THE French are not all lazy, cheating, garlic-smelling cowards with a hearty appetite for sex and little for hygiene, according to a US government manual that has become a summer hit in Paris bookshops.

This blunt talk is not a fallout from the feud over Iraq, which has fuelled American distaste for the French and a 30 per cent drop in US visitors this summer. It comes from a handbook supplied to American forces in France in 1945 and published this spring as Nos Amis Les Français (Our Friends the French).

Originally titled 112 Gripes about the French, the army manual was written, in question-and-answer form, to redress the growing hostility of GIs towards their newly liberated allies.

Although some subjects — such as black market profiteering and the decrepit towns — hail from another age, the wartime GIs’ ideas about the French are as modern as the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” of Francophobe America and Britain in 2003. “I will never like the French. I hate the French,” says one gripe. The answer to the soldier is: “No one is asking you to like the French

. . . Try first of all to understand them.”

Gripe number 6 reads: “We are always getting the French out of a jam. What have they ever done for us?” The complainer is told that France came to America’s aid against the British in 1776 and fought alongside it in two world wars. “It was France that came to us in our darkest hour,” the anonymous author says.

Other gripes include: “The French are always cheating us”, “the French are always criticising, there is always something wrong”, “the French are cynics”, “the French don’t wash” and “the French are morally rotten”.

Sometimes the author agrees with the complaint, such as “the French drive like madmen”, but most of the time he — or she — provides an explanation.

“The Metro is indeed overcrowded, hot, damp, dirty and nauseating. You can smell garlic because the French, who are extraordinary cooks, use it more than we do,” the manual says. The French wash less than Americans because they are poorer and the Germans deprived them of soap. French women are forced to mask their uncleanliness with scent, says the writer. “When you don’t have soap you fall back on perfume.”

Over sex, French women are not especially “easy”, only the ones who seek out US soldiers, says the author. “The immoral French women are, obviously, the easiest ones to meet.”

French women hitch their skirts over their knees when sitting down in order to save their stockings from wear, the soldiers are told.

Cherche-midi, the publishers, are preparing for a fourth print run after being surprised by the interest in their 140-page curiosity. About 22,000 copies have been sold so far. “We thought it important to republish this veritable jewel, which is the practical manual distributed to GIs in France to respond to all their questions about those strange Frenchies,” Cherche-Midi said of the manual, which was last reprinted in 1994.

The interest is partly in the pithy, wry style of the War Department author as he addresses topics that would now be far beyond the pale of political correctness. There is also a fine glimpse of the ill-feeling that developed on both sides after the euphoria of liberation had given way to resentment towards the liberating army — like Iraq in 2003.

“The French fêted us first and now they want us to go home,” says Gripe 16. The answer is: “We are like guests who have been well received for a weekend, but we have been in the house for a year and no one wants to have a guest that long.”

Another striking theme is the admiration voiced by GIs for the defeated Germans, compared with their distaste for their French allies.

Gripe 8 says: “We get into disputes with the French more than the Germans . . . They criticise everything. The Germans do what they are told. They co-operate when the French don’t at all.”

The answer is succinct: “Two men who work together are more likely to disagree than a prisoner and his guard.”

Apparently obsessed with hygiene, a GI complains: “The French are not as clean as the Germans.” The answer is: “Perhaps. But if the Germans had had no soap for five years, they would not be as clean as they wanted to be.”

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