Стефан Кларк - 1000 Years of Annoying the French

Consequently, when Argentina invaded the islands 600 kilometres off its coast, Mitterrand went out of his way to declare his support for Britain. In doing so, he was partially covering his own back, because he didn’t want anyone challenging French sovereignty over any of his islands. He also made a speech saying that ‘France must preserve the friendships and interests that tie it to Latin America’. But he was categorical in his support for Britain, saying, ‘We are the allies of the Anglais.’

Even so, when the Argentinians sank the Royal Navy ship HMS Sheffield with a French Exocet missile fired from a French Super-Étendard fighter jet on 4 May 1982, in the British popular imagination it was the old enemy France stabbing them in the back.

Even more provocatively, the papers reported that Prince Andrew, who was then second in line to the throne, was being trained as an ‘Exocet decoy’. He was flying his helicopter above ships in order to lure the radar-guided missiles away from their main targets, and it was presented as if France was plotting to shoot the (almost) heir to the throne out of the sky.

This was completely unfair, because Argentina had bought its weapons long before the conflict broke out, and France was actually providing information to the British secret services on how to disable Exocets. Whether it is a coincidence or not, the Exocet that sank the Sheffield didn’t explode – it knocked a hole in the ship’s hull and severed its water pipes, preventing the crew from putting out the resulting fire. The French even lent Britain a Super-Étendard and a Mirage – jets that it had sold to the Argentinians – so that the RAF could hold realistic training sessions.

All in all, France didn’t deserve any of the accusations that it used the Falklands War to publicize its missiles. It wasn’t their fault that British defence systems were unable to cope with Exocets. And the ill feeling probably wouldn’t have been half as strong if the missiles had been built in, say, America. But this was France, and the British media were ready to leap in and exacerbate the traditional distrust.

Here comes The Sun

In January 1984, a new war broke out, this time directly between France and Britain, and almost entirely in the minds of the tabloids.

The French farming lobby caused the problem when imported British lamb began to undercut its prices. British lorries were attacked, and some lorry drivers were even kidnapped (or strongly advised to get out of their lorries and not to try and deliver their loads to French meat wholesalers). The Sun declared this a ‘Lamb War’, and decided to invade France. The paper sent an army to Calais, mainly consisting of Page Three girls skimpily dressed in Union Jack shirts and tin helmets. Watched by a few confused locals (and a Sun photographer, of course), they sang ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ before planting a Union Jack on the town’s place d’Angleterre.

The anti-French onslaught became even more frenzied when, in mid-Lamb War, the paper’s editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, read a report saying that France consumed less soap than any other country in Europe. Instead of applying his journalistic instincts to find out why – the French were already using shower gel, and in fact thought the Brits were unhygienic for spending so much time soaking in their own discarded skin flakes while the soap melted slowly at the bottom of the bathtub – Mackenzie used his tabloid reflexes to renew the attack on France. His paper sneered, ‘The French are the filthiest people in Europe’, and alleged that ‘many French people smell like kangaroos which have been kept in cages’. A Page Three girl was sent to the French Embassy to deliver toiletries and clean underwear as British aid to the ‘needy nation’.

All of this shamed France into lifting the ban on English lamb, of course. Or rather it didn’t at all. The French subsequently reduced the number of points of import for British meat, claiming that their vets were too thinly spread to carry out inspections at all the Channel ports. Thanks to The Sun ’s provocation, the Lamb War was one anti-French conflict that the Brits didn’t win.

France gets a sinking feeling

In July 1985, the most recent French act of war against the Anglo-Saxons was carried out, about as far from Waterloo as you can get without leaving the planet. The scene of the ten-minute long (and rather one-sided) naval battle was Auckland Harbour, New Zealand.

An American environmental activist called Peter Willcox was threatening to sail the Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior – a converted British trawler – to the Polynesian atoll of Mururoa to disrupt French nuclear testing there. There was nothing particularly Francophobic about Greenpeace; the Rainbow Warrior had just completed a mission to evacuate some islanders who had been irradiated by American testing on Bikini Atoll, and it had recently carried out a campaign against Russian whaling. But this time the ship was intending to lead a flotilla of boats to Mururoa, and France was not going to put up with that.

It wasn’t the first time the French had tried to sabotage anti-nuclear protests. In 1966, French agents were accused of pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a yacht called Trident , which was on its way from Sydney to Mururoa. Trident managed to set sail, but one of its crew fell sick in the Cook Islands, and France put pressure on the islanders to hold the whole crew in quarantine until the series of nuclear tests had been carried out. There were many rumours of similar French sabotage attempts on protest boats, especially mysterious attacks of food poisoning amongst crews and sudden mechanical failures. But with Rainbow Warrior , France decided to go for the big bang.

Well, that is not exactly true. The problem seems to have been that, not wanting any written traces of their involvement, President Mitterrand and his Defence Minister, Charles Hernu, gave such vague instructions to their foreign intelligence service, the DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure), that the planning was left up to the head of the DGSE’s ‘Action Service’, a paratroop officer called Jean-Claude Lesquer.

Subtlety is not one of the characteristics required of French paratroopers, and Lesquer’s plan, code-named Opération satanique, therefore had about as much finesse as a demolition ball in a game of pétanque . Two limpet mines would be clamped to Rainbow Warrior while it was at anchor, a small charge to scare the crew off the ship, followed ten minutes later by a second crippling explosion to sink it.

The preparations were equally clumsy. First, Greenpeace’s New Zealand branch was infiltrated by a new French recruit, a certain Frédérique Bonlieu (who was actually a French soldier called Christine Cabon), while, under the command of an agent called Louis-Pierre Dillais, two undercover operatives posing as Swiss tourists, Alain Mafart and a woman called Dominique Prieur, began to snoop rather obtrusively around Auckland Harbour.

Once the Rainbow Warrior had been located, a four-man team brought the bombs from the French colony of New Caledonia to New Zealand on a tourist yacht called Ouvéa . The transporters were three secret-service agents called Roland Verge, 2Gérard Andries and Jean-Michel Bartelo, accompanied by a navy doctor, Xavier Christian Jean Maniguet.

After docking just up the coast from Auckland, the yachtsmen delivered the explosives to two divers whose identities have never been reliably confirmed, and on the evening of 10 July 1985, while the Rainbow Warrior echoed to the sounds of a birthday party for one of its crew, the mystery pair of divers were able to sneak up and attach their limpet mines. At ten to midnight, the first bomb went off, causing the evacuation of the ship (and, incidentally, enough damage to cripple it).