Views from across the channel

      English cartoonists lampoon French   

   By Aidan O'Donnell
from www.english.rfi.fr         

In France’s northernmost department, the Pas de Calais, an English perspective on post-revolutionary France is on show at the Château d’Hardelot’s Centre for l’Entente Cordiale.  A series of caricatures from the late 19^th century warn against French republicanism, French emperors and French cooking.        

“You can see the aristocrats are shitting themselves,” says exhibition curator Sebastien Hoyer as he points out the cruder details in a caricature from the end of the 18^th century. For a Frenchman, Hoyer takes a wicked delight in England’s look across the Channel post-1789.

 

Churchill et la France runs from 10 July  to 23 September at the Cen Culturel de l’Entente Cordiale in Condette, Pas de Calais.

He’s talking about a caricature from 1790 entitled Salus in fuga or “Safety in flight”, that shows a panicked French aristocracy fleeing across the Channel, with a definite chill on their necks. It comes complete with captions below the picture to help the gloating English patriot distinguish M de Polignac from the Duc de Luxembourg.

Another, from 1793, portrays “English misery” and “French freedom” — the “misery” in England involves well-fed characters and gluttonous amounts of food.

 

Flags outside the Château d'Hardelot

Aidan O'Donnell

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Freedom in France, it suggests, is above all the freedom to starve.

Hoyer says the publication of these caricatures was a major event at the end of the 18^th century, with Londoners rushing to shop windows to see the latest engravings. Factory owners at the time, in fits of patriotism, would buy up hundreds of copies and distribute them to their workers, thus helping to keep the threat of French republicanism at bay.

But the pens of the artists kept their sharpest poison for Napoleon.

One caricature shows him using the “whip of fraternity” on his subjects, another has him cowering on the French coast telling John Bull that he’s on his way to meet him. Solid-looking Bull is up to his knees in channel water and definitely seems to be up for it. And since every good Englishman likes a bet, another picture gives odds on how long it would take for the emperor’s head to end up on a stake, Londonside.

 

Château d'Hardelot

Aidan O'Donnell

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But the popularity of these images (north of the Channel at least) did not help to preserve them at the time. The policy of the 19^th century French authorities, to destroy those that it got its hands on, was a conservationist’s nightmare.

“They were produced in great numbers, but as with all popular culture, they came to a bad end. In fact they were considered of no great value in the years that followed and were used for things like vegetables peelings and so on,” says Hoyer.

The few that survive, he says, come down to us via French monarchists, as critical as the English of the new republican project. “In France you’ve got a good chance of finding English caricatures in the library of a château or anywhere that people supported the monarchy."

The 49 caricatures that make up Napoléon à la sauce anglaise have just come off the walls to make way for an upcoming tribute to Churchill. And after that it will be all about Charles Dickens in 2011. Dickens is almost a native in the north of France, explains Centre director Gaetan Vandenbussch. The writer “loved France and Boulogne-sur-mer” and lived with his mistress for a time in the little town of Condette.

Vandenbussch outlines projects that the Centre for l’Entente Cordiale has with the Charles Dickens Museum in London, and reels off a list of English institutions that will help the Centre begin the celebrations slightly early, next year, for the 200^th anniversary of Dickens’s birth in 2012.

Meanwhile the Churchill exhibition opens in about a week, leaving audiences a little time to recover from the recent caricatures.

And the titles of some of those caricatures — The Frogs who wanted a king or We teach de English republican to work suggest that the 19^th century French neighbour problem was not reserved simply to republicanism and empire-building. It also seems to have been also present in a Frenchman’s dissolute cuisine and his imperfect mastery of the English accent.

Plus ça change…