One of my bêtes noirs is anti-French bigotry, which for some reason USAnians are most likely to indulge in (with UKians a close second). The litany is familiar: they’re whiny, arrogant, stinkyand cowardly; the sort of lazy stereotypes any good bigot has ready to hurl at their favourite target.

In the current political climate, with France taking a stance against the mad plans Bush has for Iraq, it’s no surprise hatred of the French has gone mainstream again. Not a day goes by without some pundit getting a dig in at the perfide French. For the most part, this is coming from people who are beyond redemption anyway, so it doesn’t really bother me. However, when it’s somebody who’s normally more sensible than that, somebody who’s not a rightwing nutbar, somebody like Jim Capozzola from The Rittenhouse Review, it gets my goat.

Jim thought it would be funny to post one of thoes mass forwarde e-mails, something called The Complete Military History of France –I bet you know already where this is going, right? Correct, it’s a “hilarious” summing up of all the wars France was in and how bad they were. A real kneeslapper. It features such gems as:

Hundred Years War: Mostly lost. Saved at last moment by a schizophrenic teenaged girl, who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare: “France’s armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman.”

(Why did you link “schizophrenic teenaged girl” to Body and Soul, btw?)

Duh! Because she posts as Jeanne D’Arc, of course, as Jim has pointed out to me. sometimes I am an idiot.

World War I: Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it’s like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn’t call her “Fraulein.” Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.

World War II: Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.

In short, it betrays not only a astonishing lack of historical knowledge, it’s also incredibly offensive. If you don’t agree with me, do a gedankenexperiment and imagine the response a similar list with examples of “Jewish greed” would get.

Apart from the offensiveness of statements like “Going to war without the French is like . . . well . . . World War II” –Word War II did not start in 1941, you know– what irritates me as much is the smugness of the whole “essay”. It is drenched in a sence of superiority which is wholly unearned: when was the last time the US fought a serious war on its own territory or had a real, strong enemy at its borders? The US has not had to deal with anything like the amount of war and devastation France had to; I sincerily doubt it would’ve done better.

UPDATE: edited to make it clear Jim only posted this, not wrote it. He has e-mailed me (after I notified him) that the main reason he posted it was because he’s always the last to recieve such
forwards:

Actually, the reason I posted it wasn’t because I hate the French or anything, though I’m no fan, but because — as I’ve said on my blog several times — I’m usually the last person in the world to receive
e-mails with those kinds of world-traveling “humor” pieces. I was trying, at least, to make fun of myself, not the French, though that seems to have escaped nearly everyone who read it.

Fair enough. Obviously, it has somewhat backfired… Let me make clear that I don’t think Jim is a bigot at all; his post just irked me enough to rant about the attitude as displayed in that piece.