A Frenchman eschews cliche in his choice of headgear and beverage as he celebrates his team's victory in the 1998 World Cup. Photograph: Rick Bowner/AP
Antipathy between the French and the British goes back a long way. The Norman Conquest. Agincourt. Joan of Arc. The Napoleonic wars (during which the Duke of Wellington is said to have opined: "We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be detested in France". Etcetera etcetera. In the 1980s Rowan Atkinson perfectly encapsulated cross-channel mistrust in this ditty, a brief clip of which you can hear here. Sample lyrics:
They bake their bread in such a naughty shape;
They brag about their wine and worship the grape;
They criticise our food but then they eat crepe".
A report in today's newspapers appears to show that the jaundiced British view of the French is shared across Europe.
Two Frenchmen who asked people across Europe to come up with adjectives to describe the French received a string of negative epithets - chauvinistic, pretentious, vain, shallow and so on. Today's Telegraph (registration required) delightedly puts the story on its front page, observing impartially that "typically, the French refuse to accept what arrogant, overbearing monsters they are".
In fact the study, entitled "Why the French are the Worst Company on the Planet", reveals at least as much about the people surveyed as about the French. So while the (serious) Germans dismiss the French as frivolous, the (fiery) Spanish see them as "cold and distant", the (taciturn) Dutch find them "talkative" and the (punctilious, authority-obsessed) Swedes see them as "disobedient, immoral, disorganised, neo-colonialist and dirty". The British, for the record, described the French as "chauvinistic, stubborn, nannied and humourless" - just the same words they chose to describe us.
