They Eat Horses, Don't They? Read online

  † Along with St Denis, St Martin of Tours, St Louis IX, and St Theresa of Lisieux.

  France upheld its tradition of military prowess throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The late medieval French knight Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (a.k.a. le Chevalier de Bayard) was noted for his chivalry and valour, and is famously known to posterity as le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.‡

  ‡ From which phrase the French food critic Curnonsky (see here) derived his witticism, La cuisine du Périgord est sans beurre et sans reproche.

  Bayard served three French kings (Charles VIII, Louis XII, and François I) before being killed in the Habsburg–Valois wars in Italy in 1524 (his last words, reputedly, included the noble phrase: ‘I die as man of honour ought, doing my duty…’). And then there were the commanders of the warmongering Sun King, Louis XIV – the likes of the Vicomte de Turenne and Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, who helped consolidate French military supremacy over the Spanish during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Nor was the eighteenth century short of Gallic war heroes: one of the most notable was the Marquis de Montcalm, commander of French forces at the Battle of Québec (1759), who died in that battle (as did his British opponent, General James Wolfe), and who remains a national hero in France to this day.

  FALLING OUT WITH THE FRENCH (skip)

  The most notorious national slur against the French for their alleged unwillingness to fight derives from Matt Groening’s television cartoon series The Simpsons. In a 1995 episode called ‘Round Springfield’, the dour Scottish school janitor Groundskeeper Willie – who is unexpectedly saddled with the task of taking a French lesson at Springfield Elementary School – addresses the class with the greeting, ‘Bonjour, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’

  Since the day it was first uttered, the phrase has been endlessly repeated as a staple in the stock arsenal of insults against the French. It became especially popular in 2003, when it was used by the conservative US columnist Jonah Goldberg of the National Review to attack France’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

  Interestingly, if you mention the phrase to a French person, he or she will look at you blankly. This is because the voice-over was modified to ‘cheese-eating monkeys’ (singes mangeurs de fromage), when the series was broadcast in France.

  The wars of the Napoleonic era had their fair share of tales of tragic heroism, too. Take, for example, the case of Napoleon’s commander Marshal Ney, nicknamed by his leader as le brave des braves (‘the bravest of the brave’). Distinguished by his service, particularly during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812, Ney was arrested after the defeat and exile of Napoleon and sentenced to death by firing squad in 1815. He refused to wear a blindfold and was granted the (rare) right to order the squad to fire, reportedly saying:

  ‘Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her... Soldiers, Fire!’24

  Moving to the twentieth century, and the First World War, the magnitude of the French contribution to that conflict is reflected in their armies suffering more casualties and deaths than any combatant nation other than Germany or Russia. The number of Frenchmen sacrificed in the killing fields of the trenches far outstripped the (still enormous) number of British soldiers killed in action: French military deaths amounted to 1.3 million, as compared to 886,000 British.25 Not even the most diehard Francophobe, then, could deny the enormous contribution made by the French to this most brutal and wasteful of wars.

  How, then, did the nation of Bayard and Napoleon come to be tarred with the brush of cowardice? The suggestion that the French might be fight-shy largely arose from the part played (or rather, allegedly not played) by their forces in the next global conflict – the Second World War. ‘There’s always something fishy about the French,’ sang Noel Coward in a number from Conversation Piece. This was amended by Ivor Novello in 1941 to: ‘There’s always something Vichy about the French.’ The speed, and apparent willingness, with which France fell into the enemy embrace after the evacuation of Dunkirk by signing an armistice with Germany – allowing German forces to occupy the North and a puppet Nazi state to be created in the former spa town of Vichy in the South – astonished the British and Americans, and has provided Francophobes with a juicy opportunity to gloat over the carcass of French military glory ever since.

  Certainly, there were many brave French Resistance figures: men such as Jean Moulin, who died at the hands of the Gestapo in Lyons. During the war, internal and external opposition to the German occupation and the Vichy regime coalesced around the banner of the exiled Free French leader, General Charles de Gaulle, whose BBC radio announcements from London remained an inspiration to la flamme de la Résistance française. Even so, the accusation remains that, for most of this war, it was French collaboration that was rather more evident than French resistance. One of the most shameful episodes in modern French history is the deportation of some 75,000 Jews to German concentration camps, mainly via the temporary holding station at Drancy in the northeastern suburbs of Paris. These transports could not have taken place without the enthusiastic collaboration of the Vichy Milice and other French officials from 1940 to 1944. And although hundreds of Frenchmen joined the French Resistance – particularly towards the end of the war, when it became obvious that the Allies were going to win – thousands also volunteered to fight for the Nazis, by joining the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of SS Charlemagne (1st French).

  As far as I’m concerned, war always means failure.

  JACQUES CHIRAC, FRENCH PRESIDENT (1995–2007)

  As far as France is concerned, you’re right.

  REJOINDER BY US RIGHT-WING ‘SHOCK-JOCK’ RUSH LIMBAUGH

  Even after the war ended, Anglo-Saxon accusations of French cowardice and ingratitude continued. The postwar US Marshall Plan – one of the largest aid packages in history – poured 13 billion dollars into the reconstruction of Europe. Were the French grateful for these sacrifices in blood and cash from their erstwhile allies across the Atlantic? It seemed they were not – or at least, not as much as they should be in American eyes. The Marshall Plan, according to widespread French opinion, was simply an extension of American self-interest, a means of setting Europe back on its feet to begin spending money again on American consumer goods. As such, it was just a figleaf for the ‘Coca-Colonization’ of French society. The general view of the United States was that it was the country of ‘mass-produced goods, mass-produced culture, and mass-produced feelings’.26 Horror stories circulated of American tourists who, after trying some rare Vosne-Romanée, ordered Coca-Cola to wash it down. In the year immediately after the war, tensions mounted between GIs waiting to be sent back home and their French hosts, with outbreaks of violence. The result was that the average GI returned from France with his anti-French prejudices mightily reinforced.

  But the moral balance of virtuous versus reprehensible behaviour in time of war is, of course, infinitely more subtle than popular folklore would suggest. No single event embodies the contrasting versions of history favoured by different sides in the conflict as much as the evacuation of Dunkirk in late May 1940, the fateful action that confirmed the triumph of the German armies in the West and was followed by the fall of France a matter of weeks later. Between 27 May and 4 June 1940, in Operation Dynamo, as it was called, nearly 340,000 British and French troops were rescued by sea from the French port, in a mass evacuation that Winston Churchill described on 4 June as a ‘miracle of deliverance’ (he had characterized the plight of the Franco-British forces as a ‘colossal military disaster’ only the previous week). The legend of Dunkirk, as created by Churchill and the British press, was a tale of the heroic rescue of French and British soldiers, trapped by the German advance, achieved with the help of fishermen and other ordinary folk, who braved the high seas in their ‘little ships’. Majority French opinion,
however, classified it as a craven act of desertion, which left them fighting a hopeless rearguard action against the Germans alone, and which ultimately led to their surrender and the signing of a shameful armistice with the enemy.27

  While the French, British and Americans officially came out of the war as victorious allies, the French never again had real faith in perfidious Albion or gung-ho Uncle Sam (nor, indeed, did the latter two ever totally trust the dodgy Froggies). De Gaulle manifested his hostility by repeated refusals to allow Britain’s application for membership of the Common Market, on the basis that Britain was a free-wheeling loose cannon and too much in the US camp, and therefore not truly compatible with the other countries of Europe.*

  * The British, for their part, have always considered de Gaulle’s repeated non to Britain’s EU membership to be a manifestation of his shameful ingratitude for their sheltering him after he fled France in June 1940.

  With the benefit of hindsight, De Gaulle’s hunch may well have been right. Since joining the Common Market in 1973, Britain’s relationship with the EU has been punctuated by spats over budgetary contributions and opt-outs, and bursts of Europhobic invective on the part of right-wing Conservative MPs and the tabloid press on matters great and small – from the single currency to French farming subsidies, and from increasing European political integration to the imposition of a uniform shape for bananas.†

  † i.e. by the European Commission in EU Commission Regulation (EC) No. 2257/94.

  Despite falling out over such issues as the 1956 Suez Crisis (America v. Britain and France), British lamb imports in the 1980s (France v. Britain), the French refusal to allow US aircraft to fly over their airspace for the bombing of Libya in 1986 (France v. America), and the BSE crisis of the 1990s (Britain v. France), the uneasy truce between the wavering allies continued for several decades after the Second World War. In fact, it was not until 2003 that the reluctant bedfellows had their biggest row since the war, when France refused to join Britain and America in their headlong rush to invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in order to neutralize the dictator’s non-existent stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Contrary to Anglo-American rhetoric, President Chirac had the temerity to say that he would not support military intervention in Iraq unless Saddam Hussain ceased cooperating with the UN weapons inspectorate. In this he was supported by Germany, Russia, China, the Pope, the Secretary General of the United Nations, the ex-US president Jimmy Carter, and 70–80 per cent of European (including British) pubic opinion.28 In response, he was denounced by The Sun, which ran a French edition with the headline Chirac est un ver (‘Chirac is a worm’); in the United States, French fries were rechristened ‘Freedom fries’; and the old Simpsons quip ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ came back into circulation.

  Now that the desert dust has settled on the diplomatic crisis over the Second Iraq War, Anglo-American relations with France seem to have returned to an entente cordiale. Matters were helped during the presidency of the more NATO-friendly Nicolas Sarkozy, dubbed by barbed French opinion as Sarko l’Américain.*

  * Many French were horrified when Sarkozy brought France back into the NATO integrated military command structure, which it had left in the 1960s. This was seen as the ultimate betrayal of Gaullist values and proved that ‘Sarko’ was a traitor.

  Sarkozy’s keenness to dive into Libya would have been worthy of George W. Bush himself. More recently, the French have played a role of no small significance on the world stage, even winning the praise of US Vice President Joe Biden in February 2013 for their proactive stance against Islamist militants in Mali.

  Going to war without France is like going deer-hunting without your accordion.

  GENERAL NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF, US COMMANDER OF COALITION FORCES DURING THE GULF WAR, 1990–1

  Will the treacherous Froggies and perfidious Albion ever get over their mutual mistrust of each other? Never, perhaps. But one thing is certain, and that is that their future in war and peace is forever intertwined. Just as, in many a corner of a foreign field, there lies a richer dust concealed – more, in fact, of that British dust in northern France than in any other country in the world.

  Myth Evaluation: False. There are heroes and villains on all sides in war.

  PART 7

  A LAND OF CULTURAL EXCEPTIONS

  MYTHS ABOUT FRENCH CURLTURE

  THE FRENCH ARE PARANOID ABOUT THEIR LANGUAGE

  In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.

  MARK TWAIN, AMERICAN NOVELIST AND HUMOURIST (1835–1910)

  For generations of visitors to France from the English side of the Channel, the scenario is an all too depressingly familiar one. It runs something like this. Using his or her rusty – but possibly still serviceable – school French, the British tourist makes a game effort to order a café au lait or verre de vin rouge in the language of the locals. In response to these halting efforts, the typical Gallic waiter’s reaction is a sneer, followed by a quick switch of the conversation to (inevitably very bad, heavily accented) English. For foreign visitors to France, such supercilious rejection of their tentative forays into the language of Molière is deeply disheartening. So much so that many British people living in France give up trying to communicate with the locals, and simply hang out with other expats instead. And then, of course, the French have the temerity to complain that the British and Americans ‘don’t bother to speak their language’.

  The mixture of pride, hauteur and lurking insecurity that is felt by the French towards their language and its status in the world, particularly relative to the dreaded langue de Shakespeare, has deep and complex roots. In this context, one should not forget (the French never do) that the language of Molière really was, once, the primary language of government, the ruling classes, and culture in the Western world. From the days of the cunning and ruthless Cardinal de Richelieu (1586–1642) – credited by some as the world’s first diplomat* – to the mid-twentieth century, French was the language of international diplomacy.

  * The great American diplomat, Henry Kissinger, credits Richelieu as the first diplomat worthy of the appellation in his book Diplomacy (1994). Richelieu notably developed the concept of la raison d’état, or the idea that there are in certain circumstances reasons for pursuing a line of foreign policy that override other legal or moral considerations.

  The multitude of diplomatic terms of French origin still in use today bears this out: accord, attaché, aide mémoire, communiqué, entente, détente, chargé d’affaires… the list goes on. The French language has also traditionally dominated many areas of culture and the arts, synonymous with the most exalted and refined tastes. The terminology of the loftiest branches of the culinary world, for example, even the word cuisine itself, derives from French; as does the language of classical ballet, itself also a French word.†

  † Although ballet technically originated in Renaissance Italy, it was in France under Louis XIV that classical ballet truly developed. An avid dancer himself, Louis founded the first ballet academy, the Académie royale de danse, in 1661. To this day, French remains the international language of the ballet world, and countless ballet terms are French-derived: alonge, arabesque, attitude, barre and battement, to name but a few.

  Even in England, the language of the ruling classes was for many centuries not English but the Gallic tongue. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror established French as the official language of England. Consequently, though English remained the language of the common people, the northern French dialect called the langue d’oïl became the language of the English court, parliament and aristocracy. (Even so, some Norman kings are reputed to have uttered obscenities in English, since profanities apparently sounded more forceful in the Anglo-Saxon vernacular.) Several English monarchs of the medieval period barely spoke English at all. Richard Coeur de Lion or ‘the Lionheart’ (r. 1189–99), for instance, was famously uninterested in Engla
nd: he grew up speaking French in Poitiers, hardly spoke a word of English, and kept away from England as much as possible, spending most of his short reign fighting the Third Crusade. In fact, it was not until Henry V (r. 1413–22) that the English language began to come to the fore; Henry was the first monarch to promote the use of English in court and government, as well as the first English king since the Norman Conquest to use English in his personal correspondence. And even when English was finally established as the official language of court and government, English monarchs were generally perfectly conversant in French as a second language until the seventeenth century, when Dutch took over briefly (with the arrival of William III), followed by a settled tradition of German (with the advent of the Hanoverians).

  Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, GERMAN WRITER (1749–1832), MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS, 1832

  Perhaps with an eye to preserving its lofty associations with power and the ruling classes, the French have throughout history shown a particular zeal in protecting the purity of their language. As early as 1635, Cardinal Richelieu founded an extraordinary institution to police and safeguard the French tongue – the Académie française, which survives to this day. Presided over by forty sage dignitaries known as the Immortels (‘Immortals’), the principal role of the Académie française is to pronounce on the correct usage of the French language (although technically, its opinions are advisory and do not have the force of law). To this end the Académie periodically publishes new editions of a vast dictionary of the French language called Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, the ninth edition of which has kept the Immortels busy for the past twenty years (the first volume: A–Enzyme – appeared in 1992; the second: Eocène–Mappemonde – in 2000). Since the Académie’s foundation, over 700 distinguished persons have graced the ranks of the Immortals. They are chosen from the highest ranks of government, literature, philosophy and the arts; of these, a grand total of six have been women.*