1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Discord over Concorde

  It seems hardly credible that while de Gaulle was trying to shoot Britain down in flames, the Brits and the French were co-operating – or at least trying to – on the development of Concorde.

  They had been working individually on supersonic aircraft ever since the war. France was developing a small fast plane for routes to its African colonies. The British Aircraft Corporation, meanwhile, was drawing blueprints for a wedge-shaped transatlantic jet – basically, the future Concorde. Soon, though, the British project was soaring over budget rather than over the clouds, and the government demanded that outside funding be found. Hoping that a bit of technology-sharing might lubricate their entry into the Common Market, Britain turned to France.

  The French were unwilling at first, but realized that they needed help building a supersonic engine, and agreed. Even so, mutual suspicion was so great that the contract became a political treaty rather than a purely commercial deal, with Britain demanding prohibitive cancellation penalties from the French state to stop it pulling out later.

  In 1962, work was started on two projects – the British transatlantic plane and France’s smaller version. It soon became clear, however, that no one would want to buy the French plane, and it was dropped.

  Arguments also raged about the name of the aeroplane. The French wanted Concorde, but Harold Macmillan held out for the British spelling, Concord, and finally got his way. It was his one minor victory over de Gaulle, and it was to be short-lived – in 1967, when the first prototype was unveiled in Toulouse, Britain’s Minister for Technology, Tony Benn, announced that the plane would be called Concorde. The final E, he said, stood for Excellence, Europe, Entente and England. (When a Scot wrote to him pointing out that the nose cone was made north of the border, Benn added that the E also stood for Écosse, the French for Scotland.)

  Two prototypes were made – one in France, one in the UK – and the French beat the Brits into the air by a month, sending their version supersonic on 2 March 1969. The planes even got royal approval when the Queen flew to Toulouse in the British Concorde. Unfortunately, though, the new Anglo-French invention was a commercial flop. This was partly because of the 1973 oil crisis – Concorde used two tons of fuel just taxiing to the runway – but mainly because the Americans banned the planes from causing supersonic booms in their airspace, a move often interpreted as envy that the Europeans had achieved something they hadn’t. Consequently, only sixteen Concordes were ever built, and the Brits cursed themselves for insisting on those pull-out penalties.

  Technically, the planes were a huge success. Pilots all agreed that they were great fun to fly, and they delivered on all their promises. The flight time from London to New York was more than halved, to only 210 minutes, barely time for lunch and a film. And while the Concordes were in the air, they were elegant symbols of what the Brits and French, despite all their differences and constant squabbling, could achieve if they co-operated. It just seems a shame that the story came plummeting to its tragic end in July 2000, when a Concorde crashed on take-off – from (ironically) Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

  Au revoir to the Americans

  When de Gaulle agreed to work with the Brits on Concord(e) in 1962, it was no doubt because he saw it as an anti-American project. Throughout his post-war career, he kept up a steady campaign of Yank-bashing, saying most famously that Vietnam was a ‘detestable war, since it leads a large nation to ravage a small one’, thereby conveniently forgetting France’s exploits in the same country.

  In 1966, he saw the perfect opportunity to poke his political tongue out at America and Britain at the same time.

  He had started to cause trouble in NATO almost immediately he returned to power in 1958, grumbling that Britain and the US were plotting together to control the organization’s policy, and provoking them by asking NATO to back his colonial war in Algeria. In 1959, he had ejected all foreign nuclear weapons from French soil, forcing the Americans to move theirs to Britain and Germany, and then in 1962 he removed his navy from NATO command. His posturing for independence came to its logical climax when in 1966 he ordered all foreign troops out of France, arguing that in the event of war, he would not let French soldiers bow to American command as they had been forced to do in World War Two.

  The way de Gaulle announced his new policy has gone down in history.

  Apparently the Général phoned the American President, Lyndon Johnson, to tell him that France was opting out of NATO, and that consequently all American military personnel had to be removed from French soil.

  Taking part in the conference call was Dean Rusk, the US Secretary of State, and Johnson told Rusk to reply: ‘Does that include those buried in it?’

  1968: Parisian students discover sex

  Two years later, history caught up with de Gaulle.

  In May 1968, Paris students took to the barricades. Today, this revolt is remembered in France as a modern version of 1789, an uprising by idealistic youth against the tyrannical establishment. In fact, though, it all started as a bit of posturing about sex.

  In March, the students at a new campus in Nanterre, a suburb just west of Paris, went on strike because of poor living conditions. The campus was a barely finished building site, and combined all the impersonality of a French nouvelle ville with the mud of the Somme trenches and a ridiculously undersized canteen. What was worse, male and female students were not allowed to mix in the halls of residence – in other words, sleepovers were forbidden. In protest, the frustrated students occupied the administration buildings.

  Hearing about the reasons for the sit-in, de Gaulle’s Minister of Education stirred things up by telling the students to cool their ardour in their new swimming pool (which sounds as though it wasn’t heated). He also ordered the Nanterre campus temporarily shut down, at which point the students took their grievances to the Tests were done Sorbonne in central Paris and managed to turn disgruntlement about the single-sex dorms into a call for national revolution.

  The rector of the Sorbonne panicked and called in the riot police, who cracked a few heads as they cleared the building. A protest march against this over-reaction provoked an even greater over-reaction, especially since the police violence was filmed and photographed as no French demonstration ever had been before. Soon events had spiralled out of control in typical French style, with first the students and then the workers taking to the streets all over the country.

  By mid-May ten million workers were on strike, and the students’ cause had been sidetracked by the unions. The call for revolution had turned into a call for a pay rise.

  De Gaulle was seriously scared, though. During the protests, he took refuge on a French army base in Germany, where he discussed military intervention, and only re-emerged once things had calmed down. Ironically, the calming was done by the unions, who needed to prove that they, and not the middle-class students, were the ones who would call for revolution if and when it was required.

  What French people forget is that despite all these tumultuous events, when the country went to the polls in June 1968 (to elect Members of Parliament, not a new president), the Gaullists won a spectacular victory, taking more than two-thirds of the seats. The supposed revolution had only made the people want to strengthen the status quo.

  De Gaulle’s veneer of invulnerability had been dented, however, and he was forced to resign the following year after a failed referendum to reform local government and the Senate, the upper house of Parliament. Rather unwisely, he had promised to quit if the result of the poll was a ‘no’ – always a mistake for a leader who has been in power for ten years (except if they are controlling the ballot count, of course).

  The Général – Britain and the Anglo-Saxons’ greatest French rival since Napoleon, and an even more successful one politically – died soon afterwards, on 9 November 1970, when an artery burst while he was sitting down to watch the TV news. He was seventy-nine.

  It is almost certainly a total coincidence
that just a few days before his death Britain had announced the discovery of the North Sea oilfield, which would soon be pumping huge amounts of cash into the UK economy. Surely de Gaulle’s blood pressure can’t have been raised to a fatal level by this bit of divine intervention on the side of the Anglais? No, that is a conjecture too far. But one thing is certain – if there is an afterlife, and if de Gaulle ended up in the same place as Churchill, the old British bulldog must have been chuckling contentedly when the disgruntled Général arrived to take up his cloud. Even more so when de Gaulle started to argue with Napoleon about whose cloud ought to be highest in the section française of the hereafter.

  Hitchcock psychs up French directors

  Away from the political scene, the Anglo-Saxons were being generally annoying by polluting French culture with their barbaric films and music.

  At the end of the 1950s, French films were enjoying a surprising international success, thanks to New Wave directors like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol and their arty, low-budget movies. The style and philosophical themes of the films are often held up as examples of how France can inject a little intelligence into popular culture, generally raising the tone. It’s true – New Wave’s nervy camera techniques, abstract story-telling and improvisational feel did raise the intellectual stakes in film-making without (usually) boring the pants off the cinemagoer.

  The films didn’t make much money, and were largely reliant on a new French government subsidy, the avance sur recettes – an advance on profits that was meant to be a loan but which was only repaid if a film made enough at the box office. Few of the New Wave films repaid the loan, but the directors wore this poverty like a badge of honour. As Jean-Luc Godard once said, ‘I pity French cinema because it has no money. I pity American cinema because it has no ideas.’

  What is less often said, though, is that these French directors were the first to admit that they had been inspired by Anglo-American auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. In fact, French New Wave wouldn’t have existed without Hollywood.

  However, even though American blockbusters did better business at the French box office, thanks to the avance sur recettes and the new generation of directors willing to spend it, on the whole the news was good for le cinéma français.

  Music was where the rot really set in.

  At first, France had cleverly reined in the rock’n’roll revolution by simply translating hits into French and getting homegrown singers to perform them. It was a stroke of genius – you take a catchy song that’s already made a fortune in the USA or Britain and get a local kid to sing your new version, thereby grabbing all the lyric royalties for yourself and creating a new homegrown pop star. It was as good as insider dealing.

  Johnny Hallyday, France’s musical megastar, first appeared on TV in 1960, billed as a singer d’origine américaine. His real name was Jean-Philippe Smet, and he had Americanized himself by adopting the stage name of his cousin’s husband, a singer called Lee Halliday, and then being misspelt by a record company. Johnny became famous doing Elvis’s dance moves while singing a bizarre mix of rock’n’roll and French crooning. His early hits included ‘Souvenirs, souvenirs’, a French remake of an American hit, and ‘Be bop a lula’, a partial translation of the Gene Vincent song, and his first album, Hello Johnny, was packed with French-language covers, including one called ‘Itsy bitsy petit bikini’.*

  Johnny and all those who followed in his footsteps were the acceptable face of la musique anglo-saxonne. They gave the French public all the excitement of American rock’n’roll without any of the linguistic pollution. They were a bit like croissants or baguettes – foreign imports mutated into something quintessentially French.

  Much less acceptable were the groups and singers who came into France later on in the 1960s and showed people how it was really done – the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for example, with their Anglo-Saxon arrogance and annoyingly singable English lyrics (‘She lurv you, yé yé yé’, ‘Can get no satees-fax-yon’, etc.).

  To be fair, French singers welcomed and even promoted the Anglo musicians. Johnny Hallyday famously invited the unknown Jimi Hendrix to Paris to support him in 1966, and a singer called Hugues Aufray did a lot to popularize Bob Dylan with his translations of Dylan’s songs.

  But France’s cultural establishment was deeply troubled. Take the Beatles, for example – the French had thought that the Anglais were all bowler-hat-wearing upper-class gentlemen, and yet these working-class boys were being hailed as trend-setters, and making even a provincial city like Liverpool look cooler than Paris. (To Parisians, there are few life forms lower on the evolutionary ladder than provincials.)

  And the English didn’t seem to mind. They were treating these so-called musicians with more respect than they did their royal family. It was a true revolution, more profound than anything France had ever undergone. The pinnacle of cultural society was occupied by uneducated, lower-class, out-of-town youngsters, as far removed from Paris’s middle-class intellectual elite as fish and chips from foie gras.

  It was true that French stars like Édith Piaf and Johnny Hallyday were lower-class, but to the artistic establishment they were nothing more than artistes populaires. By contrast, people all over the world were discussing the Beatles’ music and lyrics as seriously as if they were by Sartre or Camus, and none of the Fab Four had even been to university.

  This, as much as the linguistic ‘pollution’, is what annoys French cultural conservatives even today. They just cannot accept that popular culture is as valid an art form as classical culture. In France, even pop musicians need to have studied music to be taken really seriously, which is why the French are generally so hopeless at pop music. While a Brit or American is strumming along to records and writing songs with his or her friends, a French kid is stuck at the music stand, bashing through a How to Read Music course with a teacher who won’t let him or her near an instrument until they’ve mastered the theory. It’s yet more proof that the student riots in 1968 didn’t really change things at all. They inspired a few people to drop out of the system, but the cultural system wasn’t even rocked on its foundations, and it still doesn’t rock today.

  French argie-bargie in the Falklands

  For better or for worse, with de Gaulle finally out of the way, Britain finally joined the EU on New Year’s Day 1973, and unwittingly unleashed a tide of knee-jerk anti-French bigotry.

  The shock of these close political ties with the continent and fears of losing British sovereignty meant that France was always just below the surface of the public consciousness throughout the seventies, and it was this underlying Francophobia that burst out during the Falklands War in 1982. Relations between French President Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher were relatively good at the time, mainly because Mitterrand was less haughty than his predecessors. The previous president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, had dismissed Mrs T. as ‘une petite bourgeoise provinciale’, which was absolutely accurate but rather cruel. Mitterrand, on the other hand, didn’t see eye to eye politically with Thatcher, but admired her – he once said that she had ‘the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe’, which showed what kind of kinky stuff he was probably into.

  Consequently, when Argentina invaded the islands 600 kilometres off its coast, Mitterrand went out of his way to declare his support for Britain. In doing so, he was partially covering his own back, because he didn’t want anyone challenging French sovereignty over any of his islands. He also made a speech saying that ‘France must preserve the friendships and interests that tie it to Latin America’. But he was categorical in his support for Britain, saying, ‘We are the allies of the Anglais.’

  Even so, when the Argentinians sank the Royal Navy ship HMS Sheffield with a French Exocet missile fired from a French Super-Étendard fighter jet on 4 May 1982, in the British popular imagination it was the old enemy France stabbing them in the back.

  Even more provocatively, the papers reported
that Prince Andrew, who was then second in line to the throne, was being trained as an ‘Exocet decoy’. He was flying his helicopter above ships in order to lure the radar-guided missiles away from their main targets, and it was presented as if France was plotting to shoot the (almost) heir to the throne out of the sky.

  This was completely unfair, because Argentina had bought its weapons long before the conflict broke out, and France was actually providing information to the British secret services on how to disable Exocets. Whether it is a coincidence or not, the Exocet that sank the Sheffield didn’t explode – it knocked a hole in the ship’s hull and severed its water pipes, preventing the crew from putting out the resulting fire. The French even lent Britain a Super-Étendard and a Mirage – jets that it had sold to the Argentinians – so that the RAF could hold realistic training sessions.

  All in all, France didn’t deserve any of the accusations that it used the Falklands War to publicize its missiles. It wasn’t their fault that British defence systems were unable to cope with Exocets. And the ill feeling probably wouldn’t have been half as strong if the missiles had been built in, say, America. But this was France, and the British media were ready to leap in and exacerbate the traditional distrust.