Abstract
‘A universal torrent of curses … French Dog … a bloody French cut-throat rogue … French Devil’. Thus, Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, in its issue of 12 December 1724, recorded the response of a large crowd, mostly women, when a French barber, resident in London, was hanged for the murder of his wife. This excellent collection testifies to current interest in transnational history and the related cultural and political experiences. This field can be approached largely in terms of the recipient culture or that which acts with/upon it. The emphasis generally is with the latter and so also with this volume. The French in London, not London and the French, are the key theme.
This theme is essentially started with Elizabeth Randall’s lengthy essay on London’s French Protestants. She begins with the Reformation, for in 1550 a French Reformed Church was first established in London. The Huguenot influx in the 1680s was, as Randall shows, far more important. Louis XIV’s abrogation of Protestant rights in France in 1685 resulted in a flood of Huguenot refugees such that by 1690 Huguenots were about 8–10 per cent of London’s population. While becoming a distinct and distinctive community, the Huguenots were also to become important to London’s character. They settled in particular to the east, especially in Spitalfields where the they played a major role in manufacturing, notably silk-weaving. Their arrival expanded the city physically in this direction. Other Huguenot areas of settlement included Soho, Leicester Fields, Chelsea and Wandsworth. By the late 1690s, there were 45 Huguenot churches in London, about a quarter of them in Spitalfields, with others in the City and to the west of the City.
There were tensions in the short term as a result of the Huguenot influx, notably pressure on housing and competition for jobs, especially for lower-paid workers and for the silk-weavers and cabinet-makers. The Huguenots were accused of working for lower wages, and these tensions led to some discrimination and violence. Indeed, in Richard Bean’s play England People Very Nice (2009), the darker current of xenophobia includes a mob angry at the Huguenots for taking jobs, at the same time that the theme of assimilation includes the Bethnal Green barmaid as a woman of Irish–French extraction married to a Jew.
However, new skills and techniques offered by the Huguenots helped in the development of a damask and brocade industry in Spitalfields, while papermaking and work with gold and silver also benefited. The government tended to favour the Huguenots and, in the long term, they were to integrate well into London society. Establishing the image of the expanding city, London’s most important eighteenth-century cartographer, John Rocque, was the son of Huguenot immigrants. New ideas came with them, as well as unfamiliar foods, including caraway seeds, garlic, oxtail soup and pickles. Their Protestantism was not that of the Church of England, although some Huguenots preferred it to Nonconformity. By accentuating the already cosmopolitan character of the city, the arrival of the Huguenots emphasized London’s difference from the rest of the country, a point still germane as far as the current influx of French citizens is concerned.
Cultural influence in the eighteenth century is tackled by Paul Boucher and Tessa Murdoch. Their focus is on Montagu House, Bloomsbury, but, as they show, the related patronage sustained a wider influence. In the eighteenth century, a large number of French artists practised in London. Maurice Quentin La Tour, a portrait painter admired by Hogarth, had a successful visit in 1723. The draughtsman Hubert Gravelot worked in London from 1733 to 1745 and, as a teacher at the St Martin’s Lane Academy, trained a whole generation of British artists, including Gainsborough. The portrait painter Jean Van Loo arrived in London in 1737 and spent a lucrative five years taking commissions from resentful English rivals. Ten tailors, three gilders, three embroiderers and one dancing master were among those on the list of 36 French Catholics living in Westminster which the French chargé d’affaires handed the British government in 1722.
The French were linked with change. In the eighteenth century, the morning levee was introduced into London from France, as was the umbrella, French cooking and French card games. In 1779, Robert Henley Ongley, a very wealthy London merchant, told the House of Commons that ‘the French had contributed not a little to the increase of divorces, by the introduction of their petit maîtres, fiddlers and dancing masters, who had been allowed to teach our wives and misses to allemande, and to twist and turn them about at their pleasure’.
The political impact was also considerable, notably with the French Left in exile, especially after 1848, a topic treated by Fabrice Bensimon, Thomas Jones and Robert Tombs; but also with an earlier conservative exile in London, a subject discussed by Philip Mansel with an emphasis on positive consequences for long-term Anglo-French relations. The Free French exile from 1940 is considered by Debra Kelly, Martyn Cornick and David Drake. The last is particularly interesting on Raymond Aron and his role in La France Libre, a London-based review. Tensions between Aron and de Gaulle emerge. Cornick maps the real and covert ‘spaces’ the Free French occupied. With French cooking in nineteenth-century London handled by Valerie Mars in an account of steadily growing influence, French cultural diplomacy by Charlotte Faucher and Philippe Lane, and the contemporary French population in London by Saskia Huc-Hepher and Helen Drake, this is a wide-ranging collection. The variety of the French presence is ably indicated by Michel Rapoport on the period 1880 to 1939, while Debra Kelly offers an effective conclusion to match Cornick’s introduction. It is to be hoped that this impressive volume can be matched not only by comparable studies for other immigrant communities, but also with a consideration of the response to them.