Out of scale: French fishing and fish puns show that Brexit has reignited ancient rivalries | Britain’s exit from the European Union

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The old “enemies” relationship between the UK and France has never failed to ignite passion, nor has it ever failed to ignite recurring hunting wars. Post-Brexit, there is undoubtedly an added flair for cross-channel insults.

“After the standoff, it is now a LE SURRENDER,” the Daily Mail told the Daily Mail, after France backed away from threats to block exports and ban UK fishermen from landing catches on its coast in the latest licensing row.

Other newspaper headlines evoked similar sentiments – “Le Surrender” (Metro); “Le Climbdown” (Express).

From the Hundred Years’ War in the late Middle Ages to the Napoleonic Wars of the nineteenth century, after the signing of the Entente Entente in 1904 and up to the present Hunting Dispute, the United Kingdom’s relationship with France had difficult moments.

The recent “hunting wars” provided an excuse for metaphors, columns revisiting the Allied liberation of France in World War II, to be dusted off and repurposed as so often in British feuds with its close neighbor – with the French – catching the Franglais an irresistible element.

“Clambusters,” Son told him, delicately blending World War II with seafood, after Jean Castix, the French prime minister, wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, last week saying it should show the UK caused More damage to leaving the EU than staying.

More images of the conflict were dispensed with by Clément Bonn, Minister for Europe in France, after the Scottish-recorded scallop karaoke, Cornelis Geert Jean, was seized in Le Havre. “Now we need to speak the language of force,” Bonn told French television. “Unfortunately, it is the only language the British government understands.”

The British ship’s seizure was a headline writer’s dream. “I did like a S-kipper,” said The Sun. “The ship’s hitter fan,” shouted the Daily Star. An article in the Sunday Times published one of the Sunday Times articles: “Go on Macron, blew up that boat and we were shocked by the behavior of oysters.”

Others urged the EU to “tell Macron to get rid of his rhetoric” and “seize the renegade Macron”.

Boris Johnson, who greeted France’s wrath over a new UK-US-Australia military agreement with Franglais “donnez-moi un break”, was also unable to resist the odd pun. “We have bigger fish to pick up,” he said, in a flimsy joke before meeting the French president at the last G-20 and the ongoing COP26 conference.

Fish puns were in many guides until May. “Fish and Ships: UK parades mussels,” the Sun reports on Johnson’s deployment of gunboat diplomacy by sending two Royal Navy patrol ships to Jersey after French fishing vessels threatened to close the port of St Helier.

This dispute is the latest in a long line with France over fishing, including the Great Scallop War, or guerre de la coquille, which in October 2012 led to a confrontation between French and British ships off Le Havre over a difference in fishing restrictions. The second scallop war in 2018 involved ramming fishing boats and throwing projectiles.

But for now, France has de-escalated. Or, as the sun said: “They blink – it’s fishing nets.”

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