In the early 1830s, the intrepid English traveller Richard Ford, wandering in the central Pyrenees between France and Spain, was struck by the animosity Spanish peasants expressed toward the French:

More than a transparent description of social life in the borderland, Ford's revealing observation evokes an entire corpus of mythic representations and literary tropes from both sides of the Pyrenees. Indeed, the image of the Pyrenees as a natural frontier separating France and Spain has been part of a shifting repertoire in French and Spanish political and literary cultures since the eleventh-century Chanson de Roland. During the first half of the seventeenth-century, at the height of the dynastic competition between the Bourbon and Habsburg monarchies, apologists and pamphleteers from both political centres produced a number of texts which compared the national and natural differences of Frenchmen and Spaniards, drawing often on contemporary and ancient theories of humours.