Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. There was more eye-rolling at the double-entendre of the Améthyste gala. Some Brits rolled their eyes recently when they heard that the French had given secretary of state Antony Blinken's mother, Judith Pisar, a prestigious honour, though, given her time as a cultural figure in France, she certainly had merit. Meanwhile, the British and French embassies are deep in their own competition to woo top Biden officials. As Henry IV advised his son, the best way to distract from domestic problems is to divert busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels”.
U.K. FRANCE ONCE MORE BREACH TV
Macron is trying to move right to fend off the French Trump, TV commentator Éric Zemmour.Īnd Johnson has an incentive to stir things up, too, amid inflation and fuel and food shortages. Still, the lingering tensions have their uses domestically. He also trolled the French by dining at the Australian embassy with the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison. This misalliance was not helped when Johnson was here in September and said the French were making too much of the sub spat, noting "Donnez-moi un break" and telling them to "prenez un grip". Johnson thinks Macron is a bit of a twit, and Macron thinks Johnson can be amusing but is a big, fat fibber. There's friction between Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. The Brits want to show that it is a success. The French want to show that the British exit from the European Union is a failure, scaring other countries who might consider leaving. Donc, the French took it very personally. So much of the trade between the UK and France runs across the English Channel.
No country was more disrupted by Britain leaving Europe than France. They look at each other and see the ghosts of empire. And the Brexit divorce still galls, making it harder for the two small nations that always projected power way beyond their size to show puissance, a favourite Shakespearean word from the history plays. There was the submarine scandale and a nasty territorial fishing dispute with the French seizing a British trawler. Filer à l’anglaise means to slip away rudely without saying anything, in the English way.īut things are at a particularly low ebb now in terms of relations across the channel. The mutual contempt is embedded in their language. Joan of Arc – who inspired the French to win back their country from the English after Henry V conquered it and then married a French princess – is still burning in the French imagination. In "Henry V," the French are portrayed as catty, wimpy and, in the case of killing boys in the English camp, "cowardly rascals". Shakespeare's history plays are still very alive for the British Boris Johnson has worked for years on a book about Shakespeare. And the French sniff that the British are. The British sniff that the French are arrogant.
It takes very little to get the two countries to start trashing each other. Once the guests – who wandered through an Absinthe Room with flashing green lights, past mimes and mounds of cheese and charcuterie – learned the nautical meaning of Amethyste from a post by Tara Palmeri in Politico's Playbook, they weren't buying the coincidence excuse, either.īut no one was surprised at the chill between the French and British embassies. A recent sub deal – where the Australians cancelled plans to buy French diesel-powered submarines after secretly negotiating with the British and Americans to build nuclear-powered ones – torpedoed relations among all four countries. Once more unto the breach, dear friends!Īméthyste, it turned out, was a French troll of the British: It’s the name of a French nuclear submarine.
Little did I know that I could have done my homework at the party, because the Hundred Years’ War is still raging in the French and British embassies in D.C. I didn't go to the Thursday fete, because I'm studying for a master's at Columbia University and I had to read Henry V – and watch Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hiddleston and Timothée Chalamet armour up to play the king at the Battle of Agincourt. Was it a promotional party for a French jewellery company or maybe a new perfume? When I got the invitation from the French ambassador for a black-tie gala called “Améthyste,” I wondered what that name meant.
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