On the contrary. Two examples may suffice: the first is a French re-telling of a joke (by a British officer) entitled, “sympas les grades de l’armée anglaise” (‘Kind of cool, ranks in the English army’). To which a user named “Tchetnik” (= Cetnik, a member of the far-right Serbian militia in WW2) responded, on 2nd June:
“Armée BRITANNIQUE, please, sinon, les Ecossais, les Irlandais et les Gallois vont placer une grenade DF dans votre lit.” [’…otherwise, the scots, irish, and welsh will plant a fragmentation grenade in your cot’].
Likewise, on 5th September 2016 appeared this sentiment by another French person: “J’aime bien les Anglais et j’apprécie leur compagnie et leur façon de vivre. Je connais très bien l’armée anglaise…”.
Furthermore, I can attest that such usage was the norm at least in Germany, France and Spain in the 1980s.
As a student (of mathematics) with a pronounced English accent (courtesy my primary school in Erith, Kent), I found myself constantly the butt of such remarks. Which felt quite bizarre: I am not in fact English, nor even British, at least not since 1962 with the coming into force of that year’s British Nationality Act. It did however mean that I noticed how common usage in nearly every European country was, and remains, to conflate English with British.
