Perfidious Albion

"Perfidious Albion" is a pejorative expression used to refer to England (or the United Kingdom) in Anglophobic or hostile terms. It had its enormous disclosure due to the repeated use of Napoleon Bonaparte in the so-called "Napoleonic wars" or "coalition wars" during the years that he ruled France. He took it from the Spanish-born French poet and diplomat Augustin Louis Marie de Ximénès (1726-1817) in his poem L'ère des Français (published in 1793), in which he encouraged attacking "perfidious Albion" in her own waters:

Attaquons dans ses eaux la perfide Albion.

The term “Albion” is of Celtic origin. However, the Romans associated it with the Latin albus (white) in reference to the cliffs of Dover, in the south of England, of a characteristic white color, which are the first thing seen when approaching Great Britain. Brittany from the north of France by sea.

The adjective «perfidious» applied to England had already been used at least since the 17th century, as it was also used in one of his famous sermons by the French historian and theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who compared opposition to faith Catholicism with which the Britons, isolated by their seas, argued against the ancient Romans:

L'Angleterre, ah, the perfide Angleterre, who gives him away from mers rendait inaccessible aux Romains, foi du Sauveur and est abordée.

Napoleon Bonaparte popularized it during subsequent wars and it has been used again in all conflicts in which the United Kingdom has intervened, such as the Falklands War. It was also an expression used in post-war Spain to refer to Great Britain.

The Irish rebellion of 1916, known as the Easter Rising, inspired a traditional song (“Foggy Dew”) featuring perfidious Albion wavering before the noise of the rifles at the fall of the black night:

Oh the night fell black and the rifles' crack Made perfidious Albion reel.

In chapter XIX of the book Royal Weddings, belonging to Pérez Galdós' Episodios Nacionales, it is quoted «that it is England, that pig, you know, who is nicknamed the perfidious Albion».

In Inés y la alegría by Almudena Grandes, in the first pages of the chapter (During), one of the characters waiting to be received in audience by the caudillo complains that Franco receives before a British emissary: «Of course, it is to start trembling, because if the Perfidious Albion walks through…».