BRITAIN: Hostility to the Kaiser and Hitler was the cement that bound the French and British together. With Germany now a friend, there no longer seems much point to the alliance, writes Jonathan Fenby
Anniversaries and political realities can make awkward bedfellows. This week a phrase which sounds so good that its centenary cannot be celebrated with anything but pomp and circumstance risks running right into a reality that gainsays its lasting significance.
The Entente Cordiale reached between Britain and France 100 years ago this week has been celebrated by a royal visit to Paris replete with toasts, grand speeches, royal walkabouts in a street market and the queen's visit to an equestrian display by France's top cavalry regiment, which once counted President Chirac among its cadets.
There was even the obligatory frisson when it was suggested by British reporters that France's head of state might have allowed his hand to stray too close to the royal person on one occasion.
In her speech at the main banquet, Queen Elizabeth acknowledged that the cross-Channel relationship had not always been smooth but added "vive la difference" as if encouraging rival sporting teams to take to the field.
The fact is that, almost a thousand years after the last invasion of England was launched from French soil, the Entente Cordiale looks a lot less convincing than the pageant in Paris would suggest.
This is nothing new. From England's Hundred Years War against France launched early in the 14th century, and crowned with victories of Crécy and Agincourt through the battles won by the Duke of Marlborough against the Sun King, Louis XIV, to Wellington's final triumph over Napoleon at Waterloo, the nations on either side of the narrow sea of the English Channel saw themselves as pursuing very different paths.
This was not simply a matter of military clashes. In the 19th century, after its Revolution, France regarded itself as incarnating a special model for the world, based on its national motto of freedom, equality and fraternity.
The British, meanwhile, went for fewer grand slogans and the slow but steady progress of their form of parliamentary democracy, and the pragmatic construction of a global role.
Though the two nations allied in the Crimea, colonial ambitions in Africa brought them to the point of war once more - so the Entente Cordiale was reached as the 20th century dawned. Some influential circles in Britain would have preferred to ally with the rising power of Germany, but King Edward V11 thought otherwise, prompted, perhaps, by his delight in the pleasures of the flesh to be found in Paris.
Given its essentially colonial scope, the Entente was hardly the great document which its pleasing name suggests.
What made it important was the way in which, in the ensuing years, Britain came to see itself as an ally of France in the struggle against the Kaiser's Germany.
The same was true in the 1930s. It was the threat from Hitler, long denied but finally inescapable, that held London and Paris together - first in the mutual betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich and then in the declaration of war in 1939.
So, for most of the 36 years that ran from the conclusion of the Entente to the German offensive to the West in the early summer of 1940, the alliance had some meaning. But, since then, one can but wonder - and that questioning of the Anglo-French relationship leads right up to the issues that lurk behind this week's celebrations.
At a popular, everyday level, the British and the French are as close as they have ever been, with cheap flights and the Channel Tunnel trains encouraging the British to buy holiday homes all over France.
In the other direction, 250,000 French people are reckoned to the living and working in the United Kingdom. South Kensington in London has become known as Frog Valley.
On an economic level, France and Britain are major trading partners and their companies invest heavily across the narrow sea between them.
They are both members of NATO and the European Union, and Britain's Prime Minister, who spent time as a student working in a café in Paris, speaks French well enough to have given a flawless speech to the National Assembly in Paris - even if it went down better with right- wing deputies than with the socialists.
But a hundred years on from Edward V11's love affair with France the rifts in the Cordial Understanding are evident. It is not simply a question of the divergence over Iraq, important though that was. Nor is it just a matter of differences over Europe.
The suspicions that arose in 2002-3 over everything from attacking Saddam Hussein to European farm policy reflect deeper ambivalences in the cross-Channel relationship, some of which dates back six decades.
After General de Gaulle flew to London on June 17th, 1940 as France prepared to make peace with Germany, it soon became evident that the rapport between Britain and the Free French was going to be far from simple.
Like his Gaullist successor, Jacques Chirac, de Gaulle was committed to the vision of France playing a major world role as a nation independent of the looming superpower, the United States.
In his characteristic way, de Gaulle saw this as something which had to be asserted at every occasion. To be great, he believed, France had to be seen to be great. Otherwise, he warned, the French people would sink into mediocrity. If that meant alienating Washington, so be it - whether over the conduct of the wartime relationship or, later, over issues such as Vietnam.
One natural result of this policy, which was also dictated by geography and good sense, was for France to focus on the development of Europe, with itself in the political driving seat, and to build up a relationship with Germany that would set aside the legacy of three wars in 70 years.
Britain, on the other hand, decided under Churchill that its key international link lay across the Atlantic. If forced to choose, London would look out to the seas rather than eastward to Europe . So it did not join the original Common Market across the Channel and has remained ambivalent about the depth of its commitment to the construction of Europe - sceptical of the more federalist projects for union but keen not to be left behind as a major global grouping emerged.
For its part, France nurtured doubts about Britain and its fondness for the United States from the wartime days on. De Gaulle vetoed the first British bid to join the Common Market since he saw London as a Trojan Horse for America. Long before that, urged by one of his wartime aides to get on better with Washington to make Churchill's life easier, he had replied that the United States was already too powerful and wanted to become even more so, while London would always end up by siding with Washington - words that might have been spoken by officials in Paris over the past couple of years.
There is no doubt that Tony Blair would very much like to become part of a European troika with Messrs Chirac and Schröder. The recent dinner between the three men was seen in some optimistic quarters in London as a sign that this was about to happen.
But no sooner had the meeting ended than French officials were briefing journalists that, however much Mr Blair tried to get into the tent, the Paris-Berlin relationship remained the key to France's European policy.
So, despite repeated assertions on both sides that everybody wants to put the fissure over Iraq behind them, and despite progress on military co-operation, there is still a fundamental difference in the world view taken by Britain and France.
Mr Blair believes that it is essential to retain a working relationship with Washington, and knows that his domestic public opinion remains dubious of such grand projects as the European constitution - let alone membership of the euro-zone. France - on both right and left - is convinced of the need to stand apart from the United States, to offer a different voice in the world and, despite its fondness for national sovereignty, to build up Europe as an alternative global pole to the "hyperpower" across the ocean.
In the first half of the last century, the Entente Cordiale was given substance by the common enemy, Germany. Today, the fight against terrorism provides some common ground, but the room for uncordial misunderstanding is at least as great.
The spectacle from Paris this week has been charming. The reality is that the political divide between the two countries looks far wider than the narrow sea between the two countries.
Jonathan Fenby is author of On the Brink - The Trouble with France (Abacus). An updated edition will be published this spring.