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While the Channel Tunnel became a reality in the 1990s, throughout the centuries many dreamers and innovators had come up with schemes attempting to link England and France (or the Low Countries) beneath the English Channel.

One of the first was the Duc de Lille, who in 1702 wrote to the Duc de Saint-Simon about his "phantastick dreame" in which English labourers were recruited to dig a proposed 5,000 feet below the bottom of the Channel. The bottom was to be thatched with reeds and tramped down by oxen and men. This project, like many to follow, never got off the ground due to the extreme impracticability of the scheme. The long and costly wars of Louis XIV did not help the situation either. The fact the ground would have needed hard-core not rushes, and that English labourers would not have been allowed to be recruited by French employers, and that France and England at the time were sworn enemies was probably also a contributing factor to the failure of this fantasy.

A famous depiction of a paranoid fantasy gripping England in the early 19th century was captured in a famous print demonstrating the invasion plans of England supposedly put in place by Napoleon Bonaparte. From the air, the Grande Armee was to fly across the Channel in Montgolfier balloons. Barges bearing French soldiers were to cross the Channel by water. However, the most innovative aspect of the fictional "invasion" was legions of French forces marching underground -- through a tunnel supported by rafters and lit by torches, descending into the tunnel at Calais and emerging to lay waste to the English homeland at Kent. Invasion-related paranoia was at its height before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and is much evidenced in the novels of Jane Austen, which were written in and set during this era.

References

1. St. John (ed.) Memoirs of the Duke of Saint Simon on the Reign of Louis XIV and the Regency. London: Willey Pub, 1936, Vol 1, p. 256.