1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Back in France, though, Law’s guile and self-confidence were still keeping things afloat. He merged the Compagnie and the Banque, got himself appointed France’s Contrôleur général des finances in January 1720, and even arranged to lend the state over a billion livres – all of it in his own paper money. In just three months, the shares in his new company rose from 500 livres to a staggering 20,000 livres – a 4,000 per cent increase, which was a pretty competitive rate of earnings by any standards.

  At this point, some canny shareholders said that they would like to cash in their investment, s’il vous plaît, and began to sell. Others asked to exchange their pretty Banque Royale banknotes for lumps of more solid precious metal – as was their right – only to discover that the Banque had a billion livres’ worth of notes in circulation and a mere 330 million in gold and silver.

  The whole system sank as quickly as a supply ship stuck in the Mississippi mud, and took everyone down with it. Well, nearly everyone – Law, the captain, fled to Venice in December 1720, abandoning France to its fate. He had persuaded an estimated one million French families to buy shares in his various companies, and all of them were left with worthless bits of paper. The same went for anyone with his banknotes in their safes or mattresses. ‘Last January I had 60,000 livres in paper money,’ a French lawyer wrote in 1721. ‘Now I haven’t even got enough to give my servants their Christmas box.’ Which shows how hard it was hitting.

  Britain catches the French disease

  The comic thing was that, while John Law’s Mississippi Bubble was bursting, the Brits decided to inflate their own South Sea Bubble. It was almost as if they wanted to outdo France’s insanity.

  The South Sea Company had been making money for a decade or so out of slave trading with South America (the name ‘South Seas’ referred to the Spanish-controlled part of the Atlantic), and had been promising exaggerated profits but bankrupting no one until early 1720. Then, just as Law’s system was heading for the toilet, an investment frenzy took off, with corrupt English politicians accepting shares in return for speeches about how the South Sea Company was on the verge of making a fortune from Peruvian gold, and similar Lawesque nonsense. The share price rose from £120 to about £1,000 – an absurd increase, although a modest one compared to France’s 4,000 per cent.

  At the same time, a whole multitude of copycat schemes sprang up, with British companies promising to do things like develop perpetual motion and insure people against damage caused by their servants. There were companies to ‘improve the art of making soap’, to ‘trade in hair’, and, most notoriously, for ‘carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’. The director of that particular start-up offered 5,000 shares at £100 each, with a guaranteed dividend of £100 per annum per share. All he was asking at the outset was a £2 deposit per share. He opened his office door in London one morning at 9 a.m. to find a crowd waiting. By 3 p.m., he had taken 1,000 deposits, and at 3.01 p.m. precisely he disappeared, never to be heard of again, having made £2,000 profit (minus a day’s office rental and some printing) in six hours – this at a time when a skilled tradesman might make £200 a year.

  The scenario was repeated, with only slightly less dishonesty, a hundred times in London. Shares were issued in the morning, a stock-crazy public would meet their brokers in coffee houses to buy them, the company directors would sell immediately to grab their profit, and the company would fold overnight. It was total madness, and one asks oneself why people were gullible enough to keep offering themselves up like pigs knocking on the wolf’s front door. (Though the answer to that question is, of course, quite simple: as the recent collapse of the Madoff ‘investment’ scheme has shown, we human beings have an almost limitless talent for gullibility as soon as someone promises us unrealistic returns on our investments.)

  When the British bubble inevitably burst, many investors were ruined and a gaggle of top politicians lost their jobs. A certain Lord Molesworth asked Parliament to vote on a motion that the ‘contrivers and executors of the villainous South Sea scheme’, who had started all the trouble, should be ‘tied in sacks and thrown into the Thames’. The newly appointed First Lord of the Treasury, Robert Walpole, wryly replied that they should make good the losses first, and the South Sea Company’s directors had their assets confiscated. The damage was severe, and confidence in the government was virtually destroyed, but – vitally – the crisis hadn’t dented Britain’s faith in empire-building. Amazingly, the Company itself was restructured and survived until the 1850s.

  John Law wasn’t so lucky. He didn’t get thrown in the river, but he suffered a similar fate, dying in Venice in 1729 after contracting pneumonia while out on a gondola. He was not mourned much on either side of the Atlantic, because the damage he inflicted had bitten deep. He had not only lured France into bankruptcy but had also done irreparable damage to the Louisiane brand.

  Ironically, the only people who didn’t realize this were a few poor French colonists trying to live there.

  Way down in New Orleans

  In 1721, a year after John Law’s corrupt scheme had collapsed, construction work began on a new settlement on the banks of the Mississippi. It was going to be called Nouvelle-Orléans in honour of the regent, the duc d’Orléans, and the settlers had decided that they wanted something a little grander than the usual palisade-around-a-hut arrangement. Accordingly, an engineer called Adrien de Pauger had been commissioned to build a real town on a strict grid system, with six blocks by eleven of building plots.

  Right from the start, though, de Pauger hit problems. Not because of the financial hurricane that was sweeping France, but because the settlers seemed incapable of sticking to his neat grid plan – they kept trying to build houses at the wrong angles and in the middle of his projected streets. This drove the short-tempered de Pauger to distraction, and he began to get into fights with the French colonists, some of whom were whinging that he was building the town in completely the wrong place and ought to move it further downstream.

  Amazingly, though, the town gradually grew according to de Pauger’s grid system, and a new style of architecture developed with it: French colonial, with its elegant wooden façades and classical columns. De Pauger also built the first levee to protect the town against the unpredictable waters of the Mississippi. He didn’t do it all himself, of course – it took 4,231 man days of slave labour to finish.

  When Nouvelle-Orléans was officially named the capital of Louisiane in 1723, it looked as though the colony might actually pull itself out of the political and financial mire. Until, that is, the French shot themselves in the foot yet again. With, it should be said, a little help from the Brits.

  At this time, French colonists in America enjoyed good relations with some of the biggest and most powerful Native American peoples like the Iroquois and the Hurons, whom they had persuaded to fight against the English. The small French settlements of Fort Rosalie and Fort Arkansas on the eastern bank of the Mississippi depended for their survival on the goodwill of the Natchez people. The Natchez had developed a highly complex agricultural society, and lived not in one big tepee village as Europeans might imagine, but spread out in family farms, with a territorial capital built on a large ceremonial mound. They made excellent cloth and pottery, had a well-defined class system, and enjoyed inter-tribal lacrosse tournaments. All in all, they were a lot more civilized than most of the European settlers in the area, and had even helped to build Fort Rosalie by supplying much of the timber.

  British agents provocateurs (ironic that the name should be French) were constantly trying to spoil this cosy relationship, and some of them had been getting at the Natchez, warning them what would happen if France got too strong a foothold on their land – yes, those grassy lacrosse pitches would get covered in gravel and used for pétanque. And one day in 1729, the commander of the French garrison at Rosalie confirmed the Brits’ propaganda by building his house on the site of a Natchez farm.

  The Natchez duly
attacked Fort Rosalie, massacring 60 slaves and 183 French (mainly male) settlers and taking the women prisoner. The French army was quick to react, and came marching into Natchez territory to exact revenge. A first expedition recovered 50 French women and 100 slaves. A second incursion was pure genocide: all but 1,500 or so of the 6,000 Natchez were slaughtered. Of the survivors, 500 were sent to the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue as slaves, and the rest managed to escape and were taken in as refugees by other peoples such as the Creeks, Cherokees and Chickasaws.

  As stories of the genocide spread, previously neutral Native Americans turned against France. In 1736, the Chickasaws began preparing for war, urged on by the surviving Natchez. The French got wind of this, and sent two small armies into Chickasaw territory. The first, consisting of 400-odd men, was attacked and burnt alive. The second was beaten back and retreated to the coast.

  And the fighting had far-reaching consequences beyond the immediate ethnic cleansing of the Natchez territory. King Louis XV declared the whole of Louisiane a free-trade zone, undermining Nouvelle-Orléans’s status as an obligatory stop-off for goods coming in and out of the region. And the newly created town’s situation was made even more precarious because its customers – the French settlers – took fright and began moving away en masse.

  Thanks to an ill-advised French housebuilding project and some British troublemaking, France had lost its hold on a huge swathe of eastern Louisiane.

  And a cow was about to evict them from the rest.

  A tale of two Georges

  In 1752, a certain twenty-year-old man took an oath of allegiance to his monarch, England’s King George II, and was made an army officer. The young soldier served the British Governor of Virginia reliably, and soon his reputation was so good that he was chosen to lead a vital mission against the French.

  This stalwart English patriot’s name was George Washington. Yes, the George Washington, the first President of the USA. Americans tend to blur everything in his biography between the chopping down of his father’s cherry tree and his part in the anti-British revolution, but a snapshot of him in the early 1750s would probably have shown him singing ‘God Save the King’ (which was a recent hit, having first been published in 1744) while saluting the Union Jack (which had been officially adopted as the Great British flag in 1707).

  Washington, the son of a planter and slave-owner, had begun his working life at sixteen, surveying land for a distant relative of his, Lord Fairfax, the only English hereditary peer living in North America and a fierce Loyalist who would remain pro-British even after the Revolutionary War. Now young George was going to be given a much more political job.

  Throughout 1752 and 1753, the Governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, was becoming increasingly concerned about French fort-building along the Ohio River, to the west of his colony. This was an area claimed by France as part of Louisiane, but it was also in the territory that the newly formed Ohio Company had appropriated for itself with a view to fur-trading. Governor Dinwiddie happened to be a shareholder in the company, so he gave the young Washington, who was a major in the Virginia militia (Britain’s local civilian army), a mission – to go and tell the French to get out of Ohio, or else.

  Washington took an ultimatum to Fort Le Boeuf in Pennsylvania, which he found to be a well-built outpost equipped with several cannons and manned by an experienced French-Canadian officer and a hundred men. The French, Washington reported, looked as though they intended to stick around.

  The news worried Dinwiddie, who wasn’t surprised when his ultimatum was ignored and the fort-building went on. But when he heard that the French were establishing a settlement on the site of a former British fort and calling it Fort Duquesne in honour of the Governor of Nouvelle-France, he decided the provocation had gone far enough. He promoted Washington to lieutenant colonel and sent him out to deliver another eviction notice to the French trespassers. Washington did as he was told; being a polite planter’s son, he asked them to leave. Being French soldiers, they refused.

  What happened next is rather controversial, and is often glossed over when the future First President’s life is discussed.*

  According to the French, when Washington saw that Fort Duquesne wasn’t going to be dismantled, he decided to build a base for himself, which he diplomatically opted to call Fort Necessity (as in ‘don’t blame us, Messieurs les Français, you’re making us do this’). Fort Duquesne’s commander wasn’t going to let this happen without a fight, so he sent forty or fifty of his men to warn the British off.

  The raiding party was led by an officer called Jumonville (his name was much, much longer, but we won’t interrupt the suspense by going into that here), who began roaming around threatening violence to any English-speakers he could find. One of his victims was a farmer called Christopher Gist, who arrived in Washington’s camp during the night of 23 May 1754, complaining that some French soldiers had burst into his cabin and told him that if he didn’t leave the area, they would kill his cow.

  Yes, an Englishman’s milker was in danger of being turned into French steak-frites. Clearly, the British had no option but to declare war. Guided by a Native American called Tanacharison (who could relate to the cow because he claimed that the French had boiled and eaten his father), Washington immediately went out and found Jumonville’s raiding party encamped amongst the trees in a rather attractive rocky glade. About forty Virginians and twelve of Tanacharison’s men encircled the camp, and at dawn on 24 May 1754, Washington gave the order to fire. A few minutes later, a dozen Frenchmen lay dead and twenty-three were captured, including their wounded leader, Jumonville.

  The battle was won and fighting had officially stopped, but Tanacharison, perhaps deciding that Jumonville looked like the man who had cooked his father, stepped up and bludgeoned the poor Frenchman with his tomahawk, before washing his hands in his victim’s brains.

  As an officer and a gentleman, Washington probably disapproved of this kind of behaviour, but these were violent times – after all, his men had just ambushed a dozen sleeping Frenchmen to stop them committing some serious animal abuse. So, not letting his conscience get in the way of his mission, Washington went ahead and built Fort Necessity.

  It was a grand name for a spindly construction consisting of one hut surrounded by a ring of two-metre high logs, and therefore stood no chance of resisting the 700 Frenchmen who came looking for vengeance.

  They were led by Jumonville’s brother, Louis de Villiers (his full handle was much longer, but he did have one name in common with his sibling), who began to riddle Fort Necessity with French musket balls. It seemed likely that Washington would soon have to capitulate or be turned into Gruyère, but de Villiers was impatient to see justice done, and sent over a message threatening that if the Brits didn’t surrender, the pro-French Native Americans would scalp any survivors.

  While George was mulling this over, a group of Virginians took advantage of the lull to break out the garrison’s rum ration and get roaring drunk. This, plus the pouring rain that was dampening the British gunpowder, convinced Washington to accept the French proposal. He and his men would abandon their fort and march back to Virginia.

  First, however, de Villiers gave Washington a document to sign. George, being a typical Brit of the time, couldn’t read French, but signed it anyway. What did a piece of enemy paper matter? They were out in the apparently infinite forests of Ohio, where de Villiers was (according to the Brits, anyway) an illegal alien, so his supposedly legal document was worthless.

  Unfortunately, what the document said was that he, George Washington, admitted full responsibility for the murder of Jumonville. Yes, according to the French legal profession, the kindly-looking white-haired Father of the Nation was a confessed murderer.

  On 4 July, a date that would later be associated with the signature of a less incriminating document, Washington marched his men out of the fort, trying his best to ignore the taunts of the triumphant Frenchmen and Native Americans who grabbed guns
and supplies from the retreating soldiers. It was, American historians are keen to point out, Washington’s only military defeat.

  His confession, meanwhile, was published and used as proof that the British were a brutal race of cold-blooded killers, although as we saw with the slaughter of the Natchez, this was one monopoly that British colonists couldn’t claim. And there were, after all, mitigating circumstances in Washington’s case, because everything he did was for a noble cause: the defence of an innocent cow.

  Scalps should be rinsed before use

  By 1756, France and Britain were formally at war rather than just fighting each other. Then, as now, there was a technical difference between the two. In fact, rather like a playground football match, the Seven Years War (it wasn’t yet called that, of course) was only declared once a respectable array of players had been assembled. After some jostling, the two sides were Britain and Prussia against Austria, Spain and France. At stake, as usual, was who would be the most powerful nation in Europe.

  At first, things went rather well for the French, especially outside America. In April 1756, a huge invasion force of ships and soldiers invaded the British-held island of Menorca. An inadequate British rescue force was sent down to relieve Mahon, the island’s capital, but failed to do so – it hardly even engaged the enemy. France celebrated by inventing a new sauce, la mahonnaise, designed specifically to be too complicated for English chefs to make properly.

  Britain sulked so much that the admiral sent to save the Mahon garrison, Sir John Byng, was court-martialled for ‘not doing his utmost’ and shot. His was the execution that so shocked Voltaire that he described the incident in his novel Candide.

  Even more British outrage was caused in August 1757 when 6,000 Frenchmen and 2,000 Native Americans attacked Britain’s Fort William Henry in upstate New York, which was defended by about 2,200 British regular soldiers and colonial militiamen. As they had done with Washington at Fort Necessity, the French got some shooting and bombarding out of their system and then offered the Brits the chance to surrender.