Vive la France!

by J. Christoph Amberger

Napoleon Bonaparte had a dream: Establish a French empire with subservient satellites from North Africa to the Ural Mountains, united by common law and a Francocentric economy.

He ran into a bit of a problem. Les rosbifs -- today they call them Anglo-Saxons in France -- didn’t play. And then there was some unpleasant business in Russia. But while Napoleon didn’t live to see his dream turn into lasting realities, he can rest in peace that it took less than 200 years for his heirs to accomplish it.

Today, it’s called European Union. Again, the rosbifs are a constant source of ennui. And while the Germans have happily assumed the role of a well-trained French poodle when it comes to French foreign policy, the Russians remain outside their immediate influence. (Until Gazprom manages to strike a deal with the Champs Elyssées, that is.)

Britain’s struggle against Napoleon provides the backdrop of the popular Sharpe novels by British author Bernard Cornwell. I’m a bit of a Sharpe addict, making sure I have my order for every new installment placed with the British subsidiary of Amazon.com well in advance of the publication date. (This way, I have the volume in my hands weeks before it comes out in the States.)

As a writer, Cornwell is rather successful at his game. He’s reportedly sold more than 45 million copies of his 40-some novels. No matter where you go, chances are that there’s a bookstore carrying at least a couple of Sharpe novels in the fiction section.

That is, unless you go to Amazon.fr, Amazon.com’s French subsidiary. There, you can almost sense the disdain with which the site’s search function processes your request: “Sharpe, ‘oo?”

All you find is a couple of Cornwell’s medieval adventure books. Apparently, there’s no French market for books in which the antagonists are French.

Coming from a country defeated in not just one but two world wars, I find this curious. It would be unimaginable in Germany that a popular line of entertainment or culture would be suppressed because the villains are Nazis. To the contrary: After all, Hogan’s Heroes replaced Seinfeld in Germany, back in the 1990s.

The American journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman wrote back in 2004: “[According to French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin], the real struggle in today’s world... is not between freedom and tyranny, but between the French religion of the all-powerful state and the Anglo-American system of transparency, checks and balances, which [Villepin] reminds his readers ‘inspired only contempt’ when the original generation of French revolutionaries looked across the Atlantic for support in 1793. ... Americans need to understand that our values and our model pose a challenge for the French, who have consistently favored authoritarian regimes over democracy, not just in the third world but also in Europe, where they still are attempting to force an autocratic constitution for the European Union down the throats of the newly liberated nations of the former Soviet bloc.”

No wonder, then, that Sharpe’s a mite unpopular as a concept...