French, the

Xenophobic attitudes tend to focus on nations that are military or financial rivals and that have geographical proximity and pose a threat, real or imagined, to the “host” nation. The most typical manifestations are blasons populaires , or negative stereotypes, and demeaning nicknames, which commonly turn into ethnic insults over time.

Of England’s European neighbors, France has had the longest and most problematic relationship. Although the Norman Conquest united England with the northern French kingdom of Normandy, the prolonged hostilities of the Hundred Years’ War (1338–1453) did not lead to a rapprochement. Military rivalry continued in the periods of Louis XIV and the Napoleonic era. On the other hand, the relationship between the United States and France was quite different, both countries sharing the same democratic and libertarian ideals. The French naturally supported the American Revolution and established cordial relations with the new American Republic, which the English government regarded as rebellious.

The blasons populaires for the French focus on sordid or dishonest practices, mainly associated with sex. Commenting on the stereotype in 1816, an American writer, James Kirke Paulding, observed: “In plays, poems, romances, the Frenchman was almost always a swindler, a coward, a braggadocio [boaster], or a frog-eater” (I, 183). The standard representation of the Frenchman in British cartoons of the nineteenth century was of an effete but ostentatiously dressed figure, pointedly contrasted with the robust, blunt, and plainly dressed farmerlike figure of John Bull, the stereotype created by John Arbuthnot in 1712.

Earliest in the semantic field are the terms for venereal disease although, as the entry for syphilis shows, the disease did not actually start in France. Nevertheless, the stereotypic association generated French pox (1503), followed by French marbles (1592), the French disease (1598), French measles (1612), French aches (1664), French goods (1678), French complement (1668), and French gout (ca. 1700). Also early was Pedlars’ French for “cant” or underground criminal slang, recorded from 1566 and widely used for about a century. Later came French leave , recorded from 1771, noted by Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) to refer to those escaping from their creditors. It was returned with compliments by the French in the phrase filer à l’anglaise , meaning to abandon a project without permission.

All of these instances were included in the Oxford English Dictionary , which drew the line at recording what were regarded as the more sordid details of sexual behavior. A private letter to the editor by James Dixon, a voluntary reader (December 6, 1888) generalizes: “Everything obscene comes from France,” then discusses the presumed French origins of “an article called a Cundum … supposing that it will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary” (Murray 1977, 195). In Slang and Its Analogues (1890–1904) Farmer and Henley defined French vice as “A euphemism for all sexual malpractices” but dealt fairly thoroughly with this material. Thus French letter is recorded from about 1856 for a condom, but is similarly returned as capote anglaise . Similar associations are found in French prints , a euphemism for pornographic pictures, recorded from about 1842, and “excuse my French,” an ironic exculpation for expressing a vulgar or obscene term or phrase, from about 1865. In American slang many of these idioms are reduced to the simple omnibus term French , in forms like “to be on French [leave],” “to speak French ,” or to Frenchy (to practice oral sex) and French deck (erotic playing cards).

Although frog is the nickname with the longest association with the French, the earliest meaning, “a vile or contemptible person” is recorded from the fourteenth century, and the first xenophobic references are to the Jesuits (“these infernall frogs”) in 1626 and to the Dutch in 1652. Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina (1778) has the modern use: “Hark you Mrs. Frog … you may lie in the mud till some of your Monsieurs come to help you out of it.” (Dr. Johnson defined Monsieur in 1755 as “a term of reproach for a Frenchman.”) Although a number of reference works, such as Random House (1994) associate the word with the French habit of eating frogs’ legs, the first recorded explicit reference “frog eating sons of Bitches” is in 1809 (W. Wheeler, Letters , 31). Crockett’s Almanack (1838) provides the first American allusion to the Anglo-French rivalry: “Then down comes Mr. Frog again on John Bull” (28). An apposite comment in the American Journal of Sociology (1951) notes that in World War II “many Americans formed the habit of calling all British ‘goddam Limies’ and all French ‘dirty Frogs’” (LI, 436). The related term crapeau , derived from crapaud , the French word for a toad, is recorded from 1803.

Although frog continues to be current as the principal nickname for the French in the global varieties of English, it does not have the animus of previous times. In South African English it is comparatively rare, while in Australian English the term shows the sexual association in the sense of a condom, recorded from the 1950s.