’t like it,” Robert said.

Isabelle added, “The French think England is wet, cold and expensive. So why go there?”

It took two people, one English and the other French, to write a book as compendious and unbiased as theirs. And it didn’t hurt that each seems to have an excellent sense of humor.

I laughed out loud at such details in the book as the French King Louis XV’s need for English-made condoms, pressing because he didn’t want to get his mistress Madame de Pompadour pregnant. Also noted with a wink are Winston Churchill’s intentionally incomprehensible French; the existence of a church in the Landes region of France called Notre Dame du Rugby, a vestige of the sport’s importation to France in the late 19th century; and a cross-dressing French spy in London, the Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont, who put his breeches back on to fight with the French in the American Revolution.

Anecdotes like these illustrate one of the book’s major points that cultural exchanges between the two countries have never stopped. The Tombses say that France and England loved and hated each other simultaneously.

They pick up their story in the 18th century, when France was the richest, most populous and strongest country in Europe and England was a second-rate power in the throes of religious war. But the British feared Louis XIV’s hegemonistic inclinations. As a result, they took up arms against the French in six wars between 1689 and 1815, including the American Revolution.

The position of France as Europe’s only superpower declined after its bloody revolution and the summary defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (something that Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s history of the French army fails to mention). The 19th century belonged to England, which used its masterful navy and wealth to plant colonies around the world.

The cultural aspects of the story are even more interesting. French defeats on the battlefield, persistent political disarray and interest in sybaritic pleasure made the English view the people across the Channel as weak, bellicose and effete. To the French, the English were cold, prudish, materialistic and greedy.

For centuries, the French dismissed Shakespeare, preferring Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, and they refused to learn English. French began to be considered the language of diplomacy only at the start of the 18th century; before that, treaties were often written in Latin. The gradual spread of English as the world’s lingua franca was as much due to British colonial expansion as to contemporary U.S.-generated globalization.

Misunderstandings abounded in all fields of endeavor, even on the two great occasions when the countries joined forces to defeat Germany in the 20th century. For example, to the British, the last-ditch evacuation of English troops in 1940 at Dunkirk in northeastern France demonstrated Britain’s courage and resilience. But in France, it was viewed as dishonorable abandonment by a fair-weather ally.

Nevertheless, travelers kept crossing the Channel, although the traffic generally flowed from north to south because of England’s enduring fascination with all things French. British tourists established vacation colonies in the town of Pau, north of the Pyrenees, and in the hill country of the Dordogne, part of English-controlled Aquitaine in times long past. Hotels, shops and restaurants catered to them in Paris, Biarritz and Nice, and it was English tourists who first recognized the delights of French wine and regional cuisine.

The French had the idea of digging a tunnel under the Channel as early as 1802, but the English worried that an underwater link would jeopardize their island in times of continental war. When the Chunnel was finally completed in 1994, French President Francois Mitterrand blandly noted that the slowness of trains on the English side would give French people the chance to appreciate the Kent countryside.

Now, of course, France and England are both erstwhile superpowers, trying to work together in the European Union and shape their destinies in a world dominated by the U.S. In the eyes of French critics, according to the authors of “That Sweet Enemy,” America has assumed England’s place as an over-reaching, materialistic global titan.

But to me, that’s reassuring. As the French say, “La plus ca change ... “: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.