1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  But when in 1990 the European Union decided that British beef was OK to eat again, it seemed that the country’s surviving cattle had beaten the crisis, like a herd of mooing Winston Churchills. Probably for the first time ever, the Brits were willing to point to an EU law and say how wonderful it was.

  France wasn’t going to let Europe force-feed it with British food, however, so it not only upheld its ban but also redoubled its ‘healthier than thou’ stance. The French government refused to acknowledge that its cattle might be vulnerable to BSE – it was a ‘poison anglais’, as one magazine described it. And a new label was created: VBF or ‘viande bovine française’ (French cattle meat), the implication being that French beef was sanest and safest, which it probably wasn’t. The danger sign seemed to be in the VBF logo itself, which was missing the central B – was the designer suffering from BSE or its newly identified human form, Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease?

  The discovery of new variant CJD in 1995 caused a renewed EU ban on British beef that the French adopted with triumphant gusto as confirmation that only cows with Union-Jack-coloured blood could possibly be infected. And when this ban was lifted by the EU, the French refused to comply.

  The Brits were so sure of themselves that they adopted French-style tactics. In 1999 farmers blockaded the ports of Plymouth and Poole to stop French lorries landing. Supermarkets announced that they would no longer stock French apples, pears and Brie, and one even cancelled an order for French mistletoe. Meanwhile, Conservative MEPs showed that their party still had a lot in common with Sun newspaper reporters by parading down the Champs-Élysées with a banner saying ‘Let them eat British beef’. It was ‘Up Yours Delors’ all over again.

  French politicians continued to insist that they could only trust their own cattle, but by now the policy of denial was starting to fall apart.

  In 1999, it was revealed that some French wine producers were using filtering agents that contained dried ox blood. Fourteen wineries in the Avignon region were raided and 100,000 bottles were seized. It was stressed that only low-quality wine was affected, and that there was no problem with the Appellations contrôlées and Vins de table that were usually exported, but the evidence was there; the ‘poison anglais’ had seeped into France’s lifeblood. As one American wine lover expressed it: ‘Is there a tiny chance I could go mad from drinking my 1991 Château Mouton Rothschild?’

  Then, in 2000, Britain’s Nature magazine really put the hoof in on French beef. It was very likely, the scientific journal said, that over 7,000 diseased animals had entered the French food chain, and that le boeuf français was far from pure. The subsequent media fallout caused a huge scare in France, and a supermarket was forced to recall massive stocks of French beef after a diseased animal was found at a large abattoir. From now on, French journalists gleefully reported every case of a homegrown cow that couldn’t walk straight.

  Thus it was that the British newspapers began to taste sweet revenge. In 2001, the continuing French ban on UK beef was declared illegal by Europe, and The Sun demanded that British cows should go back ‘on the moove’ into France. In 2002, The Daily Mail jeered, ‘French Beef Unfit to Eat’ amid discussions in Britain to ban imports of French beef because it had been found to contain traces of spinal cord.

  In short, the Brits had successfully exported their vache folle crisis across the Channel and were now doing their old trick of looking down on the French from the recently attained moral high ground. And when France finally agreed to let its shops stock British beef again in October 2002, the turnaround was complete.

  Not that France was going to let the ennemi enjoy its victory, of course. It imposed a ban on blood donors who spent six months or more in the UK between 1980 and 1996, even though for the final few years of that period, French beef was probably more dangerous.

  And today, thanks to a combination of the innate trust in the noble French peasant (who, despite evidence to the contrary, is still believed to produce only hand-reared, grass-fed animals), a sense of invulnerability (for example, the French government successfully convinced many of its people that the Chernobyl radiation cloud stopped at the Italian border), and traditional distrust of British food, BSE is still seen as an inherently anglais thing. This was confirmed at the highest level in 2005 when President Jacques Chirac quipped that ‘the only thing they [the Anglais] have done for agriculture is invent the mad cow’.

  Little did Chirac know, however, that jokes about British (and other nations’) food would soon cost his country very dear indeed …

  * There was some traffic in the other direction, the most famous example being ‘My Way’, which is an English-language adaptation of the French song ‘Comme d’habitude’ (‘As Usual’) by Claude François. If you listen carefully to the English version you can hear that it’s a French song – the melody is basically a variation on a single theme and the rhythm is totally undanceable.

  * It was apparently his real name, although verge is a slightly medical word for penis.

  * See Chapter 12.

  28

  Napoleon’s Dream Comes True

  From the end of the Second World War right up to the 1990s, Britain and France were like a bickering old couple, making snide remarks about one another while getting on with everyday life. And like that bickering couple, for as long as they could remember, they’d been in separate beds – in this case, on opposite sides of the Channel.

  The opening of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 was therefore a seismic shock, like suddenly throwing the old couple into a double bed after years of being free to stretch out in all directions on their own single mattress. The question was, would they lunge in with knees and elbows, or choose to snuggle up? And who, if anyone, would manage to hog the duvet?

  Return to Waterloo

  The first realistic attempt to dig a passage under the Channel was made in 1875, when Britain and France passed simultaneous laws giving permission to a firm called the Channel Tunnel Company Limited to begin boring holes in the cliffs of Dover and in Sangatte, near Calais.

  The machines to be used were British. A man from Dartford in Kent (now the site of one of London’s best-known Thames tunnels) with the impossibly patriotic name of Captain Thomas English invented a boring machine that was actually very interesting, because it could dig through a half a mile of rock a month, and allowed the Brits to predict confidently that they would arrive at mid-point by 1886. They applied for public money to fund the project, but the British government was having second thoughts about doing away with the nation’s greatest defence against those unreliable continentals, so it quoted a sensible-sounding law banning railway tunnels below sea level and put a stop to the project.

  By this time, there was already a mile and a half of tunnel on the Dover side, its opening marked by one of the miners who had begun the digging, a Welshman who had clearly left school before mastering English spelling (his carved inscription reads ‘This tunnel was begubnugn in 1880 William Sharp’). Not wanting to give up, the stubborn tunnellers carried on digging once the government inspectors had left, presumably hoping that people would believe they were just looking for fossils.

  However, the inspectors came back to enforce their ban, and the boring machines fell silent. Even so, the Channel Tunnel Company was never actually wound down, and it resurfaced in 1964 when the British and French made a joint announcement saying that they both wanted to start digging again. The head of the Channel Tunnel Company, an ageing British aristocrat called Leo d’Erlanger, declared that work would take five years. The only problem was that no one on either side could say when tunnelling would actually begin – though this silence shouldn’t have been too surprising given that the French president of the time was still de Gaulle, not the greatest fan of cross-Channel co-operation.

  In 1967 serious planning finally began, and in 1971 a dual state-funded proposal headed by the Channel Tunnel Company and the Société française du tunnel sous la Manche was given the green light, with the two govern
ments’ commitment to getting value for money being made obvious in the way they refused to waste millions getting PR firms to think up clever names for their companies.

  Digging resumed in 1973, and was going well until the Brits pulled the plug on the tunnel in 1975, saying that the project was already 200 per cent over budget and they couldn’t afford it. Napoleon’s dream was once again dead in (or rather, under) the water.

  It was refloated by an unexpected ally, Margaret Thatcher, who in 1981 gracefully conceded that she wouldn’t oppose a Channel Tunnel as long as it needed absolutely no state funding. In other words, go ahead but you’re on your own.

  This call for private enterprise had a predictable effect. One of the designs put forward was a crackpot scheme to suspend a tube across the Channel on 340-metre-tall pylons – the bidders clearly hadn’t understood the meaning of a key word in the specifications: ‘tunnel’.

  A very low-costing idea was proposed by a conglomerate of ferry companies, though of course no one suspected, or suspects, them of trying to sabotage competition to their cross-Channel transport monopoly by obtaining the contract to build a tunnel and then failing to deliver.

  Finally, an equally low-costing bid from Eurotunnel was accepted, and no one suspected, or suspects, them of putting in a low offer to obtain the contract and then ask for state aid once the budget ballooned to more realistic proportions. In any case, Thatcher and Mitterrand felt confident enough to sign the contract giving Eurotunnel the go-ahead in January 1986.

  Digging began near Folkestone in 1987 and at Sangatte in 1988, and by a miracle of Anglo-French co-operation, the two teams actually met in the same place in the middle of the Channel on 1 December 1990, when a Brit called Graham Fagg drilled through the last half-metre of the rock that had separated England from France for an estimated 8,000 years. Fagg (sorry, but surely they could have found someone with a better name for this Neil Armstrong moment of undersea engineering?) reached through the hole and shook hands with his French counterpart, Philippe Cozette (whose name rather appropriately sounds like the French word for a cosy chat, causette). In fact, though, this ‘breakthrough’ was a ceremony staged for the media, and the two teams had made sure they were both in the same place a few weeks earlier, when an almost invisible hole five centimetres wide was cut between the French and British sections of tunnel.

  After this moment of euphoria, digging work dragged on for a year beyond target, and it was announced that the budget had doubled to £12 billion. Britain’s eternal cynicism about France’s intentions turned out to be justified when it was realized that, contrary to the rules, the French state had been underpinning its side of the project because its banks were partly nationalized (one wonders why the first two words of the name Banque Nationale de Paris didn’t give the game away?).

  On 6 May 1994, after almost 200 years of talking and planning, the tunnel was finally completed. The Queen was allowed to invade France first, and travelled under the Channel to an opening ceremony in Calais. President Mitterrand then returned with her to Folkestone to open the other end of the tunnel. And around 200 million similar passenger journeys have been made since that day.

  There have been many financial problems in the interim, of course, as well as the occasional strike and accident to hold things up, but the tunnel has been welcomed almost universally as a miraculous innovation. The days of stumbling half-asleep across the wind-blown docks of one of the Channel ports in the middle of the night and trying to grab a seat on a clanky train that would spend several hours grinding to London or Paris are over. The ferries have also upped their game and are cruise liners compared to the tubs of the monopoly days.

  Nevertheless, the weight of Anglo-French history pressing down on the tunnel roof has guaranteed that the griping and sniping won’t stop just because a few engineers managed to get things right.

  First, there came the French amusement that the Brits couldn’t get permission for their high-speed rail link. Instead of ignoring or paying off protesters and ploughing a track through the empty fields of northern France, British planners had to ask permission of practically every suburban garden-owner in Kent, and they all said no. Consequently, as Mitterrand quipped during his first visit, French tourists would have plenty of time to admire the famous English countryside as they pottered along the old railway from Folkestone to London at 20 m.p.h.

  This, though, was nothing compared to the historical snub of having the London-bound trains arrive at Waterloo, the station named after the French defeat that marked the downfall of Napoleon, the man who had actually dreamed up the tunnel project. If de Gaulle had been alive, he would probably have sent Exocets through the tunnel rather than allow the humiliation to go ahead.

  The only semi-official objection to the Waterloo terminal took a long time coming. In 1998, a right-wing city councillor in Paris’s 1st arrondissement called Florent Longuépée (‘long sword’, the name of William the Conqueror’s great-great-grandfather) wrote to Tony Blair demanding that the station undergo a name change. Otherwise, Longuépée threatened, he would campaign to change the name of the Gare du Nord to Fontenoy. This meant absolutely nothing to the Brits and not much more to the Parisians, but was in fact the name of a 1745 battle in Belgium at which French troops routed an Anglo-Austro-Dutch-German army. The battle is only remembered (if at all) because the Gardes françaises chivalrously offered the English Foot Guards the chance to take the first shot. It is a gesture that is always put forward as an example of French courage, which is false for two reasons. First, it was a devious strategy – a line of musket-bearing soldiers who have just fired would take some minutes to reload, during which time their adversaries could dash towards them and take a shot from much closer range. And secondly, the French writer Voltaire tells a version of the story in which the English made the offer first, and the French cunningly saw through the ruse and threw it back in their faces.

  Be that as it may, it is just another example of the way the French and Brits can never really agree on anything. As we know, neither Waterloo nor the Gare du Nord had its name changed, and in any case, the Brits have now moved the Eurostar terminal to St Pancras station, which is politically far less inflammatory. (Or is it? More on that later.)

  And today, the tunnel is a symbol of Anglo-French synergy, while the Eurostar train (built by a French company, of course) is a place where you can use euros or pounds, speak English or French (and occasionally Flemish) and even take it in turns to smile at the cute accents of the train managers who make the service announcements. Napoleon and Josephine would have been on it every weekend.

  A law against English

  Just a few months after the Channel Tunnel was opened, the French erected a sea wall. Not to protect itself against the effects of global warming, but to hold back the rising tide of English that (so they thought) was sweeping French off the linguistic map.

  As we saw in the last chapter, France has long been suspicious of rock’n’roll and Hollywood, and in August 1994 the country’s Minister of Culture and the French Language published a law designed to stop the Anglo-American invasion once and for all.

  The minister, Jacques Toubon, was not first and foremost a cultural man – he was a career politician, a graduate of France’s elite École nationale d’administration (ENA), a right-hand man of Jacques Chirac during the latter’s career in various ministries. Toubon was as qualified to head the Ministry of Culture as he was to run the railways, a tax department or Chirac’s election campaigns.

  When he took over the job in 1993, he gave a speech saying that he wanted to promote ‘culture that makes each man a responsible citizen’. To most of us, this sounds like total gobbledygook, but to French politicians who knew the ENA, it was a comfortingly vague piece of admin-speak – other ministers were simultaneously making speeches that were exactly the same except that the word ‘culture’ was replaced by words like ‘army’, ‘nuclear power’ and ‘cheese’.

  Toubon’s first move was, typically, t
o reorganize large cultural institutions like the Louvre, the Opéra national and the Bibliothèque nationale (France’s national library), giving top jobs to ‘associates’. Again, it was so far, so ENA.

  But Toubon surprised almost everybody when he imposed his ‘Law 94-665 Relating to the Use of the French Language’, which sought quite simply to impose French on France. Its first article decreed that ‘in the designation, offer, presentation, instructions for use and utilization,* description of size, and conditions of guarantee of goods, products, or services, as well as in invoices and receipts, the use of the French language is obligatory’.

  In addition, all advertising – written, spoken or audiovisual – had to be in French; the creation of a brand name in a foreign language was forbidden if a French equivalent existed; French-based companies couldn’t insist that its employees had to speak or understand English; and teaching had to be in French if a school wanted public funding (the Bretons had to fight for the right to use their language in state schools).

  Toubon reserved the most severe measures for music and TV. ‘Before 1 January 1996,’ the law stipulated, ‘the proportion of musical works written or performed by French or French-speaking artistes broadcast in popular music programmes during prime time by all radio stations must reach a minimum of 40 per cent.’ Toubon added that it was compulsory for TV channels to broadcast ‘at least twice a week, during prime time, programmes created in French’, a move to limit the number of (highly popular) American TV series being watched.

  Apart from the fact that the French hate obeying new laws, this felt a bit like the Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dyke. The English language was already an integral part of French popular culture, and stars like Serge Gainsbourg and even Johnny Hallyday had performed songs with English titles. So the fightback began almost immediately – the French love playing with words, and translated Toubon himself into English, as Jack Allgood (for the French tout bon). And most French people treated the law as a joke.