My brother sent me a list of unflattering quotes about France recently: I’m sure he was infuriated by the casual racism on display. I have reproduced some of them below, so that you too may be infuriated (I have removed some of the more extreme examples, not wanting to condone “hate” criminals.)
'I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.'
General George S. Patton
'Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion.'
General Norman Schwarzkopf
'We can stand here like the French, or we can do something about it.'
Marge Simpson, The Simpsons
'As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure.'
Jacques Chirac, President of France
'The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army is sitting in Paris sipping coffee.'
Regis Philbin, US TV show host
'You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it.'
Unamed U.S. Senator
'The last time the French asked for 'more proof' it came marching into Paris under a German flag.'
David Letterman , US TV talk show host
Only thing worse than a Frenchman is a Frenchman who lives in Canada .'
Ted Nugent, Republican rock star
'War without France would be like ... World War II.'
Unknown
'The favorite bumper sticker in Washington D.C. right now is one that says 'First Iraq , then France .''
Tom Brokaw , former NBC news anchor
'What do you expect from a culture and a nation that exerted more of its national will fighting against Disney World and Big Macs than the Nazis?'
Dennis Miller , US comedian and talk show host
'It is important to remember that the French have always been there when they needed us.'
Alan Kent, US TV personality
'Somebody was telling me about the French Army rifle that was being advertised on eBay the other day --the description was, 'Never shot. Dropped once.''
Rep. Roy Blunt, MO
Q. What did the mayor of Paris say to the German Army as they entered the city in WWII?
A. Table for 100,000 m'sieur?
'Do you know how many Frenchmen it takes to defend Paris ? It's not known, it's never been tried.'
Roy Blount, US Congressman
Well, shame on all of those quoted. Will we never grow up?
This is a disgraceful slur on a proud nation and deserves to be reported to Trevor Phillips or the European Court of Human Rights or Cherie Blair or somebody. We gave you Escoffier and Dior and Proust and you give us insults. Perfidy. Vive La France! Vive La Republique. Death to Les Rosbifs!
ReplyDeleteWednesday, November 17, 2010 - 03:58 PM
Believe me, Asterix, I am as angry as you - after all, when it comes to a fight, who else but the French would one prefer to stand should-to-shoulder with? But as I actually know Trevor Phillips from the days when he was pretending to be a journalist, I will report myself to him immediately, simultaneously throwing myself on the mercy of whichever "thought crime" tribunal he is empowered to convene.
ReplyDeleteWednesday, November 17, 2010 - 04:32 PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1387576/How-France-helped-us-win-Falklands-war-by-John-Nott.html :
ReplyDeleteHow France helped us win Falklands war, by John Nott
FRANCE was Britain's greatest ally during the Falklands war, providing secret information to enable MI6 agents to sabotage Exocet missiles which were desperately sought by Argentina, according to Sir John Nott, who was Defence Secretary during the conflict.
In his memoirs he reveals that while President Reagan was pressurising Lady Thatcher to accept a negotiated settlement France helped Britain to win the conflict.
Although Lady Thatcher clashed with President Mitterrand over the future direction of Europe, he immediately came to her aid after Argentine forces invaded the Falklands in April 1982.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 09:16 AM
Interesting that the one example anyone ever quotes about French-Anglo cooperation (rather than the other way round) dates back to 1982 and is in an area of activity in which the relationship is two-way and mutually convenient.
ReplyDeleteI once worked for the UN and left convinced that national stereotypes existed for a purpose: they were for the most part accurate. It was very difficult to persuade French colleagues to work in any team in which they were required to take instructions from any one other than a French man (and I mean man). Much as I love my many French friends, at least half your quotes that chime with my experience.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 10:41 AM
I would not dispute for a moment, ex-KCS, that WW2 showed the French in a ghastly light.
ReplyDeleteI agree also that national characteristics are national characteristics.
What I dispute is that the national characteristic of the French is cowardice.
Before WW2, there was WW1, when the French lost 1.7 million dead (4.29% of the population) and 4.2 million wounded, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties, hardly the mark of cowardice.
And before WW2, there were the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon was nuts. And he lost. In the end. But he and his troops weren't cowards.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 10:58 AM
No one can visit the little villages around the French and Belgian sites of the WW1 battles, read the names of entire French families that fought and died and fail to be deeply moved by the sacrifice - "half the seed of Europe, one by one" as Wilfred Owen put it. The scales of their losses also explains a lot about the French appetite for defending France against invasion in WW2.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't think the dominant theme of Scott's quotes is cowardice so much as unreliability as an ally. That was the point I was making. I would not agree with the accusation of cowardice and note that I was careful to refer to about half the quotes chiming.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 11:35 AM
Point taken, ex-KCS.
ReplyDeleteI may not know much about geopolitics but I know what I like.
Here is an ignorant man's take on national alliances.
The French started the Vietnam war, ran for it, and let the US do all the fighting.
Harold Wilson kept us out of the Vietnam war, disappointing our allies, the US.
The French supported the UK during the Falklands war and the US didn't.
The French will now share their sea-borne projection powers with us, which is just as well as we have one expensive boat and no planes to put on it which makes us rather dubious allies.
The US supported us and everyone else during the second world war, after a few years, and on 8 May 2005 we finished paying them for their support, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article520034.ece
Tony Blair bombed hell out of the Christians in Kosovo and got no thanks from the Muslims. Like a good ally, he invaded Afghanistan in support of the US, ended the world heroin trade and brought peace, democracy and women's rights to that country before invading Iraq, like a good ally, in support of the US, thereby introducing Al Qaeda to the only secular state in the middle east, ending world terrorism and bringing peace, democracy, etc ..., to that country and all its neighbours.
This alliance lark is complicated. We still get a few strange looks from the Czechs when we visit Prague, n'est-ce pas? The key to it seems in my ignorance to be genuinely to act in your own country's own best interests. And that is the national characteristic, I venture, in my ignorance, etc ..., of the French. Unashamed, unswerving, selfishness. Everyone knows where you stand then, everything is rational. Rather admirable.
A little more self-interest from our lot, SVP.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 12:52 PM
Interesting stuff, CINQIÈME COLUMNISTE and EX-KCS. I don't think the English imagine for a moment that the French are cowardly, but the Americans seem to. I suspect that's because of the point you make about the French always unashamedly and unapologetically acting in their own self-interest - the Americans like to dress up their foreign adventures in a cloak of morality, and the French don’t see the need to.
ReplyDeleteThe US seems to mistake France’s tendency to calculate the benefit to them before agreeing to get involved in a anything for gutlessness: I suspect it’s also to do with the French ruling elite’s snobbish disdain for American culture and it’s rampant anti-Americanism (Bob Dylan - of all people - when appearing on stage in Paris for the first time in the 1960s, insisted on having an enormous American flag as his backdrop, just to annoy them!).
I doubt if any loyal Briton doesn’t basically believe the French approach is the one we should now re-adopt (especially given that the US President and his Secretary of State are raving Anglophobes).
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 02:24 PM
First, Scott, thanks for a Blog that attracts an intelligent audience on any subject. It's interesting that your brother's censored casual post of Franco-pisstaking gets you 8 responses when yours on culture, nature and philosophy get few, when they are vastly more interesting than anything I pick up in the vast range of periodicals I waste money on.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, 5C, I wish we had that French sense of confidence in our national culture and purpose. We don't and it might just be that we no longer have a common culture or purpose that we recognise enough to advance and defend. I have my own theories for why that is. But that view is not incompatible with the view that history over at least three centuries prompts the thoughts that when you have French support at your side, you should not immediately log on to Betfair check your finances and put the family farm on it turning out all that well.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 03:43 PM
And just to pick up a couple of other points, on the US stance on the Falklands once Mrs Thatcher had convinced Reagan to ignore Al Haig and the State Department in their "I've looked at clouds from both sides now" position they were supportive, if only in the passive sense of setting aside their policy of increasing the US sphere of influence in South America in order to support an ally.
ReplyDeleteThe other point is about your, 5C's, remark on Wilson. I always thought of him as a joke PM. After seeing how Blair reacted to the US adventure in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think that Wislon did the UK and, more tellingly, my lot a service in not conscripting the army and KCS CCF into lending token support to an un-winnable expedition. His wiliness in keeping us out and maintaining UK-US relations deserves some sort of re-evaluation of his generally crap reputation.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 04:05 PM
And may I for my part emphasise that I don't want to spoil anyone's fun pointing out the French preference for retiring at 60 after a lifetime of 35-hour weeks, many of them spent working. Or their peculiar habit of covering motorways with cow dung if the CAP taps ever look like being turned down. Or the impossibility in France of dying of a heart attack -- doctors trained not to write that on the death certificate, bad for the wine industry. Or their interminable talk radio programmes where people with nothing to say say it for three hours at a time. Cataleptic. French cinema -- some excellent, much of it a turkey, or dinde. French pop music. Or their self-importance. Etc ...
ReplyDeleteThursday, November 18, 2010 - 04:56 PM
5th C, on my travels I will always look on the hotel TV for the French channels in the hope of tuning into up a culture which I respect greatly for not having surrendered to all pervasive Americana. There is a French jazz/blues/pop culture that owes nothing to US pop heritage, which is worthy of another post.
ReplyDeleteAnd then I tune back into the English channels and think that perhaps I am living in the wrong country.
That's for another day.Thanks for a fascinating exchange.
Thursday, November 18, 2010 - 07:53 PM
We're different. The English and the French differ in some important way. Which way?
ReplyDeleteObservation 1. When a Frenchman says "sans doute", which translates word by word as "without doubt", he doesn't mean "without doubt", i.e. "certainly", he means "probably", because "sans doute" is the French for "probably". If a Frenchman wants to say "certainly", he says "sans aucune doute". That's all very well, but I can't help feeling that saying "sans doute" and meaning "probably" must nag away, unconsciously, at our Frenchman's grasp of the concepts of certainty and probability, the distinction between them must be softer than it is for an Englishman.
Observation 2. An expert in artificial intelligence of my sometime acquaintance used to attend international conferences, usually hosted by NASA, with the Frecnch and others in attendance. Whatever the topic of debate, probability came into it. And at that point in the debate, the French would clam up. My acquaintance got the impression that they just didn't like probability, they didn't think it was the right way to proceed, Descartes mapped geometry onto algebra and it was just a downright insult to la patrie to give up solutions to equations in favour of degrees of freedom and confidence limits.
Observation 3. [Stage direction: short jump, just a hop really, in the argument. Descartes-epistemology-Jacques Derrida-Gauloises-Left Bank café culture-that sort of thing ...]
Observation 4. ... because the French are idealists, whereas we Brits are empiricists and never the twain shall meet.
Saturday, November 20, 2010 - 01:51 PM
Talking of allies, the French might like to remember that Benjamin Franklin spent large parts of the period 1767 to 1784 based in France scheming with the French to defeat the English in the War of Independence, or Revolution, as we should say, and to keep Spanish influence in the Americas suppressed by fomenting arguments between them and the English.
ReplyDeleteSchemes in which he was all too successful, the French proved staunch allies, Franklin was lionised by French Society, who adopted a silly hat he wore as a fashion accessory, Marie Antoinette learned to play the armonica, a musical instrument, one of Franklin's endless inventions, and when it came time for him to leave France for good, she insisted that he take her coach to the coast.
Ask not what the French have ever done for the Americans.
(Benjamin Franklin -- An American Life, highly recommended, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Benjamin-Franklin-American-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0684807610/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1290262990&sr=1-2)
Saturday, November 20, 2010 - 02:24 PM
Damn.
ReplyDelete"Talking of allies, the French might like to remember that ..." should be "Talking of allies, the Americans might like to remember that ".
Saturday, November 20, 2010 - 03:01 PM
Apologies for a brief hiatus - you may (or may not) have noticed that I've been making a number of changes to the website - i-Web is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't half require a lot of manual intervention to change things! Still, a work in progress. Thank you very much for your kind comments EX-KCS - I am genuinely grateful! I think it's the high quality of the comments that distinguishes this site from commercial rivals, rather than the quality of the my posts!
ReplyDeleteSaturday, November 20, 2010 - 03:55 PM