1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Voltaire experienced a bit of anti-French hostility, which was only natural given that the two countries had just emerged from a long series of wars, but he was cushioned from this by being accepted into a literary crowd that respected him for his work. He was good friends with writers who, like him, enjoyed taking a swipe at the establishment: Alexander Pope, the poet famous for his satirical work The Rape of the Lock, a mock epic about a lord who steals a lock of a society girl’s hair, and Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver’s Travels is of course not a children’s story about miniature people tying up a giant but a vicious satire on human self-importance.

  Voltaire’s closest friend, though, was a merchant called Everard Falkener, a common-born businessman who was afforded a million times more respect in London than he would ever have received in Paris. Falkener, who would later become Britain’s ambassador to Turkey, was the living proof to Voltaire that French society was stuck in the past, and that it was possible to end its dictatorship of snobbery and hereditary privilege.

  The businessman also inspired the writer to indulge in a little private enterprise, and Voltaire got his influential friends to find subscribers for a special edition of one of his plays, the Henriade, about King Henri IV. To Swift he wrote ‘the subscription is only one guinea, payable in advance’ – his English was coming on fast – and the scheme was a huge success, making Voltaire a highly respectable profit of £2,000.

  Like many more recent immigrants to London (at least before the 2008 credit crunch), he decided that this was the land of opportunity, and started to write a book about the place. The result, Lettres écrites de Londres, etc., is a kind of love letter, a gush of almost unquestioning admiration for Britain’s political and religious freedoms, and for its attitude to the arts, business and science. He even liked its aristocrats, who were much less snobbish than their French counterparts. Yes, an eighteenth-century English lord as a model of democracy – it gives you an idea how bad things must have been in Paris.

  As the book’s title suggests, it is in the form of letters from London to a French friend, but it goes way beyond the scope of ‘wish you were ici’.

  Voltaire starts out with a subject close to his heart – religious freedom – and writes: ‘An Englishman is free, and takes whichever path he chooses to heaven.’ This was at a time when it was practically illegal in France to be anything but Catholic. He also aims barbed remarks at the supposedly chaste French clergy, many of whom preached strict morality while living a life of Parisian debauchery: ‘The priests here [in England] are almost all married. And the awkward manners they acquired at university, coupled with their limited contact with women, means that most bishops make do with their own wife.’

  He goes on to whinge about France’s treatment of its writers and thinkers. We call ourselves an intellectual country, he says, but look at the difference between the French philosopher Descartes and the Englishman Isaac Newton (whose magnificent state funeral Voltaire attended in 1727):

  He [Descartes] had to leave France because he was looking for the truth … and died prematurely in Stockholm, of a bad diet, surrounded by his scientific enemies and treated by a doctor who hated him … Newton lived for eighty-five years, peacefully, happily, honoured in his homeland. His luck was to be born in a free country, so that the world could be his student and not his enemy.

  This is provocative enough, but Voltaire goes still further and strikes at the root of France’s problems – the monarchy:

  England is the only nation on Earth that has managed to limit the power of kings by resisting them, and has finally established a wise system of government in which the ruler is all-powerful when it comes to doing good, and has his hands tied if he attempts to do evil.

  So far, Voltaire had written rude poems about the regent and challenged a chevalier to a duel; this, though, was revolution.

  The book came out after Voltaire’s return to Paris, and struck France like a thunderclap. Voltaire knew it would, so he published it anonymously and was able to deny any knowledge of its authorship when his apartment was ransacked by the authorities. Copies of the book were burnt, and Voltaire himself would not have fared much better if there had been any hard proof against him.

  The scandal ensured that the book was a bestseller. Then, as now, the French loved books that undermine authority, and this one scythed at all the pillars of their establishment. Copies were sold as fast as they could be imported (editions came in from England and Switzerland), and it is said that even people who could barely read wanted to own the book just for the thrill of it.

  There was no conclusive evidence against him, but everyone knew who had really written the Lettres, and Voltaire had to rely on influential friends to make sure that the sword of authority did not come down and cut off his pen in its prime. He moved to the northeastern corner of France to live with his mistress (and her very understanding husband), then to the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia in Potsdam, and finally to Geneva and a chateau on the Swiss border. An attempt to return to Paris was met with an order of banishment by Louis XV himself.

  At last, in 1778, after Louis XVI had come to the throne, the 83-year-old Voltaire was allowed home. Social change was in the air, and at a performance of one of his plays, he was hailed by an admiring crowd as a returning hero. He died soon afterwards, apparently telling the priest who was urging him to renounce his free-thinking ways and make his peace with God, ‘Now is not the time to be making new enemies.’

  Merde in England

  The Lettres écrites de Londres … caused trouble in more than one way. As well as igniting a revolutionary flame in French minds, Voltaire also made everything English – clothes, literature, art, card games, even swearing – incredibly fashionable. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a Parisian nobleman called Count Lauraguais wrote a letter to an Englishman saying:

  We are all metamorphosed into English. Our dandies, who formerly were dressed, painted and perfumed like dolls at ten in the morning, now ride in the environs of Paris in a plain shirt and frock [coat] like English jockeys. Our delicate ladies, who never ventured to stir out in the morning, run all over Paris in the genteel and loose dress of milkmaids. We hunt, swear and determine all disputes with bets, like your nobility.

  This fashion also encouraged the French to cross the Channel and see the Anglois for themselves, even though war-free years were few and far between. From 1756 to 1763, for example, the two nations were embroiled in the Seven Years War, which involved vicious land and sea battles right across the globe. Voltaire famously depicted English brutality in Candide. The hero arrives in Portsmouth to see an admiral, blindfolded and on his knees, being shot by a firing squad that puts twelve bullets into his skull ‘as calmly as you like’. He asks what is going on, and is told that the English admiral is being executed for ‘not killing enough people’ during a battle against the French, and that in England, it is considered wise to kill an admiral occasionally ‘to encourage the others’. Candide refuses to land in such a violent country. Voltaire was clearly shocked by this episode, but seems to be criticizing the war itself (which was a shared Anglo-French responsibility), and warmongering in general, more than the English as a whole. And this doesn’t seem to have discouraged French travellers from popping over to London.

  When they arrived, however, they often got a shock. Voltaire may have been able to bury the hatchet and learn to love his enemies (one of his harshest criticisms was that Oxford professors spoke Latin with a terrible English accent), but the Brits were not so forgiving. And even though some French people dressed à l’anglaise, many of them still paraded about in London in their foppish Parisian fashions, which made them stand out like ballerinas in a rugby team.

  A poet called Anne-Marie du Bocage, who made a name for herself with her French adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, went over to London in the 1760s and was horrified by how unrefined it all was. ‘Their so-called palaces would be no more than large houses in Paris,’ she wrote, and �
��their bedrooms have almost no armchairs.’

  She was even more upset when she went to the theatre. ‘One of their favourite stage characters is a ridiculous Frenchman. With his face powder, his snuffbox, his watch, his box of beauty spots always at the ready and his endless bowing, he seems terribly caricatured. But then gradually we realize it is all too lifelike.’

  Londoners could smell a scented Parisian coming half a mile away, and had plenty of time to plan a hearty welcome. One French traveller called Pierre-Jean Grosley reports in his book Londres, published in 1770, that even though he tried to avoid dressing like a Parisian dandy, ‘at every street corner, my French appearance called forth a shower of insults through which I slipped, thanking God that I didn’t understand English.’

  During a stroll by the Thames, ‘twenty boatmen stopped work, lined up and assailed me with every horror in the English language’ (Grosley knew this because an English friend was kind enough to translate). He also describes a Frenchman who is flattered that a small crowd seems to follow him everywhere he goes, only to be told by his interpreter, ‘They’re making fun of you.’

  And it was not just the over-perfumed upper classes who fell victim to anti-French prejudices. Grosley’s manservant was walking down Oxford Street after watching a public hanging when he was picked on by a mob, and was lucky to be rescued by three deserters from the French army who had been drinking in a nearby pub and came to see what the bilingual shouting was about.

  Grosley is perturbed by all this verbal and physical abuse, and devotes a whole section of his book to possible reasons for it; at least if you understand why you’re being insulted, he tells his French readers, it might make the experience less painful. He gives a long list of wars and religious disagreements, and says that Londoners probably get tired of loud Parisian aristocrats throwing their money about. By contrast, London is ‘currently the refuge for every bankrupt man in France’ and these spongers get on people’s nerves by begging for money.

  But Grosley concludes his section on ‘why they hate us’ by advising his readers not to judge Londoners too hastily. They aren’t always being deliberately impolite, he says. It’s not just because you’re French that ‘they elbow you off the pavement and push you into the mud – it is because the English are very punctual, and are therefore in a hurry to get to their appointments on time’.

  Either this was a masterful piece of Voltairesque irony or one of Grosley’s London friends had been teking ze pisse. In any case, it shows that the wars against France had spread far beyond the battlefield.

  In the eighteenth century, French tourists might have been able to forget the constant wars and fall in love with Britain (or Voltaire’s idea of it, anyway), but the average Londoner liked nothing better than to take a pot-shot at every perfumed Frenchman who strayed within smelling distance. If it was a love– hate relationship, the hate was all being aimed France’s way.

  * Bulwer-Lytton is also credited with coining the phrase ‘the great unwashed’. In fact, though, he used ‘the unwashed’ to describe the Parisian poor.

  * Yes, that does say Anglois and not Anglais. At the time, ‘ais’ was often written ‘ois’. This is why the French have the first name François, which simply means Frenchman, and why in English we speak of being a connoisseur, a word adopted from French before they changed the spelling to ‘ais’. In French, a connoisseur is un connaisseur.

  12

  Why Isn’t America Called L’Amérique?

  There is a small part of every French brain that never stops throbbing.

  This is not the section given over to sex, which the French actually find quite easy to forget – when they are discussing food, illness or workers’ rights, for example. Neither is it a colony of bacteria that entered their skull hidden in a particularly lively cheese.

  No, these are the brain cells devoted to the idea that Barack Obama ought to be French. That when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, he should have talked about ‘un bond de géant pour l’humanité’ rather than a ‘giant leap for mankind’. And that instead of getting hooked on a global brand of hamburger, the world really should be tucking into takeaway boeuf bourgignon. OK, the sauce would dribble everywhere, but a French engineer would invent an ingenious device to collect it.

  In short, what the throbbing neurons keep repeating is that America really ought to be a French département like the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

  The response to this suggestion is quite obvious, and involves asking why English words like debacle, disaster, calamity and defeat were all originally borrowed from French.* The sad fact is that France had its chance in America and blew it. Not just once, but at every step of the way, over at least a century of screw-ups. (Or should one say faux pas?)

  France’s policy in North America was to hem in British colonists on the coast and then push them into the Atlantic. And it could have worked, if the French themselves hadn’t made such a dog’s petit déjeuner of it.

  This is because, at one point, the French had a master plan for colonizing not just Canada but the whole of North America and, as we’ll see, they really could have pulled it off. But they lost or sold it all, except for a couple of islands and some street names in New Orleans.

  The French would counter this insolence by saying, Oui, mais you Brits lost even more than that, because North America was your colony until you were unceremoniously ejected from it by revolutionaries who, to add insult to injury, threw a cargo of your precious English tea into Boston Harbour. Touché!

  Oui, mais in terms of square kilometres alone, this is inaccurate, because Britain only ever possessed colonies on a relatively thin band of the eastern seaboard.

  And more importantly, in most British brains the throbbing neurons just aren’t there. (Well, not because of America anyway – there are plenty of other gripes that get our brains aching.) We Brits feel no resentment about ‘losing’ our American colonies. We’re quite fond of independent Americans, and see them as distant cousins who can’t spell our language properly. We’ve cooperated with America pretty amicably on projects like liberating Europe and inventing pop music. And we have no desire whatsoever to try and govern Texans.

  To this day, though, the French still fret about the USA as the one that got away – the dead cert who said he or she was nipping to the loo and slipped out of the back door of the restaurant; the unknown actor who left France and then became world famous. It drives their subconscious mad, and is the main reason why they constantly moan about French not being the universal language.

  And the tragi-comic thing is that their downfall was caused by some French soldiers who threatened violence on an unarmed Anglo-American cow …

  France takes a walk on the wild side

  Today, the average French man or woman doesn’t know how much they lost. They are vaguely aware that they held on to Louisiana for a while after American independence, and one of their few criticisms of Napoleon Bonaparte is that he sold that last little corner of the Southern USA to the English-speakers.

  But what they don’t generally realize is that Louisiana was originally much, much more than a little corner. At its outset, the French territory of Louisiane, named to flatter Louis XIV, was immense, and covered practically a third of the present USA, an area as big as the whole of Europe, an expanse of unexplored land stretching from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico, from Illinois halfway to the Pacific.

  Louisiane was conceived as a barrier against the Brits or the Spanish exploring the west, and was also an attempt to encircle the non-French colonies on the Atlantic coast, from New England down to Spanish Florida, and – pourquoi pas? – shove them into the ocean and claim the whole North American continent for France. It was a daring plan – and it could have worked.

  It all started much like a Molière play, with a defrocked priest in a curly wig. René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle was a Norman merchant’s son who had studied to become a Jesuit priest but dropped out because of what he
described as his ‘moral infirmities’. Seeking his more worldly fortune, he left France for Canada in the mid-1660s and was soon to be found wandering the rivers and lakes, looking for a quick route to China. He was so obsessed with this idea that when he obtained some land near Montreal, the other settlers jokingly started calling it ‘la Chine’.

  La Salle didn’t let jokes discourage him, though, and joined forces with an Italian banker’s son called Tonti, a formidable man who had had a hand blown off by a grenade, and had replaced it with an iron fist that he would often use as a club.

  On New Year’s Day 1682, La Salle and Tonti wrapped up warm and set off from the Fort des Miamis, on the southwest coast of Lake Michigan near present-day Chicago, to find China.

  These frontier ‘forts’ were often little more than a large log cabin surrounded by a wooden palisade, the idea being to convince unfriendly Native Americans that it would be dangerous to attack them. The Native Americans were courageous fighters, but saw no sense in suicide – as one Jesuit priest remarked, ‘They fight to kill, not to be killed.’ Even so, when La Salle walked out of that tiny fort, he knew that he was leaving behind his last protection on this part of the planet, and entering an untamed wilderness – which was one of the reasons why, as well as twenty-two armed Frenchmen and eighteen Native Americans, he took along a priest. He thought he might need a little help from a friend higher up.

  The party began to trudge slowly south through thick snow and, on 6 February, they found the Mississippi. Its waters were freezing cold because their source was 400 kilometres further north, but the river was wide and fast-flowing, and looked navigable.

  La Salle’s party therefore built some rafts, climbed on board, and didn’t stop floating until they hit the Gulf of Mexico, a good thousand or so kilometres south. To be fair, La Salle probably realized right then that, given the lack of Buddhist temples, the river didn’t lead to China, but the trip took them through fertile-looking country that wasn’t neck-deep in snow – a very novel thing for French explorers used to travelling in Canada.