hop off you frogs

Volume 2 No 2 - 1998

"HOP OFF YOU FROGS": FRANCOPHOBIA AND THE SUN

David Drake

The saga of the relations between France and Britain comprising lengthy periods of bloody confrontation, easy and uneasy peace, and close - and not so close - alliances has been extensively documented and analysed. However, most of the writing on this subject has focused on the political, diplomatic, economic and military aspects of Franco-British relations and much less attention has been paid to the images constructed in Britain of France and the French, and those of Britain and the British or, as the French usually say, 'Angleterre et les Anglais, constructed by the French.

One of the contemporary promoters of negative images of France and the French is The Sun newspaper and this article focuses on two of its most famous anti-French campaigns which have been referred to by Dr M. Spiering in an earlier issue of Europa. These campaigns will first be located briefly in their political contexts and then three recurring images of the French that emerge will be discussed.

The two campaigns in question were run by The Sun in January 1984 and November 1990. In January 1984, the paper was reacting to a violent campaign- including attacks on British lorries and the kidnapping of British lorry drivers - aimed at reducing the EEC quota for British lamb sold in France. The 1990 offensive, launched on November 1 with the now infamous front-page headline "Up Yours Delors", was The Sun throwing its populist weight behind Margaret Thatcher's recent denunciation in Parliament of what she perceived as the determination of Jacques Delors and the European Commission to impose the Ecu and take Britain through "the back door to a federal Europe."

Even by The Sun's crude standards the November 1 issue was pretty strong. Alan Rusbridger, writing in The Guardian, acknowledged The Sun's long and successful tradition of being rude to foreigners - "The Wapping world is peopled by wops, eyties, spics, krauts, yanks, frogs, argies" but wrote that "seldom has it savaged one of its pet targets quite as viciously as it did yesterday", while Max Wilkinson, writing in The Financial Times, saw The Sun's "sickening chauvinism"as "an obvious, if wildly vulgarised, echo of what the prime minister was herself saying a few days earlier." A Labour M.E.P. called for the paper to be prosecuted for its " xenophobic racist attack", while Julian Critchley, Conservative MP for Aldershot denounced the article as "an appalling exercise in prejudice and bigotry." Meanwhile, Eurosceptic MPs were delighted, and Thatcher's press secretary Bernard Ingham expressed the view that "At root, it is expressing the prejudices and feelings of the average Brit. It all adds to the joy of nations."

As part of both their anti-French campaigns, The Sun invited its readers to send in their favourite anti-French jokes. Most societies have groups which are traditionally the butt of "humour" because of characteristics attributed to them, jokes about "the mean " Scots", the "slow-witted Irish" in England, dim Poles (in the USA) and Belgians (in France) etc. Such "jokes" can be seen as a way of underlining the alleged superiority of the national or ethnic group to which the teller of the joke belongs. There are also those jokes told against foreigners (in general) where the "humour" is posited on the perceived superiority of one group and the inferiority of the other: they are uncivilised and stupid whereas we, by implication, are the opposite. When one examines the sixty-four "jokes" which were printed, one finds that a large number were jokes which are not in fact specifically anti-French and could be told against any foreign group. However, there are three recurring themes, both in the jokes and in The Sun's stories, which do apply particularly to the French. The first of these is the French as cowards or militarily inept, the second the French as dirty (unhygienic) the third dirty (immoral). This is not to argue that it is only the French who have this reputation within the culture of popular humour. Since World War Two there have been plenty of "jokes" portraying the Italians as militarily inept cowards (and since the Gulf War similar, and in some cases the same "jokes" told against the Iraquis) and "jokes" portraying Blacks and Asians as unhygienic are regrettably legion. However, it is the case that the themes of military ineptitude, cowardice, a lack of personal hygiene and immorality are recurrent themes within francophobic discourse and these will now be examined in turn in relation to The Sun's anti-French onslaughts.

For centuries, France and Britain were traditional military enemies and the Sun makes passing reference to past French aggressive expansionism, but this is done in order to underscore Britain's perceived superiority. "They (the French) TRIED to conquer Europe until we put down Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815." (The use of the expression "put down" suggests that Napoleon was an animal.) This portrayal of Napoleon completely ignores Napoleon's undisputed successes in consolidating the French nation state and the internal reforms he was responsible for introducing. Taking its cue from Waterloo, most of the military references and allusions to France in The Sun focus on the perceived cowardice and militarily ineptitude of the French. For example "They (the French) GAVE IN to the Nazis during the Second World War when we stood firm."

This image of the French as cowards and militarily inept is a relatively new one, and, as is made clear from the above, can be traced to the events of 1940 and les années noires, although it should be noted in passing that the view of the French as unreliable, a sub-text of this perception, has a much longer pedigree and is as central to the history of Francophobia as the view of the English as unreliable is to that to the history of Anglophobia.

The Second World War, and especially 1940, strikes a very different chord in French and British cultures. The difference is well encapsulated in the translation into French of the second volume of Winston Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War Their Finest Hour as L'Heure tragique." It is clear from The Sun's references to this period that it certainly does not consider the collapse of France to be a tragedy. There is no reference whatsoever to the 100,000 French soldiers who were killed during the short campaign of 1940 (a higher weekly average death toll than during the Verdun campaign of 1916), to the privations suffered by many French people during the Occupation, nor to any resistance activities. The repetition of military vocabulary and imagery, the reiteration of allusions to French defeats - not just 1940, but also Waterloo - serve to underscore an image of the French as weak and cowardly while the British are brave and strong - and of course superior.

One of the recurring themes in The Sun's reportage is "invasion." In 1984, during the "Lamb War" it staged its own "invasion" of Calais when it sent a "26-strong army" across the Channel. The Sun army was spearheaded by disc-jockey Ed "Stewpot" Stewart and three 'Page Three' girls - all kitted out in Union Jack shirts and World War Two-style battle helmets and, according to the report in The Sun "The wartime spirit shone through as we sang It's A Long Way To Tipperary while pushing on to the Place d'Angleterre to plant a Union Jack.". The military flavour is further reinforced by the use of the phrase "push on". The Sun pulled its invasion stunt again as part of its 1990 anti-French/anti-Delors campaign. Under the headline "In We G'Eau", Sun readers learned on November 5 that a task force was "advancing on France" with a view to giving Jacques Delors "an ear-bashing in person for plotting to swap our British pound for the faceless Ecu." Further details of "Operation Jacques-ass" were then revealed.

Under cover of darkness, a handpicked team of Sun commandos slipped ashore in northern France last night. We came heavily armed in military vehicles ready to BLAST the frogs with home-grown garlic; BASH them with true blue black puddings; BOMBARD them with crisp English apples. STUFF them with our best bangers and BOOT them with legs of British lamb. Reinforcements - in the form of BAZOOKAS of Page 3 lovelies…. were on their way. As our brave battalions pushed towards Paris, like the Nazis, we met little resistance…Eurobore Delors was believed to have fled to his bunker at the EC headquarters in Brussels.

(Note how the belligerence of the piece is underscored by the highlighting in bold and upper case of verbs of aggression. Furthermore, in one sentence Delors is portrayed as boring and a coward and the reference to "his bunker" is clearly intended to establish a parallel between him and Hitler.) The popular press in general, and The Sun in particular, has always opted to focus on individuals rather than issues, using individuals to represent or symbolise political tendencies or movements. Thus Arthur Scargill was demonised as the personification of radical trade unionism, "Red" Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn became the personification of radical socialism ("the Loony Left" in Sunspeak). In the context of Europe, The Sun had found in Delors its ideal target - French, socialist, bureaucrat and President of the body the nationalists love to hate - the EC Commission. No attempt is made by The Sun to present the view, widespread in continental Europe, that an integrated Europe is the best way to promote prosperity across the continent and to prevent nationalist rivalry in Europe developing into armed conflict.

The following day (6.11.90), The Sun carried a report of how its "invading army took Paris by storm" and again there was reference to the absence of resistance.

But it is not just The Sun's own antics that receive the "invasion" treatment. The day following the "Up Yours Delors" issue, the paper ran a story about a holiday camp director's plans to take 300 coachloads of British tourists a week to Eurodisney near Paris. Under the headline "D-Day Invasion: It's D for Disney as bold Sir Fred goes into France", The Sun revealed that Sir Fred Pontin (dubbed General Sir Fred Pontin and pictured with a World War Two soldier's helmet superimposed as headwear) was "masterminding a new British invasion of France" which promised "to be the biggest cross-channel operation since D-day."

For British nationalist opinion, accurately if crudely articulated by The Sun, France's fall in 1940 and Britain's continued resistance to Nazism was historical "proof" of Britain's superiority. Britain's traditional enemy had been crushed and humiliated and would threaten her no more. It is worth noting here that Germany has also been on the receiving end of The Sun's invasion treatment. On April 11 1987 The Sun's front page proclaimed "THE SUN INVADES GERMANY." Incensed by reports in the German press which criticised, amongst other things, the loutish behaviour of some British tourists, The Sun informed its readers that it was assembling "a Wapping task force to invade Germany - and give those lout Krauts a lesson to remember." This was to be, The Sun claimed, "an invasion that would have made wartime leader Winston Churchill proud."

The repeated use of "invasion stunts" by The Sun serves to illustrate the newspaper's view of British superiority and with 1939-45 as its reference point reduces the Second World War to the status of a game. This was made explicit when in its "invasion of Germany" story The Sun reminded readers that Britain had beaten Germany in 1918, 1945…and 1966 (The World Cup!). The sub-text of the repetition of the theme of "invasion" in Sun stories is that while in modern times her European rivals have been invaded and defeated, Britain has not. For example, while France has been invaded throughout her history (and three times in the past 100 years), Britain has remained immune from foreign invasion since 1066. No mention is made of Britain's geographical position as an island being a determining factor; instead these stories purport to explain history by reducing the absence of invasion of the British Isles since 1066 to the assertion of supposedly peculiarly British qualities of strength, independence, resistance. This is clearly nonsense. Britain was a key player in the formulation of an appeasement policy prior to the outbreak of World War Two, and even after the outbreak of war there was body of opinion within the British establishment, including members of the royal family, who favoured doing a deal with Hitler. Furthermore, the history of the Nazi occupation of Jersey, which after all is part of the UK, does not reveal the inhabitants of the island showing much strength, independence and resistance.

While The Sun might use a light-hearted "invasion" to "prove" British superiority, it should be remembered that invasion from or by France was considered a serious threat throughout much of the nineteenth century and such an eventuality was still surfacing into the twentieth. As early as 1760s, Louis XV's foreign minister the Duc de Choiseuil, who never abandoned his plan of one day invading England, had moved to an advanced stage a project of landing 60,000 troops at Barnstable in north Devon.Much of Napoleon's energies were spent on planning invasions of England and in the 1840s and 50s there were a number of French invasion panics which persisted until the outbreak of the Crimean War. The main reason for the repeated postponements of the building of the Channel Tunnel was the British fears of French invasion, and in November 1919, Sir Maurice Hankey, an inveterate opponent of the project was writing "France may become hostile…How should we like the Channel tunnel then?" According to John C. Cairns, it was not until the early 1920s that Austen Chamberlain's dictum that war with France was impossible became accepted.

However, for The Sun, and presumably many of its readers, the moves towards greater European integration in the 1980s and 1990s represented a serious threat to Britain, an "invasion" of the "foreign" in a more devious yet no less dangerous form, and with it an elimination of Britain was we know it. The Sun's knee-jerk reaction was not to consider the arguments for and against further British integration into Europe in a sober manner but simply to retreat to asserting Britain's alleged superiority against "the other".

Two other themes which were used by The Sun to champion what it considered to be British superiority were a view of the French as "dirty" both in the sense of lacking personal hygiene and in the sense of immoral. As has been shown, the portrayal of the French as cowards and militarily inept has its roots in a particular reading of the Second World War but the image of the French as unwashed, smelly and immoral has a longer history within the francophobic tradition. Here The Sun was therefore reinforcing derogatory images which were already well established in British xenophobic discourse.

The view of the French as dirty is conveyed in Sunspeak, by the constant repetition of "the feelthy Frogs" and in the issues of the paper under consideration we find a number of references to the French being dirty (and smelly). According to Chippendale and Horne, as far as The Sun was concerned "the French, as Britain's old enemy, were still a nation of unshaven beret-wearing peasants riding bicycles, smoking vile cigarettes and carrying strings of onions" - picture about as accurate as one of English men dressed in sober three-piece suits, wearing bowler hats and sipping tea at five o'clock every day. Chippendale and Horne describe francophobe editor Kelvin MacKenzie as "beside himself with delight" when he read a paragraph in The Times about a cosmetics survey which revealed that the French used fewer bars of soap per head than any other European nation. On January 18 1984, immediately following the Lamb War "coverage" MacKenzie ran the story as a front-page "exclusive" which began "The French are the filthiest people in Europe it was revealed yesterday. And the British are the cleanest." What The Sun failed to understand is that French women learned years ago about the negative effects using soap can have on skin texture and have long since use cleansing lotions and creams instead of soap. The paper then went on to "quote" a French journalist who carried out the survey for Marie France (printed as Mario France) who is alleged to have said "Many French people smell like kangaroos which have been kept in cages." It has not proved possible to trace the original Marie France article but according to The Sun, the name of the journalist responsible for the survey was Jacques Thomas which is presumably The Sun's attempt at a French rendering of John Thomas, a well-known euphemism for a penis.

The Sun tried to "freshen up the lives" of the French by donating almost £200 worth of toiletries and underwear to what it described "their needy nation" but it would seem staff at the French Embassy where a Page Three girl tried to hand in the gift were less than impressed. The idea that the French are not clean is clearly absurd as a walk around any French city or town will reveal large numbers of well-scrubbed, dapper people of all ages and both sexes who look as if they've stepped straight out of the shower via the dry cleaners onto the street. This is not the case in British towns and cities where care about ones appearance does not appear to have the same high priority.

There are also frequent references in The Sun's reportage to the French smelling of garlic. (There is, incidentally, nothing new about the association of French with garlic. Linda Colley refers to artisans in Bristol in 1754 roaming the streets shouting "No French…lowering wages of labouring men to four pence a day and garlic.) To accuse the French of smelling of garlic is about as accurate of accusing the English of smelling of beer. Some may, but it is scarcely a national characteristic. In the "Up Yours Delors" issue of November 1 1990, we find an exhortation from The Sun "to tell the French fool (Delors) where to stuff his ECU". Although the main object of The Sun's fury is Delors, it is extended to the French people who "INSULT us, BURN our lambs, FLOOD our country with dodgy food and PLOT to abolish the dear old pound." The Sun reminded its readers that the French, amongst other things, "JEERED Mrs. Thatcher when she visited Paris to boost celebrations for the bicentenary celebrations of the French Revolution last year, BANNED British beef after falsely claiming it had mad cow disease, BLEATED when we found their foul soft cheese riddled with listeria bugs", and, of course, "GAVE IN to the Nazis during the Second World War when we stood firm." Here again we have The Sun trading in cheap jibes many of them inaccurate. When and where are the French supposed to have insulted us? Where is the analysis of the events that led French farmers to resort to desperate measures to limit the imports of cheap meat from Britain? Furthermore, the French/European ban on British beef was justified, as there was a risk of BSE contamination. If French food is "dodgy", and their soft cheeses are "foul" this hardly explains the range of soft cheeses from France to be found in all major supermarkets or the success in Britain of French cooking in Britain be it in restaurants or in the home. As for the plot to abolish the pound, The Sun fails to note that the introduction of a common European currency involves the end of all national currencies, including the French franc.

After calling on its readers to kick the French "in the Gauls", The Sun then adds the short rejoinder "Remember, folks, it won't be long before the garlic-breathed bastilles will be here in droves once the Channel Tunnel is open." (Here the reference to "hordes" once again conjures up the spectre of invasion. However if there has been an "invasion" it has not so much been the French coming to Britain but the millions of trips made by British citizens using the Channel Tunnel to go to France to stock up on cheap alcohol and, much as The Sun might disapprove, French food including soft cheeses.

The Sun urged its readers to "tell the feelthy French to FROG OFF" by gathering throughout Britain the following day, facing France and at 12 noon shouting "Up Yours Delors". Pages two and three of the November 1 issue were devoted to a town by town guide giving directions on where "frog-haters" should stand and in which direction they needed to face in order to direct their wrath towards France, or as The Sun put it in a two-page headline, "WHERE TO BAWL AT GAUL." Residents of the south coast of England were reminded that all they had to do was "face the sea and turn steadily to the left until they SMELL the garlic." In its report of the day when according to The Sun "Frogland got its biggest blasting since Waterloo" (whatever happened to 1940?), the paper published a comment from one of the protesters from the Isle of Dogs "The Frogs can hop off. They are wasting their smelly breath if they think they can get rid of our pound." In fact the event was a complete flop. Groups of staff at The Sun's plant in Wapping were dragooned into assembling in front of a photographer from the paper and a tiny cluster of right-wing extremists and eccentrics did assemble in Trafalgar Square. Scarcely "the biggest blasting since Waterloo"!

This view of the French as dirty and smelly occurs in many of the early accounts written by British travellers in France. According to Paul Gerbord, British visitors to France in the eighteenth century frequently commented on the smelly and dirty hotel rooms they encountered and frequently the comparison with England is made explicit. "Peu d'auberges et d'hôtels, surtout en province paraissent acceptables surtout si le visiteur les compare à ceux qu'il a coutume de fréquenter en Angleterre." It was not only the habitations that shocked British travellers, but also the state of the towns. Arthur Young described Clermont Ferrand with its many streets like "narrow channels cut in a night dunghill" as "the worst built, dirtiest, and most stinking places I have met with." In the nineteenth century, living conditions, especially in the towns remained dangerously unhygienic. Of course this was also the case in Britain, but there, from the 1840s, initiatives taken by Edwin Chadwick and others led to improvements in public health in the towns and cities. This development coincided with beginnings of French industrialisation and urbanisation and allowed British nationalists to present themselves as being more economically advanced than "backward" France. Not only had Britain been the first to industrialise, she, unlike France, was now tackling the housing and sanitation problems which been a feature of this industrialisation.

Because industrialisation came later in France than in Britain, the introduction of sanitation within private houses occurred much later in French cities than in British ones - even among the well-to-do - and the lead of the English in this domain is revealed by the extremely un-French nomenclature of les W.C and it was not until around 1940 that nearly all Parisian buildings had running water and direct-to-sewer drainage. According to Eugen Weber, slop buckets and chamber pots were in regular use into the 1950s in Toulon, Marseilles, Saumur and Beauvais where many dwellings had only one toilet for all and…"many a housewife eased her labours by chucking the family slops and night soil out of a window into the street."

The combination of tall apartment blocks in the cities and a land mass twice the size of Britain presented considerable problems concerning the supply of water. In the 1880s in parts of the Vendée fresh water had to be fetched from up to six kilometres away and, again according to Weber, "consequently people drank mostly muddy ditchwater. Sources befouled with worms and putrid matter, the absence of ducts and sewers, and the lack of clean water were a leitmotif of rural documentation." Into the 1940s only about one child in five in France had access to running water and until after the Second World War "almost half the rural population and its cattle depended on ponds, wells, pumps, village fountains, or a rain barrel in the yard." This information gleaned from accounts of visits to France and, to a lesser extent statistical data, was used by those who wished to stress the "backwardness" of France, its "lagging behind" in the domain of public and private health in order to praise Britain's achievements in this field and in so doing "prove" the superiority of Britain and British society. While France may have lagged behind Britain as late as the 1950s, few would deny that today France, with the exception perhaps of some remote rural areas, meets the public health standards one would expect from a modern nation state. However French "backwardness" in the past in this domain has left its mark on British cultural perceptions of the French and it is on this tradition that The Sun is drawing. It is relevant to note here that perceptions of cleanliness and hygiene are relative and, although one would not expect The Sun to mention it, surveys of cultural attitudes have consistently shown Australians and Americans to consider the British to be "dirty".

The final image which will be explored is that of the French as immoral. This is a view which extends well beyond a francophobic discourse. For example, it is discretely hinted at in the 1983 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary where "French" is defined as "of France of its language or people; having the qualities attributed to French people esp. culturedness or slight impropriety". The Sun reinforced this view through the photograph of a "French maid" about to spank Sun journalist Patrick Hennessy. This appeared in the November 2 issue of the paper following the publication the previous day of a ten-question letter written in French and addressed to Jacques Delors, which contained some grammatical errors. In a caption under the photo Hennessy wrote" My howlers got me the 'punishment' of a spanking from French maid Tina Jones. She said: 'Ooh la la! You 'ave been a very naughty boy.".

Besides the jokes about French and sex, there are numerous references in the paper to the French as lovers. For example, the journalist who allegedly carried out the hygiene survey is reported as saying, "We are supposed to be a nation of lovers. But we are in fact a nation of dirty lovers", and in an editorial calling for a boycott of French goods in the "Lamb War" we find another allusion to the French as a nation of lovers. "Nothing - not even l'amour - is as close to a Frenchman's heart as his wallet"

The image of the French as a nation of lovers, and immoral to boot, is one that dates back, according to Robert Gibson, to the sixteenth century, to the meeting of the English and French at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. "Fashionable English ladies who participated in the festivities felt inferior to their French counter-parts who paraded wholly décolletées. He continues "It is from this age that frivolity and sexual licentiousness first begin to appear on the English bill of indictment against the French."

And from the seventeenth century, the English language has acquired many words and phrases with French connotations which have obvious sexual associations which has reinforced the association in British culture between French and sex e.g. French goods, French pox, French marbles, French aches or French gout (syphilis), French tricks (cunnilingus or fellatio), soixante neuf, French prints (obscene pictures), French kiss, French letter, French knickers, boudoir (incidentally also the name of a British Victorian pornographic publication), negligée, décolleté, risqué, paramour, roué, femme fatale, ooh la la. And what many British people associate with Napoleon are not his military or political achievements but the most famous phrase he never uttered "Not tonight Josephine." However it should be noted that French too has its own phrases, albeit fewer, associating the English with sex and bodily functions - for example capote anglaise (French letter), le vice anglais (a penchant for sado-masochistic sex) and Les Anglais ont débarqué (used to refer to a woman who is menstruating). The historically mutual antagonism between the British and the French is to be found in the phrase filer à l'anglaise which is rendered in English as to take French leave." Moreover the limitations of English cooking find their expression in French in the phrases "une assiette anglaise" (cold meats) and pommes de terre à l'anglaise (boiled potatoes served with melted butter).

The nineteenth century boosted France's reputation of licentiousness and sexual freedom. In his study of Victorian sexuality, Ronald Pearsall observes that "Throughout the century, French pornography, either in the original or in translation, enjoyed a consistent vogue" and Paris was also adept at producing erotic artefacts - a popular item was porcelain ink wells in the form of a pair of female breasts with detachable nipples. The translation and publication in Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century of naturalist and realist French authors served to reinforce the image of the French as immoral. Henry Vizetelly, who had been the French correspondent of the London Illustrated News from 1865 to 1870, published Zola's novels in translation in Britain and was the subject of a vigorous campaign led by the National Vigilance Association, created to protect young people from pernicious literature. Vizetelly was denounced in the House of Commons and in August 1888 was found guilty and fined £100 at Bow Street magistrates court for publishing English translations of La Terre, Nana and Pot-Bouille. Vizetelley continued to publish Zola and in May 1889 was found guilty again and this time sentenced to three months' imprisonment. A petition protesting at the sentence was signed by 150 writers and men of letters including Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Edmond Gosse and Havelock Ellis but to no avail. According to Sylvie Marandon the vast majority of the general public "ne retenait de tout ce tapage que la confirmation du sentiment, déjà bien ancré, de l'immoralité et de la 'godlessness' du roman français." And the image continued to stick. One can cite, for example, Dickens admonishing his friend and fellow-writer Wilkie Collins for expounding in his novels " a code of morals taken from French novels" even if he, on occasions, joined Collins in practical explorations of that code in what he, Dickens, called "the festive diableries of Paris."

France and the French has long been a subject of fascination for the British just as England and the English has been for the French and the construction of negative images is nothing new. For example, as early as 1780, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, who visited London in 1780, wrote "Le peuple de Londres croit qu'à Paris on est galonné, mais qu'on meurt de faim ou que l'on ne se nourrit que de grenouilles." The promotion and perpetuation of negative images within a national culture is usually a means of reinforcing the (perceived) superiority of one group by highlighting (perceived) negative characteristics of a rival group. As the French Anglophile François Crouzet expressed it: "Si la connaissance d'un peuple par un autre est toujours partielle et partiale, si souvent elle n'apprend pas grand-chose sur les réalites du pays-objet, elle est un test, un réactif des structures mentales du peuple-sujet, de la representation qu'il a de lui- même, de son système de valeurs."

In the case of The Sun, especially in the issues from early November 1990, the objective is plain. Britain is perceived as under attack. The Sun's response is to mount a crude ideological counter-attack. With no attempt at a serious analysis The Sun portrays French as leading a plot whose purpose is to foist a new identity onto Britain through modifications within the EC, which, as has been noted, is a variant on the old fear of invasion, fear of the foreign. The thrust of The Sun's response is to attack the French and undermine their credibility in they eyes of its readers by painting them as unreliable, militarily inept, cowardly, dirty and immoral and therefore obviously inferior to the reliable, brave, (and inferred) clean, upright British.

As has been noted, The Sun has chosen to indulge in xenophobic invective aimed, presumably at appealing to the nationalistic prejudices of its readership, and at no point does the newspaper attempt to make a rational political case against further European integration. The Guardian journalist Alan Rusbridger, in a dismissive comment suggests that The Sun should be given an indulgent pat on the head since anything else would only encourage it. However there is one point, albeit speculative, which is worth consideration. The "Up Yours Delors" issue appeared on November 1 1990. That night Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned as Foreign Secretary from the Conservative government led by Mrs Thatcher, and less than a fortnight later in a House of Commons speech which is generally accepted as marking the beginning of the end of the Iron Lady, denounced Thatcher's policy on Europe. Could it be, could it possibly be, as Max Wilkinson writing in the Financial Times has suggested, that it was Thatcher's anti-Europe tirade in Parliament on October 30 together with its crude populist echoes in The Sun on November 1 which finally drove Sir Geoffrey to resignation? We shall probably never know. But it is rather fun to savour the thought that the crude chauvinistic attack launched by The Sun against France, Delors and the EC in support of Margaret Thatcher and her little Englander policy on Europe might well have been one of the factors which contributed to her political demise on November 23. Perhaps it was The Sun wot done it.

[My thanks to Patricia Jupp, Pat Crawford and Keith Cameron for their helpful comments on this article.]

David Drake, School of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR. Email d.drake@nw.mdx.ac.uk

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