How the British invented France
(It seems more a joke than a serious article, but it's funny... and, as anyone may imagine, it was written by an Englishman -Anthony Peregrine- in the Daily Telegraph in March 2014)
I like and value the French. I
married one and fathered two, so don't have much choice in the matter. But they
can be damned annoying. At a French dinner the other evening, we were talking
drinks. A very presentable fellow told me: "The Scots invented whisky only
because they couldn't get hold of cognac. There was a war on. Supplies were cut
off."
He wasn't sure which war but thought
it had been in the 17th-century. "Or eighteenth." "You're
certain of this?" I said. "Oh yes," he said. "It's in
books." The French do such low-level, daily (and often bonkers) chauvinism
as, by and large, the British do not. They routinely assume that, given the
chance, everyone would live in France, be French, eat French food, drink French
brandy, watch French films, climb French mountains and listen to Daft Punic.
With self-deprecation seared into
our souls, we are ill-equipped to reply. But we should. Otherwise, the French
will grow even more insufferable, which is in no-one's interest. So, as the
great spring surge across the Channel revs up, let me furnish a few hints -
elements of the French self-image which they crow about but which we invented.
Please mention them as often as necessary:
Fashion
All that faffing about with froth,
frills and frocks, adjusting flounces and hemlines to keep barbarians from the
gates: obviously the work of a Frenchman who really loved his mother? Wrong.
Like Hereward the Wake, the "father of Parisian haute couture" was
born in Bourne, Lincolnshire. This was Charles Frederick Worth. After working
with London drapers, Worth moved to Paris in 1845 to found the fashion
industry. We have him to thank for couturiers launching their own creations,
for fashion models and fashion shows, for seasonal collections - and for the
whole idea that a designer might be a big-name artist rather than simply a
bloke with scissors, Yves St Laurent, Christian Dior and other natty chaps were
his heirs.
Worth dressed Empresses Sissi and
Eugenie, US heiresses who sailed in specially - and Cora Pearl, the era's
leading courtesan. Cora had princes and French nobles chucking money, jewels
and entire chateaux at her - despite starting life as Emma Elizabeth Crouch in Plymouth.
The French also needed Britain to supply its elite call-girls.
Vine
We didn't create French wine. We had
better things to do at the time (fraternising with Romans, fighting Norsemen, etc).
But we were vital to the development, and world status of, especially, Bordeaux.
I won't have to remind you that, when our Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152. Bordeaux came as part of the
package. It remained English for 300 years - time enough for us to get claws
deep into the Bordeaux wine trade. Monarchs set the example. Edward II ordered the
equivalent of 1.2 million bottles for his 1307 marriage. (He'd barely sobered
up by Bannockburn). Bordeaux boomed, its 14th-century exports unmatched until the
late 1940s, and most of them to the British Isles.
So they liked us; didn't want to let
us go, though they had to, when, confounding predictions, France won the 100 Years
War and took Bordeaux back. But we remained key players, our merchants established
in Bordeaux's Chartrons district, the English thirst for "claret"
just about unslakeable. And it was 17th-century London which first appreciated quality
differentiated Bordeaux wines - ones bearing chateaux names - rather
than bulk plonk. Pepys tasted the first - "Ho Bryan", he called it - and
found it "particular", which was the whole point. Thus, the wine
ranking thing which spurred Bordeaux's expansion began with us. And, incidentally,
the UK remains N°1 client (by value) for Bordeaux wines, as it also is for the €8
billion French wine export trade in general. No harm in reminding the French of
this - on you know, a daily basis.
Water
The French took to bottled mineral
water because, back then, drinking French tap water meant sudden collapse in
torrid circumstances. The British followed suit more recently, for reasons I've
never grasped. No matter. We thought we were following a French lead. We weren’t.
The greatest name in French mineral water history wasn't anything French. It was Harmsworth - thus, as English as the Daily Mail, which the family owned.
Travelling southern France at the
turn of the 20th-century, 27-year-old Sir St-John Harmsworth bumped into one Dr
Louis Perrier, a Nimes GP. Perrier had recently bought a sparkling water source
in nearby Vergèze. He badly needed investment. Harmsworth sold his shares in the
Mail, bought into Perrier's water and, within a year or two, was sole owner. Very
decently, he retained the name "Perrier", but otherwise set about booting
the enterprise into the modem age. The distinctive bottle shape was based on Indian
clubs Harmsworth used for keep-fit.
Difficult to think of a less
practical design for handling and packaging, but the bottles were a wow across the
British Empire, Harmsworth's primary target. "Perrier is better known in London,
Delhi and Singapore than in France," as someone wrote in 1908, the year
that the water bagged its 'By Appointment' tag. World War II ended the British
connection. These days, the world's best-known mineral water belongs to Nestle,
and sells almost a billion bottles annually. You can check all this yourself
with a visit to the site; it's just off the motorway between Nimes and
Montpellier.
Cote-d’Azur
Everyone knows that, if it weren't
for us, the Riviera would still be the preserve of toothless Mediterranean
peasants, gutting fish and sleeping with donkeys. That's how it was before we arrived.
Lord Henry Brougham - Lord Chancellor, anti-slavery
campaigner and all-round good egg - was among our first men in, bringing hygiene,
money and solid building to Cannes in the mid-1830s. You may still see his
holiday Villa Eléonore-Louise (named for his daughter) off Avenue Dr Picaud.
Now in flats, it's not in as good a nick as we might hope, but that's what
happens when you turn things over to the natives.
Meanwhile, across in Nice, English
clergyman Lewis Way was funding what became the Promenade-des-Anglais, partly
to provide work during a mid-1850s recession, partly to give decent British wives
and daughters somewhere to stroll free of the attentions of swarthy locals. Later,
Russians, Germans and Americans rolled in as the Riviera began seriously to fashion
itself for the fashionable. But we were the first.
I mentioned this - shouted it, really
- when a daft old bint almost ran me down as, recently, I ambled away from the
Brougham villa. "We invented your b****y town!" I cried after her. But
the French only hear what they want to hear.
Etiquetas: Alégrame el dia
posted by Catalina @ jueves, noviembre 30, 2017
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