1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Initial fighting saw gains for both sides in Holland and Germany, and made Queen Anne of England happy enough to give John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, a dukedom. Meanwhile, the French had identified their most dangerous opponent, and decided that the only way to win was to contain Marlborough’s army in the north while they went to grab Austria with their allies the Bavarians. Marlborough saw the danger and began a forced march south down the Rhine valley into Germany, keeping his tactics so secret that he didn’t even tell his allies where he was going.

  Five days later, he popped up by the Danube. He had covered 250 kilometres, which sounds to us like a none-too-strenuous mountain-biking holiday but gets military historians very excited indeed. Back in the early eighteenth century, such a rapid advance on foot and horseback would usually have decimated an army, with large numbers of soldiers dropping from exhaustion or disease caused by drinking bad water. Marlborough, though, made sure that his troops were constantly fed and watered along the way, so that, according to one of the officers present, ‘the soldiers had nothing to do but pitch their tents, boil their kettles and lie down to rest.’

  The French, on the other hand, had been hampered in their attempts to follow Marlborough because every change in tactics and direction had to be approved by the power-mad King Louis XIV, and Versailles was several days away. Worse, dispatches from abroad could only be read to Louis at certain times of the day, taking second place to the straightening of the royal wig and other more intimate ceremonies.

  On the banks of the Danube, Marlborough met up with Prince Eugene of Savoy, the head of the Austrian army, yet another enemy created by Louis XIV. Eugene was born in Paris to one of Louis’s lovers, and would have served in the French army had the Sun King not rejected him. He subsequently went to Austria and became head of the Habsburg army instead – the very troops who were about to join up with Marlborough and inflict one of France’s greatest military defeats.

  Blenheim: another Agincourt

  The Battle of Blenheim in 1704 was, like that other famous victory over the French, Agincourt, a misnomer. It was actually fought around a village called Blindheim in Bavaria, and in misnaming it, the English annoyed both the French and the Bavarians.

  To non-military eyes, the battle looks very much like just another of those days in history when men were ordered to charge straight at cannons and muskets, with victory coming to the side who showed the most suicidal courage. In this case, some 52,000 Anglo-Austrians were sent against 56,000 Franco-Bavarians who had taken up what they thought were impregnable positions in and around the village of Blindheim, which was set behind marshland and surrounded by protective woodland. And a French general had just sent off a message to King Louis saying that the enemy would never dare attack when Marlborough and Eugene came marching over the horizon at dawn on 13 August 1704.

  The suicidal charges carried on all day, and the battle was finally lost by the French rather than won by the Anglo-Austrians. More exactly, victory was made possible by Marlborough’s ability to spot what the French were doing wrong and exploit the situation instantly. When they packed too many of their troops into the village, he held back his charges and poured withering fire into the buildings, setting many of them alight and scaring the defenders out into the open. When the French commanders disagreed over strategy and left a lightly defended gap in their lines, Marlborough immediately struck at their weak point. In the end, 30,000 French troops were killed – including about 3,000 cavalrymen who drowned when they tried to escape across the fast-flowing Danube – and over 10,000 of Louis XIV’s best infantry were forced to surrender when they were left isolated by their uncoordinated generals.

  This not only removed France’s ally Bavaria from the war also made Marlborough even more famous in France, and he became the hero of a popular song, ‘Marlbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre’ (or ‘Mispronounced Marlborough goes to war’). More importantly, the ditty served as a cruel blow to Louis XIV’s ego. No one dared tell him of the defeat until his mistress, Madame de Maintenon, plucked up the courage to break the terrible news that ‘you are no longer invincible.’

  From here on, the long-drawn-out war progressed with Louis alternately suing for peace and then launching offensives, while Marlborough marched around the continent inflicting one brilliant defeat after another on the French army. He even got to the stage where he could have attacked Paris itself if the political will had been there to let him do so.

  But by now the backlash had set in. Marlborough was like a pop star who has had one too many hit singles, and the British military establishment turned on him, accusing him of corruption and self-aggrandizement. He was dismissed from his command.

  Even so, France had lost the war, and Louis signed the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, in which he recognized the new line of British succession, ceded control of large chunks of French Canada and – far more humiliating – agreed that the Crowns of France and Spain would never be united, even if they were held by the same royal family. Basically what Louis was signing away was his dream of world power.

  The sun goes down on France

  The Sun King died on 1 September 1715, of gangrene due to bad circulation, which his doctors initially diagnosed as sciatica and then tried to treat with smallpox medicine. And although he is remembered today as the glorious Roi Soleil – mainly by people in awe at the size of the Château de Versailles and envious of all his mistresses – at the time it was more a case of ‘bon voyage and don’t come back’. His funeral procession was jeered by a mob as it travelled to the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis Cathedral, just north of Paris. (Though this might just be a local tradition, because a French president going through this northern suburb today, alive or dead, would get the same treatment.)

  On his deathbed, Louis seems to have recognized the error of his ways, telling his five-year-old successor, the future Louis XV, ‘j’ai trop aimé la guerre’ (‘I loved war too much’). Perhaps he was trying to simplify things for the youngster, because even he must have seen that there was a little more to it than that.

  Louis XIV had squandered away all of his country’s wealth on lost wars and a palace as big as a town, encouraged the aristocracy to become foppish layabouts, and over-taxed the commoners who would finally lose their patience and start chopping off privileged heads seventy-four years later. What was more, by mobilizing two of Europe’s most ambitious and daring soldiers – William of Orange and the Duke of Marlborough – Louis had blown France’s chances of spreading its influence right across the continent.

  To add insult to injury, ‘Marlbrouck’ took the wealth he had accrued during his spectacular career and built his own Versailles, a glorious chateau in the English countryside (mis)named after a French defeat: Blenheim Palace. The building is literally a monument to French humiliation, and its entrance features a sculpture of the Duke’s coronet on a cannonball that is crushing a fleur-de-lis, the device on the French monarchy’s coat of arms. And the insults don’t stop there. The palace was built on land donated by the grateful nation, and to this day the Marlboroughs still present the British monarch with an annual symbolic payment in the form of a fleur-de-lis banner.

  In short, the Churchill–Marlborough family home is an eternal reminder of Louis XIV’s historic cock-ups, a three-century-old anti-French joke that is enjoyed by half a million visitors – and the British royals – every year.

  * For the full details of the Secret Treaty of 1672, see Chapter 8.

  † Incidentally, this new Prince Louis of Orange had five daughters, four of whom would go on to be squeezes of King Louis XV.

  * See Chapters 7 and 8 for full details of his recklessness and foppery.

  11

  Voltaire: A Frenchman Who Loved to

  Get France in the Merde

  When it comes to annoying the French with the written word, one man takes the gateau. Not Shakespeare, although he did get in some incisive digs at France in his history plays. Not Winston Churchill, even if his remarks about de
Gaulle during the Second World War were often pretty incendiary. And certainly not the horde of American writers who gave the French a verbal gang-banging in the wake of the Iraq War.

  No, the writer who annoyed the French – or more exactly the French establishment – most efficiently was a Parisian who has been credited with striking the first real blow of the French Revolution.

  He was Voltaire. No first name, just a single nom de plume at a time when the French upper classes had titles as long as their family trees. Anyone who was anyone was called something like Philippe-Maximilien de Thingy de Wotsit, comte de Gubbins et marquis de Howsyourfather, and yet here was a man adopting a two-syllable name that sounded like a newly invented unit of measurement to calculate the amount of electricity in the atmosphere. And during his long life (1694–1778), Voltaire aimed some real bolts of lightning at his country and its snobbish establishment.

  Choose your weapon

  Voltaire’s real name was François-Marie Arouet, but almost no one in France knows that. Mention his pseudonym though, and even someone who has never read him (which is unlikely if they went to a French school, because he’s required reading in class) will know that you’re talking about a man who proved that the pen really can be as mighty as the sword.

  Incidentally, the saying ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ has a French connection – it comes from a play about France called Richelieu, or The Conspiracy, written by one Edward Bulwer-Lytton* and first performed in 1839. The full quotation adds some essential subtlety to the expression – ‘Beneath the rule of men entirely great/The pen is mightier than the sword.’ It’s true – less noble rulers will simply unsheath their sword and decapitate any writer who criticizes them. Which is exactly what worried Voltaire for most of his life.

  He was born into a well-to-do, but non-aristocratic, Parisian family. His father was a government officer in charge of the revenues generated by the spice trade, and sent the young François-Marie to the best schools in the hope that he would follow in Papa’s safe and predictable footsteps. However, the tactic backfired when the future Voltaire became obsessed by the classical literature he was studying, and at the age of seventeen he dropped out and announced that he was going to be an homme de lettres – a writer. At the time, this was roughly the equivalent of saying he was hoping for a career in graffiti painting – hardly anyone made money from literature, and writing anything controversial would get you arrested. Louis XIV had recently died, but it was still an age of an absolute monarchy that thought of itself as divine.

  Papa, of course, blew a fuse, so François-Marie agreed to sign on at law school, and spent his time drinking and wenching with the Paris in-crowd. Being French, this also involved lots of talking, and Voltaire found that he had a real talent for witty remarks and acerbic put-downs. These days, to rise in French society you have to go to a good school and have friends in the right places (or if not friends, at least people interested in your sexual favours). But in the early eighteenth century a sharp tongue could get you a long way, even if you only used it for talking. A well-placed jibe or witty speech would quickly do the rounds of polite society. On the other hand, if you didn’t have a comeback for an insult, you would be a laughing stock, and watching reputations rise and fall was a favourite spectator sport. The young François-Marie Arouet was a skinny, hook-nosed commoner, but he was a skilful exponent of this parlour game, and by the time he was twenty-one he was something of a celebrity in fashionable Paris, with everyone waiting to see what pithy piss-take he was going to come out with next.

  The danger was, however, that you could let your wit run away with you, and in 1716 Voltaire did just that, and was banished from Paris to deepest Corrèze (the provinces, the ultimate punishment) for writing rude poems about the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, uncle of the boy King Louis XV. He was forgiven after a few months, and returned to the capital, only to repeat his offence and get himself thrown into the Bastille for almost a year.

  This seems to have brought him to his senses, and on his release he changed his name to Voltaire and put his witty pen to more profitable use, writing plays and epic poems that immediately brought him fame if not fortune.

  His fame, though, caused his downfall. The son of a civil servant mixing with the high and mighty? The man who had insulted the regent lording it over polite Paris society? It was too much for the snobs to bear.

  With French friends like these …

  Accounts vary as to exactly how Voltaire’s demise came about. The most convincing version sets the story at a dinner with Voltaire’s friend, the duc de Sully. (This duke was a descendant of King Henri IV’s famous right-hand man of the same name.)

  Amongst the dinner guests that night was a dandy from one of France’s oldest aristocratic families, Guy-Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, chevalier de Rohan, comte de Chabot (yes, that is just one person), who was hated by practically everyone, even his friends. He was arrogant, dull (one commentator neatly describes him as ‘a lord among wits, but never a wit amongst lords’) and known to be a crooked moneylender. He only seems to have been invited to the party because he was a cousin of the Duke.

  The conversation over dinner was cut and thrust, with Voltaire at his rapier-like best. But when he dared to contradict the chevalier, the affronted aristocrat turned to the Duke and asked pointedly, ‘Who is this young man that speaks to me so loudly?’

  Quick as a flash, Voltaire replied for himself, ‘He is a man who does not drag a great name about with him, but who honours the name he bears.’ The other guests must have held their breath in anticipation of a fight. Behind the elegant phrasing, this was a vicious putdown. A modern equivalent might be something like: ‘Hey, loan shark, you think you’re better than me just because all your ancestors married their brothers and sisters?’

  As soon as he’d worked out the insult, the chevalier stormed off. Instead of being affronted by the anti-aristocratic remark, though, the duc de Sully thanked Voltaire for getting rid of the boring snob. The incident seemed to be over.

  However, a week later, at another dinner chez the Duke, the meal was interrupted by a messenger saying that someone wanted to talk to Voltaire outside ‘about doing a good deed’. Voltaire went down to find a carriage waiting in the street. A voice called him over, and as soon as he put his foot on the step, three men sprang from nowhere and grabbed him. Two of them held his arms while the other started hitting him with a cane. A few thwacks later, the voice, now clearly recognizable as the chevalier de Rohan, called out, ‘Enough!’ and the carriage drove off.

  Voltaire was shocked more than hurt, but decided that he was not going to take the affront lying down – or even standing up. He went back indoors and told everyone what had happened, and asked for volunteers to come and make a formal complaint.

  But it was now that Voltaire found out where he really stood in Parisian society. He had been friends (or so he thought) with the duc de Sully for six years, he had been entertained as an honoured guest in all the best houses in Paris, and now he couldn’t find anyone willing to bear witness against the chevalier. It was OK for a commoner to make jokes about the establishment, but he wasn’t allowed to question its ultimate authority.

  Voltaire decided to go it alone. He found himself a fencing teacher, and as soon as he was good enough to take on a toff, he challenged the chevalier to a duel. The aristocrat accepted, but ran straight home to his family to report Voltaire for breaking the law that forbade commoners challenging noblemen. The Rohans immediately went to see the Prime Minister, who signed a lettre de cachet, an order that could be obtained by aristocrats to imprison anyone who was bothering them. So when Voltaire turned up to the duel, the police were waiting for him, and he was dragged off to the Bastille again. Although he stayed there for just a month this time, he was only released on condition that he promise to leave France and not return without the King’s permission.

  The haven he chose was England.

  Revolutionary French letters

  Af
ter his novel Candide, Voltaire’s most famous work is a hymn in praise of the traditional enemy across the Channel, a book so controversial that its title was changed to lessen the scandal. It is usually known as Lettres philosophiques, but when Voltaire published it in 1734 he wanted to call it Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglois* et autres sujets (Letters Written from London on the English and Other Subjects).

  Voltaire wrote most of the Lettres between 1726 and 1729 during his English exile, which seems to have been the most eye-opening experience of his life (except, presumably, his initiation into the debauched ways of his high-society friends when he was a student).

  Voltaire was not your average political refugee. He didn’t have to queue for days in government offices begging for a visa and a work permit. He was strapped for cash, but he was a well-known writer and had letters of recommendation from a few loyal friends in Paris that ensured him a soft landing in London. His only major problem seems to have been getting used to the local sense of humour. Instead of being subtly witty, Londoners talked surreal nonsense. He was horrified, for example, to discover that they had been joking when they told him that you should never ask an Englishman a favour if the wind is blowing from the east.