They Eat Horses, Don't They?

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  To Alek, Oscar and Noah,

  my Franco-British sons,

  who cheer for France and England

  (depending on who’s winning)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Display Options Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Apéritif

  The archetypal Frenchman wears a beret and striped shirt and rides a bicycle festooned with onions

  Part 1

  The King of Cuisines and the Cuisine of Kings

  Myths about French Food and Drink

  French cuisine is the best in the world

  They eat horses, don’t they?

  … and frogs’ legs… and snails

  The French are the world’s no. 1 consumers of cheese

  The French consume a very great deal of garlic

  The French don’t eat fast food

  The French drink wine with every meal

  The French don’t get drunk

  Part 2

  Trop Belle Pour Toi

  Myths about French Women

  French women are the most stylish in the world

  French women don’t get fat

  French women are kitchen goddesses

  French women don’t shave

  Part 3

  Dangerous Liaisons

  Myths about French Sex, Marriage and Children

  The French are obsessed with sex

  The French are uniquely tolerant of adultery

  The French habitually have large families

  French children don’t throw food

  Part 4

  Merde alors!

  Myths about French Plumbing

  French toilets are repellent

  The French don’t wash

  Every French bathroom has a bidet

  Part 5

  Bof! Je m’en Fous!

  Myths about French Manners

  The French are uncommonly rude

  French people always kiss when they greet you

  The French are a nation of inveterate smokers

  The French are cruel to animals

  Part 6

  Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

  Myths about French History and Society

  The French are a nation of Revolutionaries

  France is an egalitarian society

  The French don’t work very hard

  The French are a nation of cheese-eating surrender monkeys

  Part 7

  A Land of Cultural Exceptions

  Myths about French Culture

  The French are paranoid about their language

  French pop music is irredeemably naff

  French films are uniformly pretentious

  Part 8

  City of Light

  Myths about Paris

  The Left Bank is a haven of writers and intellectuals

  The Paris Métro stinks

  Paris is the European capital of canine excreta

  Part 9

  La France Profonde

  Myths about the French on Holiday

  France shuts down for August

  French beaches are polluted

  French beaches are packed with topless women

  French villages are so quaint

  French country style is so chic

  Part 10

  The Best of Enemies

  Myths about the Entente Cordiale

  The French think British food is revolting

  The English have taken over the French countryside… and the French have taken over English cities

  The British are the champions of gardening

  Digestif

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Picture Captions and Acknowledgements

  About this Book

  Reviews

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  It was on a sunny August bank holiday that I checked into a hotel in the Latin Quarter of Paris for a weekend break. Almost ten years later, I am still in France. The story is the usual one for many expats in France: meet, fall in love, marry. I never did get to stay in the hotel in the Latin Quarter (spending that whole first weekend with my future husband). But I did get to live in several dodgy apartments in the seedier arrondissements of Paris. Over the years, I have spent sweltering summers queuing in traffic jams on the motorways leading to the French coast, and many a winter in the deepest Gallic countryside. Now ensconced in a quiet French village, that first Paris bank holiday seems a world away. Another life.

  During my first few years in France, I was excited and enticed by everything around me that seemed quintessentially French. A freshly baked croissant – how French! The rudeness of the waiter at the bistro – how French! The thin and glamorous women who tottered down the Parisian boulevards – how French! A glass of wine at lunchtime – how French! Shopping in the local market – how French!

  Gradually, however, I began to notice cracks in this ‘French’ experience. Not all, or even most, of the women I saw were particularly beautiful or glamorous. Every so often, there was a polite waiter. The croissant in the café was tired and crusty. There were McDonald’s and fast-food joints jostling for space beside the cute bistros, with their checked red tablecloths. The supermarkets were stuffed with rows of canned goods. Somehow, however, I ignored these things. They weren’t really ‘French’. The beautiful and glamorous women, the freshly baked croissant, the local market, on the other hand – all these things were ‘French’. It was as though I yearned after, needed this romantic, glamorous, ‘French’ world to which to aspire, closing my eyes to the reality which was, often, very different.

  But the fast-food joints, ordinary-looking women, and supermarkets with rubbishy food were there, all the same. They were, unmistakably, ‘French’. What they were not part of was what I considered the ‘French experience’.

  The more I considered this ‘French experience’, the more it seemed to me to consist of certain specific ideas. For example, it most definitely included rude waiters, bistros, glamorous women, smoking and dangerous liaisons. It most definitely did not include fast food, fat women and sandwich lunches. Yet these were things I encountered every day.

  And so gradually, I began to see around me more and more the exceptions to the so-called ‘French experience’. I began to see how my ideas about France and the French, although some of them were true, were also often a construction of my imagination. I asked around my English-speaking friends back home, and found that they shared a lot of these same preconceptions. And not only that, but there was a whole sub-genre of writing, a mini-industry of ‘Froglit’ – mainly consisting of books written by foreigners who had spent a couple of years in Paris – busy propagating, promulgating, and disseminating the myth of the ‘French experience’. So I listed these common ideas about the French in my notebook and set out to investigate them, poring over tomes in the local libraries and talking to everybody – English or French – that I could persuade to give me some minutes of their time. Were these myths about the French true or false? The results, as you will see, were often quite unexpected.

  APÉRITIF

  THE ARCHETYPAL FRENCHMAN WEARS A BERET AND STRIPED SHIRT AND RIDES A BICYCLE FESTOONED WITH ONIONS

>   ‘You aren’t one of those French onion sellers, are you?’ the woman asked Hercule Poirot.

  AGATHA CHRISTIE, ENGLISH CRIME WRITER (1890–1976), THE VEILED LADY, 1923

  This is a myth that everybody knows, few believe, and even fewer will admit to having witnessed. This is not surprising, since if you do recall having seen a Frenchman wearing a beret and striped shirt on a bike festooned with onions, you are very likely either to frequent naff fancy-dress parties or to be very advanced in years. In my ten years of living in France, I have never seen any Frenchman on a bike festooned with onions, and only occasionally the odd ageing artist by the Sacré Coeur in a striped shirt and beret (and those clearly donned for the benefit of the tourists). And yet the image is ingrained in the Anglo-American imagination as that of the stereotypical Frenchman. Where, exactly, does it come from?

  The answer is that the image is a British invention. It does, however, ultimately derive from a Frenchman: one Henri Ollivier. In 1828, Monsieur Ollivier, a Breton peasant farmer, made the hazardous trip to the shores of Albion from his home – the fishing village of Roscoff – to travel around door to door, selling his strings of onions to British housewives. He made such a packet that many of his fellow Roscoff peasant labourers quickly followed suit. Soon, hundreds of them were crossing the Channel every year with their harvest of onions, which they would store in rented barns while they travelled from village to village, peddling their wares on rickety old bicycles. The English called them ‘Onion Johnnies’, since most of them seemed to be called ‘Jean’, and some of them were as young as teenagers. They would arrive in July and depart the following December or January, sleeping in barns on top of their piles of onions. This ‘unofficial’ Anglo-French trade boomed until the outbreak of the Second World War. It peaked in the late 1920s – when 9,000 tons of onions were sold in England by 1,400 Johnnies – before gradually petering out in the postwar period. For many English people, the Onion Johnny was as close to France or the French as they ever got. Soon, he became in British minds the image of the stereotypical Frenchman, immortalized on everything from packets of cheese to the TV series ’Allo ’Allo! This was ironic because, hailing as they did from Brittany, most of the original Onion Johnnies did not actually speak French. Breton being a Celtic language related to Welsh, the itinerant costermongers naturally bonded with the Welsh as a united fringe against the Anglo-French enemy. Even to this day, some former Onion Johnnies continue to meet up with their old Celtic pals at that forum for self-assertion against colonial oppression, the Welsh Eisteddfod.

  Onion Johnnies wore the béret, the traditional ‘cloth cap’ of the French peasantry. This originated in the Southwest of France, the Basque beret being worn by shepherds in the Pyrenees from the seventeenth century onwards. In the twentieth century the beret came to be associated with left-wing intellectuals and radical artists, including, most famously, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. It also became, in the 1960s, a powerful symbol of rebellion and radical chic: Che Guevara was rarely seen without one (the image of his trademark black version with a red star found a post-revolutionary afterlife on millions of posters and T-shirts the world over), and the beret became the accessory de choix of radical and paramilitary groupings as diverse as the Black Panthers in the USA, the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, and the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain. Until the 1970s the beret, along with the cloth cap, was one of the types of headgear traditionally worn by film directors, until it was ousted by the now-ubiquitous American baseball cap.

  In France nowadays, though, berets are seldom to be seen – except on the occasional octogenarian playing pétanque in a dusty village of the Southwest. Certainly not in Paris, where it would just be… well, pas comme il faut.*

  * Even so, there are exceptional circumstances where the beret is still de rigueur: for example, berets are sometimes worn by French rugby fans (particularly at away games in Britain), presumably to advertise their national allegiance.

  The average French workman these days is just as likely to be wearing a casquette, or baseball cap, turned jauntily backwards in the manner of his favourite rap star, as the traditional headgear of the French peasantry. In July 2012, the last traditional French beret manufacturer in the Southwest was bought out in the nick of time, saving the jobs of the twenty-odd remaining artisan beret-makers.1 The beret is nowadays mainly used as an item of army uniform, and as such is still going strong around the world. In fact, it is a crowning irony that today’s principal market for the ultimate sartorial symbol of the nation of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ (see here) is… the US Army.*2At the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, it was the American athletes who sported the beret. The French team – somewhat unsportingly – did not make an appearance on bikes with berets, striped shirts and onions, but rather in outfits created by that ambassador of French chic, the German sportswear brand Adidas.

  * Though even the US Army is beginning to phase out the beret in favour of the cheaper and more practical baseball cap. In June 2011, the Pentagon announced that the US land army was to renounce the beret in favour of the cap for ordinary workwear, keeping the beret only for ceremonial use. The move was welcomed by the troops. ‘I can’t stand a wet sock on my head,’ was the comment of one officer to the Army Times.

  Onion Johnnies also frequently wore striped black or blue and white boat-necked shirts: the traditional garb of Breton fishermen. The Breton shirt was created as an official garment of the French Navy in 1858, according to tradition because the stripes made it easier to spot a man overboard. They were not considered remotely stylish at the time (striped garments were also worn by lepers and convicts). In a display of tricolour-tinted nostalgia, the original Navy shirt featured 21 stripes, one for each of Napoleon’s victories. The striped shirt was spotted on Breton fishermen by Coco Chanel on a weekend break to Deauville and inspired a nautical collection by her in 1917, subsequently becoming one of the most famous fashion icons in the world. Once an item of peasant garb – a sign of the outcast and dispossessed – the striped shirt now became the ultimate in modern chic, sported by the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Jean Seberg and Jeanne Moreau. It has subsequently been rehashed and reinterpreted hundreds of times by fashion houses from Gucci to Givenchy, incarnating everything from the hunky sailor as gay icon in Jean-Paul Gaultier’s 1993 campaign for the perfume Le Male, to the retro innocence of a traditional childhood in the classic child’s yellow and striped fisherman’s coat by Petit Bateau.

  Today, however, Onion Johnnies have all but disappeared from the British landscape. After the Second World War, increased competition from rival producers and English protectionism, together with the fact that wandering Johnnies did not qualify for the new French postwar state welfare benefits, meant that most hung up their berets. Now there are only a handful left who regularly make the trip to sell onions door to door in English streets. Today’s Onion Johnnies, however, are as likely to send a round-robin by e-mail to alert customers to their arrival, and make their rounds in a van (although they might keep a bike in the back for special appearances). The Onion Johnnies have been immortalized with their own museum in Roscoff (La Maison des Johnnies et de l’oignon): here one can see fading photographs of this curious, all-but-forgotten second French invasion of England, have a master class in onion-plaiting by a real Onion Johnny, and listen to nostalgic folk songs and poems (all with a strong onion theme to bring tears to the eyes). There is even an annual Roscoff Onion Festival, where local delicacies such as onion tart and onion crêpes can be sampled. Most powerful of all, the image of Onion Johnny lives on in the minds of millions of Japanese, American and British tourists, as the quintessential mythical Frenchman.

  The French for their part are entirely nonplussed by the foreign stereotype of the Onion Johnny. Given that the original Johnnies were nationalistic Bretons who considered the French an alien race, this is hardly surprising. It is as though the national stereotype of an Englishman were a Welshman selling leeks
with a daffodil tucked behind his ear. An absurd thought. But then, the French invented the philosophical concept of ‘the Absurd’ and the novelist Albert Camus, its most famous proponent, could hardly have come up with a more meaninglessly random national stereotype. In its absurdity if nothing else, the image of the Onion Johnny is archetypically French.

  Myth Evaluation: False

  PART 1

  THE KING OF CUISINES AND THE CUISINE OF KINGS

  MYTHS ABOUT FRENCH FOOD AND DRINK

  FRENCH CUISINE IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD

  Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.

  CHARLES-LOUIS DE SECONDAT, BARON DE MONTESQUIEU (1689–1755)

  It has been taken as gospel for many years that French cuisine is the best in the world. Whether it is regional, bourgeois or haute cuisine (and in truth, these all feed off each other), French cuisine is the crème de la crème of the world’s gastronomic heritage, unbeatable for its distinguished history, refinement and savoir-faire. The priority accorded by the French to what they ingest over everything else, including the achievements of science, cannot be doubted: ‘The discovery of a new dish,’ the eighteenth-century French wit and gastronomic critic Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin observed, ‘creates greater happiness for the human race than the discovery of a new star.’ The great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910–87) summed up the ultimate goal of French social interactions thus: ‘Everything ends this way in France – everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs – everything is a pretext for a good dinner.’ Just as eating has traditionally dominated French life, so French cuisine has traditionally dominated the world’s restaurants. No other single cuisine has exerted such an influence on the world’s palate. Until now, perhaps.

  Enchant, stay beautiful and graceful, but do this, eat well. Bring the same consideration to the preparation of your food as you devote to your appearance. Let your dinner be a poem, like your dress.