Mais pourquoi?
Feb. 10th, 2018 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakFirst of all, for Star Trek: Discovery fans, a delightful interview with Michelle Yeoh about playing Philippa Georgiou and women in Star Trek. No spoilers for the finale, but spoilers for all other episodes of the season.
In other news: it's a minor side aspect of the Orange Menace's wish to throw himself a military parade, complete with phallic rockets and tanks, that I've seen several US and one British commenters go "...and he got the idea after his visit to France for Bastille Day? French military hahaha surrender heh heh he..." Which had me eye rolling like a mad woman. Guys, I'm on your side re: the ridiculousness of Cadet Bone Spur's wish to compensate via military equipment, truly I am. But what is it about the Anglosaxon obsession with the "French = military weaklings/cowards" stereotype? Can't you stop that?
It makes me ponder where this comes from, and why it's so specific to Americans and Brits. Because, look: until the second half of the 20th century, there was no shortage of anti French stereotypes in Germany. (And before there was a Germany, in the German states.) (Sidenote: Thankfully, the one thing even our current bunch of Neonazis, the AFD, weren't able to bring back were anti-French stereotypes. It would have been a tough sale to their members anyway, seeing as they're best buddies with Marine Le Pen.) But that was never one of them. (Which, by US/British logic, given that Germany was who France surrendered to in WWII, you'd think there was.) Usually, French-bashing came with the "immoral decadent lecher" stereotype or the "bloodthirsty conqueror" stereotype (during the Napoleonic Wars, but also earlier in the days of Louis XIV; in those eras, the French usually show up in German poetry and drama as Romans, while the German writers go through another phase of enthusiasm for good old Arminius/"Herrmann" the Cheruskan and the battle in the Teutoburg Forest). The sheer number of wars over the centuries where everyone got to play invader and invaded, defeater and defeated at different points would have made it ridiculous to claim a tendency for victory or surrender for just one side. And when you try to rally your subjects against the neighbour on the other side of the Rhine, "omg those guys want to invade us again!" always makes for better propaganda anyway. There was also a lot of unpleasant mixture of the two stereotypes with "want to seduce/rape our women" accusations thrown about.
Meanwhile, British pop culture: it's AGINCOURT AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT, with nary a thought given to, say, the those utterly pointless British-French wars Henry VIII. indulged in (spoiler: he didn't win), the less than glorious follow up his kids had to cope with until Calais was finally gone, too, or that Waterloo was a group effort, not a Brits versus French kind of thing.) Our armchair psychologists in the newspapers declare that it's perhaps because SOMEONE never got over the Battle of Hastings and being a Norman state with French as the official language for centuries (btw: well played, Monsieur le Presidente, promising them that tapestry) or, more recently, over the loss of Empire, but that doesn't explain why the Americans picked up that stereotype with such enthusiasm and endlessly repeat it. (Independent of party affiliation.)
Last night I had dinner with someone whose job it is to trace down inheritors if someone dies without direct heirs. And he said, apropos some US clients, that one reason why British or American law is such a headache to him every time he has to deal with it is "that they don't have the Code Napoleon as a basis for their civil law. Whereas I have no problem understanding the legalese of an Italian or even Polish lawyer, because there's that common basis". And I thought, here might be another reason for the difference in stereotypes. Because Napoleon's function in British pop culture history is to show up as a threat and be eventually defeated (by Sharpe's chip on the shoulder on land and Hornblower's manpain at sea, as one person on lj memorably put it). Not to change things on a fundamental level. And this happened here on the continent. Yes, there was the eventual defeat. (Group effort.) But before that were years in which the many principalities were restructured into more or less their current shapes and a lot of them got a modern civic law for the first time, from which their current one derives. And it's all seen as the follow up to the French Revolution as the big change on the continent, the shatterer of (ancient) worlds. Now, depending on the era and its dominant attitudes, this was seen more negatively or more positively, but one thing it would never be classified as by even the most fervent anti French chronicler/poet/politician/novelist was "weak" or just intermediary.
And then, of course, there were all those earlier centuries of even the tiniest prince of the tiniest German state desperately wanting to be Louis XIV., and building his own mini Versailles (from which we derive a great many Baroque palaces and gardens all over Germany), the nobility copying French fashion, and French being spoken by some of said nobility more fluently than they could speak German. Even when the middle class started to become dominant instead of the nobility, speaking French (and being well versed in French literature) was still regarded as a sine qua non right until English took over post WWII. With that kind of background, a "muhahha, those French, always surrendering" cliché simply wouldn't have been possible. Post WWII, of course, not only was there the utter horror of the Third Reich to confront and (eventually) accept as responsibility, but the first chancellor, Adenauer, was a Rhinelander who made French-German reconciliation a key part of his strategy. All those decades later, French-German relations are still regarded as the big European sucess story in my part of the world. Which is why the recent elections in France, before their outcome, caused angst and fears on a level that Brexit did not (with Brexit, the general reaction then and now is more in the vein of Asterix' saying "die spinnen, die Briten" (il sont fous ces Britanniques)). No Europe-friendly France, no Europe, but it's even more than that, if you're German: needing the French not to succumb en masse to their demons (insert here: Front National, racism, antisemitism, post colonial baggage of all sorts) is part self interest, because, see above, we've got a historical centuries long habit of seeing them as trend setters.
In other news: it's a minor side aspect of the Orange Menace's wish to throw himself a military parade, complete with phallic rockets and tanks, that I've seen several US and one British commenters go "...and he got the idea after his visit to France for Bastille Day? French military hahaha surrender heh heh he..." Which had me eye rolling like a mad woman. Guys, I'm on your side re: the ridiculousness of Cadet Bone Spur's wish to compensate via military equipment, truly I am. But what is it about the Anglosaxon obsession with the "French = military weaklings/cowards" stereotype? Can't you stop that?
It makes me ponder where this comes from, and why it's so specific to Americans and Brits. Because, look: until the second half of the 20th century, there was no shortage of anti French stereotypes in Germany. (And before there was a Germany, in the German states.) (Sidenote: Thankfully, the one thing even our current bunch of Neonazis, the AFD, weren't able to bring back were anti-French stereotypes. It would have been a tough sale to their members anyway, seeing as they're best buddies with Marine Le Pen.) But that was never one of them. (Which, by US/British logic, given that Germany was who France surrendered to in WWII, you'd think there was.) Usually, French-bashing came with the "immoral decadent lecher" stereotype or the "bloodthirsty conqueror" stereotype (during the Napoleonic Wars, but also earlier in the days of Louis XIV; in those eras, the French usually show up in German poetry and drama as Romans, while the German writers go through another phase of enthusiasm for good old Arminius/"Herrmann" the Cheruskan and the battle in the Teutoburg Forest). The sheer number of wars over the centuries where everyone got to play invader and invaded, defeater and defeated at different points would have made it ridiculous to claim a tendency for victory or surrender for just one side. And when you try to rally your subjects against the neighbour on the other side of the Rhine, "omg those guys want to invade us again!" always makes for better propaganda anyway. There was also a lot of unpleasant mixture of the two stereotypes with "want to seduce/rape our women" accusations thrown about.
Meanwhile, British pop culture: it's AGINCOURT AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT, with nary a thought given to, say, the those utterly pointless British-French wars Henry VIII. indulged in (spoiler: he didn't win), the less than glorious follow up his kids had to cope with until Calais was finally gone, too, or that Waterloo was a group effort, not a Brits versus French kind of thing.) Our armchair psychologists in the newspapers declare that it's perhaps because SOMEONE never got over the Battle of Hastings and being a Norman state with French as the official language for centuries (btw: well played, Monsieur le Presidente, promising them that tapestry) or, more recently, over the loss of Empire, but that doesn't explain why the Americans picked up that stereotype with such enthusiasm and endlessly repeat it. (Independent of party affiliation.)
Last night I had dinner with someone whose job it is to trace down inheritors if someone dies without direct heirs. And he said, apropos some US clients, that one reason why British or American law is such a headache to him every time he has to deal with it is "that they don't have the Code Napoleon as a basis for their civil law. Whereas I have no problem understanding the legalese of an Italian or even Polish lawyer, because there's that common basis". And I thought, here might be another reason for the difference in stereotypes. Because Napoleon's function in British pop culture history is to show up as a threat and be eventually defeated (by Sharpe's chip on the shoulder on land and Hornblower's manpain at sea, as one person on lj memorably put it). Not to change things on a fundamental level. And this happened here on the continent. Yes, there was the eventual defeat. (Group effort.) But before that were years in which the many principalities were restructured into more or less their current shapes and a lot of them got a modern civic law for the first time, from which their current one derives. And it's all seen as the follow up to the French Revolution as the big change on the continent, the shatterer of (ancient) worlds. Now, depending on the era and its dominant attitudes, this was seen more negatively or more positively, but one thing it would never be classified as by even the most fervent anti French chronicler/poet/politician/novelist was "weak" or just intermediary.
And then, of course, there were all those earlier centuries of even the tiniest prince of the tiniest German state desperately wanting to be Louis XIV., and building his own mini Versailles (from which we derive a great many Baroque palaces and gardens all over Germany), the nobility copying French fashion, and French being spoken by some of said nobility more fluently than they could speak German. Even when the middle class started to become dominant instead of the nobility, speaking French (and being well versed in French literature) was still regarded as a sine qua non right until English took over post WWII. With that kind of background, a "muhahha, those French, always surrendering" cliché simply wouldn't have been possible. Post WWII, of course, not only was there the utter horror of the Third Reich to confront and (eventually) accept as responsibility, but the first chancellor, Adenauer, was a Rhinelander who made French-German reconciliation a key part of his strategy. All those decades later, French-German relations are still regarded as the big European sucess story in my part of the world. Which is why the recent elections in France, before their outcome, caused angst and fears on a level that Brexit did not (with Brexit, the general reaction then and now is more in the vein of Asterix' saying "die spinnen, die Briten" (il sont fous ces Britanniques)). No Europe-friendly France, no Europe, but it's even more than that, if you're German: needing the French not to succumb en masse to their demons (insert here: Front National, racism, antisemitism, post colonial baggage of all sorts) is part self interest, because, see above, we've got a historical centuries long habit of seeing them as trend setters.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 05:38 pm (UTC)Agreed. And it was enough of an extant attitude in the '90's that it could be parodied by The Simpsons with the relatively famous (by which I mean that I who never watched The Simpsons heard of it) line "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," but I think of it as really gaining nationalistic currency during the Iraq War, with the whole "freedom fries" debacle. As now, it was top-down: the government said it was all right, and people took the excuse.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 06:19 pm (UTC)But you see, while those clichés would not surprise me from Fox TV, I heard and read them most recently from Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Peter David (as in, the sci fi writer who penned some Star Trek tie in novels I like a lot, plus two memorable Babylon 5 episodes). All of whom are affirmed liberals.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 10:36 pm (UTC)So while the "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" taken baldly is definitely a right-wing meme, the idea that French people/politics are on a whole cultured/decadent rather than military/violent and wouldn't be bothered to kick up a fuss in their own defense is kind of... background stereotype of French people here. An easily reached for joke, as it were.
Obviously this is utterly ludicrous to anyone who's spent more than five minutes reading actual French history, but humans are frustrating. Even liberal humans.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 04:42 am (UTC)I've heard it suggested that the mainstream anti-French sentiment in the US initially emerged in response to de Gaulle pulling out of NATO in the early '60s. That sounds about right to me - 50s American films still treat 'French Foreign Legion' as an easy synonym for 'total badass', so it can't be any earlier than that.
(And that would explain why, as someone else said here, Australia never really picked up on any of it.)
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 09:02 am (UTC)Thank you; reading up on that set of events led right into his veto of the UK from the EEC in 1963, which explained Flanders and Swann's "All Gall" (whose catalogue includes a shout-out to the situation with NATO). So now I'm wondering if that's a contributing factor on the British side, too.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 06:26 pm (UTC)I agree that there are a lot of factors in play here; national stereotyping has been around since there were nations. But in terms of the current formulation, something shifting in the second half of the twentieth century (self-boosting simplification of WWII, anger at de Gaulle) and then escalating again in the early twenty-first (when all of W's rhetoric about the Iraq War was self-consciously invoking WWII, as was much of the popular interpretation—9/11 as the new Pearl Harbor, the "Axis of Evil," etc.) makes a lot of sense. And at least this route would explain why the rest of the Anglosphere never picked it up.
See also: the way the Cold War almost immediately erased the Soviets from the American narrative of World War II. I was fascinated to read James Agee's wartime film reviews and see that they included Soviet films being shown in mainstream American theaters, where anyone could and would be expected to sit down and watch an ally's-eye view of the war.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 09:30 am (UTC)I listened to the clip you linked. Colbert's "Me-ow!" sounds like calling Oliver on the stereotype; Oliver going for the stereotype in the first place sounds like an illustration of the problem with ironic racism, chauvinism etc., which is that it's sufficiently difficult to distinguish from the real thing that we wind up with this conversation. Playing to the expected joke still reinforces the association, whether he believes it or not. I agree with
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:25 am (UTC)"Trump wants this country, which apparently is running out of money to help Puerto Rico, to waste millions of dollars on a parade displaying our military might. He claims that he got the idea from watching the Bastille Day parade in France.
Let us put aside for a moment that Bastille Day is a celebration of a massive internal war in which nobility was publicly executed by the guillotine. Let us put aside that, fair or not, the French, going all the way to “Encounter on Farpoint” where the French starship captain surrendered, have a reputation for giving up.
Putting all that aside, I do not believe for one second that this was inspired by Bastille Day. It was unquestionably inspired by Kim Jong un’s display of the North Korean army."
It's quite likely he wanted to be ironic, but as you say - it reinforces the stereotype, and since I read this only an hour after watching the Colbert & Oliver clip, well... The thing is, all of them could have made their point about Trump without an allusion to the stereotype in the first place. I mean, it's not like you need additional material to satirize the Orange Menace asking for a parade...
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 06:28 pm (UTC)Oh, yeah. Just point out that only 45 could see a Bastille Day parade for the first time in his life and think it's about celebrating the undefeatable armies of the government.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 05:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 06:26 pm (UTC)I admit I was relieved that it was "I want to be like the French" as the reasoning, because I was thinking "May Day parades in Red Square."
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 08:05 pm (UTC)(Anyone who thinks the French rolled over easy in WWII has completely forgotten the French Resistance. Which was not, contrary to popular American and British tv and movie casting, made up primarily of American or British spies.)
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 02:27 am (UTC)I think that's the thing where the popular reception is always more simplistic than the history, where "history" includes "art made at the time." It is weird.
[edit]
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 09:50 pm (UTC)That was my first thought as well. If you cast the French as not a big deal militarily, that makes the Americans more, well, independent, because the French contribution couldn't have been that important.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 07:06 pm (UTC)I've always thought it was post-WWI/WWII American propaganda and stereotyping (on our part, at least). I mean, we couldn't have done shit in our Revolutionary War without France's military backing, for example.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 07:20 pm (UTC)I'm coming at this as an American who hasn't been abroad, and have a really limited viewpoint as a result, but I can speak anecdotally to some of the "indoctrination" (I'm hesitant to call it that) that some of us experience re: world cultures. For example I recall a college course on French history, in which the professor flat refused to teach anything about their military history, and had us reading Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade; that same semester, most of my classmates and I were also taking a survey course on World War II, in which the French were cast only as Vichy traitors, and a course on Britain after WWII. Had I been a student only interested in what was presented to me - which is the case in many instances, enough that what is taught is all that is learned - my conclusion would have been that the French were ill-equipped to fight battles other than those on the written page, or in the salon (and the flip side of that is, of course, that with only those parameters, that rather ugly conclusions are drawn about the British, the Germans, Russians, etc. - it doesn't even have to be explicit).
Anyway, I give that anecdote as an illustration - if there is a lingering idea of the French as weak and emasculated, the origin or at least the perpetuation of the idea isn't too hard to find.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:50 am (UTC)Otoh, US literature was taught in greater detail as part of English lessons; we got introduced to Poe, Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce and Hemingway as masters of the short story, and later read "Catcher in the Rye" as an example of the post WWII modern US novel. Plus of course, never mind school, US pop culture (movies, songs, tv shows etc.) was ever present even if you didn't live in a part of Germany where US troops were stationed, which I did. (But the cinematic and tv US wasn't exactly reality, either. I mean, the two hit US tv shows of the 80s broadcast on German tv were "Dallas" and "Dynasty" which, err, didn't exactly paint a drawn-from-life picture of what Americans and the US were like.)
no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-10 11:29 pm (UTC)It is endlessly puzzling to me. /is French
no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 11:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-02-11 06:40 am (UTC)No idea whether this ever showed up on your radar, but back in 2007 there was an exhibition called Napoleon - Genie und Despot at Schloss Oberhausen which focused on the depiction of Napoleon in both British and German pop culture of the time, with exhibits ranging from heroic portraits and busts to newspaper caricatures.
Unfortunately neither Cavendish or I ever managed to get hold of a catalogue (sold out), but I still remember how fascinated I was by the subtle and not so subtle differences between German and British depictions.
http://www.ruhr-guide.de/kultur/kunst-im-ruhrgebiet/napoleon-genie-und-despot/12331,0,0.html
no subject
Date: 2018-02-12 04:56 am (UTC)I think there was also a stereotype of weak effeminate pre-Revolution French nobility, think "The Scarlet Pimpernel".
And Shakespeare has some responsibility.
Also the stereotype of the French always being on strike and weak on Communism and inefficient in business and slow on high-tech.
no subject
Date: 2018-02-13 08:24 am (UTC)Well, we Germans were even more notably defeated in WWI and WWII, have made the dislike of military actions a part of our post WWII identity so that when the first post WWII Germany participated in a war situation abroad, it was Afghanistan (if you want to get technical, it was Kosovo but that was logistic support, i.e. US troops could use Germany as a base to fly from, not troops, whereas in Afghanistan there are actually German troops), it was and is hugely controversial. (It's also not particularly successful from a purely pragmatic pov.) The UK lost their colonial empire as surely as the French did, and not just in peaceful fashion, either. The US got even more thoroughly beaten than the French were in Vietnam (btw,
Now I'm not surprised British and US stereotypes in Anglo culture don't reflect British and US defeats, but the German stereotype in the Anglosaxon world is still connected to military toughness. (Back when Bush II pitched the second Iraq War, I remember even relatively moderate media outlets like Time Magazine wondering why not solely the French but also the Germans refused, and where was their famed military toughness, and leaving aside the very obvious fakeness of the WMD cause in that particular case, I thought, people writing these articles, do you ever get any information about Germans that's not a WWII movie?)