Clarke - Annoying The French Encore!

Contents

About the Book

Weve been annoying the French for 1000 years. But did you know that, as recently as 2010:

• When the French and British navies tried to join forces, two nuclear submarines collided, an accident that Frances Minister of Defence blamed on shrimps. It was Trafalgar all over again but with seafood.
• The Americans infuriated the French by arresting Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a memberof Frances political lite, and then treating him like a normal suspect. Ce nest pas normal!
• With both a royal wedding and a jubilee, the Brits showed the French what a rash idea it was to decapitate their king.
• When David Cameron walked out of a eurosummit, he provoked a volley of comical anti-Anglais insults from French politicians.

Stephen Clarke reviews everything the English-speaking world has been doing recently to ensure that France hangs on to its national inferiority complex. For the French, the merde never ends

About the Author

Stephen Clarke lives in Paris. His first novel, A Year in the Merde, became a word-of-mouth hit in 2004, and is now published all over the world. Since then he has published three more bestselling Merde novels, as well as Talk to the Snail, an indispensable guide to understanding the French.

Research for Stephens novels has taken him all over France and America. For 1000 Years of Annoying the French, he inhaled the chill air of ruined castles and deserted battlefields, leafed through dusty chronicles, brushed up the medieval French he studied at university and generally lost himself in the mists of history. He has now returned to present-day Paris, and is doing his best to live the entente cordiale.

Annoying the French Encore

Stephen Clarke

The French are a logical people, which is one reason why the English dislike them so intensely. The other is that they own France, a country which we have always judged to be much too good for them.

Robert Morley, British actor

Introduction

Since 1,000 Years of Annoying the French was first published in 2010, we mischievous English-speakers have certainly not given up our old habits. It seems were addicted to annoying the French, and over the past couple of years weve really been indulging ourselves.

Most famously, there was the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, in which the Americans proved how flawed their justice system is by actually treating a member of the French political elite like a normal suspect. What were they thinking of? Britain and France also continued to demonstrate why the entente is no more than cordiale. When, at the end of 2011, David Cameron walked out of a eurosummit, he infuriated the then President, Nicolas Sarkozy. It was yet another case of those blasted Brits flaunting their independence. Not only have they hung on to their own currency, they think they can just retreat to their island fortress and leave everyone else to deal with the mess. Well, yes, because thats what weve always done. And the French are so jealous it hurts.

This short text is my chance to talk about these and other recent events, and update 1,000 Years of Annoying the French. My only regret is that I wont be around in a few centuries time to put together 1,500 Years of Annoying the French. The way things are going, there will be no shortage of new material.

Chapter 1

The dangers of navalgazing

Shortly after 1,000 Years of Annoying the French was published, a reader wrote to me with a story that had been told to him by his dentist. Apparently the dentists son was a student at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, and had attended a lecture on the Battle of Trafalgar. Also present, said the dentist, were some French students on an exchange programme, all of whom were astonished to be told that it was Nelson and not the FrenchSpanish fleet that had won the battle. Whether this story is true or the product of too much laughing gas, it is the kind of anecdote we Brits love to tell, as well as being a reminder that the English and French fleets have been fighting almost since we first learnt to paddle canoes.

One of our bloodiest naval battles took place only a few decades ago, in July 1940, when Winston Churchill gave the order to sink the French fleet at Mers-el-Kbir in Algeria, to stop the ships falling into Nazi hands. More than 1,250 French sailors died. So perhaps it was appropriate to bring the fighting to an official end in November 2010, almost exactly seventy years after Mers-el-Kbir, by signing a Franco-British treaty designed to merge our two navies.

Admiral Nelson would not have been pleased this was the man who famously briefed a new recruit aboard one of his ships with the immortal words: You must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil. He might have approved, though, of the name of the treaty: the Defence and Security Co-operation Treaty, or DSCT (pronounced, well almost, deceit), and he probably would have sniggered at the chaotic build-up to its signature. Assuming someone of Nelsons gravity sniggered.

It all started in June 2008, when the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said: It is totally untrue that we are trying to merge the British and French navies and that is not something we will do. It was exactly the kind of categorical denial that implies the story is probably true. Mr Brown added that there is no proposal to merge the use of aircraft carrier, thereby suggesting he was unaware that any navy could afford more than one aircraft carrier, and meanwhile getting so detailed in his denial that he convinced everyone such a merger was definitely on the cards.

While the rumours were tossed around on waves of speculation, the British and French navies themselves did their best to show that co-operation was probably a very bad idea indeed.

In early February 2009, the French Ministry of Defence announced that one of its nuclear submarines, Le Triomphant, had had a minor accident while on patrol in the northern Atlantic. It had collided, so the official statement said, with a submerged object, probably a container (which may have been a neat way of blaming the Chinese, those importers of cheap goods that so annoy the makers of French luxury brands). However, British reporters began to dig around and revealed that the collision had in fact been with a British nuclear sub, HMS Vanguard. Typically, the MoD had not even reported the incident.

How, everyone quite justifiably wanted to know, had two vessels equipped with the most effective detection equipment naval engineers ever invented, been able to bump into each other? And, more importantly for us civilians, was the Atlantic seabed now littered with nuclear missiles and lumps of radioactive submarine?

Assuring everyone that there had been no nuclear pollution at all (another one of those worryingly categorical denials), Frances then Minister of Defence, Herv Morin, came up with a wonderfully

Morin also went one detail too far, as Gordon Brown had done earlier, by saying that French submarines dont hunt British submarines, but here he was probably being truthful; the problem seemed to be that the subs were often patrolling the same waters while deploying their anti-detection devices. All in all, some naval experts suggested, it might actually be a good idea if Britain and France did co-operate more on naval matters. It was almost as though the accident, costly and dangerous as it was, had been arranged to support the plans to merge the two navies.

President Nicolas Sarkozy also sailed in to support the merger, and took the opportunity to show off his strategic awareness, or lack of it. He stated that: France and Britains clocks strike the same hour at the same time, demonstrating a surprising ignorance of Greenwich Mean Time and the one-hour time difference between Paris and London. He seemed to mean that the two countries were on the same wavelength militarily speaking, for once in their long history.