1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, parley-vous,

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, parley-vous,

  She’s the hardest working girl in town,

  But she makes her living upside down,

  Hinky-dinky, parley-vous?

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, parley-vous,

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, parley-vous,

  She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum,

  And sometimes for chocolate or chewing gum,

  Hinky-dinky, parley-vous?

  You might forget the gas and shells, parley-vous,

  You might forget the gas and shells, parley-vous,

  You might forget the groans and yells,

  But you’ll never forget the Mademoiselles,

  Hinky-dinky, parley-vous?

  Amex will do nicely, Monsieur

  That ‘parley-vous’ in the song is just one example of the pidgin franglais that evolved in the Allied ranks. The Brits and French already had an amusing exchange of vocabulary going on before the war. To ‘take French leave’ was known as filer à l’anglaise (‘to run away English-style’), syphilis was known as ‘the French disease’ and a ‘French letter’ was une capote anglaise or ‘English greatcoat’, which speaks volumes about the thickness of winter clothes supplied to British troops.

  Mispronounced phrases like ‘toot sweet’ for tout de suite and ‘san fairy ann’ for ça ne fait rien (‘it doesn’t matter’) soon became an everyday part of the Tommy’s language. And even though soixanteneuf was already used to describe mutual oral sex (France’s nineteenth-century brothels and prolific pornography industry have a lot to answer for linguistically), the use of the word ‘French’ to describe fellatio dates from 1917, when ordinary soldiers discovered pleasures that until then seem to have been reserved for Edward VII and other cross-Channel travellers.

  Like a linguistic bout of soixante-neuf, the pleasure was mutual, and the French adopted many English words. A 1920 dictionary of anglicismes gives a list of English terms that entered the French language during the war, including business, Tommy, chips, no good, no man’s land, all right (apparently pronounced American-style as ‘olrède’), lorry, tank and three words for American soldiers: Sammy, Yank and Amex. The last one does not prove that American troops were rich enough to have credit cards – it comes from American Expeditionary Force.

  The author of the dictionary seems to feel almost guilty about listing these foreign additions to the French language. ‘It is highly likely that our Allies, forced to learn a few words of French during their stay with us, have taken back to their respective homes a much richer harvest of Gallicisms than this meagre crop of Anglicisms and Americanisms,’ he reassures his countrymen, displaying the paranoia about the ‘purity’ of French that continues to this day.

  The French get a kick out of the war

  The French picked up more than just vocabulary from the foreign troops, however.

  In 1914, a French soldier wrote a letter home after seeing Scots soldiers ignoring incoming shellfire to brew up and have a shave. He couldn’t believe his eyes – ‘No danger deflects them from their allegiance to the razor and the teapot.’

  In Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, André Maurois paints a far more ambivalent picture of British officers. He admires their stiff upper lip but clearly thinks their priorities are insane. In one conversation he has a British major describe a ‘typical’ Englishman’s thoughts on war and revolution in a way that would have had a Frenchman howling with derision.

  ‘In England,’ the Major says, ‘it would be impossible to organize a revolution. People would come and shout outside Westminster, then the policeman would tell them to go away, and they would leave.’ (Political passivity being one of the worst crimes imaginable in French eyes.) The British major goes on:

  We are a funny people. To get a Frenchman interested in a boxing match, you have to tell him that national honour is at stake. To interest an Englishman in a war, the best thing is to tell him it’s like a boxing match. Tell us that the Hun is a barbarian and we will agree politely, but tell us he’s a bad sportsman and you will rouse the whole British Empire. Bombarding neutral cities is almost as unforgivable as fishing for trout with a worm or killing a fox with a shotgun.

  A British colonel interrupts: ‘Don’t exaggerate, they haven’t done that yet.’

  But then, sport was an area where the Allies and the French didn’t see eye to eye. The Tommies seemed to be football mad. At Mons, in some of the first fighting in the war, the French were amazed to see British soldiers going into attack with footballs hanging from their backpacks. Whenever they could find flat ground and free time, the Brits would have a kick-about. The French were right about this British obsession – one Tommy wrote a letter home in 1914 describing the war as a giant football match. He called it a ‘great match for the European Cup. The Germans haven’t scored a goal yet, and I wouldn’t give a brass farthing for their chances of lifting the cup.’

  After their initial amazement, the French troops joined in with the kick-abouts. It was a new game for the vast majority of them and, at first, they would get thrashed anytime they took on a British team. But with coaching from the Tommies, they improved and even began organizing matches of their own. Soon, football had become a French national sport.

  In fact, you could say that France’s victory in the 1998 World Cup was all thanks to the Brits. An apt date, too – it came seventy years after the armistice that allowed the young Frenchmen who survived to go home and perfect their ball control.

  We’ve won the war, now we want blood

  The guns stopped firing at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, which must have seemed horribly cruel to the men who were killed between midnight and 11 a.m. In any case, the end of the war had come too late for an estimated 8.5 million dead and 21 million wounded.

  The peace was almost as much of a carve-up as the fighting. The only Allied leader who came out of it with impeccable honour was American, President Woodrow Wilson. He was apparently appalled at the slaughter, and amazed that the supposedly great European civilizations had been capable of dragging the world into such barbarism. He insisted that everyone should disarm, join a new League of Nations, and guarantee self-determination for the smaller European countries that had been swallowed by the great powers.

  Britain’s Prime Minister, Lloyd George, thought the Allies should be less lenient on the Germans. He wanted to punish them while keeping their country healthy enough to act as a barrier against the new Communist state of Russia in the east.

  The French, though, were obsessed with bringing Germany to its knees. Remembering the Franco-Prussian War, France’s Prime Minister, the 77-year-old Georges Clemenceau, was determined that the Germans should never be strong enough to invade France again – which makes it hard to understand why he insisted on a peace treaty so harsh that they would come back looking for vengeance only twenty years later.

  Clemenceau declared that the pacifier Wilson and anti-Russian Lloyd George were timewasters with overblown political theories. ‘I find myself between Jesus Christ on one side and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other,’ he quipped. And he didn’t mean this as flattery – Clemenceau was an anti-Bonapartist who had been imprisoned in his youth for opposing Napoleon III. He had also been against any form of appeasement with the Germans throughout the war, and had had a former French Prime Minister, Joseph Caillaux, arrested for suggesting surrender.

  Clemenceau wanted something much more punitive than peace – reparations. Germany, he said, had to pay for every French house, barn and turnip destroyed by the war. According to the Treaty of Versailles, damages were to be paid to:

  … injured persons and to surviving dependants, by personal injury to or death of civilians caused by acts of war, including bombardments or other attacks on land, on sea, or from the air, and all the direct consequences thereof, and of all operations of war by the two groups of belligerents wherever arising.

  This last phrase
implying that Germany had to compensate French people killed by Allied shelling.

  To give people time to calculate how many relatives, buildings and turnips they had lost, Clemenceau insisted that the treaty should not fix a sum – the Germans had to sign a blank cheque promising to pay whatever the Allies demanded later. And when the invoice finally came, it was for a crippling amount: 226 billion Marks, a meaninglessly huge fine on which Germany began to default as early as 1922.

  Clemenceau was also determined to cripple German trade, so the treaty stipulated that Germany had to accept all imports from Allied countries. Clemenceau was furious that penknives engraved with ‘La Victoire’, on sale in France, had been made in Germany. The exports, he said, had to start flowing in the other direction.*

  In short, Clemenceau wanted total humiliation, and the Germans were so incensed that they seriously considered climbing back into the trenches and starting the war again. The German Chancellor resigned, and the Foreign Minister who signed the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, Herman Müller, was branded a traitor. Even the Americans decided not to ratify the treaty.

  For the French, though, getting Germany to sign its own bankruptcy notice was a victory, and after the signing ceremony, Clemenceau emerged smiling broadly and commenting: ‘It is a beautiful day.’

  He didn’t realize that he had set in motion a storm that would burst over France just over twenty years later and spoil much more than the weather.

  Joan of Arc rises from the ashes

  As soon as the Treaty of Versailles negotiations were over, the French took the opportunity to annoy one of its supposed friends – Britain – by resuscitating Joan of Arc.

  Her memory had been revived by Napoleon in the early 1800s, and again in the 1870s when the Prussians had grabbed Alsace and Lorraine, Joan’s native region. However, both the Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian Wars had resulted in French defeats, so her magic seemed to be temporarily ineffective.

  It wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century, when an organization called Action française (a group of right-wing Catholic Royalists) was battling to bring down the Socialist government in France, that Joan’s name was put forward as a serious candidate for canonization. The Pope, Pius X, wanted to support Action française, and accepted a petition to make the ‘Witch of Orléans’ a saint.

  A hearing was held at the Vatican, during which serious objections to her sanctification were made. For a start, it was said, Joan did not actually want to die for her beliefs, so she wasn’t a true martyr. She had also killed quite a few people in battle – how Christian was that? And the cardinals were troubled by the fact that, in several accounts of Joan’s life, male witnesses commented on her breasts, which they had usually glimpsed while she was being forced to change from men’s to women’s clothes. Could she really be a saint if she’d let men ogle her boobs?

  But Joan’s canonization was too much of a political necessity for both the Pope and Action française, and these objections were brushed aside. The obligatory three miracles were found – a convenient trio of French nuns who swore they had been cured by praying to Joan, including one who had been suffering from leg ulcers – and she would have been declared a saint in 1914 if the First World War hadn’t broken out and interrupted papal proceedings.

  However, as soon as the guns fell silent, France, now in dire need of a heroine to symbolize its victory and to expunge the awful memories of slaughter in the trenches, put pressure on the Vatican again, and in May 1920 St Joan of Arc officially came into being.

  Yes, just eighteen months after Britain had sacrificed a whole generation of its young men to defend Joan of Arc’s homeland against invasion, the French adopted an anti-English patron saint. Merci beaucoup, les amis.

  Worse, not only is she the patron saint of France, but Joan is also – according to various slightly contradictory sources – the protector of soldiers, prisoners, funeral directors … and Anglophobes.

  And one of her most devoted worshippers, and France’s most fervent Anglophobe of the twentieth century, was a tall soldier with a large nose who would soon be crossing the Channel to make life for another World War One veteran, Winston Churchill, very annoying indeed …

  * Graves was up in arms about the whole war, and was equally damning about British civilians and their misplaced patriotism.

  * And as mentioned in Chapter 9, the French even sneaked in a clause protecting French Champagne against foreign imitations.

  25

  World War Two, Part One

  Don’t mention Dunkirk

  The subliminal French version of World War Two goes something like this …

  In 1940, the Germans cheated by sneaking around the side of the Maginot Line. They pushed the weak Anglais into the sea at Dunkirk and then temporarily occupied France (but only half of it). Meanwhile, General de Gaulle was in London telling Churchill how a war should be run. The fat old Brit was a waste of time, but luckily America entered the war on the French side and agreed that the most important thing to do was invade Normandy and link up with the Resistance, who had previously cleared the way to Paris by blowing up all the railway bridges. OK, bit of a contradiction there, but never mind, because the French capital was already being liberated by General Leclerc and his tanks, after which the war was over, apart from some minor tidying up in Germany (which the Russians and Americans got all wrong – they couldn’t even catch Hitler alive). Oh, and there was some messy stuff in Hiroshima that ended the conflict in Asia which was not very important anyway because it was so far away from France.

  That is an exaggeration, of course, but only just. If you talk to French people about the Deuxième Guerre, it immediately becomes clear that we remember events very differently. And the funny thing is that the contradictions and confusions were all there between 1939 and 1945. Here are a few real, unexaggerated, quotations that show how complicated relations were between France, Britain and the USA:

  Churchill on de Gaulle: ‘He is like a female llama surprised in his bath.’

  De Gaulle on the Brits: ‘England, like Germany, is our hereditary enemy.’

  President Roosevelt’s nickname for de Gaulle: ‘The temperamental lady.’

  De Gaulle on the attempts by the Brits and Americans to liberate Nazi-occupied French colonies: ‘We must warn the people of France and the whole world of Anglo-Saxon imperialist plans.’

  And we thought we were Allies.

  Party like it’s 1939

  In the interwar years, the Brits and Americans did anything but annoy the French. Au contraire.

  The American heiress Peggy Guggenheim brought her dollars over and almost single-handedly bankrolled the French avantgarde art movement.

  An African-American erotic dancer called Josephine Baker lifted the Folies Bergère out of the doldrums and restored Paris to its pre-1914 status as world capital of sex. Her semi-naked dance with bananas hanging from her waist would not be considered very PC today, but back in the mid-1920s this sassy chorus girl from Missouri became a massive star in Paris and embodied France’s lack of racial prejudice. A whole host of black musicians followed in her wake, instilling in France a love of jazz that has never faded.

  English-speaking writers also flooded into the country. Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer, and made Paris the capital of both sex and alcohol. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett arrived and it became the new epicentre of Irish literature. Ernest Hemingway hit town and made machismo respectable. (George Orwell also nipped over to do some washing-up in poor Parisian restaurants, but that has left less of a mark on the French artistic consciousness.)

  By 1940, France was the capital of contemporary Western culture, and it was just a shame that the ham-fisted Nazi philistines came and spoilt the cultural idyll.

  The last ligne of défense

  The artists might have been enjoying themselves between the wars, but there hadn’t been quite as much fun and frolicking in the political world, especially where Anglo-French relations were concer
ned.

  France saw the rise of Hitler as a direct challenge to its demands in the Treaty of Versailles. Determined to stand up to him, it quickly erected* a line of fortifications that was a throwback to World War One – a kind of massive armoured trench designed to stop Germany invading through Alsace and Lorraine. They called it the Ligne Maginot, after their Minister of War, André Maginot. Yes, even in peacetime, the French had kept on a Minister of War.

  The Brits, meanwhile, hung back and watched the agitation on the continent with a naïve hope that things would settle down so that everyone could get together for a nice cup of tea. Initially, their only reaction to the rise of Nazism was a polite suggestion that Herr Hitler might like to consider some minor arms limitations – a proposal that enraged the French because, under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany wasn’t supposed to be arming itself at all.

  In March 1936, Hitler tested the troubled Anglo-French water by occupying the Rhineland, a sector of Germany on France’s eastern border that was supposed to be demilitarized. He sent in a small force of 3,000 men to see what would happen, and the answer was hot air – France blustered but didn’t want to invade Germany and risk starting a war. Churchill, who wasn’t yet Prime Minister, added a sort of lukewarm air of his own by saying, ‘I hope that the French will look after their own safety and that we shall be permitted to live our life in our island.’ You can almost hear the ‘More tea, vicar?’

  The problem for Britain and France as they decided whether or not to stand up to Hitler was that both countries’ top politicians and military men had served in World War One. It was less than twenty years since the trench slaughter had ended. The leaders’ schoolfriends had been killed, mutilated men were still begging on street corners, and war widows were marrying off children who had never known their fathers.