Opinon: Why the sneering French President needs a history lesson

Were the ghosts of those fallen Australians to rise from their graves, what would they think of a French president who sulks, pouts and snarls like a spoilt child when Australia ­exercises its legal right to terminate a ship-building contract?

When the City Hall bells toll the hour at 11am on Thursday, a few, a very few, will pause for a ­minute and spare a thought for the nation’s lost legions whose members rest in foreign fields.

Their moment’s silence will be in remembrance of that moment on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 when World War I ended and the guns in Europe finally fell silent.

November 11 is a public holiday in France with military parades and ­official speeches throughout the country. President Macron is sure to make one and when he does will he, I wonder, make reference to the 45,000 Australians who lie buried in French and Belgian soil and who gave their lives defending France?

The French President appears to have forgotten, in his sneering ­accusations against Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his anger at the US that when France finds itself threatened, it is inevitably the youth of other nations whose blood is spilt in defending it.

It was the Americans and the British who liberated France in World War II and paid a heavy price in so doing with precious little help from the French, leading US General George Patton to declare that he’d rather have a German ­division in front of him than a French one behind him.

Allied soldiers disembark from transport ships at Normandy, France, on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Were the ghosts of those fallen Australians to rise from their graves, what would they think of a French president who sulks, pouts and snarls like a spoilt child when Australia ­exercises its legal right to terminate a ship-building contract?

They might think that as a nation, given the debt that we are owed by France, that we were deserving of more respect. Instead, we were treated to the spectacle of a French leader accusing our Prime Minister of lying.

They might also question the mindset of those Australians who were so quick to leap on the bandwagon of abuse directed at Scott Morrison by those from the other side of the political fence.

If Macron was sledging Morrison, then Macron was the good guy and Morrison the baddie.

It was unedifying to see people who would struggle to differentiate between a submarine and a prawn trawler and who had no knowledge of the contractual issues involved, take the side of the French president for no other reason than their blind political hatred of all things Morrison.

We had Australians apologising to the French for our Prime Minister ­because he did what anyone would do and defended himself against Macron’s self-serving accusations.

French president Emmanuel Macron. Picture: Alain Jocard

The French have form in seeing matters through a uniquely Gallic prism. The French government thought it was quite acceptable to turn the South Pacific, handily distant from Paris, into a nuclear testing ground.

It conducted 193 nuclear explosions on Moruroa and Fangataufa ­atolls of which 41 were atmospheric, exposing more than 110,000 Polynesians to high levels of radiation.

When Greenpeace announced that its ship Rainbow Warrior ­planned to disrupt the tests, the French government thought it was quite all right for its security forces to attach explosives to its hull and sink it in Auckland Harbor, killing a crew member. This is not ancient history. It is only 25 years since the last test was conducted.

The criticism of Morrison, ­however, was sadly predictable given the venom that now poisons our ­political landscape. A child could see that the climate scare farce we have just endured in Glasgow would be huff and puff on a grand scale and achieve nothing apart from provide a stage from which the likes of Prince Charles, who needs a servant to dress him daily – “your trousers, your Royal Highness. The fly goes to the front. That’s the way!” – and whose extended family has a carbon foot print the size of Tasmania, tell us as a nation where we’re going wrong.

Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, in Glasgow for the UN Climate Change Conference. Picture: Jane Barlow/AFP

His Royal Highness, of course, was right and Morrison the villain. Never mind the staggering hypocrisy of the 400 private jets that roared off into the sunset when the conference ended or that of the newly greened Twiggy Forrest railing against fossil fuels while his company happily accepts $300m a year in diesel subsidies.

The critics were right and Morrison and Australia were wrong in the eyes of the haters for no other reason than to reach a different conclusion would require rational thought and a modicum of intelligence.

President Macron and the French played and lost and now he’s taken his boules and gone home, forgetting that if it were not for the sacrifice of others, it would be a very different flag now flying over his Elysee Palace.