By Ed West

There is now neither German nor French, Swiss nor Swede…

A few years back we were holidaying in the Vendée, a gentle and family-friendly part of France famous for the horrors of Jacobinism. In one of those deserted French villages where the median age is about 58 and you can feel the demographic death spiral around you, an oldish man started talking to us in good English. Just as Michael Oakeshott was refused permission to go into occupied Europe because he just looked too Anglo-Saxon to not stand out, so perhaps I didn’t quite blend into the surroundings.

He talked about how growing up after the war had made him an Anglophile; just to the south, La Rochelle has long connections with the English and beyond that is the wine-growing region around Bordeaux, which was joined to England for centuries. It would be a tragedy if Britain left the EU, the man said, because of our long-standing ties — but also because we had to stand together to face the threat of Putin.

And then he brought up the Hundred Years’ War, of all things, and how the English had wrecked much of France, launching into a song about Edward III he had learned as a child.

France lost 2 million people in the wars launched by King Edward, a series of conflicts in which ‘the scum of England’, as Desmond Seward put it, rampaged across the country in chevauchée, travelling orgies of violence, rape and burning.

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