France

France is presented less as a setting for the central action than as England’s defining counterpart: a rival in war, a model in court culture, and a point of comparison for the coercive powers of the state. The novel’s historical commentary makes the relationship deliberately uneasy. England resists French power while adopting French fashions and admiring French royal authority.

A model for court and spectacle

The reign of Queen Anne is described as a diminished reflection of the reign of Louis XIV. Its court, ceremonies, arts, military commanders, and patronage of writers are arranged as a smaller English counterpart to the French model. The analogy extends to named figures and institutions: Christopher Wren is likened to Mansart, and Anne’s court is compared with Versailles. The resemblance is theatrical rather than equal; France supplies the grandeur that England imitates, while the English version remains, in the narrator’s assessment, a miniature.

The cultural borrowing also reaches public entertainment. A French promoter, Foretroche, first proposed an elaborate royal circus in Paris, a project opposed by D’Argenson. He then brought the idea to England, where Queen Anne was attracted to a London theatre equipped with machinery and an under-stage designed to surpass the French king’s. The episode makes France both the origin of a fashionable spectacle and the standard against which English ambition measures itself.

Rivalry and the balance of power

France is also the military opponent against which English expansion is measured. In the account of the period, the victory at Hochstadt precedes the victory at Ramillies: France retreats from the Danube toward the Rhine and loses a substantial stretch of territory. England’s wider gains and ambitions—including its pressure over Dunkirk and its advances overseas—are narrated as reversals of French power. The contrast sharpens the irony of the cultural relationship: England fights France while drawing inspiration from it.

That contradiction is made explicit in the narrator’s account of English attitudes toward Louis XIV. English admiration for the French king coexists with the English claim to love liberty. The commentary treats this as a willingness to tolerate, and even praise, despotic rule when it binds another country. France thus functions not only as an adversary but as a mirror that exposes the limits of England’s self-image as a free people.

Coercion and social comparison

The comparison between the two countries also concerns forced service. Under Queen Anne, English authorities pressed sailors into the fleet with extreme violence. The narrator sets this practice beside France’s conscription of soldiers: in French towns, able-bodied men could be seized from the streets and confined in recruiting houses known as ovens, where those fit for service were selected and sold to officers. Paris had thirty such houses in 1695. The parallel does not erase the difference between naval impressment and military recruitment; it places both within a broader history of state power imposed on people treated as subjects rather than citizens.

France also appears as a legal comparison in the discussion of unexplained arrests in England. The narrator likens delicate cases handled by English silent arrest to the lettres de cachet associated with France, while noting that English arrests of this kind continued despite the Habeas Corpus Act. The comparison gives France a place in the novel’s account of secrecy and raison d’état, even where the action under discussion takes place in England.

Narrative significance

Across these historical excursions, France occupies several roles at once: the source of courtly and theatrical models, the target of English military ambition, and a parallel case in the exercise of state coercion. These roles resist a simple opposition between English liberty and French absolutism. England can celebrate its freedoms, imitate French magnificence, admire Louis XIV, and subject its own people to compulsion. France’s importance lies in making those contradictions visible.