From the Publisher
This is a wonderfully entertaining piece of `alternative' history; well, I say `piece' - it is of course 1000 years worth of history, all of it true and all of it mega-interesting, most of which won't be available in more conventional history books. My favourite chapters? The Hundred Years War (chapter three) which the author says was `120 years of terror inflicted on French civilians by out-of-control English bandits' (our sympathies are with the bandits, of course); the demise of poor Joan of Arc (chapter four), betrayed by the French for making the disastrous fashion mistake of wearing trousers at her trial; and the accounts of French exploration, all of which were uniformly catastrophic. See, for example, chapter seven (French Canada, or How To Lose a Colony); and chapter fourteen (India and Tahiti: France Gets Lost in Paradise). Yes, it's true that when the 17th century French explorer La Salle was on the point of naming the vast areas surrounding the Mississippi in the Deep South of America, as well as the fertile pastures of what is now Illinois as important centres of French colonization, Louis XIV declared that La Salle's efforts were `utterly pointless, and similar expeditions should be prevented'. Sacre Bleu! Enjoy ...
From the Author
Bonjour, dear reader, One of the most frequent questions people ask me is: how much of your books is true? They are usually talking about the barely credible fun going on in my Merde novels, but the question is equally valid for 1000 Years. For the novels, I usually invite everyone to guess, but with 1000 Years, the answer is a wholly serious 100 per cent. Incredible as some of the historical stories might seem, especially to French readers, they're all true - as my publishers' long-suffering copyreaders will testify, because they fact-checked the finished manuscript, often demanding to see my sources, and even asking me to translate them when they were in medieval French. People might contest my provocative interpretation of the facts, but the book is based on a solid bedrock of la vérité.
For example, did you know, that:
* Mary Queen of Scots considered herself to be French? She used to sign her letters `Marie', and when Elizabeth I had her executed, it annoyed France more than Scotland. (Though less than it annoyed Mary, of course.)
* France's favourite lunch, le steak-frites, was inspired by British soldiers holding barbecues in the Tuileries gardens?
* Even today, there are French people who believe that Napoleon was poisoned by the Brits using toxic wallpaper, and that an American bought the Empereur's severed penis?
* Despite what the French might like to believe, out of the 156,000 troops who landed in Normandy on D-Day, only 177 were French? (Yes, that's 177 soldiers, not 177 brigades or battalions.)
And the funniest thing is, it's all completely true. I do realize that in telling the vérité, I run the risk of annoying the French all over again. But that, it seems, is a habit that we Brits will never give up.
Yours historically,
Stephen Clarke
About the Author
Stephen Clarke lives in Paris. His first novel, A Year in the Merde, became a word-of-mouth hit in 2004, and is now published all over the world. Since then he has published three more bestselling Merde novels, as well as Talk to the Snail, an indispensable guide to understanding the French. Research for Stephen's novels has taken him all over France and America. For 1000 Years of Annoying the French, he has also been breathing the chill air of ruined castles and deserted battlefields, leafing through dusty chronicles, brushing up the medieval French he studied at university and generally losing himself in the mists of history. He has now returned to present-day Paris, and is doing his best to live the entente cordiale.
