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

Apollo, August, 2003 by David Bindman

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The Ramberg prints show frogs in the presence of Frenchmen who watch from the sidelines, leaving the Dutch to face the music. But the French are not in this case characterised as frog-eaters. Frogs and frog-eaters are, however, in direct confrontation in Isaac Cruikshank's 1793 caricature entitled Dumour[i]er & his Aid du Camp on full march to seal up the papers of the Prince of Orange (Fig. 9), (15) which concerns the threatened French Revolutionary invasion of Holland. The French general Dumourier and his sansculotte aide-de-camp are shown entering Holland with the mission of taking over the government of the country, but they are faced by the Dutch army, an implacable band of armed frogs, to whom the aide-de-camp exclaims: 'Aha Mon[sieu]r Grenouille. I woul'd rather eat you than fight'.

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The Dutch therefore remain frogs and the French frog-eaters until at least as late as 1793, but if we move forward to a print of 1825, we find that the French have themselves become frogs. An anonymous print, CORONATION of the KING Of FROGS, or MUMMERY FRANCOIS (Fig. 10), (16) shows the coronation of the French king Charles X, represented as a very fat frog holding a sceptre and cross being crowned by two venal-looking friars. They are surrounded by adoring supporters who are also frogs. Michael Duffy has explained that 'with Holland disappearing from focus, the gastronomic satire of French food has now led to the French becoming frogs instead of monkeys'; the French take over as frogs by default, as it were, from the Dutch who in this period begin to disappear from English satire. But it is surely more likely that the frogs in the 1825 print are present not for gastronomic reasons, but because they associate Charles X's notoriously lavish coronation and the politically fickle French people with Aesop's Fables, and above all with the tale of 'The Frogs who wanted a king'. In this fable, 'The commonwealth of frogs, a discontented variable race, weary of liberty, and fond of change, petitioned Jupiter to grant them a king'. (17) Jupiter then sent them a log as a reminder of their good fortune in their present state. There are two versions of the conclusion to the tale: in one the log turns into a crocodile and eats the frogs, in the other Jupiter replaces the log, after a further petition by the frogs, by a crane who 'began to devour his subjects one after another in a most capricious and tyrannical manner.' The fable is thus directed against discontented subjects, who should heed the moral: ' 'Tis better to bear with some defects in a mild and gentle government, than to risque the greater evils of tyranny and persecution'. (18) The point of the 1825 print, then, is to contest the claim of Charles X and his reactionary supporters that his elaborate coronation represented a return to the stability of the ancient French monarchy, by arguing that it was nothing more than an example of the French people's habit of wilfully changing their system of government at frequent intervals. An unsympathetic English observer might have noted that they had done so many times since 1789, in the vain hope that each regime would be an improvement on the previous one, but in each case found themselves plunged into a worse tyranny. The bloated figure of Charles X also seems to refer to another of Aesop's Fables, 'The Frog and the Ox', in which the frog 'being wonderfully struck with the size and majesty of an ox', (19) puffs herself up until she bursts.