Here are a few articles and comments worthy of note.

• Du «french bashing» en Amérique – Petite poussée anti-française avec l’intervention «alliée» en Libye, mais bien moindre que lors de la guerre d’Irak. By Antoine Bourguilleau – The article’s approach is interesting but misses a lot of what we’ve uncovered over the near decade of existence. See my response below to Bourguilleau.
• “‘[...] Only Obama could make France look good” – David Letterman
• The French: ‘Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys’ No More?

Jones has since expressed regret for the “freedom fries” incident, and has become a vocal anti-war Republican.

Read more about Water Jones’ defection, Freedom Fries

A little movie by Cédric Villain. Available in English and in French. The most obvious of stereotypes we’ve been battling here for years is regrettably absent from this animation.

Read the rest of the entry at Cracked.com!

Update (14 July 2011): Welcome to one of our most-tweeted articles. It seems everytime the French are mentioned anywhere in the media, legions of lemmings reach for their tweeting apparatus to make rather lame and pathetic “French Surrender” jokes. Be it Strauss-Kahn, Libya, Tennis, Bastille Day, Women’s Soccer.

Our original article from 2009: Pretty much everybody online fancies themselves a comedian; unfortunately most of us are and will remain wannabes. Now that “Eternal September” has hit twitter, legions of newbies clamoring for attention are using the micro-blogging platform to repeat, rehash and retweet their skewed and simplistic view of history and the world.

On average, about a dozen or so anti-French jabs are written on twitter per week, most of them being some form of “French Surrender” joke. While some are deliberately trying to be offensive, others are living proof there is a “long tail” to America’s recent spate of French Bashing.

A few examples from 2009:

• @timchi – “You can try and run over a french bulldog but it would surrender first”
• @asianlunatic – “Mantastic: When ur in France for holiday, the French will surrender to u, just to be on the safe side.” 
• @JohnHancock61 – “Great movie line from Flushed Away: Lead French frog: To action! French frog commandos: We Surrender!”
• @Simon4365 – “ahhhh the weekend or as the French say “we surrender”!!!” 
• @Hondo11 – “I’ll say it. Pietrus is not only French (known to surrender) he looks strikingly erily to a Primate. FACT” 
• @macslash – “It’s nice to hear Serlet attack Windows with a French accent. Would have expected him to just surrender.”

While most comedic outfits have abandoned French Bashing, especially Jay Leno and his forty or so jokes about supposed French cowardice and propensity to surrender, legions of twitterers, bloggers and comment contributors have kept the myth of French cowardice alive.

Having turned a traumatic historical event of epic proportions into a timeless character trait, French Haters have woven prejudice against France and the French into pop-culture.

Thankfully, one of North-America’s most astute international columnists has decided to take the myth of French cowardice and surrender head on. I present to you, Eric Margolis and his column : “Getting to the truth about World War II”. Thank You Eric. Merci.

Here are a few excerpts:

“France’s army did not simply surrender or run away in 1940, as ignorant American Know-Nothing conservatives claim. “

“Britain’s well-trained expeditionary force in France was beaten just as quickly and thoroughly as the French, and saved itself only by abandoning its French allies and fleeing across the Channel. “

“France lost 217,000 dead and 400,000 wounded.  Compare that to America’s loss of 416,000 dead during four years of war in the Pacific and Europe.”

Eric Margolis is an award-winning columnist who contributes regularly to the Quebecor Media Company and the Huffington Post. His articles appear in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Times of London to name a few. Eric Margolis has also appeared on CNN, BBC, France 2, France 24, Fox News, CTV and CBC.

See also: French Bashers hit twitter @ Miquelon.org

New spot for Alan Colmes’ new show on Fox News. The ad is a spoof of all things perceived as left-wing and anti-American. “Anybody” from France is represented by Pepé LePew, Warner Brother’s anthropomorphic skunk. h/t to Browmf

South Park’s French Bashing Explored.

The world of cartoons is a powerful way to get out any message you could never achieve with traditional actors or more conventional means. Much like Aesop’s fables, the use of animated characters often serves as a vehicle for political and social satire that avoids serious scrutiny. After all, it’s just a cartoon right?

The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill and South Park have all achieved success through poking fun at our collective hypocrisies or our contradictions. Unfortunately, when empowered with such a potent vehicle, the creative teams behind these cartoons sometimes let their own prejudices show through.

The Simpsons famously entered the fray of Anti-French prejudice with several barbs, most notably the “Cheese eating surrender monkey” epithet spoken by Groundskeeper Willie in an episode aired on April 30, 1995. In another episode, the character Lenny is also used as a vehicle for Anti-French stereotypes: “I’m shaking like a French soldier!”. Anti-French prejudice from the Simpsons is also evident in licensed games such as “Medal of Homer” (See note 1).

Matt Groening disputed his association with that now famous Anti-French slur: “That was not the original context. It was all about Willie yelling at students in a French class. People took that expression out of context (…) Besides I adore France, to be associated with this was insulting” (See note 2). Given the Simpsons long record of Anti-French attitudes, Matt Groening’s comments can only be considered as pure hypocrisy. But enough with this antiquated series that overstayed its welcome 6 years ago.

Last Wednesday, South Park aired an episode ripped from the headlines that deals with Somali pirates. At one point a French crew surrenders to children wielding toys. In another scene, another characters exclaims: “they were French so of course they surrendered immediately”.

South Park’s late foray into the world of French Bashing is not only regrettable, it proves once more that anti-French prejudice is so entwined in American pop-culture that it will take monumental efforts on our behalf to undo the harm done by years of laissez-faire.

In the meanwhile, little can be done with our limited means. We can however let the creators of South Park know how we feel with it comes to mocking the most tragic event of our recent history or we can also share our opinions with the myriad of bloggers, writers, columnists out there who are applauding this new Anti-French jab like circus seals.

(1) Miquelon.org article on Medal of Homer
(2) Source: Interview with Erwan Cario, July 25th 2007

Related links

• South Park Episode 7, season 13 “Fatbeard”
• Entertainement Weekly by Ken Tucker who thinks this is a “funny depiction of the French as pretentious cowards”
• AvClub.com – tv.ign.com

Update : following the Friday April 3rd monologue by William Maher where jokes were made about the supposed non-cleanliness of the French, we have no choice but to put an immediate end to this endeavour. We sincerely apologize to our community.

While some may not agree with Bill Maher’s libertarian politics, his support for PETA or his anti-religious stance, nobody stood up for France and the French during the era of French Bashing with more force and conviction. Bill Maher took the Republican Party head on and voiced serious and structured criticism of their Anti-French rhetoric.

The “initiative citoyenne” legislation for the Legion of Honor was not designed for foreign citizens, however we believe that using a similar process should be initiated and forwarded to the Ambassador of France in Washington.

To petition the French government, you must be a French citizen. We will need your name, date and place of birth, your postal address and phone number, your consular registration number if applicable. This information will not be shared with anyone except the French government and their consular agents.

More information on the Legion of Honor – L’initiative citoyenne

More information on Bill Maher – Wikipedia [fr] – Wikipedia [en] – BillMaher.com

Photo : David Shankbone

On another front, this one being in the Gulf of Aden, the news of French successes against Somali pirates is being greeted with sarcasm by Jennifer Fermino – are we Italian? – of the New York Post. Harping on France’s 1940 surrender, which we remind our non-French readers, is as funny to the French as 9/11 is to Americans, Fermino plays loose with history and claims the French have not had a military success on water since 1884.

Please use the comment section of the New York Post to leave informative and thought provoking comments.

The headline was vulgar and blunt: Brit Performs, French Surrender.

We immediately posted a note in their comment section which read as follows: “Very disappointed by TMZ’s French Bashing. By referring to the 1940 surrender to describe some pop culture news, TMZ is showing utter contempt and disdain for a people and their history. To the French, the 1940 surrender is as funny as 9/11 is to Americans. Please show some cultural understanding the next time you wish to write something about France or the French.” We added for good measure a quote by Edward C.Knox.

Within hours, our comment was removed. Was it the mention of 9/11? TMZ can dish it out certainly, but can they take it? It seems not. These cowardly writers believe they can vilify and trash the French anytime they want, but when faced with the ugliness of their words, they censor.

Source : TMZ.com
Act Now : Contact TMZ and let them know how you feel about French Bashing and the trivialization of our painful history and request an immediate retraction

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French assistance was critical to the success of the American Revolution against Great Britain. In fact, if not for French help, we’d probably all be speaking English right now. We repaid the favor – most notably during the two world wars, when we twice helped the French drive out invading Germans.

Yet despite being there for each other when it mattered, Franco-American relations recently have gotten nastier than reheated Spaghetti-Os with franks. It’s to the point that expressing disdain for France and French-ness has become an important staple of contemporary American politics.”

Read the rest of the article at Atlanta.CreativeLoafing.com
With kind permission by the author, Andisheh Nouraee

Trickle-down hatred has fostered a pop-culture bias against the French and France and it will be years before the long tail of Anti-French bigotry disappears from the scene. At Miquelon.org, we strongly believe the “laissez-faire” policy of the Quai d’Orsay on this matter (French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) has encouraged the general acceptance of French Bashing in American pop culture.

If Areva, Veolia, Sodexo and now find new markets in the United States, all the better, but for the hundreds of thousands of French Expatriates who went through hell in their public and private lives, this news will hardly be of any comfort.

Just a reminder to our readers: we are planning to go forth with the Freedom Fry Awards in September 2008, so stay tuned.

• Update 1: looks like the video was removed. We did not get a DMCA notice.
• Update 2: the video was likely flagged and subsequently restored for viewing

This has to be one of the strangest, out-of-the blue, French Bashing comments ever aired by Fox News. It happened during Hannity & Colmes. The odd exchange came after a clip where Barack Obama’s suggested Americans should learn another language. Barack Obama : “It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup, right?”

Frank Luntz and Sean Hannity, rejected Obama’s comments as insulting, and then proceeded to wallow in the glorious achievements of unilingual Anglo-America in the worlds of medicine, science, technology …

Sean Hannity then wore the mantle of the liberation of Europe during World War II as another example of America’s glorious achievements, to which Luntz rebounded with a purely Anti-French dunk: “ If it wasn’t for us, the French would be speaking German right now”.

Frank Luntz’s comments – and Sean Hannity’s – are typical of a generation of historical amnesiacs who have reduced World War II to an American endeavor (2% of Allied troops, 3 % of casualties*), completely sideswiping the efforts of the Soviet Union who bled the German War Machine for a year before D-Day at incredible human cost (91 % of Allied troops, 88 % of Allied casualties), and the contributions of the British, Canadians, Australians, Free French and other Allies to the liberation of Europe and the destruction of the IIIrd Reich.

The French, Dutch, Belgians and others owe their freedom – not to America – but to the Allies as a whole. Using the sacrifices of men and women during the most horrendous conflict of the 20th century for petty political points is shameful and beneath contempt.

Sources : Hannity & Colmes – CBS – Wikipedia (Frank Luntz)

Source : Professor Joseph V. O’Brien
Department of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
* Numbers exclude China and India