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

Apollo, August, 2003 by David Bindman

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Gillray's early caricature POLITENESS of 1777 (Fig. 4) (10) contains a catalogue of virtually all the contrasting stereotypes of England and France, from the Englishman's stolid figure to the thin Frenchman and their attendant symbols, while the two men are shown framed by a joint of beef and a cluster of frogs hanging at opposite ends of the wall behind. An anonymous caricature of 1786, entitled The Commercial Treaty; or, John Bull changing Beef and Pudding for Frogs and Soup Maigre (Fig. 5), (11) satirises the Anglo-French trade treaty encouraged by Midlands manufacturers like Josiah Wedgwood with the aim of opening French markets to English goods and vice-versa. The claim that such a treaty would lead to the overwhelming of the English market by alien manufactures is represented by a scene in which the King and Queen of England solemnly hand over a large roast beef, the birthright of all Englishmen, and a plum pudding, in exchange for a dish of frogs, proffered by an insidiously smiling Frenchman, and a container of soupe maigre. The persistence of this trope into anti-French Revolution propaganda is also evident in a print by Thomas Rowlandson dated 8 January 1793, entitled Reform Advised, (12) widely distributed by the loyalist Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. It was advertised as showing 'Several degrees of Modern Reform, and its fatal consequences, contrasted with the settled, constitutionally protected, affluent, happy Briton'. The French diet of frogs is thus enlisted to argue that any reform of elite privileges or the extension of suffrage, as proposed by Charles James Fox and Tom Paine among others, brought with it the danger of revolution on the French model. John Bull's acceptance of reform is equated with the surrender of his roast beef, plum pudding and porter to three unctuous and seedy sansculottes who address him with courtly politeness, but then offer him frogs to eat, before they attack him and trample him underfoot.

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In Isaac Cruikshank's French Happiness, English Misery of 3 January 1793 (Fig. 8) (13) four desperate, starving Frenchmen fight over a single frog, but lack the strength to pull it apart. As a consequence of the Revolution, we are to believe, the French are not only reduced to the most abject poverty and starvation, but they are no longer able to hang on to their last emblem of national identity. The date is significant--a mere eighteen days before the execution of Louis XVI. It marks the last moment for some time that traditional comic emblems of Frenchness could be employed, for the French Revolution, for a period at least after the King's execution, ceased to be considered a laughing matter even in England.

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To return from the frog-eaters to the frogs, by the 1770s a Dutchman, an ungainly and plump figure in a cloche hat, appears in prints about the American Revolution as a sly character who takes advantage of Britain's quarrels to sneak away with milk or an unattended purse. The revival of the Dutch as frogs after their earlier incarnation seems to date from the German satirist Johann Heinrich Ramberg's brilliant paired satires on the Dutch-Prussian conflict of 1787 (Figs. 6 and 7), entitled REHEARSAL in HOLLAND 1787 and PERFORMANCE in HOLLAND in Sept[embe]r. & Oct[obe]r. 1787. (14) The Dutch militia are shown as ungainly and stolid burghers, whose absurd bravura in the face of a scrawled image of a Prussian hussar is destroyed by their abject behaviour in the face of real invaders. The Dutchmen's actions are mimicked comically by the puffed-up flogs who inhabit the same marshy terrain, and who also collapse before the enemy.