1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Louis was delighted. At last, he was going to see action. On 1 June, impatient to leave, he badgered Carey into going out without the full escort. In a party of only nine men, they rode along the ominously named Blood River, the proud Prince sporting his great-uncle Napoleon’s sword. The valley was thought to be free of Zulus, which may explain why the small group of soldiers rode several miles out into the bush, where Louis spotted a deserted kraal, a Zulu settlement, and suggested that they go and brew up coffee there.

  There were signs of very recent occupation, and the grass around the kraal was so high that it was impossible to see if anyone was lurking nearby. But Louis insisted that the troops rest up and have a coffee.

  Finally Carey became really anxious and ordered the party to leave. Louis pulled rank on him (although technically Carey was the superior officer) and told him to give it ten minutes more. The extra time was almost up when they were stormed by forty armed Zulus, charging out of the long grass and yelling ‘uSuthu!’ which meant ‘kill!’ rather than ‘forty espressos, please’.

  Spooked by gunfire, the British horses bolted. Louis managed to cling on to his saddle holster and was pulled along by his mount until the leather strap broke. Shoddy English workmanship, he no doubt thought as he hit the ground and injured his right arm.

  He looked for his sword, but couldn’t find it. So, firing his revolver with his left hand, he ran as best he could until he was hit in the thigh by a Zulu spear. He bravely pulled it out and turned to face his pursuers, but another assegai caught him in the shoulder, and he went down fighting.

  Carey and four surviving soldiers had got on their horses, and met up about 50 metres away. However, instead of returning to try and save the Prince, Carey rode back to base camp without firing a shot.

  When a search party came out, they found Louis’s body with eighteen assegai wounds. It had also been disembowelled, a Zulu practice meant to guarantee not only that the injured man was actually dead, but also that his spirit would not return and avenge the death (an unwitting and ironic reminder of Napoleon Bonaparte’s belief that an army marched on its stomach).

  Carey made his report about Louis pulling rank and refusing to leave the kraal, but the man he was meant to protect was too important. All the fingers of blame were pointed at Carey, especially those of Eugénie and Victoria. There were even rumours that Victoria herself had planned the whole thing to prevent the Frenchman’s marriage to her daughter. To make things worse, the Zulus said that if young Louis had been wearing royal regalia, they wouldn’t have killed him. Inevitably, a court martial found Carey guilty of cowardice. He was sent to Coventry by his fellow officers for the rest of his career, and died a broken man in India in the mid-1880s.

  The Brits shipped Louis’s badly embalmed remains back to England, where French officials unwisely insisted on opening the casket to formally identify the body. One of them fainted at the sight of the putrefying, mutilated corpse, which was only identifiable thanks to a childhood abcess scar on his hip.

  Louis was given a state funeral, which was attended by Queen Victoria but boycotted by the French ambassador. The young Prince’s mother Eugénie was there, but was so grief-stricken that she had to be informed when the service was over and it was time to get up off her knees. After the ceremony, the coffin was taken to Chislehurst, to lie alongside the body of Emperor Napoleon III.

  Louis had a theoretical successor, his cousin Victor Jérôme Frédéric Napoléon Bonaparte, who declared himself Napoleon V and later returned to France to demand a plebiscite on restoring imperial rule. All he achieved, though, was to get himself arrested, proving that the dashing young soldier Louis Napoleon had been his family’s last realistic chance of regaining power in France.

  And so it was that the hopes and dreams of both the Bourbon and Bonaparte dynasties were buried in southeast England. France’s royal and imperial families had come looking for asylum in Britain and had ended up receiving little more than a fancy funeral. It was nothing personal, of course. A bit of lead piping, a medical mishap and an encounter with over-zealous Zulus – it could happen to anyone.

  And the fact that it was the Brits, so fond of their own royal family, who ensured that France would be a Republic for the foreseeable future, was an unfortunate accident, a complete coincidence. N’est-ce pas?

  * Interestingly, Dumas compares Louis-Philippe not to Lord Emsworth (who hadn’t been created yet, anyway) but to King Lear, a Shakespeare reference that would have been unthinkable in French literary circles just a few years earlier, and proof that the Bard had finally made it big in France.

  * The reader will note the complete absence of jokes about exile in Southport being worse than imprisonment in a fortress in the Somme.

  * Orsini and one of his fellow conspirators were guillotined, and an accomplice called Carlo di Rudio was transported to Devil’s Island, the notorious French prison camp in French Guiana. He escaped and later fought alongside General Custer at Little Big Horn. True to form, he survived.

  22

  Why All French Wine Comes

  from America

  In the 1860s, an epidemic came very close to killing off all the vines in France. Winemakers in the most famous grape-growing areas of the country could only stand helplessly by as their plants withered and died. A mystery disease was eating at the very root of the French wine industry, and the extinction of Chablis, Champagne and Chateau Margaux was a real possibility (along with Beaujolais, Bordeaux and Burgundy, St Émilion, Sauterne and Sauvignon, and all the other letters of the alphabet, of course). Only a miracle could save them.

  And that miracle, when it came, was American. Which would subsequently prove to be rather ironic …

  Horrifying green acne

  The first ominous signs that something was up were spotted in 1863, in a village called Pujaut, on the left bank of the Rhone Valley near Nîmes. A few plants in one of its vineyards seemed to have sprouted a horrifying case of acne – the smooth green leaves were a mass of little buboes. Soon they yellowed, dried up and fell. Weirdly, the spots then cleared up and the plant produced grapes, but the following year the vine produced less fruit, and the wine was acid and had no bouquet. By the next season, the plant had shrivelled and when it was pulled up, its roots were black, as if the disease had exhausted it. Worse, it had infected the surrounding plants, which suffered exactly the same three-year death rattle.

  ‘The Phylloxera, a true gourmet, finds out the best vineyards and attaches itself to the best wines.’ A not-at-all French view of the deadly phylloxera aphid that bugged, and almost bankrupted, the country’s winegrowers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Soon reports came in of similar shrivellings in the nearby villages of Roquemaure and Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, and in 1866 a second outbreak was diagnosed near Bordeaux. As the plague spread out in concentric rings across France, panic set in. No one knew what was causing the epidemic. Farmers thought it was a kind of vine tuberculosis, even though plants don’t have lungs.

  It wasn’t until 1868 that three French scientists at Montpellier University finally found the cause.

  The team was headed by the director of the Botany department, Jules-Émile Planchon, a local man who had worked at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, one of the world’s leading centres for the study of plants. Planchon dug up dead and dying vines and found that the roots of the sick plants were infested with a tiny yellow aphid, almost invisible to the naked eye. He recognized it as a deadly new mutation of an existing pest and, a man with a sense of occasion, gave the bug a name that sounds like a baddie in the Astérix comics: Phylloxera vastatrix (meaning more or less ‘devastating dry leaves’).

  The aphids were quite attractive, if you like that sort of thing. They were a very pleasant colour, a sort of pale saffron yellow that looks great in a Van Gogh painting, but, crawling over every root in your vineyard, was the stuff of nightmare. The bugs’ life cycle, Planchon discovered, was a model of destructive efficien
cy. The female laid her eggs beneath the surface of the leaf in summer (hence the buboes); on hatching, the insects would make their way to the stem of the vine, where the female hatchlings sneakily laid a second generation of eggs – up to 600 each – that gestated throughout the winter; the following spring, a mass of wingless yellow aphids were born and stampeded down to the root, which they demolished like English tourists at a drink-all-you-can beach bar. At which point, the host plant went to meet its maker, and the overfed little insects staggered off to find their next victim. And the tragic thing was that the females were capable of laying eggs through asexual reproduction – there wasn’t even any pleasure involved. It really was a soulless, evil plague.

  The question was, how to stop it, especially as the bugs were marching across Europe as efficiently as one of Napoleon’s armies. Within twelve years, they had popped up in every major wine-producing country in Europe. They even made an appearance in Australia (having got there on imported vines rather than by burrowing through the planet from Europe). But the hardest-hit country was France – between 1875 and 1889, its wine production fell from 8.4 billion litres to only 2.3 billion and around 40 per cent of French vines were dead.

  Yes, more than twenty-five years after its symptoms were first noticed, the disease was still spreading, and the only solution seemed to be to destroy practically all the surviving vineyards in the country.

  The Americans liberate France

  Some French growers and scientists wanted to use cure rather than prevention – either spraying with noxious insecticides or temporarily flooding the vineyards (it had been found that the bugs were not very fond of water). But curing infected plants, argued Planchon, was a waste of time. What was needed was a kind of vaccine.

  And this was where the Americans came in.

  As early as the 1870s, an entomologist called Charles Valentine Riley, a Londoner living in Missouri, had found that phylloxera bugs were present in USA (where they had been given a more English name, the grape louse), but did not seem to cause damage to vineyards. For some reason, the American plants were resistant to the bugs.

  Riley began sending American rootstocks to Planchon, who agreed that these plants were indeed immune. Why not replant all France’s vineyards with American grapes, he wondered? The answer, of course, was obvious: the French were sure that their native vines produced superior wine. But two Bordeaux winegrowers called Léo Laliman and Gaston Bazille had a solution to this quandary, too. At their suggestion, Planchon began grafting branches of the French plants on to American roots, and soon confirmed that the resulting plants were also resistant.

  The discovery split the French wine industry down the middle between the sprayers and the grafters, with anti-Americans derisively calling the supporters of Planchon’s method ‘wood merchants’.

  As the argument dragged on, French winegrowers were going out of business en masse – many emigrated to America and North Africa – and merchants were importing wines from abroad. Even if the grafting worked, it looked as though it might be too late to save the industry.

  A typically French scandal held things up even further. The government had offered a prize of 320,000 francs to the first person to find a cure for phylloxera. The Bordeaux winegrower Laliman claimed it, even though he had been working alongside Planchon and Bazille. This in itself might seem dubious, but worse was to come – Laliman was turned down because of accusations that he had been the man to import the infected vines in the first place.

  Almost miraculously, given the arguments that were raging, grafting and replanting slowly began to have an effect. About 2,500 hectares of new vines were planted in 1880, rising to 45,000 hectares in 1885. Soon a Franco-American army of liberation was marching across the country.

  It is said (probably by Americans) that if their vines hadn’t been parachuted in, the yellow aphids would have wiped out almost the whole European wine industry. Because of its isolation, Cyprus was untouched, but pretty well every other country would have lost its vineyards. The only European grape that is immune to attack by phylloxera is the Assyrtiko, which is native to the Greek island of Santorini.

  In any case, the day was saved thanks to some solid botany, creative thinking, a Darwinian belief in the survival of the fittest – Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859 – and the hardy American plants. A big transatlantic merci was in order.

  Or was it? Because some people were also saying that the Americans, with a little help from Darwinism, had helped to cause the phylloxera outbreak in the first place.

  Ever since the end of the 1850s, French winemakers (including, it was alleged, the Bordeaux grower Léo Laliman) had been experimenting with ways of boosting production by improving upon Nature. They had been planting foreign vines in their vineyards, including rootstocks from the USA. And judging by the way Laliman came forward with the grafting theory, he was probably experimenting with grafting on his own farm.

  Everyone now agrees that the pest was originally shipped over from the New World in one or more of these batches of vines ordered from an American plant catalogue. Of course it was an unfortunate accident, but infecting a country with a deadly plant disease and then selling them the cure is exactly the kind of sharp business practice that makes the French suspicious of the Anglo-Saxons to this day.

  Wherever the fault lies, though, one thing is for sure – if a French winegrower holds up a glass of Bandol, Bordeaux, Burgundy or one of the enormous numbers of wines belonging to B or any other letter of the alphabet, and claims that it is superior to anything that the New World could ever produce, there is an all-too-simple response.

  That French wine is, in part at least, a product of the New World.

  23

  Edward VII Has a Frolicking Good

  Time in Paris

  Dirty Bertie and the Entente Cordiale

  British and French monarchs have been visiting each other’s countries ever since William the Conqueror started the fashion for regular cross-Channel tourism. Some of them, like Henry II and Edward III, travelled abroad to patrol their own possessions and pillage those of others, like Charles II and Louis XVIII, to escape political troubles back home, and a few to get killed in bizarre mishaps – Napoleon III and Richard the Lionheart spring to mind.

  Modern monarchs go on diplomatic state visits, but probably the only royal who travelled purely for pleasure was Edward VII. He was a man who understood just how pleasant it was not to be at war with France.

  Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Queen Victoria, ‘Bertie’ to his friends and lovers, made France his adventure playground in the last decades of the nineteenth century. When he wasn’t playing musical bedrooms in English country houses, he was ‘gadding about’ (as his mother put it) in Paris and Cannes, flitting from the racecourse to the Folies Bergère and his favourite bordels. He was such a regular reveller that he had his very own room in one of Paris’s poshest brothels equipped with custom-designed erotic furniture – but more of that in a moment.

  Even when tensions between France and Britain arose, Bertie made sure that politics didn’t stand in the way of pleasure. He got on equally well with French Royalists and Republicans, who were all his amis as long as they didn’t try to tell him that Britain should have a revolution or a French-style monarchy. Republicans who resented the presence in their country of such a high-profile royal melted as soon as they came to lunch at his hotel, which in turn infuriated the Royalists, who thought that he should be helping them reinstate their deposed monarchy.

  But Bertie just wanted everyone to be friends so that he could get on with having fun. It could even be argued that his sexual exploits forced France kicking and screaming into talks about the Entente Cordiale, the agreement that buried the ancient hatchet of Anglo-French warfare once and for all in 1904.

  In short, never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to one man’s libido.

  Paris, a most un-Victorian city


  Bertie first fell in love with France when he was thirteen. He came to Paris on a royal visit to the court of Napoleon III and realized that palaces didn’t have to be as dull as his parents’ house. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert believed in making princes learn boring stuff like Latin and history rather than just letting them be princes. They wanted him to be a Victorian, with all the moral constraints which that entailed.

  In Paris, though, Bertie danced while chic ladies teased him about what he was hiding under the kilt that his parents made him wear. The Empress Eugénie was a glamorous fashion icon who took Bertie under her wing and no doubt caused un-Victorian stirrings behind his sporran. Napoleon III, a bit of a lad, talked to him man to man, and the young Prince must have realized that here was a city where you made up your own morals day to day. After all, in French avoir le moral means to feel good, so in France good morals must mean anything that makes you happy, n’est-ce pas?

  Bertie had to wait a few more years until he got the chance to enjoy France to the full. First, his parents wanted to finish his education. They sent him to Oxford and made him go to highbrow London plays. But he wasn’t cut out for the intellectual things in life, and once shocked theatergoers by asking loudly, ‘Can anyone tell me what this damned play is about?’

  By the 1860s, though, he considered that his formal education was over and more informal proceedings could begin. He started coming to Paris on annual pleasure sprees, often accompanied only by an equerry. And even if wifey came along (in 1863 he had married Alexandra, the daughter of the Prince of Denmark), she liked to go to bed early, so as soon as he’d seen her back to the hotel, Bertie could go out on the town for some extra-marital R&R.