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

Apollo, August, 2003 by David Bindman

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This print was not the first one to make an association between the French Revolution(s) and the fable of the Frogs who wanted a King; indeed, the idea was also current in French Royalist satire. A beautiful and haunting French engraving, L'Age d'Or--L'Age de Fer, (20) of c. 1794-95, presumably issued by a Royalist group in the Directoire period, uses the Aesop fable to contrast the pastoral paradise of the ancien regime, captioned 'l'Age d'Or', where the frogs live in peace at the edge of a formal garden with a chateau in the distance, with 'l'Age de Fer', a scene of the destruction and discord caused by the Revolution. The fable of the frogs is reenacted against a background of revolutionary horror, including the massacre of a crowd of frogs by a crane operating a cannon, a burning chateau, a damaged church and a guillotine, while cranes hungrily gobble up the frogs. In a completely different spirit, an English comic etching of November 1799, The Corsican Crocodile dissolving the Council of Frogs!!! (Fig. 11), (21) concerns Bonaparte's recent coup d'etat of 18 Brumaire. The Council of the Cinq-Cents are shown as flogs at the moment of shock when they realise that the 'king' they have chosen to replace the previous regime has turned out to be a crocodile and not a passive log, and has already grabbed a couple of frogs to put in his capacious jaws.

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It should be clear from the foregoing examples that the French became figuratively frogs as well as frog-eaters in the aftermath of the French Revolution, for reasons that had nothing to do with their taste for eating frogs or any other small creatures. The question of the extent to which the French were known as frogs or frog-eaters--or both--in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remains to be investigated, and it is perfectly possible that French prowess in cooking things that excited English chauvinistic disgust like frogs, if only their legs, and snails, served to reinforce the stereotype, especially as the Dutch faded from political relevance. But the fact remains that for the French to become flogs required the migration of a symbol that in its time seemed self-evidently to belong to the Dutch. That this change should have taken effect so completely--and then have been so completely forgotten--is a fascinating and in many ways chilling comment on the way such absurd and historically contingent stereotypes can work their way into the national consciousness.

(1) John Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull A.W. Bower and R.A. Erickson (eds.), Oxford, 1976.

(2) Ibid., p. 9.

(3) Ibid., p. 32.

(4) Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner, Cambridge, 1986, p. 82, no. 15.

(5) Ibid., p. 86, no. 17.

(6) The Baboon A-la Mode, a satyr against the French, London, 1704, p. 22 (cited in Bower and Erickson, op. cit., p. LXVI).

(7) Quoted in W.H. Irving, John Gay's London, Cambridge, MA, 1928, p. 235.

(8) Ibid., p. 236.

(9) R. Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, London, 1989, no. 202.