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La Belle France: A Short History, by Alistair Horne (Knopf, 512 pp., $30)

AS a true-born Englishman, I took Francophobia in with my mother’s milk-or, at any rate, with my mother’s reflex response, when anyone mentioned our neighbors across the Channel, that “they let us down in the War.” This settled in my infant mind as a sort of Homeric epithet: the French who-let-us-down-in-the-War. My father was even more astringent. He spent his declining years writing furious letters to the editor opposing British membership in the European Common Market, which he believed to be a French attempt to pick the pockets of honest Englishmen, and to obtain by guile what Napoleon had been unable to gain by force. Some years of experience in the world naturally broadened my outlook, but I still came to Alistair Horne’s La Belle France bearing a good load of ancestral prejudice, that load fortified most recently by my colleague John J. Miller’s book, a splendid Francophobic rant titled Our Oldest Enemy.

About the Author

John Derbyshire

Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.

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La Belle France: A Short History, by Alistair Horne (Knopf, 512 pp., $30)

AS a true-born Englishman, I took Francophobia in with my mother’s milk-or, at any rate, with my mother’s reflex response, when anyone mentioned our neighbors across the Channel, that “they let us down in the War.” This settled in my infant mind as a sort of Homeric epithet: the French who-let-us-down-in-the-War. My father was even more astringent. He spent his declining years writing furious letters to the editor opposing British membership in the European Common Market, which he believed to be a French attempt to pick the pockets of honest Englishmen, and to obtain by guile what Napoleon had been unable to gain by force. Some years of experience in the world naturally broadened my outlook, but I still came to Alistair Horne’s La Belle France bearing a good load of ancestral prejudice, that load fortified most recently by my colleague John J. Miller’s book, a splendid Francophobic rant titled Our Oldest Enemy.