Six French Frizeurs

David A. Bell

• The Perfidy of Albion: French Perceptions of England during the French Revolution by Norman Hampson
  Macmillan, 210 pp, £40.00, June 1998, ISBN 0 333 73148 4
• Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders by Don Herzog
  Princeton, 472 pp, £18.00, September 1998, ISBN 0 691 64831 X

The moment in the 18th century when Anglo-French relations reached their lowest point was probably 29 May 1794 – 10 Prairial, Year II, as the French then styled it. On that day, the Jacobin Bertrand Barère delivered a typically long-winded and overheated speech to France’s National Convention on his favourite subject, English perfidy. He accused English soldiers of unprecedented atrocities in Europe, North America and India. He denounced English spies for trying to assassinate his dear friend Maximilien Robespierre (two months later, in Thermidor, the politically nimble Barère voted to condemn Robespierre to death, but that is another story). He called corrupt, commercial England the new Carthage facing France’s new Rome, and added that the sooner it shared Carthage’s fate, the better. ‘National hatred must sound forth,’ he trumpeted. ‘Young republicans should suck a hatred of the name Englishman with their mother’s milk.’ The English were ‘a populace foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity. They must disappear.’ It seems that he meant this last sentence all too literally, for he concluded by proposing a pithy little motion, which the Convention approved unanimously and without debate, instructing French commanders in the field to take no English or Hanoverian prisoners alive. Fortunately, the commanders mostly ignored the order, although Norman Hampson, in his valuable new book, has found a couple of unfortunate instances where they followed it to the letter.