1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Here comes The Sun

  In January 1984, a new war broke out, this time directly between France and Britain, and almost entirely in the minds of the tabloids.

  The French farming lobby caused the problem when imported British lamb began to undercut its prices. British lorries were attacked, and some lorry drivers were even kidnapped (or strongly advised to get out of their lorries and not to try and deliver their loads to French meat wholesalers). The Sun declared this a ‘Lamb War’, and decided to invade France. The paper sent an army to Calais, mainly consisting of Page Three girls skimpily dressed in Union Jack shirts and tin helmets. Watched by a few confused locals (and a Sun photographer, of course), they sang ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ before planting a Union Jack on the town’s place d’Angleterre.

  The anti-French onslaught became even more frenzied when, in mid-Lamb War, the paper’s editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, read a report saying that France consumed less soap than any other country in Europe. Instead of applying his journalistic instincts to find out why – the French were already using shower gel, and in fact thought the Brits were unhygienic for spending so much time soaking in their own discarded skin flakes while the soap melted slowly at the bottom of the bathtub – Mackenzie used his tabloid reflexes to renew the attack on France. His paper sneered, ‘The French are the filthiest people in Europe’, and alleged that ‘many French people smell like kangaroos which have been kept in cages’. A Page Three girl was sent to the French Embassy to deliver toiletries and clean underwear as British aid to the ‘needy nation’.

  All of this shamed France into lifting the ban on English lamb, of course. Or rather it didn’t at all. The French subsequently reduced the number of points of import for British meat, claiming that their vets were too thinly spread to carry out inspections at all the Channel ports. Thanks to The Sun’s provocation, the Lamb War was one anti-French conflict that the Brits didn’t win.

  France gets a sinking feeling

  In July 1985, the most recent French act of war against the Anglo-Saxons was carried out, about as far from Waterloo as you can get without leaving the planet. The scene of the ten-minute long (and rather one-sided) naval battle was Auckland Harbour, New Zealand.

  An American environmental activist called Peter Willcox was threatening to sail the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior – a converted British trawler – to the Polynesian atoll of Mururoa to disrupt French nuclear testing there. There was nothing particularly Francophobic about Greenpeace; the Rainbow Warrior had just completed a mission to evacuate some islanders who had been irradiated by American testing on Bikini Atoll, and it had recently carried out a campaign against Russian whaling. But this time the ship was intending to lead a flotilla of boats to Mururoa, and France was not going to put up with that.

  It wasn’t the first time the French had tried to sabotage anti-nuclear protests. In 1966, French agents were accused of pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a yacht called Trident, which was on its way from Sydney to Mururoa. Trident managed to set sail, but one of its crew fell sick in the Cook Islands, and France put pressure on the islanders to hold the whole crew in quarantine until the series of nuclear tests had been carried out. There were many rumours of similar French sabotage attempts on protest boats, especially mysterious attacks of food poisoning amongst crews and sudden mechanical failures. But with Rainbow Warrior, France decided to go for the big bang.

  Well, that is not exactly true. The problem seems to have been that, not wanting any written traces of their involvement, President Mitterrand and his Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, gave such vague instructions to their foreign intelligence service, the DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure), that the planning was left up to the head of the DGSE’s ‘Action Service’, a paratroop officer called Jean-Claude Lesquer.

  Subtlety is not one of the characteristics required of French paratroopers, and Lesquer’s plan, code-named Opération satanique, therefore had about as much finesse as a demolition ball in a game of pétanque. Two limpet mines would be clamped to Rainbow Warrior while it was at anchor, a small charge to scare the crew off the ship, followed ten minutes later by a second crippling explosion to sink it.

  The preparations were equally clumsy. First, Greenpeace’s New Zealand branch was infiltrated by a new French recruit, a certain Frédérique Bonlieu (who was actually a French soldier called Christine Cabon), while, under the command of an agent called Louis-Pierre Dillais, two undercover operatives posing as Swiss tourists, Alain Mafart and a woman called Dominique Prieur, began to snoop rather obtrusively around Auckland Harbour.

  Once the Rainbow Warrior had been located, a four-man team brought the bombs from the French colony of New Caledonia to New Zealand on a tourist yacht called Ouvéa. The transporters were three secret-service agents called Roland Verge,* Gérard Andries and Jean-Michel Bartelo, accompanied by a navy doctor, Xavier Christian Jean Maniguet.

  After docking just up the coast from Auckland, the yachtsmen delivered the explosives to two divers whose identities have never been reliably confirmed, and on the evening of 10 July 1985, while the Rainbow Warrior echoed to the sounds of a birthday party for one of its crew, the mystery pair of divers were able to sneak up and attach their limpet mines. At ten to midnight, the first bomb went off, causing the evacuation of the ship (and, incidentally, enough damage to cripple it).

  Tragically, however, the crew didn’t react as the French had predicted. Instead of dashing for the dockside and calling the police, they returned on board to make sure no one had been trapped there, and to inspect the damage. And a few minutes later, when the second explosion ripped a hole the size of a garage door in the hull, there were still several people on deck and one man below – Fernando Pereira, a 35-year-old Portuguese photographer who had gone to retrieve his expensive cameras. It is thought that he was stunned by the second blast, and drowned when the water flooded in. His body was found early next morning by a police diver, with his camera straps wrapped around his ankles.

  The Auckland police began investigating, and quickly discovered a French theme to events in the previous days. A French-speaking ‘Swiss’ couple had hired a camper van and been seen lurking near the Rainbow Warrior. A yacht crew of four Frenchmen had shown brand-new passports to customs officers, and although one of them claimed to be a photographer, no cameras were seen on board.

  Alerts were issued, and on 12 July the ‘Swiss’ couple returned their camper van to the rental agency earlier than expected, claiming a refund for their unused days. While they waited for their money, the police were called, and the pair were arrested. A rapid check revealed that ‘Monsieur et Madame Turenge’ were French DGSE agents Mafart and Prieur.

  A few days later, the suspicious yacht Ouvéa was picked up by the Australians, but they had no jurisdiction to hold the crew, who were rescued by a French submarine that scuttled the Ouvéa, sending any forensic evidence that explosives had been on board to the bottom of the sea.

  Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, the French government went into a frenzy of denial, and even spread a rumour that it was the British foreign secret service, MI6, that had carried out the bombing. But after two months of non, the French Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, was finally forced to confess that oui, France was guilty, and heads began to roll – the Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, resigned and the head of the DGSE, Pierre Lacoste, was fired.

  Back in New Zealand, Mafart and Prieur pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison, but the French quickly bailed them out. Threatening to get New Zealand’s imports into the EU banned, France was able to repatriate the two convicts to a French atoll, where Prieur was joined by her husband. Mafart ‘fell ill’ and was sent back to France, and Prieur became pregnant and followed him soon afterwards. By May 1988, less than three years after the bombing, both agents had returned to a life of freedom.

  Ironically, though, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior had achieved exactly what Fran
ce didn’t want. Greenpeace had been hoping to focus world attention on French nuclear testing, and now the issue was on every front page. France was even forced to ‘contribute’ over $8 million to Greenpeace in damages. Meanwhile, New Zealand was transformed from a quietly sceptical nation to an out-and-out opponent of nuclear testing, and became a close ally of the small Pacific nations, effectively helping a gaggle of small, inaudible protest movements to form a single, united force. And nuclear testing in Mururoa was stopped – apart from a series of explosions in 1995, the atoll has been silent ever since.

  The French did manage to save some face. Neither the mission commander Dillais or the so-called Greenpeace volunteer Christine Cabon were ever charged, and the men who planted the explosives have never been officially named.

  Affair over, the French hoped.

  Mais non, because the fired head of the DGSE, Pierre Lacoste, had left a time bomb. In 2005, the newspaper Le Monde revealed that, just after the bombing, he had written an account of the story describing how he had received a personal go-ahead for the mission from President Mitterrand, who was apparently horrified when he heard about the bungled bombing and the absurd attempts at secrecy. At last, the finger of ultimate responsibility was being pointed.

  And then in 2006, while the Socialist politician Ségolène Royal was preparing her presidential election campaign against Nicolas Sarkozy, rumours emerged that Royal’s elder brother Gérard had been one of the two men who planted the limpet mines, an allegation he refuted. And the French national embarrassment was made worse by the fact that the rumours were started by the presidential candidate’s other brother, Antoine.

  In short, although it is more than twenty years after the events, the two explosions that sank the Rainbow Warrior are still echoing very loudly around the corridors of French power.

  Maggie goes tabloid

  Margaret Thatcher was infuriated by French allegations that the Brits had framed France for the Rainbow Warrior bombing, but seems to have regarded the episode as a minor skirmish in the much longer-lasting and more fundamental struggle for domination of Europe.

  On 31 October 1990, she made a speech lambasting the French head of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, for wanting to force Britain to adopt a European currency and to relinquish its sovereignty in favour of a single European state. In her speech, Mrs T. defended ‘the great history behind sterling’ and accused Delors of ‘striving to extinguish democracy’.

  The next day’s headline in The Sun was the immortal ‘Up Yours Delors’. The paper didn’t confine its reporting to discussion of the pros and cons of European federalism, of course – it reminded its readers of France’s crimes, past and present: ‘They tried to conquer Europe until we put down Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815’ and ‘They gave in to the Nazis during the Second World War when we stood firm.’ More recently, it said, France had ‘banned British beef after falsely claiming it had mad-cow disease’ (of which more in a moment).

  Anti-French bigotry in the tabloid press? Or an accurate representation of British policy towards France and the EU in the 1980s and early 1990s? Well, in fact it was both.

  Inspired by its own headline, The Sun sent out a call to its readers: ‘They insult us, burn our lambs, flood our country with dodgy food and plot to abolish the dear old pound. Now it is your turn to kick them in the Gauls.’ At the stroke of noon, all ‘frog-haters’ were to face France, yell ‘up yours, Delors’ and ‘tell the feelthy French to frog off’. For people living on the south coast of England, this was going to be easy. They just had to face the sea and they would ‘smell the garlic’.

  There were British voices of dissent. Julian Critchley, the Conservative MP for Aldershot, who was no slouch at insults himself, and once called Mrs Thatcher ‘the great she-elephant’, branded The Sun’s campaign ‘an appalling exercise in prejudice and bigotry’.

  However, Mrs Thatcher’s PR man, Bernard Ingham, disagreed. He said that The Sun was ‘expressing the prejudices and feelings of the average Brit’. The Financial Times went even further. It dubbed the tabloid’s campaign ‘sickening chauvinism’, but recognized that The Sun was giving ‘an obvious, if wildly vulgarised, echo of what the Prime Minister was herself saying a few days earlier’.

  Mrs Thatcher had set the tone the previous year with some outrageous diplomatic howlers during France’s celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Revolution. Even if the truth about the events of 1789 isn’t exactly palatable to the French, it was hardly tactful of the British PM to give an interview to Le Monde in July 1989 pouring scorn on the whole business. The French are convinced that their 1789 declaration of human rights was the first of its kind, but Mrs T. pooh-poohed this as Gallic arrogance. ‘Human rights did not originate in France,’ she lectured France’s most serious newspaper, ‘we had our Magna Carta in 1215, our Bill of Rights in the seventeenth century, and our Bloodless Revolution in 1688 when Parliament imposed its will on the monarchy – we celebrated that last year, more discreetly than you.’ She added that the French Revolution itself was ‘a period of terror’, another accurate but tactless jibe that infuriated the French. It was as though a French president had been invited to the Queen’s Golden Jubilee garden party and then told the other guests that the monarchy was a load of outdated, elitist merde.

  In short, the frightening thing was that The Sun’s storm of nonsense about the French smelling of garlic and kangaroos was not merely a yobbish outburst that went against all serious thinking in Britain – it was actually a translation into tabloid language of the British government’s hostility towards France and the EU throughout the Thatcher years. It was quite credible to imagine Mrs T. smiling as she read one of The Sun’s headlines, just as Charles de Gaulle might well have nodded his approval of a low journalistic punch aimed by a French newspaper at Britain or America.

  It is such a shame that the two leaders weren’t in power at the same time. Thatcher and de Gaulle were so alike that their verbal cannonades would have been more explosive than Waterloo.

  The disease the French couldn’t catch

  Very occasionally, it suits Britain to remember that it’s in the EU, especially when its membership can be used as a weapon against the French. This was never truer than during the mad-cow crisis, which arose during Margaret Thatcher’s time in office (giving the French a chance to brand her a vache folle), and exploded in the 1990s, shortly after she had been deposed.

  It all started in December 1984, when cow number 133 at Pitsham Farm in Sussex began to act strangely. A reliable sanity test for cattle has never been developed, mainly because they can’t lie down on couches and are useless at word association tests (‘What does the word “mother” evoke for you?’ ‘Moo!’ ‘And “father”?’ ‘Moo!’), but cow 133 definitely wasn’t herself. She was staggering about, drooling, arching her back and generally not spending her life chewing and mooing like all her brothers and sisters. The vets weren’t sure what was wrong with the poor beast, but when she died six weeks later, the illness was ascribed to poisoning.

  However, more and more cows, both dairy and beef cattle, began to show the same symptoms, and the Ministry of Agriculture realized it had a major problem on its hands. Even so, acutely conscious that the country earned millions from meat exports (Britain was, for example, the biggest exporter of beef into France), the government decided that it was not necessary to panic. Tests were done, and more tests, sometimes by labs that didn’t communicate with each other, and it wasn’t until two years later, in November 1986, that the cows’ staggering about was given a name. It was a new condition called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE for short.

  The problem, as we now know, was that modern farming methods had turned cattle from herbivores into carnivores and even cannibals. Their feed and protein supplements often contained mulched-up meat and bone that was unfit for human consumption, including the brains of sheep suffering from their own, well-documented, form of BSE called scrapie. This appetizing stuff was called meat
and bone meal (or MBM – the mad-cow crisis would also cause an epidemic of abbreviations) and it had apparently caused a new sickness to develop in bovines’ already somewhat floppy brains.

  Not since a British cow provoked George Washington into evicting the French from America* had cattle played such a key role in les relations anglo-françaises. Just as in 1754, the stage was set for a major cross-Channel confrontation, and, true to form, it played out in a supremely Anglo-French bout of tit-for-tat point scoring.

  Now that the cat (or cow) was out of the bag about BSE, the Brits acted quickly, banning the use of MBM in cattle feed, slaughtering all beef animals before the age of thirty months, and obliging abattoirs to remove and destroy the disease-carrying parts of the carcasses – the spinal column, intestines, brain and bone marrow. Nevertheless, they continued (it is alleged) exporting their stocks of potentially infected animal feed to France.

  The EU was fairly lenient on Britain, and in 1989 it banned only the export of MBM, animals under one year old, and any cattle suspected of having BSE. So, although the reputation of British meat had taken a bad beating, in theory it was business almost as usual.

  The French, though, were having none of this leniency. They had always suspected that most British food was infecte (disgusting); now it was infecté (infected). Furthermore, they regard brains and bone marrow as delicacies. A Frenchman is rarely happier than when he is scraping the jelly out of a sawn-off chunk of cow’s leg – an os à moëlle. There was no way the French would eat British beef if some of the tastiest bits of the animal were diseased, so they took the logical step and banned it.

  For once, the Brits couldn’t really complain about France’s behaviour, and anyway they were engrossed in their own mad-cow panic, as the media bombarded Britain with pictures of vets in sterile bodysuits marching about the countryside massacring any four-legged animal that had a slightly paranoid glint in its eye (and given the scale of the cull, no British cows were looking particularly relaxed).