Is there a historical reason for this? The Spanish are known for being passionate and fiery, the Italians similarly are stereotyped as passionate and “good lovers”. The French are known for being sexually open, although probably a bit less “hot-blooded” and more sophistacted. Meanwhile, Germans are stolid, efficient, hard-working and humourless, the English rather dull and reserved and stuffy. Basically, people from Romance cultures are viewed as more fluid, extroverted, with heightened emotions, while Germanic cultures more awkward, introverted and blockish. These are all stereotypes obviously, but presumably there’s a historical reason for why we ended up with these particular stereotypes. Is it to do with religion? The Roman Empire and Germanic tribes?
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Experts on Late Antiquity and the Reformation can probably add useful background, as both of these periods heavily shaped the prehistory of this dichotomy: Roman Empire vs Germanic tribes; Catholic vs Protestant areas. Neither of which gives an exact one-to-one match – think of Germanic yet Carholic Austria for instance, or even France, named for the Franks. And everything new builds on existing roots. But in my view the substantive development comes after the French Revolution, when France and Prussia emerged as the two key players of continental European politics. And their political rivalry, when it expanded into foreign policy, needed a cultural or even civilisational pretext.
After 1789, you find a combination of several new ideological voncepts sweeping across Europe. First, the concept of nationhood – i.e. a large community coterminous with states borders. Next, Romanticism, which sought to champion the emotional, the passionate, and the irrational side of humanity, in contrast to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason. (Ironically, Rationalism had previously been long associated with the Latin world – “Cartesians” and the “Lumières”, and Romanticism initially with post-Napoleonic Germany: the opposite of the stereotype you mentioned). The Romantic movement celebrated the cultures of southern Europe (often associated with ancient Rome – the clue is in the name) as the repositories of intense emotion and spontaneity. By contrast, the growing intellectual and political movements in German- and English- speaking (terms like “Anglo-Saxon” are a nod to this) lands emphasized order, efficiency, and rationalism. Both German and English cultures now identified more with Ancient Greece, land of thinkers and individualists; they saw emotional excess as a Roman quality, now associated with the passion and upheaval of the French Revolution (which also had significant echoes in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Latin America). That contrast between the political turmoil in the Romance-speaking countries, and the orderliness of Britain and Prussia, was key to swapping around the stereotypes of rationalist Latins and spontaneous Germans.
Over the next decades, foreign policy – the Franco-Prussian rivalry – then added to the mix.
German figures like List, Lagarde and Bismarck all pushed for the ethnically-German parts of Europe to unite and occupy a space as the dominant hegemonic power in Central Europe – the idea of Mitteleuropa. In an equal-and-opoosite manner, a concept of the Romance world uniting on tye basis of a shared “Latinité” was promoted by figures like Napoleon III. Napoleon’s vision of Latin unity extended from Latin Europe into Latin America, and was given concrete form through a single currency among the core Latin countries (the reason Belgium and Switzerland use/d currencies called the franc). Both of these were not just a cultural movement but a political and diplomatic one, positioning Romance cultures as structurally and culturally distinct from the Germanic world. So that is really the origin of the idea of a Western/Central Europe split into two cultural blocs, with stereotypes that Southern Europe was more “emotional” and “passionate,” while the Northern world was defined by its seriousness and cool-headedness.
Subsequently the rise of nationalism and the search for distinct national identities, separate from the neighbouring people/language across the border, led to the solidification of these stereotypes – i.e. people “buying in” to the stereotype and internalising them. Opinion-shapers like the historians Ernst Renan and Teodor Mommsen, or the literary men Hippolyte Taine and Heinrich Heine, leant into this binary contrast and help to amplify them to a wider audience, defining each culture against the other, creating clear lines between the “hot-blooded” Roman-influenced south and the “cold-blooded” Teutonic north. This even goes beyond the Franco-German rivalry, with a Brit like George Eliott or a Spaniard like Angel Ganivet also usung the same schema to contrast the Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Germanic) tempérament to the Mediterranean (i.e. Latin) one (Ironically, Spanish observers after the collapse of their empire accepted the definition but tended to view their Latin nature as a negative; in contrast to the French who believed their character of passion and “élan” was a positive).
Over time, these distinctions, while obviously oversimplified and stereotypical (French cultural commentators seeking to grapple with what the “essence” of France was, pointed out the irony that you could hardly call the Bretons, Flemings or Alsatians “Latins”, and the entire northern half of France was distinctly less “Latin” than the Catalano-Occitan south) became ingrained in popular culture.
So while you’ll get plenty of backstory from Antiquity and the Reformation, the modern origins of these stereotypes lie in a mix of cultural and political forces, with the French Revolution and its geopolitical aftermath as the fulcrum.