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The people are revolting. And by people, I mean the French. While Britain’s government has limply backed down over vaccine passports, Paris has decreed that vaccines are, in effect, mandatory. Toulouse has erupted in response — but, then, French anti-vaccine passport protests have been ongoing for weeks, while the gilet jaunes, after a brief interlude, have been back demonstrating for a year now.
The French love of protesting at the drop of the hat is perhaps their defining character trait, but it reflects a deeper culture of political violence that goes deep into their history, and not just the revolution.
Theirs is a culture in which use of force is much more acceptable, and where authority has both menace and glamour. Last time I made the crossing back from France to England, the first UK Border Force man I saw was sat in one of those knackered old swing office chairs, with the word “Colin” written on A4 on the back; the whole veneer served to ensure that authority in England was something to not take too seriously.
It was a different matter two weeks earlier, crossing from Italy into France, where one is greeted along that slightly sensitive border by a parade of young French soldiers carrying machine guns and dressed in dazzling outfits, like a Jean Paul Gaultier advert. It’s designed to show that they mean business, and that authority should be admired and feared.
While our police spent much of their summer either on their knees in front of Black Lives Matters protesters, or running away from them, the gendarmes have a somewhat different attitude to demonstrations: since the gilet jaunes protest began at least 24 people have lost an eye as a result, while five have lost a hand; 315 have suffered head injuries, and two have died.
France’s frequent eruption of violence is baffling to its neighbours. They have short working hours, generous welfare and a first-class health care system (far better than Britain’s). The French live very long lives on a comfortable pension, and their disposable income is rising.. The French inhabit a country that to many of its neighbours feels like paradise, and so the Dutch expression“leven als God in Frankrijk” (live like God in France), but then historically that partly explains the readier resort to violence — you had to have a certain belligerence to occupy Europe’s most desirable real estate.
Next time you’re lucky enough to visit the country, take a glance outside when you’re driving through the Loire Valley and look at what you see – chateaux, lots of them. There are over 1,000 in that region alone, because chateaux tended to be built to replace older castles and strongholds, and western France was littered with them.
The geography of Britain ensured that a monarch based by the Thames was able to grow wealthy enough to rule over the entirety of England. The kingdom of Wessex united all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 927 and there was never any danger of the north being powerful enough to secede. Wales was slowly conquered and while Scotland was a different matter, it was never an existential threat to England.
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SubscribeActually even ‘war’ comes from French.
The phonemes w and gui are often mutually interchangeable between English and French. Thus William = Guillaume, but also wicket = guichet. A wicket gate is one made of spaced vertical stakes; the guichet at a French railway station is the grille through which you speak to the ticket office employee, i.e. it’s the same thing. Likewise wasp and guêpe (if you put the s back in where the circonflexe deletes it). King Arthur’s wife Guinevere was really a Winifred, and people called Wilmot came over with the Normans and were originally called Guillemot.
Guerre and war are thus homonyms and it’s even more pronounced when you consider warrior and guerrier.
Once you know this, it’s quite helpful. I remember being told, as French A-Level prep, that if you encounter a French word in the exam you don’t know that begins with é, try replacing it with an s and see if the result resembles an English word (eg épice = spice, écarlate = scarlet, écaille = scale, etc). You can do the same with French words beginning with gui-.
Looking further back, owning a horse has been a mark of nobility since at least Roman times, where the horse-owning class, the equites, were the social equivalent of baronets. This gave rise to the later military cult of chivalry.
Wow, thanks for the very interesting etymology lesson!
It has to do with the (ultimately, a long way back) Celtic roots of French. William (English) = Guillaume (French) = Gwilym (Welsh)…1,000 or more years ago the ancestral versions of these languages must have sounded very similar.
Eg the word guêpe becomes guespe if you restore the s and wespe if you switch out the gu for a w. Wespe is not only Middle English for wasp, it’s also modern German for wasp, it’s very similar to the Danish (hveps) and the Dutch (veps), while the Italian for wasp, vespa, is pronounced the same as the German word and was thus originally onomatopoeic.
None of this is surprising if you figure the Celtic civilisation was as geographic widespread in the third century BC as Rome’s was in the third century AD.
Wasn’t France so-called after the Germanic tribe the Franks?
I think so. Burgundy is named after the Burgundians, who originated in Germany. We tend to assume that there was Burgundy first and Burgundians originated there, but in fact this is to have it backwards.
It does point to substantial Germanic influence linguistically on French, and Germania was Celtic before it was German.
Mr Redman, your contribution outshines the original article which is very illuminating too. I feel doubly educated. Thank you.
Me too. Thanks Jon, for adding to an already interesting article.
Thanks! Very good.
Wish our A level French teachers gave us a similar heads up.
Great stuff. I learnt a few things. Thankyou.
Ha ha. This is a great essay. I don’t know how true it is but I really enjoyed the read.
I lived and worked in the UK many years ago. The cops and officialdom in general seemed to be staffed by apparently innocuous Colins complete with clipboards and dandruff. What I noticed, though, is that if you actually messed with them then much more serious people would appear and assert the full force of officialdom and/or the law. I rather appreciated the understated, blokey face of UK authority that everyone knew was backed up with much stronger stuff when necessary. Perhaps things have changed.
“…although the Harrying of the North came close (done, of course, by you-know-who)…”
Shouldn’t that now be renamed the ‘Meganing of the North’? Harry is no longer Harrying anyone, except as a sidekick on the front cover of glossy magazines.
I noticed it has become Harrying (annoy, harass) in my son’s school history book. The true word of course is The Harrowing of the North – annihilation, rape, murder. Words matter.
Reminds me of the Chesterton lines:
The North would have been Danelaw etc, but weren’t the Normans themselves originally Scandinavians, who roved in all directions looking for land and wealth as the Roman empire broke up?
If I recall, Rollo the Viking was the leader who founded Normandy. Basically, a northern French version of the Danelaw. My old school books used to regard 1066 as the “end of the Viking era” since Harald Hardrada got killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and he was the last Viking king to invade England. (Although I recently learned that Magnus Barefoot, King of Norway, got killed in Ulster in 1103 while trying to invade Ireland, so I am going to revise that to claim the Northern Irish ended the Viking era).
Your timing’s a bit out. The Roman Empire had broken up by the late 5th century. The Vikings (from whom the Normans were descended) didn’t start raiding until the late 8th.
“…Britain and France share a similar sized Islamic terrorism problem, but the scale of the violence there is much more spectacular and terrifying, largely because there are so many more firearms available…”
Yeah. Many more islamists available too.
This quote is simply inaccurate, but it should not be a competition. The situation in France is catastrophic, I will not deny this, but the UK is also very bad! I feel the same pain when I see attacks in London as when it happens here in Paris. This is a huge problem for both countries. For legal reasons, there are no reliable French figures for the proportion of Muslims in France but most estimates are >5%. Some say it is double, but I accept this EU number. This is still higher than the UK (around 4.3%). To blame guns is to miss the point. Guns are not always a factor- many of the attacks in France have been with cars/vans (Nice) or machetes/knives (Samuel Paty, Father J. Hamel). Finally, it gives me no pleasure to say this, but I think that Islamic terrorists in the UK have less reason to resort to violence because their government leaves them unmolested (unlike the children in Rotherham!).
Although apparently we have at least a million undocumented illegals running about the UK. I wonder how they would skew the numbers because there sure seem a hell of a lot more than 4%
Don’t assume that all the English have an urban, southern mentality. I live in the land of the Border Reivers and spraying slurry over tax offices and banks is definitely not unknown. The farmers up here are largely ignoring the Covid nonsense (one said to me, ‘It doesn’t apply to me though, does it?) except for wearing cowboy bandanas at the Mart when ‘face coverings’ were mandated.
The French are much closer to their peasant origins than most people here, except in pockets like Northumberland, and peasants don’t like being told what to do, particularly on their own land!
We peasants in the south have been known to do likewise.
I thought this article very accurate, and I’m often irritated by the scorn shown by some British to French military prowess. OK, we won on a few significant occasions, but I know that our ancestors never underestimated French skill and courage in arms – or they did so and regretted it. This British attitude is mostly based on the French surrender in 1940, and overlooks the fact that France suffered enormously more than Britain in WWI, and even so, the British were similarly inclined to pacifism up until the very last moment. Fortunately, those responsible for our defence in the late 30’s took some quick and wise decisions, the Channel was useful, Churchill managed to inspire the population, and we gained time for other nations to support us.
The Channel was a rather stout anti-tank ditch. The RAF made it ruinously expensive to cross.
This a good essay and rather less predictable than most in “unherd”, there was no mention of the middle-class North London middle-class elite. It is good to dent the standard British (and US) derision of the French as career surrenders. After all, what was Dunkirk but a surrender, albeit a well-managed one and the French Army put themselves at considerable risk protecting it.
The key to France is, I think that it is a fairly conservative country with a revolutionary past (a bit like the US).
It was a defeat, but the 300,000 evacuated troops certainly didn’t surrender.
To me the French attitude is emblematic of ‘the government should be afraid of the people, not the other way around’. I’ve always admired the strong French culture of pride and secularism. Macron has won brownie points with me for almost singlehandedly standing up to Islamism. In the face of the murder of Samuel Paty I sensed a turning point that we in the UK, shamefully, do not seem to have reached yet.
what’s your point? I don’t get it. Portugal tried to imitate the french system and I don’t see the advantage. You describe extreme violence like it’s a reason to be proud. Maybe the reason French history is so violent is due to the incredible conservatism of the French. Nothing ever changes through negotiation and incremental reforms. So, they need wars, and revolutions very often to accomplish what Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa says in the book “The Leopard” , “change everything so that everything stays the same. The French state has huge problems of sustainability, President after President tries to fix the problem but the French don’t want to hear about it. What the French want is very simple, they want to maintain all their rights and perks, pay fewer taxes and have lower energy prices (electricity and gas). Simple but also impossible. Yep, the WWII is a great example of French exceptionalism! That and the 9 Frenchmen that joined the resistence.
“What the French want is very simple, they want to maintain all their rights and perks, pay fewer taxes and have lower energy prices (electricity and gas).” Don’t we all?
I also want to be 190 cm tall, have the fortune of bezos, the looks of Di Caprio and the inteligence of Newton.
Many thanks for an article off pace from the typical Unherd article. I, like many Americans, need to broaden our knowledge of our European brothers and sisters.
I digress somewhat from the focus of the article , but am compelled to share that we here in Louisiana have a slice, but long removed, segment of the French – our Cajuns.
When I was young, our state seemed as if was two countries – my native north was predominently Protestant – solemn and to me quite boring. The south, Catholic and French – a people that celebrated food and fun, enhanced by alcohol and lively music, characterized by the expression, “Les le bon ton roulette” – “Let the good times roll”! As soon as I could, I moved south, and never returned.
Sadly, just within my lifetime, things have changed and the strong Cajun culture, along with their language, have faded. There were attempts to check this erosion by importing into our schools teachers from France. That failed for a number of reasons.
I really miss what was.
Most enjoyable, thank you Ed West.
Not all the demonstrations or “manifestations” in France are violent. We missed a flight because young farmers blocked the motorway. They said they would re-open it at 8pm except for one junction which they planned to re-open at 1 am because they were roasting a pig and such things take time.
Rioting? Sure.
Fighting? Not so much.
I think you are wrong. The French Foreign Legion is formidable for example, and still operates today. I also know a few military people, both retired and active, and I wouldn’t judge them as not having courage. This article is correct in saying that their capitulation in WW2 was part of the hangover from WW1 and their massive losses then. Also, France has numerous, very porous land borders which Britain does not meaning that she will always have to be attacked and invaded by sea or by air which makes her more easily defensible.
According to Wikipedia, the majority of men in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion are not French.
I believe they all are non-French. France is, I understand, the only country from which an FF Legionnaire can not come.
That’s why it’s called, “Foreign” only the officers are French.,
“French Foreign Legion”
The clue’s in the name.
Fighting? Sure.
Winning? Not so much.
I wondered about that too. They didn’t show themselves to be the best fighters in Europe in either the Franco-Prussian War or WWII.
Don’t be unfair. They were incredible efficient rounding up the Jews and handing them over to the Germans. They also excelled in slaughtering civilians in Argelia or screwing up things in Indochina.
But if our near neighbours were rioting, surely it would have been on our news outlets?
Dustin, don’t get me started. (oh. Too late)
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, we saw legions of British protestors haranguing police in Whitehall, chanting things like “hands up don’t shoot” at unarmed British bobbies. Many of these protestors are also “passionate” Europhiles – yet whilst they appeared eager to blame British police officers for brutality that took place 4000 miles away, they seemed oddly unwilling to notice consistent brutality that had been happening, practically every weekend, just a short hop across the channel.
Over the Gilet Jaunes protests, journalist David Dufresne had catalogued more than 300 verified reports of serious injuries, most caused by Police using LBD Guns which fire high-velocity rubber bullets and by tear gas grenades. Among them he lists one person killed by tear-gas grenade, 4 people losing a hand, 18 blinded by rubber bullets or grenades and dozens of people losing their hearing from grenades.
At every one of the protests, all French policemen wear body-cams. Incredibly the Interior Ministry has claimed there is no “usable” footage of any policeman injuring any protestor.
Every country in Europe, except France, has banned the use of these “Flashball” rubber bullets. Over 15000 have been fired at protestors. Every country in Europe, except France, had banned the use of explosive tear gas grenades – France finally agreed to stop using them last year – too late for the 80 year lady blown up in her apartment by such a device, and the many dozens of people maimed for life by them.
Macron at that time was still fêted by the BBC and Guardian as the great hope for Europe now that Mutti’s star is waning. As a Blair-lite, centrist European he’s been their pin-up and was thus given a free pass for the brutal, militaristic force used against the Gilets Jaunes – SHOOTING and MAIMING both protestors and bystanders with rubber bullets and grenades!
Imagine what the media coverage would have been like if our Police force, under a Boris Johnson Govt, ever reacted to protestors in a similar fashion.
Yet the liberal-left media paint the Tory party as fascists and Macron as a beacon for European harmony. Though, rather than some latter-day Napoleon, Macron’s suppression of protest has been more akin to Pinochet in mid-season form.
Try and picture Katya Adler bringing you that story, though.
Thanks Paddy, didn’t know all of that. One of my early political memories was of watching the Paris student protests (1968) on the news. So the muted coverage of Gilet Jaunes protests 50 years later was a depressing reminder of the current state of UK media.
Vraiment!
Don’t be silly it’s ok if the Europeans do it, they’re in the EU so they must be more progressive and enlightened than the horrid Brits.
Good to get well informed comments rather than regurgitated media content. I have some experience of the French way of life but still struggle to understand their … motivation in many things. So lovely in person, so obnoxious in groups. So ruthlessly determined that they are superior to us Brits or other foreigners. Such intransigence when all the common sense points to a practical solution. Non! The rules must be followed to the exact letter!
Love their dogs but refuse to pick up their poop. Lost count of the times I’ve remonstrated with a French person who watches their dog do a poop on a busy path and simply leaves it and walks on. For children to step in. Maybe this sums up the French psyche.
Anybody with any clues please comment.
Deborah,
I appear to be falling foul of the algorithm and my response to you keeps being thrown into pending limbo.
I’ll try and water it down.
Nothing could better demonstrate the intransigence and hypocrisy of our former “EU friend and partner” than the behaviour of dear Michel Barnier this week.
“Mr Europe” – the man for whom the 4 Freedoms were indivisable and entirely sacrosanct. The man who refused to accept the idea that the EU could, should or would ever give an inch to reach an amicable solution with an ally and former partner.
All well and good whilst he sat coccooned in his Ivory Tower at the Berlaymont. Each appeal from the UK to finding a mutually advantageous solution was met with a Gallic shrug of indifference that swept the corridors of Brussels like the world’s most apathetic Mexican-wave. But witness Michel’s hilarious volte face now he has to actually try and appeal to voters.
“We must regain our legal sovereignty so that we are no longer subject to the rulings of the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights.”
Sounds rather more like Monsieur Farage these days, doesn’t he?
Isn’t it interesting that even the most staunch defender of the EU has to completely turn against the institution if he wants to appeal to an electorate?
I remember visiting the One Pillar Pagoda in Hanoi, the young English grad showing us around telling us all about it being built in the 11th century, etc. Now I don’t know much about construction techniques but the pillar it was built on looked suspiciously like modern reinforced concrete to me. When I pointed this out the young man looked a bit embarrassed and said this particular version of the pagoda dated from (I think he said) 1974. When he saw my surprise he admitted “It’s because when they left in 1954 the French blew up all our ancient monuments”. He leaned in and lowered his voice, whispering “And the French talk so much about how cultured they are”.
One major error: Algeria was part of Metropolitan France; it returned deputies to the French parliament. There were considerable numbers of Pieds-Noirs there, also.
This is why it so infected French politics.
I’m surprised the piece didn’t mention Michael Haneke’s Hidden, which dealt with the legacy of the deaths of two parents in the massacre in 1961 on their son and grandson. Ironically, the star of that movie, Daniel Auteuil, is a Pied-Noir.
Very true; Look at extinction Rebellion, they irritate the hell out of most of us but we are too inert to respond and if we did the Police would arrest us and we would dealt with harshly in court, a thing that never happens to XR.
A most informative and enjoyable condensing account of the tendency of the French to bellicosity through their later history. I think some of the reasoning may be because the country’s governments are more often officious and demanding and this unbending rigour raises the heckles in most human beings. We in the UK will rise up but only in extremis – as you suggest, probably too lazy. Elections provide some relief.
Not lazy, it just seems *uncivilised*.
Depends who you are. As a white South African (with more than a little English blood, but that doesn’t matter), I have always been treated with contempt and menace by English authorities.
White immigrants are much easier targets to keep the figures up. Ask people from Australia, NZ and Canada….
My main takeaway from this excellent essay is that I should have named my children Leofwine and Wulfnoth…
Doesn’t the tank joke refer to the Italian army?
Si non è vero, è ben trovato.
That’s ‘Se non…’ I think you’ll find, but ben trovato, anyway.
I must admit that when I read that section i thought similarly.
Definitely Italian. Five reverse gears and three forward in case the enemy attack from behind.
You state that “France is by far the most war-like country in Europe” but sadly they are not very good at winning, e.g. Franco Prussian War, First and Second World War, Algeria and Vietnam. Maybe that is why, today, the State bigs itself up by whacking its own people very aggressively.
“While our police spent much of their summer either on their knees in front of Black Lives Matters protesters, or running away from them…”
Don’t forget beating up women at a vigil for someone murdered by a policeman.
I’m somewhat puzzled. If France is such a paradise, has a generous welfare system with a health system better than ours, why is it that hoards of coracle adventurers are navigating across La Manche every day.
“Come in number 6174 your time is up”
I agree that France is a wonderful country, but if I were a foreigner without a French ID card but in sight of the white cliffs, with a dangerous and dirty squat behind me, I too would paddle across, kept safe the first half by the French and the last half by the British, to be put in a hotel when I get there. And if it’s not good enough, there are plenty of journalists, solicitors and MPs to help me complain. I can even sue the British government, paid for by British charities and ……. the British government.
“….high-viz vests, which in Britain are the very symbol of health and safety-driven inertia and defeatism”. You’re not referring to the police on the M25, are you? I wonder what the CRS would have done.
Very interesting analysis, but one error (I know of). ‘War’ IS cognate with ‘guerre’ and is a similar Anglo-Norman / Parisian French pairing as ‘warden’ / ‘guardian’. In the latter and several other cases, both of these variants have been taken into English, though at different periods.
And William/Guillaume.
Brilliant writing, and a lot of good historical points about the French which are rarely made.
A quality read, hugely enjoyable, which makes a refreshing change to the usual knocking of them over there across the water. Thankyou.
What a joke !!!
on July 12 th, Emmanuel Macron announced the implementation of the health pass. The same evening, 1 million french people went online to book a spot to get vaccinated. The prospect of not being allowed into a bar for a beer proved too much for them.
In 2020, they had to carry a s….d « attestation » explaining why they had to go out. Did they ever march the streets ? Build barricades ? fought the riot police ? Nope on all accounts. Everyone stayed home like good obedient children.
To see the very same marching the streets every Saturday is very entertaining knowing that they are the minority. The rest of us want to enjoy a beer and get on with life.
So…..the french …….warriors ????…….allow me to pause to burst
Done !
“…Paris’s inability to create a monopoly of violence…” While I know nothing about the French, I know a brilliant statement when I see one. The analytical understanding — the creation of a legitimated monopoly of physical force against the subject’s will — crystallized herein is applicable in every human and even animal grouping, isn’t it? And obviously so. My gosh, even to my local sheriff’s department…
All of civilization is summarized in one word, five (5) letters: w.o.r.d.s.
What we say, becomes what we do. Thought precedes words.
Introduce new thoughts, thus we integrate new construction of words;
Ideas are power in politics; Culture precedes politics.
Ideas that get to see the light of day and are acted upon become new realities.
We create our reality with thoughts and words;
W.o.r.d.s. that fail become a > s.w.o.r.d. | same letters, different arrangement.
All of human history is defined by five (5) letters of the English language: W.o.r.d.s.
when the arrangement of these letters fail, they must by definition become a different arrangement in order to effect the needed change of affective political and cultural structure, to: s.w.o.r.d.
When common words of debate and argument fail, then they, by definition, in order to effect the necessary change must become ‘harsh words’; When ‘harsh words’ fail, then we say: “The knives came out.”
Now you know history better than anybody.
A good pinto well edam.
Your thesis may have a flaw. Swords are not just drawn when words fail. Caesar’s invasion of Gaul was not a failure of diplomacy, to name just one. Genghis conquered because he believed it was a good way for a man to spend his years.
Words DO matter! Ideas move men and history.
But we also like land, women, status and building things. 🙂
They’re not that bad…
They weren’t “the best fighters” in 1940.
An essay glamorising violence as a political tactic? There’s no perfect society but I’d a million times rather live this one. One person’s spinelessness is another’s tolerance
Equally one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.
My favourite theory is that the French have always eaten rare or uncooked meats – while the British tend to overcook theirs. Undercooked meat will sometimes contain the parasite Toxoplasma gondii – which infects the brain and in lesser mammals and fish, causes a prey response that makes them easier to catch and eat. The parasite requires a second digestive system to finish its life cycle.
People infected with it apparently have more car crashes. Fish with this parasite hold still when a heron shadow falls over them, while parasite free fish scatter. Rats with it freeze when a cat leaps….and perhaps, just perhaps….the French react slowly when manning a warship gun, or facing our cheerful butchers on a battlefield.
If true, if a decent percentage of French people have always had toxoplasmosis, it would explain why they win so very rarely and almost always lose to perfidious, roast-beef eating Brits.
I assume the down votes are from the French.