Entente Not-So-Cordiale.

Byline: William Underhill

It's early morning in Patisserie Valerie, a Soho cafe that feeds the habits of London's hard-core francophiles. Walls are hung with Toulouse-Lautrec; the windows are stacked with aorta-clogging pastries. Like the rest of the breakfast crowd, I'm stocking up on French comfort food--buttery croissants--and wishing I were in France.

It's a timely sentiment. Exactly 100 years ago, we Brits embraced everlasting friendship with our closest neighbor and oldest enemy. No more squabbling over colonies, threats of war, cartoons portraying an elderly Queen Victoria baring her bum to the French. Instead it would be Entente Cordiale.

And it's worked. Our pols may squabble but France we adore. Every summer, like 13 million of our countrymen, my family heads for the nation's favorite holiday destination--France. We marvel at the high-speed trains, the empty roads, the lavish health care. Through the year we yearn for "steak frites " and inexpensive wine. Britain's middle-aged bourgeois dream no more of roses-round-the-door cottages in Devon; the fantasy is of a tumbledown Provencal farmhouse with olive grove.

Still, somewhere in the gut, old prejudices live on. At the height of last year's spat over Iraq, the mass-circulation Sun ran an anti-French joke campaign. ("What's the difference between Frenchmen and toast? You can make soldiers out of toast.") In the words of the novelist Julian Barnes: "If you were God and you were trying to invent a nation that would most get up the British nostril, it would probably be the French."

My own problem starts with envy. It's the irritation of the law-abiding older brother at the insouciant sibling who somehow walks away with all the prizes. Our politicians don't take bribes. Inefficient industries have ...