Why are french called frogs?

Some years ago the London Institut Francais, a French government body, put out an elegant and witty poster to advertise French language courses at all levels from beginners to advanced students (Fig. 1). It pictures the development of a frog in stages from egg through tadpole to full maturity. The humour--unmistakeable to any British person--lay in its highlighting of the age-old identification of the French as frogs, and it was given a further level of irony through its use by a French organisation.

That such a motif could register its meaning clearly without verbal explanation confirms the familiarity of the stereotype. The identification, furthermore, comes with a ready common-sense explanation. As everyone knows, the French eat frogs, and by the same token the English are, or were, known in France as 'les rosbifs'. The principle that we are what we eat seems reasonable in this case, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was not the French but the Dutch who were identified as frogs for just as commonsensical a reason: the Dutch and frogs were both at home in waterlogged terrain. It is true that the French were often caricatured in eighteenth-century literature and visual satires as frog-eaters, but--as we will see from looking at some English caricatures--that is not at all the same as being frogs.

In one of the foundation texts of eighteenth-century national polemic, John Arbuthnot's The History of John Bull, written in 1712 (1) we find that the author--a Tory--uses stereotypes of the English, Dutch and French to argue against going to war with France, taking the then unusual position that the Dutch were a more natural enemy of the English. The Englishman John Bull is a clothier, 'an honest plain-dealing fellow, Cholerick, Bold, and of a very unconstant Temper'; he is thus bull-like in his temperament, though he is susceptible to flattery and is easily led by other nations. The Dutchman, who is called Nic Frog, is a linen draper and, by contrast with John Bull, is 'a cunning sly Whoreson, quite the reverse of John in many particulars; Covetous, Frugal; minded domestick affairs; would pine his belly to save his Pocket, never lost a Farthing to careless servants, or bad debtors'. (2) The French are represented by their king, who plays a major part in the drama under the name of Lewis Baboon, a humorous corruption of Louis Bourbon.