France exacts it's revenge on doves and rainbows

France exacts it's revenge on doves and rainbows

Hating the French has become so easy, so popular worldwide, it’s almost an Olympic sport. After all, what have they really contributed to civilisation? The White Flag, and women with hairy armpits? Cheers, mate.

But New Zealand, rather unusually for an such an unassuming pair of islands on the opposite side of the planet, has had it’s own unique, and particularly troubled history with the land of stripey-shirted, garlic-around-the-neck, pontificating troubadours.

The dilemma of this longstanding diplomatic frisson, however, is that 90% of middle-class New Zealand is desperately in love with anything French, and harbour private dreams of one day retiring to the south of France to welcome death, slowly, on a diet of soft cheese and unpredictable red wine.

The relationship between the two countries had been souring slowly, like creme-fraiche, throughout the 1970s and 80s, due to France’s fondness for blowing up pacific islands with nuclear bombs. But events reached a head in 1985, when the French government sent two spies to New Zealand to sink Greenpeace’s flagship vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, while it was docked in Auckland harbour, killing (albeit, unintentionally) one of the boat’s crew.

Although the boat’s moniker could well describe an evil character in the ‘My Little Pony’ series, it was actually christened in honour of the first openly gay WWF Wrestler of the same name.

The bombing of the boat was ordered by the French president, Francois Mitterand, after years of Greenpeace sailing it around the French atolls of the South Pacific, bringing unwelcome attention to both their aforementioned nuclear testing programme, as well as their secret experiments to genetically engineer a frog with horse-sized hind legs.

The agents who sunk the boat would probably have gotten away with it too, had it not been for the curious interest New Zealanders took in them as they built a cover story pretending to holiday around the country.  “So, where are you from?”, “Are you having a great holiday,” and “Isn’t it beautiful here?”, they were questioned by every Kiwi they met (naturally seeking continued reassurance about New Zealand’s appeal & place in the world). When the police later put out an APB for eyewitnesses to a ‘suspicious French couple’, they were flooded with calls.

An international scandal ensued; NZ prosecuted the two spies, and, after much diplomatic wrangling, tit-for-tat, sanctions and political head-rolling, they were eventually imprisoned on a lovely island resort in the Pacific.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, however, New Zealand’s relationship with France warmed. This is largely attributed to the release of Peter Mayall’s book, “A Year in Provence”, which became required reading and dinner party conversation in the chattering-class suburbs of Parnell, Kandallah and Fendleton. Lacking confidence in New Zealand’s own sense of identity, Kiwis embraced the French ‘joie to vivre’, hoping that a little style from a country which is, let’s face it, so steeped in culture you can smell it from England, might rub off on us.

During this period, much of New Zealand progressed from a nation of beer-swilling bogans to wine-quaffing urbanites. Roast beef was superseded in popularity by boeuf bourguignon. And the most sure fire way to become the envy of friends and neighbours was spending thousands of dollars furnishing your living room with the kind of discarded french junk that can be picked up in any 2nd-hand-store on the outskirts of Paris for less than 10 euros.

However, in 1999, the dark garlic cloud returned, when the All Blacks were unceremoniously, and unexpectedly, knocked out of the Rugby World Cup semi-finals by France. 8 years later, at the 2007 World Cup – in an almost biblical repeat of history – the same thing happened again.

The nation thereafter entered a long and subdued period of shame and mourning. To this day, rugby fans are still unable to look at themselves in an ornate, gilded French mirror.

Even as recently as 2009, the delicate Franco-Aotearoa accord was again tested, when the (appropriately named) French rugby player, Matheiu Bastareaud, lied about being beaten up by a gang of Polynesians on the streets of Wellington. It was exposed as a cover-up engineered by the coach, and even going as high as the French Rugby Union itself, to mask a fight between two French players over a pain-au-chocolat.

Perhaps, in concocting the story, they simply hadn’t anticipated the level of guilt for the incident that the New Zealand public immediately assumed, and concern over any potential tarnishing of our reputation as a ‘nice, friendly sort of place’. They probably figured, quite correctly, that the rest of the world would neither a) notice, nor b) give a shit, about such a minor item of news in this far-flung corner of the world. They almost certainly wouldn’t have expected the prime minister to publicly apologise for what was a fabricated, but otherwise quite common, Saturday night street brawl.

By the time they eventually recanted their story, however, they we’re so deep in sheep dip that even a return apology from the French prime minister did little to appease the angry mobs in NZ baying for (oh-so magically low in cholesterol) French blood.

So while French markets are still wildly popular in many New Zealand suburbs, antique shops continue charging the cost of a black-market organ for 2nd hand French tat, and groups of retired baby-boomers make yearly pilgrimages to Provence to blow their children’s house deposit money on foie gras and Chateauneuf du Pape, underneath it all there exists in New Zealand a barely concealed Francophobia.

It is enough to make even the most toothless, Freedom-Fries-munching, Alabama redneck pick up his banjo in shame, and strum along to the chorus of ‘La Marseillaise’.

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