[Backstage-list] H-Travel/France and the Grand Tour Book Review

[Michael Zinganel]

[Cross-posted from H-France. H-France is not affiliated with H-Net.]


Jeremy Black, France and the Grand Tour. London and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003. x + 234 pp. Table, notes, bibliography, and index.
$65.00. ISBN 1-4039-0690-4.

Review by Munro Price, University of Bradford.

There is a considerable literature on the grand tour, and on France’s
place within it. Much of it, however, relies on printed primary
sources. Jeremy Black’s aim is different: to rely almost exclusively on
archival rather than public sources to give a fresh and different
perspective on the experience of British travellers in
eighteenth-century France. The result is a thoughtful and significant
study that adds much to our understanding not only of France’s place in
the grand tour, but of Anglo-French relations in general during the
period.

As Black points out, eighteenth-century British travellers had a very
different purpose in visiting France than Italy, the traditional
destination of the grand tour. “The impact of France on tourists was
not framed by a search for cultural experience and a classical
resonance comparable to that of Italy” he writes, “[I]nstead, the
engagement was with modern France, a frame of reference in which
challenge and hostility could more readily be seen” (p.191). Whereas
Italy sheltered the remains of a past civilization on which most
members of the British élite had been nurtured, France displayed a
state and a culture that were immediate and dangerous rivals to that of
Britain.

Unsurprisingly, British attitudes to France varied considerably during
the course of the eighteenth century, and these variations were closely
linked to the eddy and flow of the “second hundred years’ war” between
the two countries. In the years between the war of the Spanish
succession and the 1730s relations were friendly, and this could be
gauged by the number of eminent British travellers in Paris: in 1728 a
French magazine reported that “fifty lords and gentlemen of the English
nation” attended a dinner given to celebrate the first anniversary of
George II’s coronation. (p.2). Such cordiality did not survive the next
bout of hostilities, from the War of the Polish Succession through the
Seven Years’ War. The burst of British self-confidence that followed
the peace of Paris in 1763 then gave way, after the reverses of the
American War of Independence, to a mood of doubt and introspection
coupled with renewed fear and distrust of France. France may have
served as playground and excursion for the British up to 1789, but she
was always a powerful enemy, actual or potential, to be reckoned with.

Given this ambiguous context, how did France appear to the intrepid
British tourists who braved the perils of the Calais packet (Abraham
Hawkins’ crossing in 1783 took eight and a half hours)? Paris was
obviously the major attraction, and the travellers dutifully inspected
the Louvre, Tuileries, Invalides, Notre Dame, and Palais de Justice.
Lyon, too, elicited favourable comment, particularly the Place
Bellecour. One factor that recurs with significant frequency in the
accounts cited is the remarkable openness of French society to these
English visitors, up to the very highest level. Having travelled to
France to see the marriage of Louis XV, Humphry Parsons MP struck up a
friendship with the young king; he returned frequently to Versailles
thereafter, staying on very good terms with Louis and frequently
hunting with him. Richard Creed, travelling with the Earl of Exeter in
1699, even had a chance meeting with Louis XIV, which reveals the Sun
King as rather less remote and inaccessible than he is usually
depicted: “…we met the king in a very large coach and eight horses…I
rode by the coach; and the king seeing my Lord Exeter’s equipage
inquired whose it was; he captain of the guard came and asked me; I
told him; but the king perceived I was of the company; called me and
asked me particularly whose it was; I told him; he made me repeat the
name to him, till he could say it perfectly well. He asked me if the
king of England was arrived [in England from a visit to the United
Provinces], and several questions relating to the journey and to
England. I answered him so that he was pleased to be very free and
civil to me” (p.142).

Other aspects of travel through France were less agreeable. French inns,
and particularly the insect population of the beds they provided,
spawned a substantial, and uncomplimentary, literature. Walter Stanhope
in 1769 encountered “beds …occupied with troops of bugs, and whole
armies of fleas”(p.55), while Samuel Boddington, having managed to
repel the bedbugs, wrote from Lyon in July 1789: “I last night was
attacked a by a new enemy, fleas of an enormous size. They have used me
most cruelly and they are such an active foe that there is no escaping
from them” (p.56). Arthur Young’s Travels are peppered with references
to the dreadful accommodation he had to endure on his journeys: “an
execrable auberge, called Maison Rouge,” near Limoges; the Lion d’Or at
Montauban--“an abominable hole”; the Prince of Asturias at
Bordeaux--elegant and well-furnished, “yet the necessary house the same
temple of abomination that it is to be in a dirty village” (p.57).

Nothing more clearly defined the “Britishness” of these travellers than
their reaction to French food. This was unfavourably compared, on every
occasion and with almost religious fervour, to the great British
national dish, roast beef. Certainly the British were generally
recognised as masters of the art of roasting a joint, but this may have
simply have been, as a Swedish visitor to England in 1748 slyly
remarked, because “the art of cooking as practised by most Englishmen
does not extend much beyond roast beef and plum pudding” (p.66). The
British elevation of their roast beef, however, had a political and
cultural subtext: plain, simple, solid and nourishing, it epitomized
the British character, just as French cuisine, pretentious,
overcomplicated and unreliable, reflected their neighbours’. For
British travellers, all these Gallic faults came together in one dish:
the ragout. “I dined this day upon a veal ragoo’d”, wrote Robert Poole
from Paris in 1741, “but I like not their ragooes, nor method of
cookery, in these parts….Their roast meat is not well ordered. Their
boiled meat is done to rags, in order to make good their soup. Their
bread, for common use, is generally made into long rolls, of two or
three foot long; it is sometimes pretty good, at other times hardly
eatable, and often but very indifferent” (p.65).

If eighteenth-century British travellers visited France in a spirit of
curiosity and often appreciation, fear and distrust were never far from
the surface. The numerous testimonies in France and the Grand Tour
contain little of the pacific thought of the Enlightenment and still
fewer early glimmers of the Entente Cordiale. As Jeremy Black concludes
in this excellent and perceptive book: “The British critics, whether
tourists or not, who condemned aspects of France, and discerned and
defined hostility towards her, were more realistic assessors of
circumstances, and predictors of future strife, than those who wrote of
the brotherhood of man” (p.198).

Munro Price
University of Bradford
MunroPrice at aol.com

Copyright © 2004 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all
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H-France Review Vol. 4 (September 2004), No. 92