How the French became frogs: English caricature and a national stereotype

Apollo, August, 2003 by David Bindman

The baboon or ape implies imitation. The Frenchman, supposedly lacking the good manners that derive from a good character, apes good manners, revealing his insincerity by exaggeration, concealing his poverty in empty display. Behind this characterisation lay English envy of French taste and artistic superiority, well recognised by aristocratic patrons like Lord Chesterfield, whose support of French artists and Huguenot craftsmen by implication put English craftsmen to shame. Attacks on French taste were, therefore, as often as not directed against fashionable English men and women, who were themselves held to ape French ways at the expense of plain English manners and taste.

Such anti-French attitudes are familiar from Hogarth and other satirists, but it is striking to what an extent food played a part in English attempts to portray the French as 'unnatural', especially for their supposed preference for dainty portions of inedible creatures rather than manly slabs of honest roast beef. In the 1730s and 1740s frogs and sometimes snails and other creatures became in English satirical discourse the defining elements of the French diet, always contrasted with 'The Roast Beef of Old England'. In James Branston's Man of Taste of 1733, the eponymous protagonist expresses his effeminate rejection of native mores through his taste for all things foreign, crowned by his scorning roast beef in favour of French cuisine:

Sir Loins and rumps of beef offend my eyes, Pleas'd with frogs fricasseed, and coxcomb pies: Dishes I chuse though little, yet genteel Snails the first course, and Peepers [chicken embryos] crown the meal. (7)

It is amusing to note that Robert Burns takes a similarly dismissive view of French cuisine in his 'To a Haggis', celebrating not of course roast beef but the haggis of old Scotland:

Is there that owre his French ragout, Or olio that would staw a sow, Or fricassee wad mak' her spew Wi' perfect scunner, Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view On sic a dinner!

The eating of frogs in particular took over as a crucial indication of debased French taste as the century progressed. According to an anonymous pamphlet of 1739, A Panegyric on a Court:

In foreign vests the gaudy Fops may shine, And on dissected frogs politely dine. (8)

However, the eating of frogs could also be a sign, not of luxury and affected delicacy, but poverty. If roast beef signified English manliness, prosperity and liberty, so the eating of frogs, snails and even cats began to stand for not just effeminacy, but the deprivation endemic in a nation enslaved by the superstition of Catholicism. The almost universal thinness of Frenchmen in English caricature stands for affected elegance in contrast to the foursquare stockiness of John Bull; but it is also a reminder of the inadequate diet of the poor, who long hopelessly for English roast beef. The first of Hogarth's two Invasion prints, produced in 1756 (Fig. 3), (9) shows French soldiers gathering in Calais for the anticipated invasion of England outside an inn offering 'Soup Meagre a la Sabot Royal', and revealing through the window as a kind of trophy a completely stripped rib of beef. On the fight a soldier cooks a kebab of frogs on his sword, while gesturing to a banner inscribed in cod French 'Vengeance et le Bon Bier et Bon Boeuf de Angleterre', the real reasons for invasion.