Article by John Derbyshire |
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| All-Vapouring
France All
this anti-French commentary these past few weeks has stirred warm feelings
of nostalgia in my breast. This
is my home territory; this is
stuff I know. Frog-bashing is
only an occasional and desultory pleasure for Americans, but growing up in
England, I took in Francophobia with my mother’s milk.
“With
my father’s cigarette smoke” would be more accurate. My mother actually held no strong opinions on the matter.
“They let us down in the War,” she would say when the subject
of the French came up, but in a tone more of sorrow than anger.
A gentle and kindly person, my mother bore no large resentments.
The great fount of anti-French feeling in the Derbyshire family was
my father. In his youth Dad
had had some intimate encounters of the military type with both France, as
ally, and Germany, as enemy. Those
encounters had left him with an abiding admiration for the Germans and a
deep loathing of the French. My
earliest mental map of the world included the facts, which I took to be as
indisputable as the Laws of Thermodynamics, that the Germans, though they
might sometimes get above themselves and need keeping in check, were
basically sound, while the French, though we had to go to their aid every
so often in order to prevent the Germans overrunning everything, were
scum. Dad spent his declining
years writing furious letters to the newspapers denouncing the European
Common Market (fore-runner of the EU), which he saw as a cunning plot on
the part of the French to strip Englishmen of their birthright and their
money — to obtain by guile what Louis XIV and Napoleon had been unable
to get by force. My
father was drawing on a deep reservoir of anti-French feeling among his
countrymen. Readers of
Patrick O’Brian’s novels will recall that English sailors of the early
19th century were summoned to meals by a drummer beating out the rhythm of
“The Roast Beef of Old England.”
This song long pre-dated Napoleon.
Written by Richard Leveridge in 1735, it is a critical commentary
on the England of that time. It
begins: When
Mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food It
ennobl’d our veins and enrichéd our Blood. Our
Soldiers were Brave & our Courtiers were Good: Chorus:
Oh! the Roast Beef of
old England, And
old English Roast Beef. The
second verse gets down to business: But
since we have learned from all-vapouring France, To
eat their Ragouts, as well as to Dance, We
are fed up with nothing but vain Complaisance. Chorus:
Oh! the Roast Beef... Etc.** Thus
we see that 200 years ago the basic image of the French as a nation of
effeminate dancing-masters who eat mush was already well established in
the Anglo-Saxon world-view. This
was by no means the beginning of it, though.
A couple of lifetimes earlier, William Shakespeare had his first
commercial success with the play we know as Henry VI Part I, one of
the most anti-French works in all of English literature. This play is not often staged.
I myself have never seen it. The
version done for the BBC
Complete Shakespeare is
said to be very good, and I have it on my to-buy list, but at present I
know the play only from reading it, and from reading about it in
Peter Saccio’s wonderful little classic Shakespeare’s
English Kings. The
main point of the play is to show the origins of the Wars of the Roses.
This sorry business was a distant consequence of the fact that
Edward III, who ruled England through the middle years of the 14th
century, had too many sons. The
trick of medieval kingship was to leave
behind you precisely one healthy and strong-willed male heir to
carry on the dynasty. Less
than one, or more than one, spelled trouble.
Edward Plantagenet over-egged the pudding, producing five healthy
sons, two of whom — the Duke of Lancaster (“John of Gaunt” in
Shakespeare) and the Duke of York — engendered mini-dynasties of their
own. The subsequent tensions
were kept fairly well under control so long as there was a strong king in
charge; but when Henry VI ascended to the throne in 1422 at the age of
nine months, things began to go awry.
Henry grew up to be bookish and weak-willed, and in the third
quarter of the 15th century England descended into civil war between the
House of York and the House of Lancaster, whose emblems were a white rose
and a red rose, respectively. The
good news about all this discord is that it provided Shakespeare, writing
at the end of the 16th century, with material for eight fine plays.
Henry VI Part I is
usually reckoned as the first of the eight to have been written, though
there are the inevitable scholarly wrangles about this.
We actually have a review from August 1592 of what is almost
certainly this play. Though
the lead-up to the Wars of the Roses forms the principal theme of the
play, the tail-end of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France
is also acted out onstage. The
horror of political disorder that runs through all of Shakespeare’s work
is clearly visible here in his picture of squabbling, scheming English
aristocrats bringing the nation to ruin.
The particular ruin they bring England to in Henry VI Part I
is the loss of the “first British Empire” — the possessions
in France that English kings had laid claim to, with various degrees of
plausibility, for three centuries, that had actually been fought over
pretty continuously since the early years of Edward III, and that the
glorious campaigns of Henry V in 1415-22 had made into firm
stepping-stones towards the conquest of all France. Showing
these losses, however, presented Shakespeare with difficulties of
presentation. His countrymen
were flushed with national pride following the defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588. How could he
display the disasters in France 160 years earlier to an audience full of a
sense of their nation’s invincibility?
The dissensions of the English nobles gave him one hook to hang his
story on. See what happens
when we quarrel among ourselves.
For the other, he drew a scathing picture of the French as wily
cowards, who basically won by cheating and witchcraft.
See what happens when you deal with the French as people of
honor. There
are no good French people in this play at all.
Every one of them is arrogant, or crafty, or duplicitous, or in
league with “fiends.” One
of the French principals bears the name “Bastard of Orleans.” All their victories are won by tricks, or by the use of
unfair, un-gentlemanly weapons like cannon.
Most scandalous of all to French sensibilities is Shakespeare’s
portrayal of the French national heroine and saint, Joan of Arc.
In Henry VI Part I Joan
is a scheming slut who dabbles in the black arts.
“Search out thy wit for secret policies, And we will make thee
famous through the world,” hisses the Bastard to Joan after the loss of
Rouen. She goes off to
consult her “fiends.” The
play is full of sentiments to gladden the heart of any Francophobe.
Just 25 lines into the first act, here is the Duke of Exeter at the
funeral of Henry V: ...Shall
we curse the planets of mishap That
plotted thus our glory’s overthrow? Or
shall we think the subtile-witted French Conjurers
and sorcerers, that, afraid of him, By
magic verses have contrived his end? Later
the French take Rouen by a sly ruse of Joan’s, then lose it by
cowardice. Scoffs the English
hero, Lord Talbot, in between the gain and the loss: ...Base
muleteers of France! Like
peasant footboys do they keep the walls And
dare not take up arms like gentlemen. When
the Duke of Burgundy, up to this point an ally of England’s, is seduced
away to the French side by Joan of Arc, she thanks him with a line that
would get as good a laugh from Jonah Goldberg as it must have got from the
Elizabethan audience: Done
like a Frenchman — [aside] turn and turn again. Henry
VI himself, in Paris for his coronation, warns his nobles to: ...remember
where we are, In
France, among a fickle wavering nation. After
the decisive English loss at Bordeaux, the French Dauphin greets an
English emissary with: “On
what submissive message art thou sent?”
The Englishman replies haughtily: Submission,
Dauphin? ‘Tis a mere French
word. We
English warriors wot not what it means. There
is even a gratuitous swipe at the Belgians.
A messenger, reporting on an attempt to assassinate Talbot, tells
us the dirty deed was done by “a base Walloon” who, “to win the
Dauphin’s grace, Thrust Talbot with a spear into the back.” That
the Bard could make free with all this Frog-bashing was the more
remarkable in that at the time he was writing, England and France were
allies, with Spain their common enemy.
France had given no trouble to the English for decades, having been
consumed by her own wars of religion and a bloody change of dynasty.
In 1592, when Henry VI Part I appeared, the jovial and
capable Henri IV, first of the Bourbons, had title to the French crown.
He was a Protestant, which made him popular with the English, and
English soldiers were actually in the field with him, fighting to help him
take Paris, which was in the hands of a Catholic faction.
Henri’s victory over Catholic forces at the Battle of Ivry in
1590 had been cheered in England; the British Museum has a copy of a
printed song-sheet sold in the streets of London to celebrate the occasion.
Elizabeth I sent Henri gifts — a scarf she had made herself, and
an emerald — and addressed him in letters (written in her own hand, in
her own excellent French) as “dearest brother.”
She signed herself off as “your very assured good sister and
cousin.” The
Queen regarded Henri as an insurance policy against England’s worst
nightmare: a grand Catholic
alliance between France and Spain. When
he cynically turned Catholic in 1593 with the famous remark that “Paris
is worth a mass,” neither Elizabeth nor her countrymen held it against
him, and the two nations remained on cordial terms until the
Franco-Spanish alliance of the late 1620s, ten years after Shakespeare’s
death. (It was Henri IV, by
the way, who is supposed to have planned the “Grand Design” for a
Franco-German Christian republic, with a council of Europe to discuss
affairs of common interest — a first draft, if you like, of the European
Union.) All
of which goes to prove that Frog-bashing requires no actual excuse, and
can be enjoyed at any time, with the support of no less an authority than
the Swan of Avon. [Note to
editor: If you don’t
like my title for this piece, how about “Swan Bashes Frogs”?]
When the French actually do go out of their way to vex the
Anglosphere, as they did recently in the U.N. Security Council, there is
no reason to restrain ourselves at all.
All those jokes you have been hearing this past few weeks about
French treachery and pusillanimity — “French rifle for sale; almost
new; only thrown down in surrender twice...” — have a long and
respectable pedigree. Go
ahead, enjoy yourself. Did
you hear that the French government has banned fireworks at Euro Disney?
They are afraid that the sounds of the explosions might cause
soldiers at a nearby French army garrison to surrender. ———————–——————–—–—–—— |
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