1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  The French leader, Montcalm, promised that the defeated troops and all their civilian camp followers could leave unmolested. So it came as some surprise when the departing Brits were leapt upon by the pro-French Native Americans. Men, women and children were slaughtered, while guns and scalps were snatched as trophies. Apparently the warriors had been under the impression that they were going to be able to do some killing and looting, and didn’t agree with the generous surrender terms.

  Estimates vary, but it is likely that almost 200 people died before Montcalm was able to live up to his name and calm his bloodthirsty allies. No one ever asked him to sign a confession admitting to mass murder, but history has been much less kind to him than to Washington, because in 1826 the events at Fort William Henry were immortalized in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans, which tells the story of an attempt by two Native Americans to save the British commander’s daughters.

  History took more immediate revenge, too – after the massacre, some Native Americans returned to the scene of their crime and dug up the bodies, hoping to get more scalps. What they actually got was smallpox, which they passed on, starting a raging epidemic that caused countless deaths amongst the French and their allies. And one of the victims may well have been Washington’s accuser, Louis de Villiers, who died in Quebec of smallpox in 1757.

  Gifting America to the Brits

  Officially, the Seven Years War lived up to its name, and lasted until 1763, but in practice it was pretty well over after only three years. By this time, France had lost Quebec and a largely unsung English naval hero called Sir Edward Hawke had done so much damage to French shipping that France had almost no way of transporting soldiers and supplies across the Atlantic. Paris therefore began to put out feelers for a negotiated end to the war in late 1759.

  Naturally, the French didn’t admit this to everyone, which was why one poor Breton was still wasting his energy trying to make a go of Louisiane.

  As governor of the territory, Louis Billouart, chevalier de Kerlerec, was doing his best to bring order to total chaos. Everyone in Nouvelle-Orléans seemed to be arguing with everyone else – the military with the merchants, the clergy with the lay people, the Jesuits with rival religious groups – and when the penniless Acadien refugees started to pour in after having been expelled from Canada, they became a whole new source of expense and argument.

  Kerlerec feared that the Brits could just stroll in and take Nouvelle-Orléans whenever they wanted, so he had a wooden palisade built around the town and moored an old ship in the Mississippi so that it could be sunk to block a British invasion fleet. He also asked Paris and Canada for more troops, but these requests were ignored. He was on his own.

  Kerlerec’s only choice was to try and convince the Native Americans that the French weren’t all like the troops who had massacred the Natchez. And at first he was successful, persuading the Cherokees to help him defend Nouvelle-Orléans if the Brits came calling.

  In the event, though, he didn’t need to call on the Native Americans, because, as the French historian Henri Blet puts it, Nouvelle-Orléans ‘wasn’t attacked. It had to defend itself against itself.’ In other words, France was perfectly capable of losing colonies without help from the Anglais.

  Kerlerec’s problem was that he was a rather stuffy naval officer in charge of a vast area populated by trappers, fur merchants and slave-owners – people who were perpetually living on the verge of bankruptcy and violent death, and therefore given to bouts of dishonesty and corruption. The only bribes that Kerlerec willingly paid were sweeteners for the Native Americans. The chiefs had to stay pro-French, and to ensure this, regular gift presentation ceremonies were held. The Governor would invite tribal representatives to a great banquet, during which he would formally hand over large quantities of gunpowder, bullets, billhooks, axes and red paint (the Native Americans loved to decorate themselves and their villages in red) which the chiefs would then distribute amongst their warriors.

  The budget for this exercise was managed not by the Governor but by his ordonnateur, or financial controller, in this case another naval man called Vincent de Rochemore. But budgets were a sore point with Rochemore. Even before he arrived in Nouvelle-Orléans, he had been complaining that his salary wouldn’t be enough to keep himself and his family, and that he would have to spend his own money to maintain a decent lifestyle. A financial controller with money issues was not a happy combination, and soon there were rumours that Rochemore was stealing the Native Americans’ gifts and selling them for his own profit. And as Kerlerec was keenly aware, a Cherokee deprived of his French axe or paint pot might go looking for more generous allies.

  The Governor had no choice but to send Rochemore back to France, where the disgraced ordonnateur immediately set about destroying Kerlerec’s reputation. It was alleged, for example, that the Governor wanted to have the gift ceremonies in Nouvelle-Orléans, whereas it would have been safer to have them at Mobile, where there was a large French fort as well as a town. Why would Kerlerec want the ceremonies close to home if it wasn’t to steal some of the red paint for himself?

  The upshot was that Kerlerec was recalled and thrown into the Bastille, then exiled from Paris and ordered to stay 30 leagues away from any royal palace (presumably the authorities were afraid he would paint red graffiti on the walls).

  In essence, Louisiane’s last chance of staying French was lost because of an argument over presents. It was like a family’s Christmas Day squabble that ends when the house burns down.

  Meanwhile, France’s Fort Duquesne, which had got George Washington into such hot water, had been lost, and a new British outpost built in its place – this was Fort Pitt, which would later become Pittsburgh, in honour of Britain’s prime minister.

  The 1763 Treaty of Paris, which marked the official end of the fighting, was a total humiliation for France. King Louis XVI signed over Nouvelle-France (Canada), preferring to hang on to the sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. The fighting had involved Spain, too, and in an exchange of territories, Britain obtained Florida, while France gave Spain its lands on the west bank of the Mississippi, which included Nouvelle-Orléans. (Although no one dared tell the town the bad news until September 1764.) Meanwhile, Britain received the east bank of the Mississippi, meaning that Louisiane was split down the middle and lost. The French humiliation even stretched all the way back home – France agreed to dismantle the fortifications in its own port of Dunkirk so that England would feel less threatened by an invasion.

  You can feel the lasting pain in a French government website. ‘The Treaty of Paris’, it says, ‘annihilated two centuries of effort by colonists, explorers and royal officials. It was the end of the dreams of a French America.’ And it was all their own fault. As Napoleon himself once said, ‘Our ridiculous national fault is that the greatest enemy of our success and glory is ourselves.’

  In other words, the French really should not have provoked George Washington by threatening to kill that cow. Never has a piece of steak cost a Frenchman so dear.

  * Admittedly, victory, triumph, success and glory are also French words, but that would weaken my argument.

  * These days, the French make fun of English food because, for example, ‘les Anglais eat jam with meat’ (they mean mint jelly). But almost everything British that the French grudgingly admit to liking is sugar-based. They love our fruit cakes so much that they make a rather pale version of it that they call generically le cake. The name has even entered French slang, and a common term for someone with pimples is ‘tronche de cake’, or ‘cake face’, because of all the fruity bits.

  * For once, Law was actually telling the truth, but sadly oil wouldn’t be found there until after the French had sold Louisiane.

  * By American writers, that is. The French love to talk about it.

  13

  American Independence – from France

  There’s one thing you can’t accuse the French of, and that is giving up on trying t
o outwit the Brits. Even after the humiliation of the Treaty of Paris, which robbed France of practically every square centimetre of land it had owned in America, the French didn’t abandon hope of spoiling things for the Anglais on the other side of the Atlantic. First they helped the Americans gain independence (though they received scant gratitude for that), and then they went one better and tried to turn America into Britain’s arch enemy in world politics – and we all know how well that turned out.

  And the final move in their American power play was so disastrous that even today, almost no one in France knows the whole truth …

  Merci but non merci

  American independence really started not with the Boston Tea Party but with a huge, and uncharacteristic, British mistake: having fought a vicious seven-year guerrilla war to hang on to America, the Brits went soft. And the Americans were all too quick to show them that softness was for wimps.

  The first sign of flabbiness was King George III’s Proclamation of 1763, which forbade European settlement west of the Appalachians, the mountain chain that runs parallel to the Atlantic coast from Canada down to Alabama. It was a surprisingly modern proposal – the Brits were effectively saying that the vast majority of the American continent would be better off in the hands of its rightful owners, the Native Americans.

  This provoked immediate fury in the American colonies, because it hemmed them in even more efficiently than the French had ever done. Worse still, eviction orders were issued to settlers living west of the Appalachians, including those in Ohio, where the Seven Years War had originally broken out. Leading Americans like George Washington were horrified – they’d fought and died for this land, expelled the French army, and now they were meant to give the territory away?

  Britain then showed its total flaccidity by passing a second compassionate law, the Quebec Act, in favour of those other enemies of the American colonists – the French-Canadians, who had provided so much help to France. The Act finalized the separation of Canada from the American colonies, and gave the French Catholics living there religious freedom and even some independence within the new British territory of Quebec. The British-Americans, many of them hard-line Puritans, didn’t take kindly to this at all.

  So the American patriotism that had united the disparate colonies against the French now turned against the Brits, especially when London began to try and recoup some of the costs of the war by imposing higher colonial taxes. It was one of these taxes that provoked the Boston Tea Party in 1773, the famous protest by a gang of Bostonians who dressed up as Native Americans, as if they hoped to prove that the Iroquois and Cherokees were too badly behaved to own a whole continent.

  France couldn’t resist the temptation. It saw the breach in Britain’s empire, and decided to fill it with French gunpowder.

  Famous names join the war

  Louis XVI’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charles Gravier de Vergennes, was virulently anti-British, and wanted revenge for the Seven Years War and the Treaty of Paris. When divisions began to appear between the Brits and the Americans, he saw his chance. ‘Providence,’ he said, ‘has chosen this as the time for the humiliation of England.’

  At the same time, Benjamin Franklin was over in Europe, ostensibly as the Colonies’ representative in London, but also making amis with France. The French apparently fell in love with the easy-going, unpretentious American immediately, even though he was a vegetarian. He was a self-made man, a successful writer and inventor turned politician, and seems to have cut through Parisian snobbishness like a tomahawk.

  The French may also have felt an affinity with him because he, like them, had a talent for eccentric and ultimately useless inventions – he conceived the glass harmonica, a musical instrument that enabled the player to make the sound of running his or her moistened fingers around the rim of a glass, only using a much more complicated method. Franklin did useful research too, notably into electricity, and even though he was a rather stout, plainly dressed man, his eccentricity seems to have endeared him to the Parisiennes. It might well have been this success that led him to develop his theory that the best protection against sexually transmitted disease was a hearty post-coital pee. Not one of his better ideas.

  Anyway, when Franklin arrived in Paris in late 1776 to ask the French to help defend America’s newly declared independence, he was welcomed with open arms by the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The only condition that the anti-British Vergennes wanted to impose was that no one should know that France was supporting America, so the minister looked around for someone to be their unofficial go-between.

  The man Vergennes chose was Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. He is famous today for his plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, but before achieving literary fame, this former watchmaker and harp tutor to the royal family was engaged in less public, and often much shadier, activities. His first two wives both died in mysterious circumstances, leaving him to inherit their fortunes, and on one occasion he was sent to London to shore up the reputation of one of Louis XV’s mistresses. Now, Vergennes asked Beaumarchais to become an arms dealer. Comedy writer as gun-runner for revolutionaries? It was as if Ricky Gervais had been shipping missiles to the Tamil Tigers.

  Beaumarchais set up a fictitious company called Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie (the Spanish name was chosen to disguise its true origins) and began trading French arms with America in exchange for tobacco. In all, he shipped around 30,000 muskets and 2,000 barrels of gunpowder across the Atlantic, as well as cannons, uniforms and tents.

  One man in France was advising caution, however. This was the Contrôleur général des finances, a rather dull and un-Beaumarchaisesque economist with a woman’s first name – Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. He suggested that the French should stay well out of the American Revolutionary War – otherwise, he said, the Brits would turn against France and embroil the country in a war it couldn’t afford.

  Ironically, Turgot was probably the most pro-American politician in France. He supported the revolutionaries’ egalitarian ideals, and was lobbying for economic reforms to reduce social inequality amongst his own countrymen. And it was for precisely this reason that his warning was ignored. He had made too many enemies amongst the French aristocracy, and they were fed up with him trying to tell them what to do with the country’s money.

  In the event, of course, Turgot was right. Vergennes’s and Beaumarchais’s ‘these aren’t French weapons, honest, even if they’re being shipped from France and have “Made in France” stamped on the boxes’ ploy was fooling no one. The Brits had long seen through the pretence, mainly because some very prominent Frenchmen were giving the game away.

  The most famous of these was Lafayette, America’s favourite Frenchman. This nineteen-year-old nobleman, whose real name no American would have been able to pronounce – Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette – came from an almost genetically anti-British family. One of his ancestors had fought alongside Joan of Arc, and his father had been killed by an Anglo-German cannonball during the Seven Years War. So in April 1777 Lafayette sailed to America to join the cause célèbre, despite the pleas of Louis XVI to be a bit more discreet.

  Soon, there was no point pretending, anyway. In February 1778, the French signed an alliance with the Americans, causing the Brits, who had been preparing for just such an eventuality, to declare war. France now had to start pumping real money into the conflict.

  At this stage, things weren’t looking good for American independence. There were more pro-British Loyalists in the Colonies than there were Patriots fighting for Washington. Meanwhile, most Native Americans were siding with George III, who wanted to grant them land rights, and around 100,000 slaves had run away from their owners after they were offered freedom if they fought for the Brits – George Washington was one of the men who lost valuable unpaid workers in this way. His own soldiers were deserting and mutinying, too. He was in desperate need of French support.

  And he got i
t. The USA may have forgotten it during the Iraq War, but France really did go all out to win independence for America. It even sent one of its best old soldiers, a man called Rochambeau, to Newport, Rhode Island, with an army of over 6,000 troops.

  At first, relations between these French troops and their American hosts were tense. The French were gamblers, and seemed to be able to ogle right through the chaste Puritan women’s clothing. To avoid a diplomatic incident, only officers were allowed out of camp, and their elegant manners soon charmed the locals, who were touched that such noblemen would come to help their fight for democracy. And when Washington visited his new allies, he was received warmly. The French seemed to have forgotten that he had fought against them in the Seven Years War and signed a confession admitting to the cold-blooded murder of one of their officers.

  Such a cosy atmosphere couldn’t last for ever, though, and the French didn’t take long to start squabbling amongst themselves. Rochambeau got into an argument with Lafayette, who had been made Washington’s aide-de-camp* and thought he knew a thing or two about war. The young marquis had already been shot in the leg while helping the Americans to lose a battle in Pennsylvania, and he now tried to tell Rochambeau how to deploy his troops. This elicited a superb putdown – the older man wrote ‘as a father to a dear son’, accusing Lafayette of personal ambition:

  It is all very well to consider the French invincible, but I am going to tell you a great secret that I have learned in 40 years of experience – no one is easier to beat [than French soldiers] when they have lost confidence in their leaders, and they lose it immediately if they feel that they have been endangered for the sake of personal gain.