France v Britain: a history of cross-Channel slanging matches

Napoleon: likely to be mentioned in a row between the French and the British. Photograph: Alamy

In the roll-call of great cross-Channel slanging matches, of course, it still has some way to go. But the Franco-British spat sparked by Dave's rejection of Angela and Nicolas's cunning plan to save the euro has been given wings by news the US credit agencies may soon strip France of its triple-A rating and is coming along very nicely, thank you.

"One would rather be French than British at the moment," France's finance minister, François Baroin, thrust on Friday, pressing home Thursday's barb from the head of the Bank of France to the effect that if anyone's AAA-listing should be at risk it was Britain's, not France's. This after the revelation that the French president thought the British PM behaved "like a stubborn child" during last week's Brussels summit.

It's almost starting to feel like we're back in the good old days of July 2005, when Paris lost out to London in the battle to stage the 2012 Olympic Games, a defeat immediately interpreted by France as a bitter blow to Gallic ideals of fair play and non-commercialism and yet another undeserved triumph for the underhand, free-market manoeuvrings of perfidious Albion.

Or perhaps the "mad cow"-fuelled beef war in the late 1990s, when France maintained its ban on British beef for three long years after the rest of the EU had lifted it, prompting the Sun to publish a special edition in French portraying then president Jacques Chirac as a worm. Not to mention the heated words exchanged over Paris's persistent refusal to close the Sangatte refugee camp.

We're some distance yet, though, from rivalling June 2005, when at another EU summit France demanded that Britain surrender its €3bn subsidy and Britain, in return, suggested France might like to pass up on some of its 22% share of the EU agricultural budget.

That prompted Chirac to call Tony Blair's attitude "pathetic and tragic" and the PM himself "worse than Thatcher; just as arrogant, but selfish too". Blair responded that he was "not prepared to have someone tell me there is only one view of what Europe is".

And we're nowhere near 2002, when a particularly ugly spat – again over the Common Agricultural Policy – led Chirac to publicly scold Blair for being "bad-mannered" and call off the annual Franco-British summit. (One witness to the encounter described the two leaders as like "lads looking for a brawl outside a pub on a Friday night").

Nor is the new spat on the scale of 2002-2003, when Franco-British relations sank to an all-time low over Paris's fierce but ultimately futile opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Blair termed Chirac's stance "foolish" and "irresponsible", Chirac asked Blair how he would answer when Leo asked what he had done in the war, his foreign minister Jack Straw recalled "Napoleon – and remember who won", and even Straw's urbane French counterpart Dominique de Villepin complained of "comments unworthy of a friend and a European partner".

So, as rows go: not bad, but could do better. If perhaps not as well as in the period from 1066 to 1815, when the two countries fought each other in, among others, the Norman invasion, the wars of Henry II, the hundred years war, the Italian wars, the wars of the Spanish and Austrian succession, the seven years war, the American revolutionary war, the French revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic wars. Eight-hundred-odd years of near-continual armed conflict do tend to colour a relationship.

Today's Anglo-French rivalries, though, are born not of military ambition but long-established and strongly-held differences of view: social, cultural, political, commercial, on the economy, Europe, America, and free-market liberalism versus the "social model". Each remains the other's favourite mirror, in which to hold itself up and say: "Well, at least we're not like them."

For as Chirac once put it, "You can't trust people who cook as badly as that." Or as Noel Coward preferred: "There's always something fishy about the French."

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