This article provides a comparison of welfare chauvinism responses in France and England, and demonstrates that there is in the latter a much deeper rootedness of such nativist dynamics, not only vis-à-vis France, but also when compared with other European countries. The article also interrogates top-down and bottom-up approaches in the social sciences, particularly as they apply to welfare chauvinism. The extreme interconnectedness between the two is not acknowledged in classical studies of “populism”. Bringing together elite-driven discourses and grassroots interpellations of said elites, combining qualitative and quantitative data, the article underlines how deep-seated welfare chauvinist responses are in England, reaching back to at least the mid-1960s, whereas similar responses or dynamics (« seuil de tolérance », etc.) would appear to be much more recent in France, whose major radical-right, nativist party (Rassemblement National) only fairly recently tapped into such feelings.