The Anglo-French Entente in the Seventeenth Century

The seventeenth century saw England and France locked in a grinding cycle of war yet simultaneously drunk on each other's culture. Bastide's landmark study traces this paradox with scholarly precision, revealing how English writers, politicians, and aristocrats looked to France even as their armies clashed across the Channel. The book illuminates the surprising channels of cultural diplomacy that flourished beneath the surface of conflict: French Protestant exiles finding refuge in London, the flow of Parisian fashion into English courts, and the literary borrowings that would reshape the English language. Bastide digs into archives and correspondence to reconstruct the lived experience of French immigrants navigating their dual identities in a foreign land, giving human flesh to what might have been a dry diplomatic history. The work remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how two nations can be simultaneously enemies and cultural kin, a dynamic that would shape European politics for centuries to come.