Jules Eden - 50 Reasons to Hate the French

50 Reasons to

Hate the French

By Jules Eden and Alex Clarke

www.50reasonstohatethefrench.com

I have tried to pull France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. Even I cannot prevent the French from being French.

Charles de Gaulle, French General, Writer and Statesman (1890-1970)

PRAISE FOR

50 REASONS TO HATE THE FRENCH

Deliciously irreverent and provocative Eden and Clarke skewer Gallic corruption, pretentiousness and self-regard, and slay the sacred cows of French life and culture, from suppository medicines to Sartre to the 2CV. Immensely valuable as a source of obscure information such as how many glissandes (slip-ups) requiring hospitalisation are caused each year in Paris by canine merde their book is also riotously amusing50 Reasons to Hate the French?Why so few?!?

Christopher Silvester, Independent on Sunday diarist

If the French can inspire a book as funny as this, perhaps we shouldnt hate them after all.

Toby Young, Spectator critic and egghead

This admirably intemperate book gives the nation of Cresson and Chirac and Elf and the egregious Enarques a spirited kick in the Jean-Paul Sartres. Ouff! Zut! Merde! Theyre wrong about French food and the wine, though.

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail senior columnist

I must confess I was tickled, amazed and shocked by Eden and Clarkes missive. They had better aim their furious invective at the UK

for another best seller; before some Frenchie does (not as well, of course).

Terence Stamp, Actor, Icon and The Limey himself

For Sophia

JE

For Sir Percy Blakeney

AC

Note on currencies

Plus a Change:

The Euro was launched in 2002 on an expectant French public. Fed up with an over fluctuant French Franc playing second fiddle to the Deutschmark, at last they had a currency they could be proud of. It soon dropped against the US dollar and British pound, but it did something decidedly odd in later years.

As Euro member economies started to collapse, the Euro actually got stronger. Up to 2007 a Brit could buy his cheese, wine and suppositories at 1.5 euros to a pound. Since the crash this has dropped to 1.1 euros. An odd turn of events - considering the weakness of other nation states using the currency.

Personally I feel this is due to its one redeeming feature. The 500 note. If any paper currency were made for the money launderer, it is this. Worth $665 dollars, thats a huge decrease in suitcases needed when visiting your favourite Caribbean bank than if you were using $100 bills.

Introduction

De Saint-Malo j'avons parti

Sur une frgate bien jolie

Pour s'en aller dedan La Manche

Dedam la Manche vers Bristol

Pour aller attaquer Les Anglais.

From Saint-Malo I had gone

On a right pretty frigate

To sail away down the Channel

Down the Channel for Bristol

To go and attack the English.

French Sea Shanty (Eighteenth Century)

In 1989, Salman Rushdie wrote a book called The Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini believed it to cast aspersions on Islam and called upon any one of the worlds 1.4 billion Muslims to kill him. Rushdie sat out the 90s in a shack on the moors of Scotland, so jumpy he tested the postman with bacon sandwiches before opening the front door. He learned his lesson, legend has it, because a proposed sequel was never published, Buddha: What A Bastard.

The point is that these days its just not in anyones interest to flip off any social, political, racial or religious group with access to an AK-47, which is pretty much all of them not including the Amish but theyre more lawyered up than the NRA. All in all, we live in a world of different cultures, different peoples and different opinions where hate of almost anything, thank god, is taboo.

Except, of course, France and the French.

For all the magnificence of the Louvre and the Arc De Triomphe, for all the cultural joys of Debussy and Cezanne, for all the achievements of Joan of Arc and Napoleon, there just is something fishy about the French.

The desire to think better of the world only conceals reality, it doesnt change it. The reality of it is, my reality as an Englishman in the 21st Century, is that France and the French are different, and many of those difference are less than likeable. Around the world, animosity towards the French is still the dislike that dares to speak its name.

This is not just un anglo revulsion that you might find in Americans outraged that while Jacques Chirac was touring the United Nations to whip up opposition to intervention in Iraq, Jean-Bernard Merimee, Frances former UN ambassador and a special advisor to Kofi Annan, was receiving $165,725 in payments from Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister. Its not even the perennial dislike you find in a Briton from albion perfide angered that 40% of the taxes paid into the agriculture budget of 25-country European Union goes straight to French farmers. Its not even the delayed reaction of former French colonies, like Algeria which has no income tax except for French residents. Its everywhere. As a young student, I once visited a ruined fort in Penang, Malaysia. A rusty old cannon still stood on the collapsed battlement. After wiping off the dust and weeds, I read the words engraved upon it: This gun was positioned here to fight the French.

I have family in France and a home there. Where other writers, glad to have left the city life behind them for the slow Gallic lifestyle, relish the experiences of pleasant peasant neighbours, my reality left me wanting. In St Marin de Lerm le Bourg, in the Dordogne, one dinner with French locals in this small village soon descended into a drunken row. Iraq. Algeria. The headscarf ban. Anti-Semitism. Collaboration. Corruption. Camembert. Personal hygiene. Gerard Depardieu. Rudeness. Little yapping dogs. Le rock and roll. Le Roi Soleil. Napoleon. The UN. The EU. Stuffed geese. Suppositories. Strikes. Speedos... My boozy French friends drank all my wine and left. With the exception of the local mayor, who collapsed in the garden. We left him under a blanket next to his dog. It all got me thinking about Frances place in the world, past and present.

Why do the French condemn Coalition actions in Iraq while their own army rampages through the Ivory Coast?

How do they reconcile being such animal-lovers that Michelin-starred restaurants let dogs eat at table yet, every summer, they go hunting for songbirds to crush with large stones?

What exactly do they mean by Liberte, Egalite et Fraternite and how did they lead to the worlds first guillotine-powered, slave-owning, totalitarian dictatorship?

When did the French, the most unhygienic nation in Europe according to their own newspapers, become home to some of the worlds most fabulous scents?

The French are different, believe it. And no amount of wishful thinking or relativism makes all those differences congenial. That truth struck me the next day. Work needed to be done on the house, and it became apparent that I needed a wheelbarrow.

No problem I thought, I can borrow one off the farmer next door who was at the party. I knew he had three. He had spent half an hour the previous evening describing every last detail of his machinery to me.

Puis-je empreinter votre brouette I asked politely as he stood by, I need it for, juste une demi-heure?.

Non. Came the shortest of replies and off he went to fill in his forms to claim more European Union subsidies. Thats the reality of living in France and dealing with the French on a daily basis.

This book explores fifty such realities across French history, politics, culture, sport, show business, food, geography and cuisine. They dont make up a complete picture of the French but, who knows?, next time you meet a French person and walk away from the experience thinking Was that guy for real?, youll find the answer in here.