Of Stereotypes and of the French

A stereotype is a cliche. Both are typographical terms for printing plates, soon applied to ready-made opinions, repetitive, hackneyed phrases, and also to something which is turned out of the same mould. The word is modern, the reality it describes is ageless. Equally so the tendency to attribute particular characteristics to places, or to animal groups, including groups of humans. Greeks had stereotyped views about Persians and Egyptians, Romans about Greeks and Gauls. But the national stereotypes we live with began to take shape in the Middle Ages. It is in the eleventh and especially in the twelfth century that we find them formulated, as members of different ethnic groups rub against each other on pilgrimages, on crusades and in the new schools then springing up in cities such as Paris. That is when we pick up the trail of a French stereotype: not a Roman highway, but a river made up of many confluents Gascon, Poitevin, Aquitain or Picard, full of unexpected meanders, yet identifiable in its sources and in its flow. It is at the beginning of the twelfth century that a French cleric refers to the inborn pride of the French. Soon after, when writing about the Second Crusade, Odo de Deuil speaks of the superbia nostri populi and Abbot Walo of Metz notes the French incapacity to be pacificus, humilis or quietus.' Acquaintance across ethnic lines does not generate favourable judgments or friendly feelings. Stereotypes are negative: the Germans are stupid, the English drunken, the French prickly and proud. Before the century's end, German knights can be heard grumbling about perfidia anglica.2 Scholars are no less vituperative. For Jacques de Vitry, listing ethnic slurs current among thirteenthcentury Paris students, if the English were drunkards (and had tails!), the Germans obscene and prone to fury (an allusion to furia teutonica), the French were 'proud, effeminate, and carefully adorned like women'. Furthermore, while stereotypes vary, some references remain constant: the Germans, for example, continue cloddish and

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