The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (35 page)

The answer is that the image is a British invention. It does, however, ultimately derive from a Frenchman: one Henri Ollivier. In 1828, Monsieur Ollivier, a Breton peasant farmer, made the hazardous trip to the shores of Albion from his home – the fishing village of Roscoff – to travel around door to door, selling his strings of onions to British housewives. He made such a packet that many of his fellow Roscoff peasant labourers quickly followed suit. Soon, hundreds of them were crossing the Channel every year with their harvest of onions, which they would store in rented barns while they travelled from village to village, peddling their wares on rickety old bicycles. The English called them ‘Onion Johnnies’, since most of them seemed to be called ‘Jean’, and some of them were as young as teenagers. They would
arrive in July and depart the following December or January, sleeping in barns on top of their piles of onions. This ‘unofficial’ Anglo-French trade boomed until the outbreak of the Second World War. It peaked in the late 1920s – when 9,000 tons of onions were sold in England by 1,400 Johnnies – before gradually petering out in the postwar period. For many English people, the Onion Johnny was as close to France or the French as they ever got. Soon, he became in British minds the image of the stereotypical Frenchman, immortalized on everything from packets of cheese to the TV series
’Allo ’Allo!
This was ironic because, hailing as they did from Brittany, most of the original Onion Johnnies did not actually speak French. Breton being a Celtic language related to Welsh, the itinerant costermongers naturally bonded with the Welsh as a united fringe against the Anglo-French enemy. Even to this day, some former Onion Johnnies continue to meet up with their old Celtic pals at that forum for self-assertion against colonial oppression, the Welsh Eisteddfod.

Onion Johnnies wore the
béret
, the traditional ‘cloth cap’ of the French peasantry. This originated in the Southwest of France, the Basque beret being worn by shepherds in the Pyrenees from the seventeenth century onwards. In the twentieth century the beret came to be associated with left-wing intellectuals and radical artists, including, most famously, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. It also became, in the 1960s, a powerful symbol of rebellion and radical chic: Che Guevara was rarely seen without one (the image of his trademark black version with a red star found a post-revolutionary afterlife on millions of posters and T-shirts the world over), and the beret became the accessory
de choix
of radical and paramilitary groupings as diverse as the Black Panthers in the USA, the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, and the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain. Until the 1970s the beret, along with the cloth cap, was one of the types of headgear traditionally worn by film directors, until it was ousted by the now-ubiquitous American baseball cap.

In France nowadays, though, berets are seldom to be seen – except on the occasional octogenarian playing
pétanque
in a dusty village of the Southwest. Certainly not in Paris, where it would just be… well,
pas comme il faut
.*

* Even so, there are exceptional circumstances where the beret is still
de rigueur
: for example, berets are sometimes worn by French rugby fans (particularly at away games in Britain), presumably to advertise their national allegiance.

The average French workman these days is just as likely to be wearing a
casquette
, or baseball cap, turned jauntily backwards in the manner of his favourite rap star, as the traditional headgear of the French peasantry. In July 2012, the last traditional French beret manufacturer in the Southwest was bought out in the nick of time, saving the jobs of the twenty-odd remaining artisan beret-makers.
1
The beret is nowadays mainly used as an item of army uniform, and as such is still going strong around the world. In fact, it is a crowning irony that today’s principal market for the ultimate sartorial symbol of the nation of ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ (see here) is… the US Army.*
2
At the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, it was the American athletes who sported the beret. The French team – somewhat unsportingly – did not make an appearance on bikes with berets, striped shirts and onions, but rather in outfits created by that ambassador of French chic, the German sportswear brand Adidas.

* Though even the US Army is beginning to phase out the beret in favour of the cheaper and more practical baseball cap. In June 2011, the Pentagon announced that the US land army was to renounce the beret in favour of the cap for ordinary workwear, keeping the beret only for ceremonial use. The move was welcomed by the troops. ‘I can’t stand a wet sock on my head,’ was the comment of one officer to the
Army Times
.

Onion Johnnies also frequently wore striped black or blue and white boat-necked shirts: the traditional garb of Breton fishermen. The Breton shirt was created as an official garment of the French Navy in 1858, according to tradition because the stripes made it easier to spot a man overboard. They were not considered remotely stylish at the time (striped garments were also worn by lepers and convicts). In a display of tricolour-tinted nostalgia, the original Navy shirt featured 21 stripes, one for each of Napoleon’s victories. The striped shirt was spotted on Breton fishermen by Coco Chanel on a weekend break to Deauville and inspired a nautical collection by her in 1917, subsequently becoming one of the most famous fashion icons in the world. Once an item of peasant garb – a sign of the outcast and dispossessed – the striped shirt now became the ultimate in modern chic, sported by the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Jean Seberg and Jeanne Moreau. It has subsequently been rehashed and reinterpreted hundreds of times by fashion houses from Gucci to Givenchy, incarnating everything from the hunky sailor as gay icon in Jean-Paul Gaultier’s 1993 campaign for the perfume
Le Male
, to the retro innocence of a traditional childhood in the classic child’s yellow and striped fisherman’s coat by
Petit Bateau
.

Today, however, Onion Johnnies have all but disappeared from the British landscape. After the Second World War, increased competition from rival producers and English protectionism, together with the fact that wandering Johnnies did not qualify for the new French postwar state welfare benefits, meant that most hung up their berets. Now there are only a handful left who regularly make the trip to sell onions door to door in English streets. Today’s Onion Johnnies, however, are as likely to send a round-robin by e-mail to alert customers to their arrival, and make their rounds in a van (although they might keep a bike in the back for special appearances). The Onion Johnnies have been immortalized with their own museum in Roscoff (
La Maison des Johnnies et de l’oignon
): here one can see fading photographs of this curious, all-but-forgotten second French invasion of England, have a master class in onion-plaiting by a real Onion Johnny, and listen to nostalgic folk songs and poems (all with a strong onion theme to bring tears to the eyes). There is even an annual Roscoff Onion Festival, where local delicacies such as onion tart and onion crêpes can be sampled. Most powerful of all, the image of Onion Johnny lives on in the minds of millions of Japanese, American and British tourists, as the quintessential mythical Frenchman.

The French for their part are entirely nonplussed by the foreign stereotype of the Onion Johnny. Given that the original Johnnies were nationalistic Bretons who considered the French an alien race, this is hardly surprising. It is as though the national stereotype of an Englishman were a Welshman selling leeks with a daffodil tucked behind his ear. An absurd thought. But then, the French invented the philosophical concept of ‘the Absurd’ and the novelist Albert Camus, its most famous proponent, could hardly have come up with a more meaninglessly random national stereotype. In its absurdity if nothing else, the image of the Onion Johnny is archetypically French.

Myth Evaluation:
False

FRENCH CUISINE IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD

Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half.

CHARLES-LOUIS DE SECONDAT, BARON DE MONTESQUIEU (1689
–
1755)

It has been taken as gospel for many years that French cuisine is the best in the world. Whether it is regional, bourgeois or
haute cuisine
(and in truth, these all feed off each other), French cuisine is the
crème de la crème
of the world’s gastronomic heritage, unbeatable for its distinguished history, refinement and
savoir-faire
. The priority accorded by the French to what they ingest over everything else, including the achievements of science, cannot be doubted: ‘The discovery of a new dish,’ the eighteenth-century French wit and gastronomic critic Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin observed, ‘creates greater happiness for the human race than the discovery of a new star.’ The great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910–87) summed up the ultimate goal of French social interactions thus: ‘Everything ends this way in France – everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs – everything is a pretext for a good dinner.’ Just as eating has traditionally dominated French life, so French cuisine has traditionally dominated the world’s restaurants. No other single cuisine has exerted such an influence on the world’s palate. Until now, perhaps.

E
nchant, stay beautiful and graceful, but do this, eat well. Bring the same consideration to the preparation of your food as you devote to your appearance. Let your dinner be a poem, like your dress.
CHARLES PIERRE MONSELET, FRENCH JOURNALIST (1825
–88)

That French gastronomy has historically dominated European cuisine is certainly true, at least since the reign of the illustrious King Louis XIV (1643–1715). The
Roi Soleil
(‘Sun King’) was himself a legendary gourmand, capable of putting away gigantic quantities of food at a sitting. His repasts were gargantuan. Lunch – known as
le petit couvert
(‘the little table’), although
there was nothing little about it – would typically consist of four different bowls of soup, a whole stuffed pheasant, a partridge, chicken, duck, mutton with garlic gravy, two pieces of ham, hard-boiled eggs, three enormous salads and a plateful of pastries, fruit and jam (and on top of all this the king would go on to demolish a further forty dishes at dinner). On Louis’ death, his stomach and intestines were found to be twice the size of an ordinary man’s.