I like and value the French. I married one and fathered two, so don’t have much choice in the matter. But they can be damned annoying. At a French dinner the other evening, we were talking drinks. A very presentable fellow told me: “The Scots invented whisky only because they couldn’t get hold of cognac. There was a war on. Supplies were cut off.”

He wasn’t sure which war but thought it had been in the 17th-century. “Or eighteenth.” “You’re certain of this?” I said. “Oh yes,” he said. “It’s in books.” The French do such low-level, daily (and often bonkers) chauvinism as, by and large, the British do not. They routinely assume that, given the chance, everyone would live in France, be French, eat French food, drink French brandy, watch French films, climb French mountains and listen to Daft Punk.

With self-deprecation seared into our souls, we are ill-equipped to reply. But we should. Otherwise, the French will grow even more insufferable, which is in no-one’s interest. So, as the great spring surge across the Channel revs up, let me furnish a few hints - elements of the French self-image which they crow about but which we invented. Please mention them as often as necessary:

All that faffing about with froth, frills and frocks, adjusting flounces and hemlines to keep barbarians from the gates: obviously the work of a Frenchman who really loved his mother? Wrong. Like Hereward the Wake, the “father of Parisian haute couture” was born in Bourne, Lincolnshire. This was Charles Frederick Worth. After working with London drapers, Worth moved to Paris in 1845 to found the fashion industry. We have him to thank for couturiers launching their own creations, for fashion models and fashion shows, for seasonal collections - and for the whole idea that a designer might be a big-name artist rather than simply a bloke with scissors. Yves St Laurent, Christian Dior and other natty chaps were his heirs.

Worth dressed Empresses Sissi and Eugénie, US heiresses who sailed in specially - and Cora Pearl, the era’s leading courtesan. Cora had princes and French nobles chucking money, jewels and entire châteaux at her - despite starting life as Emma Elizabeth Crouch in Plymouth. The French also needed Britain to supply its élite call-girls.



Charles Frederick Worth - the first Haute Couture designer - came from

Lincolnshire

Wine

We didn’t create French wine. We had better things to do at the time (fraternising with Romans, fighting Norsemen, etc). But we were vital to the development, and world status of, especially, Bordeaux. I won’t have to remind you that, when our Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, Bordeaux came as part of the package. It remained English for 300 years - time enough for us to get claws deep into the Bordeaux wine trade. Monarchs set the example. Edward II ordered the equivalent of 1.2 million bottles for his 1307 marriage. (He’d barely sobered up by Bannockburn.) Bordeaux boomed, its 14th-century exports unmatched until the late 1940s, and most of them to the British Isles.

So they liked us; didn’t want to let us go, though they had to, when, confounding predictions, France won the 100 Years War and took Bordeaux back. But we remained key players, our merchants established in Bordeaux’s Chartrons district, the English thirst for “claret” just about unslakeable. And it was 17th-century London which first appreciated quality-differentiated Bordeaux wines - ones bearing châteaux names - rather than bulk plonk. Pepys tasted the first - “Ho Bryan”, he called it - and found it “particular”, which was the whole point. Thus, the wine ranking thing which spurred Bordeaux’s expansion began with us. And, incidentally, the UK remains N°1 client (by value) for Bordeaux wines, as it also is for the €8 billion French wine export trade in general. No harm in reminding the French of this - on, you know, a daily basis.



Bordeaux wines - English for 300 critical years

Water

The French took to bottled mineral water because, back then, drinking French tap water meant sudden collapse in torrid circumstances. The British followed suit more recently, for reasons I’ve never grasped. No matter. We thought we were following a French lead. We weren’t. The greatest name in French mineral water history wasn’t anything French. It was Harmsworth - thus, as English as the Daily Mail, which the family owned.

Travelling southern France at the turn of the 20th-century, 27-year-old Sir St-John Harmsworth bumped into one Dr Louis Perrier, a Nîmes GP. Perrier had recently bought a sparkling water source in nearby Vergèze. He badly needed investment. Harmsworth sold his shares in the Mail, bought into Perrier’s water and, within a year or two, was sole owner. Very decently, he retained the name “Perrier”, but otherwise set about booting the enterprise into the modern age. The distinctive bottle shape was based on Indian clubs Harmsworth used for keep-fit.

Difficult to think of a less practical design for handling and packaging, but the bottles were a wow across the British Empire, Harmsworth’s primary target. “Perrier is better known in London, Delhi and Singapore than in France,” as someone wrote in 1908, the year that the water bagged its 'By Appointment’ tag. World War II ended the British connection. These days, the world’s best-known mineral water belongs to Nestlé, and sells almost a billion bottles annually. You can check all this yourself with a visit to the site; it’s just off the motorway between Nîmes and Montpellier (0033 466 876101, vergeze.fr; £2.50 adults, 85p seven-18-year-olds).

Côte-d’Azur

Everyone knows that, if it weren’t for us, the Riviera would still be the preserve of toothless Mediterranean peasants, gutting fish and sleeping with donkeys. That’s how it was before we arrived. Lord Henry Brougham - Lord Chancellor, anti-slavery campaigner and all-round good egg - was among our first men in, bringing hygiene, money and solid building to Cannes in the mid-1830s. You may still see his holiday Villa Eléonore-Louise (named for his daughter) off Avenue Dr Picaud. Now in flats, it’s not in as good a nick as we might hope, but that’s what happens when you turn things over to the natives.

Meanwhile, across in Nice, English clergyman Lewis Way was funding what became the Promenade-des-Anglais, partly to provide work during a mid-1850s recession, partly to give decent British wives and daughters somewhere to stroll free of the attentions of swarthy locals. Later, Russians, Germans and Americans rolled in as the Riviera began seriously to fashion itself for the fashionable. But we were the first.

I mentioned this - shouted it, really - when a daft old bint almost ran me down as, recently, I ambled away from the Brougham villa. “We invented your b****y town!” I cried after her. But the French only hear what they want to hear.

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