1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Acadie had been more or less abandoned to its fate, but an experienced soldier was chosen to defend France’s interests in the rest of Canada: Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, marquis de Saint-Veran (usually referred to in these less wordy times as Montcalm), who had fought in several European conflicts and received both sword and musket wounds for his pains. In spring 1756, he crossed the Atlantic with 1,200 soldiers to bolster a force of some 4,000 troops already based in Nouvelle-France. He also had 2,000 or so local militiamen at his disposal, although he knew that the latter were notoriously fickle fighters, much more interested in the whole animal-gutting scene than international wars.

  At first, Montcalm carried out successful raids against the Brits, capturing forts and their much-needed cannons and ammunition. But the aid promised by Paris did not arrive because a large proportion of French convoys were being captured by the British, and in September 1759 Montcalm took refuge in the well-defended town of Quebec.

  It was here that the English General James Wolfe came looking for the final showdown. On 13 September 1759, Wolfe arrived in Quebec, having brought a huge army of 9,000 soldiers and 18,000 sailors some 450 kilometres up the St Lawrence River in 170 boats – thanks in part to a thirty-year-old captain called James Cook who had a gift for surveying and mapmaking that was to stand him in good stead in later years.

  With the French feeling very cosy in their fortified town on top of an impregnable cliff, it looked as if Wolfe’s long river journey had been for nothing. But the General refused to accept defeat, and sent a section of his troops to attack the base of the river cliffs. This would not have bothered Montcalm except that the Brits had landed cannons, and he was afraid that the town would be bombarded, so he personally led 5,000 men out to chase the invaders back into the river.

  Wolfe was also leading his troops, and had developed a daring, cool-headed way of dealing with frontal attacks. He let the charging Frenchmen come on until they were just 40 metres away, and then ordered his soldiers to unleash a single, murderous volley of musket fire, breaking the charge with one blow and sending the survivors – many of whom were the only half-convinced militiamen – into instant retreat. The battle was over in a quarter of an hour, and Quebec was taken.

  Outside the city, both leaders were lying mortally wounded by musket fire. When Wolfe was told that the enemy were retreating, he said, ‘God be praised, I will die in peace,’ before doing exactly that. Montcalm, meanwhile, was informed that he wasn’t going to survive his wounds, and moaned ‘tant mieux’ – ‘so much the better’. He seemed to know the fight for Canada was lost.

  Go home (if you know where that is)

  France’s other main town in inland Canada, Montreal, was surrendered the following year. The Brits left most of the non-military residents in peace, and they stayed there, cut off from France, preserving their archaic accent and having Catholic-sized families to try and boost their numbers – until just a generation ago, most Quebeckers had ten brothers and sisters.

  The Acadiens were allowed no such luxury. For those who survived the initial imprisonment and expulsion, the suffering wasn’t over yet.

  The British colonies hadn’t been warned of the refugees’ imminent arrival, even though Governor William Shirley of New England had been involved in the whole business. Around 1,500 Acadiens disembarked in Virginia and North Carolina, but were refused entry and forced to live on the beach or on their ships until passage could be arranged to take them across to England. When they left again, two boats sank in the Atlantic, drowning about 300 people, and the survivors fared little better. For years, there were Acadiens living in huts by Southampton harbour, in disused potteries in Liverpool and in ruined buildings in Bristol, all of them considered prisoners of war.

  Some 2,000 refugees arrived in Massachusetts, only to die of smallpox or be forced to take jobs as servants. And just down the coast in New York, 250 were imprisoned or forced into servitude.

  In Maryland, the Acadiens were treated little better than slaves, and put in prison if they did not find a job, however menial, immediately. If they tried to leave the colony, they were shot. In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, they were packed into a shanty town outside Philadelphia (the ‘city of brotherly love’) and denied the right to work. Many of them were encouraged to emigrate to Haiti, where they were used as slave labour by the island’s French governor to build a naval base. Bienvenus en France.

  In 1763, the French and British signed the Treaty of Paris, by which all of Canada except for a couple of tiny islands off the Atlantic coast – Saint-Pierre and Miquelon – was ceded to Britain. One effect of this peace was to improve relations enough for France to get back their prisoners of war, the Acadiens. Or, to put it another way, now that the war was over, the Brits and American colonists had a good excuse to get rid of the troublesome French-Canadian refugees.

  Accordingly, almost all the Acadiens who had managed to survive their years of imprisonment, slavery, deprivation and bad English lessons were ‘allowed’ to emigrate from the American colonies and England. Several hundred went to Haiti, but soon regretted it – as before, the French treated them as badly as the English had done, and half of them died of malnutrition or disease. A few dozen were taken to the Falklands, but were quickly shipped out again when France gave the islands to Spain. Around 1,500 Acadiens made their way to French-held Louisiana, to have their name misspelt and become Cajuns.

  And almost 4,000 went to France, amongst them seventy-eight families who were resettled on Belle-Île. These new Bellilois were the people who now have their own museum in the fortress at Le Palais. In the permanent exhibition, they are represented in heartrending scenes of exile and separation in Canada, or gazing gratefully on the little cottages in their new homeland.

  On the island, they were given land and livestock (which was a lot more than most French peasants had at the time) and, according to Belle-Île’s tourist-office website, they ‘didn’t take long to integrate with the island’s families, and mixed marriages were performed in the first year’.

  Apart from the fact that the phrase ‘mixed marriage’ seems strange when applied to people of the same linguistic and ethnic origin (it seems strange whenever it is used, but even more so here), this can’t have been the whole truth, because an Acadien-Cajun website says that ‘due to livestock epidemics, crop failure, drought, and local resistance* the colony failed in seven years.’

  So it seems that the Acadiens weren’t made to feel at home in France, either. They were, after all, taking land, food and work away from struggling French peasants. What was more, they kept trying to get off with the local blondes, and probably set up beaver traps that caught the islanders’ cats and dogs. And to cap it all they spoke with funny accents.

  Within a couple of years, over 1,500 of the Acadiens who had been ‘repatriated’ to France left again, most of them heading to join their former neighbours who were now getting established in Louisiana. This new refuge was to be temporary as well, though, because France was just about to sell it to those same welcoming American colonists.

  Sacrament and tabernacle!

  * This Pope was more than just a Holy Father. The Catholic Encyclopedia concedes that he had ‘relations with a Roman lady’ who bore him four children, including the notorious Lucrezia. It doesn’t mention his three children by other mistresses.

  * Nicotine is named after a Frenchman, Jean Nicot de Villemain, France’s ambassador to Portugal in the mid-1500s. He sent some tobacco snuff to Catherine de’ Medici, who sniffed it and was so delighted with the effects that she tried to have tobacco renamed Herba Regina.

  * Antoinette is famous for becoming the first known example of a woman refusing the advances of a French king. She told Henri IV: ‘my rank is not noble enough for me to become your wife, but my heart is too noble for me to become your mistress’, a line that, in a more modern form, is still used today by countless French secretaries resisting their bosses.

  * The rumours were fired by King James’
s pet name for Buckingham – his ‘sweet child and wife’ – and the Duke’s appointment as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Buckingham reciprocated the royal affection, writing to James that ‘I naturally so love your person, and adore all your other parts, which are more than one man ever had.’ In modern English, this would probably translate as something like: ‘Let’s do it again, big boy.’

  * The unit of measure Voltaire actually mentioned was the arpent, which in France was an area 220 ‘King’s feet’ (71.48 metres) square. In Nouvelle-France, i.e. French Canada, it was only 200 ‘King’s feet’, or 64.97 metres, square. Even the units of measurement snubbed the French Canadians.

  * Mes italiques.

  8

  Charles II: The Man Who Taught

  Everyone to Distrust French Motives for

  Doing Absolutely Anything

  If France had decided to cast the French Canadians adrift on a leaky political raft, it was mainly because Canada was very low on their list of priorities. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France was much too busy harassing the countries huddled around it on the map of Europe to bother worrying about what was going on in the frozen north.

  It was also during this time that the hostility between France and Britain took on its modern form. That is to say, there would be plenty more wars – right up to the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 – but even in peacetime, the two nations would be in a state of permanent suspicion. It was in the late seventeenth century that the childhood and adolescence of Anglo-French rivalry came to an end, and a fully mature relationship of fundamental distrust began. Which is why, today, British politicians constantly appear to be thinking: what are the French up to, how will it affect us, and should we sabotage it?

  It’s a feeling that has spread way beyond Anglo-French relations, and now causes practically every country on the planet to wonder what France really wants whenever its attention strays outside the haven of its modern borders.

  And the person who brought this distrust of the French to fruition was a rather genial, frivolous man who was much more interested in hunting, playing cards and chasing women than politics – a fairly typical English king, in fact. He was Charles II.

  What is most ironic is that, like so many English kings before him, he was half French. His mother was Henrietta Maria (or Henriette-Marie de France as she is more correctly called), daughter of France’s King Henri IV, sister of King Louis XIII and aunt of the Sun King himself, Louis XIV.

  In 1625, Henriette-Marie played her first, albeit passive, part in creating Anglo-French tensions during the preparations for her marriage to England’s Prince of Wales, the future King Charles I. Negotiations over the dowry and the political implications of the union were highly complicated, and the diplomatic mission was entrusted to the hopeless Duke of Buckingham – the same man who ballsed up a British campaign to help the French Protestants hold on to La Rochelle.

  While over in Paris to discuss pre-nuptials, the bisexual Buckingham had taken advantage of his visit to the French court to try and seduce one of the local aristocratic ladies. For a man of his position and good looks, this would have been nothing out of the ordinary. It could even have been seen as a gesture of international friendship – the Parisian beauty winning the approval of an English duke.

  But the nice-but-dim Buckingham had set his sights on Anne, the wife of King Louis XIII. Imagine President Sarkozy coming to London for trade negotiations and trying it on with the Queen. Anglo-French relations would not exactly benefit (and neither, probably, would President Sarkozy). This flamboyant frontal assault on the French Queen’s honour did not go unnoticed at court, and it was fortunate for Buckingham that political necessity overrode King Louis’s desire to have him castrated and thrown in the Seine. Despite the close diplomatic shave, the match between Charles II’s parents went ahead, and history was allowed to take its course.

  Gatecrashing the Louvre

  The marriage was reasonably stable (particularly once the omnipresent Buckingham died and left the couple in peace), although the devoutly Catholic Henriette-Marie is often blamed for causing Charles I to stand up so unbendingly to the Protestant English Parliamentarians and thereby provoking the Civil War. In 1644, when the fighting got too hot for comfort, she went into exile in Paris, where she was joined in 1646 by her son, Prince Charles.

  At this point, Henriette-Marie was even more at the heart of the French court than ever, because her brother, Louis XIII, had died and France was being ruled by the boy King Louis XIV and his mother Anne, who was Henriette-Marie’s sister-in-law. Henriette-Marie was therefore one of the senior royals living in the Louvre, all of whom were bonding together to preserve their family’s fragile hold on power via the enfant Louis.

  The brain behind the throne, though, was an Italian-born cardinal called Mazarin. He was the regent Anne’s guiding hand – and some say his hands did much more than just guide her. Mazarin was wholly in favour of welcoming the royal refugees from England. A Catholic, he didn’t want a strong Protestant republic across the Channel giving the militant French Protestants, the Huguenots, ideas. Mazarin was therefore keen to have Prince Charles in France as a potential weapon to be unleashed against England if the monarchy fell.

  However, despite his distaste for Protestants, he didn’t want to exclude altogether the chance of allying with a future Protestant-ruled England to fight his arch enemy, Spain. He was even considering marrying a French princess to Oliver Cromwell’s son in order to defuse any future Anglo-French tensions. It was therefore important to him not to make it obvious that he was supporting Charles I in the Civil War.

  Poor sixteen-year-old Prince Charles had no idea what a Parisian hornets’ nest he was stepping into. He just thought he was going to live with his mum while his dad got a few domestic policy issues sorted out. So when he arrived at the French court in June 1646, Charles was dismayed to feel as though he was gate-crashing a garden party – instead of being welcomed into his mother’s family, he was completely ignored by Mazarin, King Louis XIV and the Queen Mother Anne for two whole months, and forced to hang around the corridors and anterooms of the Louvre hoping for an invitation to something more exciting than a wig-weaving display by the second cousin of the third wife of a duke’s hunting horse.

  Not surprisingly, Henriette-Marie was shocked by this implied insult to her own royal status, and repeatedly asked for an explanation as to why her son, a prince, was not granted so much as a five-minute audience with anyone of his own rank.

  The excuses given by Mazarin were a miracle of political evasiveness. The protocol of this unplanned visit was, he said, so complicated that lengthy discussions were needed before an audience could take place. The problems were endless. Should Charles see the King in one of his salons? If so, who would sit and who would stand? And where exactly would the sitting, if it happened at all, happen? The chairs at such get-togethers were arranged in a strictly pre-defined order, and who sat (or did not sit) where was a matter of endless gossip and rivalry. Since Charles was heir to a throne, it might be necessary for him to take precedence over Louis XIV’s younger brother, Philippe, who could construe this as a snub. And Louis himself, who was only seven at the time, was in a delicate position vis-à-vis his English cousin Charles, who was a teenage giant at nearly six feet; it must not look as if Louis was being belittled.

  In short, Charles and Henriette-Marie would just have to wait on the sidelines of court life until all the practical details had been hammered out.

  Charles uses the French art of mime

  In truth, of course, Mazarin was simply trying to make it look to the outside world as though Charles was an unwelcome guest, and it wasn’t until August 1646 that Charles and his mother were invited by Louis and Anne the regent for a three-day stay at Fontainebleau castle, a royal country residence south of Paris.

  The visit did not get off to a good start. When they arrived at the chateau, Charles disappointed his hosts because he couldn’t speak or understand
a single word of French. Parisians are never pleased when Anglophones are unable to speak their language, but in Charles’s case it was even less excusable – not only had he been living in France for two whole months but his mother was French. Was he stupid, they wondered, or was this a deliberate insult?

  Luckily for Charles, his immense height and royal bearing argued in his favour. ‘His mouth was large and ugly but he had a very fine figure,’ observed one generous French courtier.

  Next day Charles at last had an official audience with Louis XIV, who, it was noted, let his English cousin sit in an armchair. This was judged to be a great compliment, not because it was Louis’s favourite chair, but because very few people on the planet were allowed to park their backsides so close to a French monarch – and not just on some low, stumpy-legged stool, either, but a comfy chair. It was the ultimate accolade, and clearly worth waiting two months for.

  Observers were even more impressed when, at the end of the audience, Louis was seen to accompany his guest as far as the staircase. This was an almost unheard-of honour – most visitors were obliged to reverse out of the room, bowing and scraping, hoping that they didn’t make fools of themselves by backing into a duchess or falling down the stairs.

  The only blot on the diplomatic copybook was that, aside from the niceties of protocol, the audience was a complete farce. Both boys spent the whole half-hour or so in silence, smiling at each other but not saying a word for fear of making grammatical mistakes in a foreign language or not being understood in their own. Even if they had learned ‘bonjour’ and ‘hi’, they weren’t going to risk having their accent laughed at.