Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
Encyclopedia
"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys", sometimes shortened to "surrender monkeys", is a derogatory description of French
people that was coined in 1995 by a writer of the television series The Simpsons
. The phrase has since entered two Oxford quotation dictionaries. After being popularized by National Review
journalist Jonah Goldberg
, it has frequently been used by journalists and academics. The phrase was particularly used in the run-up to the Iraq War, since France was opposed to military intervention in Iraq.
. In the plot of the 1995 episode "'Round Springfield
", budget cuts at Springfield Elementary School force the janitor Groundskeeper Willie
to become a French teacher. Expressing his disdain for the French people, he exclaims to his class in his Scottish accent: "Bonjour, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys." On the audio commentary
for the episode, executive producer Al Jean
said the line was "probably" written by The Simpsons staff writer Ken Keeler
. He also commented that the staff did not expect it to become widely used and never intended it as any kind of genuine political statement. When "'Round Springfield" was dubbed in French, the word "surrender" was omitted and the line became "singes mangeurs de fromage".
Following the appearance of the phrase on The Simpsons, "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" has become widely used by journalists in the media. It was used particularly in the run-up to the war in Iraq, having been popularized by the right-wing National Review
journalist Jonah Goldberg
to describe European and especially French opposition to military action in that war. Paul Starobin of the National Journal
commented that "it fell to a pop-culturally informed conservative polemicist, National Review scribe Jonah Goldberg, to revive and popularize the insult in the prewar name-calling."
However, Goldberg first used the phrase in April 1999 with no relation to the Iraq War, as the title of a column in the National Review on the "Top Ten Reasons to Hate the French". The reasons he listed included: the French people insisting that they are "one of the Big Four victors" of World War II
despite surrendering Paris to the Germans "without firing a shot"; the French denying the United States overflight rights in their airspace under the 1986 bombing of Libya; and the French wanting "nothing to do with NATO" during the Cold War
.
Goldberg continued to use the phrase several times in what he has described as his "French-bashing columns". In a July 2002 National Review column, he noted that the phrase had become frequently used by other journalists and that he takes "some pride in its wide currency, as I believe I am its most successful popularizer." In this column, Goldberg discussed why hating the French had become so popular in America around that time. One of the reasons he gave was the two countries' different views on the War on Terrorism
that began after the September 11 attacks. By July 2003, Goldberg commented that he was starting to lose his "taste" for writing columns that criticize the French. He added: "Oh, I haven’t lost my distaste for the French, but French-bashing is so clichéd these days, I feel like I’m doing schtick
when I talk about Cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the like."
Ben Macintyre
of The Times
wrote in 2007 that the phrase is "perhaps the most famous" of the coinages from The Simpsons and since Goldberg's usage it "has gone on to become a journalistic cliché." Following Goldberg's popularization of the phrase, it has been used by the New York Post
(as "Surrender Monkeys") as the headline for its December 7, 2006, front page, referring to the Iraq Study Group
and its recommendation that U.S. soldiers be withdrawn from Iraq
by early 2008. Articles in the Daily Mail
have used the phrase in reference the French's "attitude problem" and the "muted" European reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden
, while The Daily Telegraph
has cited it in relation to Anglo-French military cooperation.
noted that Goldberg's use of the phrase during the time before the Iraq War made it "acceptable in official diplomatic channels around the globe", and Slate
s Chris Suellentrop commented in January 2003 that Goldberg made "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" the "rallying cry of Francophobes everywhere" in the time that led to the war in Iraq. Laurie Morrow of the National Review wrote on May 7, 2003 that "there’s not a third-grader left who hasn’t heard and repeated this phrase these past months. Thanks to the war with Iraq, Americans have finally found an appropriate means of regarding the French — as the butt of a joke."
The term has been used in books by commentator Laura Ingraham
, and academics Stuart Croft, Stephen Chan, and Paul L. Moorcraft and Philip M. Taylor. Ned Sherrin
included the quote in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations; it was introduced in the third edition in 2005. It is also included in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Douglas Coupland
's 2009 novel Generation A
refers to Groundskeeper Willie's use of the phrase.
On BBC 2's Top Gear
, British television presenter Jeremy Clarkson
described the French Renault Clio
V6 as a "surrender monkey" in terms of handling at its limits. In episode forty-six of the anime
series Hetalia: Axis Powers
, England wants to get a new hairstyle after being taunted by France that England's current style is "unsophisticated". After France gives England several haircuts he is not pleased with, France gives him the same haircut that he had at the start of the episode. This infuriates England, who leaps up and screams at France, calling him a "cheese-eating surrender monkey".
In December 2005, the phrase was used by British United Kingdom Independence Party
(UKIP) Member of the European Parliament
(MEP) Nigel Farage
who said the French President Jacques Chirac
was "...no cheese-eating surrender monkey, he", in an unflattering comparison to Tony Blair
during a session of the European Parliament
following Blair's brokering of the EU budget deal.
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
people that was coined in 1995 by a writer of the television series The Simpsons
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
. The phrase has since entered two Oxford quotation dictionaries. After being popularized by National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
journalist Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author. Goldberg is known for his contributions on politics and culture to , of which he is editor-at-large...
, it has frequently been used by journalists and academics. The phrase was particularly used in the run-up to the Iraq War, since France was opposed to military intervention in Iraq.
Origin
The phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" first appeared in the American animated television series The SimpsonsThe Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
. In the plot of the 1995 episode "'Round Springfield
'Round Springfield
"Round Springfield" is the 22nd episode of the sixth season of The Simpsons. It originally aired on April 30, 1995. In the episode, Bart is rushed to hospital after eating a jagged metal Krusty-O and decides to sue Krusty the Clown. Whilst visiting Bart, Lisa meets her old mentor, jazz musician...
", budget cuts at Springfield Elementary School force the janitor Groundskeeper Willie
Groundskeeper Willie
William McDougal, usually referred to as Groundskeeper Willie, is a recurring character on The Simpsons, voiced by Dan Castellaneta. He is head groundskeeper at Springfield Elementary School. Willie is a Scottish immigrant, almost feral in nature and immensely proud of his homeland...
to become a French teacher. Expressing his disdain for the French people, he exclaims to his class in his Scottish accent: "Bonjour, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys." On the audio commentary
Audio commentary
On disc-based video formats, an audio commentary is an additional audio track consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with video...
for the episode, executive producer Al Jean
Al Jean
Al Jean is an award-winning American screenwriter and producer, best known for his work on The Simpsons. He was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan and graduated from Harvard University in 1981. Jean began his writing career in the 1980s with fellow Harvard alum Mike Reiss...
said the line was "probably" written by The Simpsons staff writer Ken Keeler
Ken Keeler
Kenneth "Ken" Keeler is an American television producer and writer. He has written for numerous television series, most notably The Simpsons and Futurama. According to an interview with David X. Cohen, he proved a theorem which appears in the Futurama episode "The Prisoner of Benda".-Career:After...
. He also commented that the staff did not expect it to become widely used and never intended it as any kind of genuine political statement. When "'Round Springfield" was dubbed in French, the word "surrender" was omitted and the line became "singes mangeurs de fromage".
Use in journalism
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
journalist Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative syndicated columnist and author. Goldberg is known for his contributions on politics and culture to , of which he is editor-at-large...
to describe European and especially French opposition to military action in that war. Paul Starobin of the National Journal
National Journal
National Journal is a nonpartisan American weekly magazine that reports on the current political environment and emerging political and policy trends. National Journal was first published in 1969. Times Mirror owned the magazine from 1986 to 1997, when it was purchased by David G. Bradley...
commented that "it fell to a pop-culturally informed conservative polemicist, National Review scribe Jonah Goldberg, to revive and popularize the insult in the prewar name-calling."
However, Goldberg first used the phrase in April 1999 with no relation to the Iraq War, as the title of a column in the National Review on the "Top Ten Reasons to Hate the French". The reasons he listed included: the French people insisting that they are "one of the Big Four victors" of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
despite surrendering Paris to the Germans "without firing a shot"; the French denying the United States overflight rights in their airspace under the 1986 bombing of Libya; and the French wanting "nothing to do with NATO" during the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
.
Goldberg continued to use the phrase several times in what he has described as his "French-bashing columns". In a July 2002 National Review column, he noted that the phrase had become frequently used by other journalists and that he takes "some pride in its wide currency, as I believe I am its most successful popularizer." In this column, Goldberg discussed why hating the French had become so popular in America around that time. One of the reasons he gave was the two countries' different views on the War on Terrorism
War on Terrorism
The War on Terror is a term commonly applied to an international military campaign led by the United States and the United Kingdom with the support of other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as well as non-NATO countries...
that began after the September 11 attacks. By July 2003, Goldberg commented that he was starting to lose his "taste" for writing columns that criticize the French. He added: "Oh, I haven’t lost my distaste for the French, but French-bashing is so clichéd these days, I feel like I’m doing schtick
Schtick
A shtick is a comic theme or gimmick. "Shtick" is derived from the Yiddish word shtik , meaning "piece"; the closely related German word Stück has the same meaning. The English word "piece" itself is also sometimes used in a similar context...
when I talk about Cheese-eating surrender monkeys and the like."
Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre is a British author, historian, and columnist writing for The Times newspaper. His columns range from current affairs to historical controversies.- Author :...
of The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
wrote in 2007 that the phrase is "perhaps the most famous" of the coinages from The Simpsons and since Goldberg's usage it "has gone on to become a journalistic cliché." Following Goldberg's popularization of the phrase, it has been used by the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...
(as "Surrender Monkeys") as the headline for its December 7, 2006, front page, referring to the Iraq Study Group
Iraq Study Group
The Iraq Study group , was a ten-person bipartisan panel appointed on March 15, 2006, by the United States Congress, that was charged with assessing the situation in Iraq and the US-led Iraq War and making policy recommendations...
and its recommendation that U.S. soldiers be withdrawn from Iraq
Iraq
Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
by early 2008. Articles in the Daily Mail
Daily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
have used the phrase in reference the French's "attitude problem" and the "muted" European reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden
Death of Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, then head of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, shortly after 1 a.m. local time by a United States special forces military unit....
, while The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
has cited it in relation to Anglo-French military cooperation.
Other uses
An article in The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
noted that Goldberg's use of the phrase during the time before the Iraq War made it "acceptable in official diplomatic channels around the globe", and Slate
Slate (magazine)
Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company...
s Chris Suellentrop commented in January 2003 that Goldberg made "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" the "rallying cry of Francophobes everywhere" in the time that led to the war in Iraq. Laurie Morrow of the National Review wrote on May 7, 2003 that "there’s not a third-grader left who hasn’t heard and repeated this phrase these past months. Thanks to the war with Iraq, Americans have finally found an appropriate means of regarding the French — as the butt of a joke."
The term has been used in books by commentator Laura Ingraham
Laura Ingraham
Laura Anne Ingraham is an American radio host, author, and conservative political commentator. Her nationally syndicated talk show, The Laura Ingraham Show, airs throughout the United States on Talk Radio Network...
, and academics Stuart Croft, Stephen Chan, and Paul L. Moorcraft and Philip M. Taylor. Ned Sherrin
Ned Sherrin
Edward George "Ned" Sherrin CBE was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. He qualified as a barrister and then worked in independent television before joining the BBC...
included the quote in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations; it was introduced in the third edition in 2005. It is also included in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and...
's 2009 novel Generation A
Generation A
Generation A is the thirteenth novel from Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. It takes place in a near future, in a world in which bees have become extinct. The novel is told with a shifting frame narrative perspective, shifting between the novel's five main protagonists...
refers to Groundskeeper Willie's use of the phrase.
On BBC 2's Top Gear
Top Gear (current format)
Top Gear is a British television series about motor vehicles, primarily cars. It began in 1977 as a conventional motoring magazine show. Over time, and especially since a relaunch in 2002, it has developed a quirky, humorous style...
, British television presenter Jeremy Clarkson
Jeremy Clarkson
Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson is an English broadcaster, journalist and writer who specialises in motoring. He is best known for his role on the BBC TV show Top Gear along with co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May...
described the French Renault Clio
Renault Clio
The Renault Clio is a supermini car produced by the French automobile manufacturer Renault. Originally launched in 1990, it is currently in its third generation...
V6 as a "surrender monkey" in terms of handling at its limits. In episode forty-six of the anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
series Hetalia: Axis Powers
Hetalia: Axis Powers
is a Japanese webcomic, later adapted as a manga and an anime series, by . The series presents an allegorical trivialisation of political and historic events, particularly of the World War II era, in which the various countries are represented by stereotyped anthropomorphic characters...
, England wants to get a new hairstyle after being taunted by France that England's current style is "unsophisticated". After France gives England several haircuts he is not pleased with, France gives him the same haircut that he had at the start of the episode. This infuriates England, who leaps up and screams at France, calling him a "cheese-eating surrender monkey".
In December 2005, the phrase was used by British United Kingdom Independence Party
United Kingdom Independence Party
The United Kingdom Independence Party is a eurosceptic and right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. Whilst its primary goal is the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, the party has expanded beyond its single-issue image to develop a more comprehensive party platform.UKIP...
(UKIP) Member of the European Parliament
Member of the European Parliament
A Member of the European Parliament is a person who has been elected to the European Parliament. The name of MEPs differ in different languages, with terms such as europarliamentarian or eurodeputy being common in Romance language-speaking areas.When the European Parliament was first established,...
(MEP) Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage
Nigel Paul Farage MEP , a position he previously held from September 2006 to November 2009. He is a current Member of the European Parliament for South East England and co-chairs the Eurosceptic Europe of Freedom and Democracy group....
who said the French President Jacques Chirac
Jacques Chirac
Jacques René Chirac is a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. He previously served as Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988 , and as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.After completing his studies of the DEA's degree at the...
was "...no cheese-eating surrender monkey, he", in an unflattering comparison to Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
during a session of the European Parliament
European Parliament
The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union . Together with the Council of the European Union and the Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world...
following Blair's brokering of the EU budget deal.
External links
- "'Round Springfield" episode guide – The Simpsons ArchiveThe Simpsons ArchiveThe Simpsons Archive, better known as snpp.com or simply SNPP , is a Simpsons fan site that has been online since 1994...
- References to France on The Simpsons – The Simpsons ArchiveThe Simpsons ArchiveThe Simpsons Archive, better known as snpp.com or simply SNPP , is a Simpsons fan site that has been online since 1994...