Thatcher, Mitterrand the Targets : British and French Declaring War Again--This Time in Song

The British and French, who have been squabbling for the last 900 years or so, are at it again. But this time the chosen weapon is song.

A Frenchman fired the first salvo with “Miss Maggie,” a chart-busting rock tune that pulsates with street slang and heaps musical abuse on Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

In reply, Britain’s biggest daily newspaper, The Sun, put together a ditty called “Hop Off, You Frogs” that lambastes France’s President Francois Mitterrand. “Frog” is a derogatory term for a Frenchman.

Anglo-French animosity can be traced back to the Norman invasion of 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel and defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold.

In the ensuing centuries, the two countries often engaged in open warfare--for example, the Hundred Years War in the Middle Ages and the Napoleonic Wars that ended with the British victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

Close Allies Now

These days, of course, the British and French are close trading and defense partners and have just agreed to build a rail tunnel under the English Channel to link their countries.

But it doesn’t take much to reopen old wounds. A disagreement over cheap meat imports or, in this case, a song, will do.

Enter “Miss Maggie,” the creation of Renaud Sechan, a 34-year-old French rock star who goes only by his first name and is best known for catchy, hard-hitting songs of political protest and social discontent.

He says the song is more a tribute to women than an attack on Britain’s “Iron Lady,” although some Britons may miss that point.

Sample of Lyrics

A sample of his lyrics:

There aren’t any women mean enough to polish a gun and feel iron-tough, except, of course, Mrs. Thatcher.

“Hop Off, You Frogs,” which likens Mitterrand to, among other things, “an oily old master like Toulouse-Lautrec,” was written by Sun entertainment writer Geoff Barker and sung by four of his colleagues calling themselves The Bizarre Boys.

Sung to the tune of “Under the Bridges of Paris,” it bristles with such lines as:

Over in Frogland, he’s reckoned a hit; but people in Britain think he’s just a twit; Eating frogs’ legs and snails, no wonder his detente fails. ...

Renaud says “Miss Maggie” was inspired by televised scenes of rioting by British hooligans at Brussels’ Heysel Stadium last May, in which 39 people, mostly fans of a rival Italian soccer team, were killed.

Not to Fuel Hatred

“My goal is not to fuel Franco-British hatred,” Renaud told a French news agency earlier this month, “but rather to make the French laugh at a woman political leader whose behavior is often more masculine than a man’s.”

But Garry Bushell, one of The Bizarre Boys, said Renaud’s hit “got a lot of people’s backs up” on the other side of the channel.

“There’s a lot of longstanding animosity between the British and French,” he said. “We couldn’t miss the chance to have our say.”

Unlike “Miss Maggie,” which soared to the top of the French charts in a matter of weeks, “Hop Off, You Frogs,” has only been heard a few times on British radio.

But John Morton, a distribution manager at the record company PRT, which is handling The Sun single, said, “It’s early days yet.”