Anglophile
Anglophiles may enjoy English actors, actresses, authors, cars, comedians, fashion, films, magazines, motorcycles, musicians, radio, subcultures, television series, and traditions.
[11] The French version, Lettres philosophiques, was banned in 1734 for being anti-clerical, after complaints from the Roman Catholic Church; the book was publicly burned in Paris, and the only bookseller willing to sell it was sent to the Bastille.
[12] However, underground copies of the Lettres philosophiques were printed by an illegal print-shop in Rouen and the book was a huge bestseller in France, sparking a wave of what the French soon called Anglomanie.
[12] Ultimately, the popularity of Anglomanie led to a backlash, with H. L. Fougeret de Monbron publishing Préservatif contre l'anglomanie (The Antidote to Anglomania) in 1757, in which he argued for the superiority of French culture and attacked British democracy as mere "mobocracy".
[16] The writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called the plays of Shakespeare "a huge, animated fair", which he attributed to his Englishness, writing: "Everywhere in England – surrounded by the seas, enveloped in fog and clouds, active in all parts of the world".
[20] The Osnabrück historian Justus Möser wrote that England was everything that a unified Germany should be, as Britain was a land of "organic" natural order where the aristocracy respected the liberties of the people and had a sense of duty to the nation.
The reactionary Catholic royalist intellectual Charles Maurras took a virulently-Anglophobic viewpoint of Britain being the "cancer" of the world that made everything good rot, especially in his beloved France.
[22] However, the conservative French art historian and critic Hippolyte Taine was an Anglophile who greatly admired Britain as the land of "civilised" aristocratic order that at the same time embraced freedom and "self-government".
[40] The Conservative government under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which saw the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russia sought to deny the so-called "Bulgarian horrors" under the grounds of realpolitik.
Gladstone saw himself as the defender of human rights which led him in 1890 to criticise anti-Chinese laws in Australia under the grounds that Chinese immigrants were being penalised for their virtues like the willingness to work hard rather than any supposed vices.
[44] In the same way, Gladstone perceived himself as the champion of the rights of small nations, which led to support "Home Rule" for Ireland (i.e. devolving power from Westminster to an Irish parliament).
Balkan Anglophiles such as Vladimir Jovanović and Čedomilj Mijatović in Serbia; Ioannes Gennadius and Eleutherios Venizelos in Greece and Ivan Evstratiev Geshov in Bulgaria were all inclined to admire British liberalism, especially of the Gladstonian type.
[45] Furthermore, all five of the above-named men saw Britain as an example of a liberal power, which had successfully created institutions that were meant to serve the individual rather the state, which inspired them with institution-building in their own newly independent nations.
[47] Jovanović was a Serbian economist and politician of marked liberal views who was much influenced by John Stuart Mill's 1859 book On Liberty and by Gladstone, taking the viewpoint that Britain should be the model for the modernisation of Serbia, which had emerged as a de facto independent state in 1817 after being under Ottoman rule since 1389.
Gennadius was a wealthy Greek and a famous bibliophile educated at the English Protestant College in Malta who moved to London in 1863 at the age of 19 where he worked as a journalist for a liberal newspaper, The Morning Star.
[61] From 1875 to 1880, Gennadius worked at the Greek legation in London, where he gave a speech in 1878: "It finds in us echo all the more ready as the two nations, great Britain and little Greece, have both attained to the highest position amongst the people of the earth, at different epochs, it is true, but by the identical pursuits of commerce and the same love of civilisation and progress.
[65] In 1915, Venizelos stated in an interview with a British journalist, "Whatever happens within the next few critical weeks, let England never forget that Greece is with her, heart and soul, remembering her past acts of friendship in times of no less difficulty, and looking forward to abiding union in days to come".
The "Swing Youth" were Anglophiles who preferred to dress in the "English style", with the boys wearing checkered coats and homburg hats, carrying umbrellas, and smoking pipes, while the girls wore their hair curled and applied much make-up.
[70] The French writer Simone de Beauvoir described the Zazou look as "the young men wore dirty drape suits with 'drainpipe' trousers under their sheep-skinned lined jackets and liberally brillianted their long hair, the girls favoured tight roll-collar jumpers with short flared skirts and wooden platform shoes, sported dark glasses with big lenses, put on heavy make-up and went bare-headed to show their dyed hair, set off by a lock of different hue".
[71] Among the Karen people of Burma who were converted to Christianity by British missionaries in the 19th century and had long felt oppressed by the militaristic Burmese state, Anglophilia is very common.
Sengjoe accused the British of betraying the Shan by including them in Burma, a state dominated by chauvinist Burmen nationalists, who had all been willing collaborators with the Japanese and wanted to wreak vengeance against those had fought against them in the war.
[77] Freyre argued that just as the British Empire had united white, brown, black and Asian peoples together, Brazil should be a place that would bring together the descendants of the Indians, African slaves and immigrants from Europe and Asia.
[78] Starting out as a leftist, Freyre hailed the British Labour Party's victory in the 1945 election as the "socialist democratic revolution in Great Britain" that was a turning point in world history.
He often praised the "great tradition of English socialism"; called Sir Stafford Cripps, the leader of Labour's left-wing faction, Britain's most original politician and dismissed Churchill as an "archaic" reactionary.
[81] By contrast, Brazilian conservative figures such as ex-president Jair Bolsonaro have hailed wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as an influence on their political career.
[83] In this regard, Irvine quoted the remark by the American cultural critic Lionel Trilling in his 1957 essay "On Emma" that: "not to like Jane Austen is to put oneself under the suspicion...of a want of breeding".
[85] Finally Irvine argued that the popularity of Austen films was due to their depiction of an ordered society where the chief problems faced by the characters are those relating to romantic love and where everything ends happily.
[87] Barrister and pro-democracy politician Martin Lee has been cited as an example of an Anglophile,[88] as has social activist Grandma Wong who is known to wave a British flag at her protests and has expressed a fondness for the colonial period.
Yeung Sum argued that the British colonial administration led to "well-established legal system and world-class social infrastructure" in Hong Kong which is still looked at fondly by some Hongkongers.
During a football match between England and Kosovo in November 2019, the streets in Pristina were filled with banners with the slogan "Welcome & Respect", in addition to raising the English flags and thankful messages.
