French Jerk

"I adore France. It's the French who ruin it."

— Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear (UK)

Putting the word Douche in "douchebag."

In popular culture, usually comedy, Frenchmen are often Acceptable Targets. They will be portrayed as villains, antagonists or someone who is just plain mean, arrogant, snobbish, bad tempered, foul mouthed or rude. Often he will talk and laugh triumphantly in a Maurice Chevalier Accent, after insulting foreigners.

These are the most common situations in which this character turns up:

1. Characters visit France or meet a Frenchman. They'll ask him a simple direction or question, but the French Jerk refuses to answer, starts insulting or threatening them and/or feels they are beneath him.
2. French Cuisine Is Haughty: Characters visit a French restaurant, where the chefs are all arrogant, badly tempered snobs who think they are the greatest geniuses in the culinary profession, and refuse to give their clients what they want or interpret everything they say as a complaint. If they deliver the meals the food will always be "artistically" bizarre.
3. Characters meet a rich Upper-Class Twit, who happens to speak Gratuitous French in order to appear très chic and looks down upon the others because they are out of his noble league. A lot of comedy will be built around the fact that he or she doesn't understand or care for the common people and is unable to speak the language of the protagonists correctly. To top it all off he/she will wear or carry a lorgnette, a monocle or a small handkerchief, to emphasize his/her snobbishness. In the end he or she will always be humiliated or put in her place. This Stock Character can be found in a lot of countries who were conquered/colonized by the French or dominated by a French elite in the past, such as Belgium.
4. Characters meet an arrogant Frenchman full of Misplaced Nationalism, either in their country or in France. He acts as The Rival to The Hero and will start a discussion about whose country is better, either in dialogue or through some sort of competition, such as a sport tournament. After the conflict is resolved, however, he often will have grown to love the country of The Hero and isn't as arrogant about himself or his country as he was before. This follows after he is defeated or after any interaction between them that resolves the conflict.
5. In the USA in particular the French jerk may be portrayed as an ungrateful coward, whom the brave Americans saved in World War One and Two, but who has no respect for Americans in modern times.
6. In Canada, francophones have also been lumped together with their European counterparts, to the chagrin of both groups.
7. In France itself, non-Parisian people are often said to think of Parisians this way. And possibly blame them for this trope.
8. The character just happens to be a jerk from France, with none of it being due to their nationality.

This trope does not apply if the story takes place in France and the majority of the cast is French. An exception does apply if only the jerks speak with a French accent.

This is more of a Characterization Trope, unlike, say, Eagle Land or Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys. Compare to Evil Brit, Germanic Depressives, Rambunctious Italian and Balkan Bastard.

noreallife

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Examples:

Advertising

• An old McDonald's ad featured Ronald McDonald and his friends touring around the world visiting humorous re-imaginings of famous landmarks. In France, they meet the "Awful Tower", who is a sentient Eiffel Tower that tells bad jokes in an obnoxious French accent.
  Awful Tower: Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine! Oh hon hon hon...!
  Birdie: My, he is awful.

Anime & Manga

• France of Hetalia: Axis Powers. A Handsome Lech who frequently annoys the other nations with his antics, especially his Sitcom Archnemesis, England (who is somewhat mean himself).
• Patrick Colasour from Mobile Suit Gundam 00. An Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who always chase the heroes to no avail. In the end, he ends up helping them in the final battle. His name and hair color suggest that he's Irish, though. Regardless, he's the huge Ensemble Dark Horse.
• Perrine H Clostermann from Strike Witches. Mainly, its due to her attitude towards Yoshika born from jealousy of her closeness to Mio. However, she mellows out over the course of the first season.
• Henri Claytor from Future GPX Cyber Formula is an extreme version of this in ZERO. While he may not be arrogant like other examples, he is a huge jerk, being a Manipulative Bastard, as well as borderline batshit insane, and he also has a deep-seated hatred for the main character. He mellows out at the end; he's still a jerk, but much less than he used to be.
• Tiger & Bunny's Agnes Joubert is a pretty good example of Everyone Looks Sexier if French. And she's really not very nice. Subverted in the last episode, where she gets her own Big Damn Heroes moment.
• Sophie Montgomery and her mother Jeanne in Lady!!. Ultimately subverted with Sophie, who shows a quite more sympathetic side as it's shown that Jeanne manipulates and harasses her in hopes to get her to inherit her English grandma's fortune, threatening Sophie with abandoning her in France if she fails. Meanwhile, Sophie just wants to be loved by her mom.
• Marginal Prince gives us Henri-Hugues de Saint Germain, the series' resident stoic Deadpan Snarker. He's relatively silent in general, but when something comes out of his mouth it's often snarkage at others, his favorite target being the American Alfred. Subverted sometimes, when his proverbs and comments veil genuinely valuable lessons/suggestions. He never takes any effort in making them sound nice, though.
• A unique case in Food Wars!, Shinomiya Kojirou is Japanese but studied and works exclusively in French cuisine. He gets the jerk label early on because he expelled a cooking student because the student had used a citrus based shampoo that he felt might interfere with the presentation of food they hadn't even started preparing yet.
• Most Venusians from Battle Angel Alita. A race of hideous, egg-shaped mutants descended from French space colonists, their dependence on Organic Technology has given them a very callous attitude towards other living things.
• Jewelpet Twinkle☆ has three French sisters - Marianne, Catherine and Angelina - who constantly gloat about their achievements and put the main characters down for going to a "country" school. That said, Marianne gets a bit of Character Development and becomes Tsundere for the (female) protagonist midway through the anime, after the latter saves her life.
• While Pierre from Captain Tsubasa averts this by being a Lovable Jock, Louis Napoleon plays it very straight. And boy, does he pay for it.
• Charles Bonaparte from Freezing is calmly and openly condescending and hostile to everyone, even her own Limiter, and dismissive of the E-Pandora. She gets better.
• Featured in Pop Team Epic 's CG-animated French segment in Episode 1 of the Anime. A mime-disguised Pipimi tells Popuko they'll use sign language to direct themselves in France. Once there, she proceeds to sign to a Frenchman to communicate with him, and the Frenchman replies with middle fingers. Popuko then concludes that French people are indeed skilled at sign language.

Comedy

• Eddie Izzard, on the French in his stand-up show "Dress To Kill":
  ...and France hated them all ‘cause Southern France was collaborating with the Germans, embarrassing! So since then, they've been kind of spiky and kind of, er, French... I'm very positive on the French, my family way back was French, so I go with it, but they are kind of, well, fucking French at times...
  "All of Europe, you must do this!"
  "Well... we're not gonna! We're gonna have a sandwich."
  • Later in that show:
  We play bad guys in Hollywood movies because of the Revolutionary War. Oh yes, no two ways about it. And the French, who were on your side in the Revolutionary war, they play more esoteric characters. They have characters who turn up and go,
  "My name is Pierre! I have come from Paris. I’ve come to have sex with your family."
  "Help yourself! Because of the debt of honor to General Lafayette."
  You know your own history, yeah? [beat, gives audience a knowing smirk] You don't know who he is, do you?! What was it? The Spanish-American War? The French-Banana War? What? Revolutionary War! Hung out with Washington. Lafayette. Street named after him in New York. Forget it!
• French comedian Marcel Lucont uses this as part of his stand-up persona.
• Robin Williams sometimes had skits to this trope's effect:
  (Imitating a Frenchman) Fuck you Americans! Uncultured, crass Americans! We hate all of you! Fu- the Germans are here! Hello Americans! We love you!
• An inversion attributed to Chris Rock:
  You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America’s Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn’t want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon. Need I say more?

Comic Books

• The Boys: Averted, as the Frenchman is probably the nicest, friendliest, most genial guy in the series. He'll crush your skull if you make him mad, but still, by the standards of an Ennis story, stand-up guy.
• Captain America: You have Georges Batroc, the Leaper, a classic foe of Cap and a giant dickwad to boot. Depending on the Writer. He's a tad egotistical, true, but he's not really a jerk most of the time. He gave up crime after hearing Steve lament the fact none of his enemies ever reformed. In fact, Batroc and Cap have a pretty friendly relationship and he has helped Cap numerous times. Even as a villain, he'll team up with Cap to take on the really vile supervillains.
• Doom Patrol: The Brain is a an early case of this, being an Evil Cripple who turned himself into a Brain in a Jar to fight the titular Doom Patrol alongside his sentient gorilla manservant Monsieur Mallah. He's never reformed, but has been made slightly less vile over the years through his relationship with Mallah.
• Fantastic Four: Inverted during J. Michael Straczynski's run, set during Civil War (2006). Since the Marvel Civil War seems to involve everyone Ben Grimm knows in the U.S. turning into a colossal jerk and he doesn't want to have to pick sides between his friends, he travels to France. The French super-heroes he meets are all a little eccentric, but charmingly nice people, in contrast to how things have gotten back in the States.
• Hawkeye: One of Hawkeye's earliest foes was Jacques Duquesne aka the Swordsman, a greedy fellow who trained Clint as a boy only to rob the carnival they both worked at and almost kill his pupil in the bargain. Following that he committed various international crimes, tried out for the Avengers hoping to commit bigger crimes while posing as a hero, and eventually fell for Mantis, leading to Love Redeems.
• Spider-Man: Peter Parker has a couple of run-ins with an obnoxious French waiter during JMS's run as writer.
• Suske en Wiske:
  • In De Klankentapper a very posh French girl looks down upon Suske and Wiske and speaks in mangled Dutch with French phrases. When she tries to make Wiske jealous by trying to seduce Suske Wiske hates her with passion. Then the story takes a dramatic turn, as the French girl turns out to be an iron lung patient. Wiske takes pity on her and the French girl apologizes for her arrogance in the past.
  • The baroness in De Spokenjagers is also a posh Upperclass Twit who happens to speak French.
• Thunderbolts: The Cyclone, Pierre Fresson. Vain, egotistical, self-serving, and lecherous to the last.
• Tom Poes: Marquis de Canteclaer is a snobbish rooster, who uses très chique French words and expressions, but always looks down upon everyone in his environment, especially Bommel whom he sees as someone not worthy to be called a nobleman.
• X-Men: Exodus, a Knight Templar mutant who became the Mouth of Sauron to Magneto in The '90s when he was on A God Am I kick. Originally a mysterious presence, then a one-dimensional fanatic, later writers fleshed him out into a more complex character, truly wanting to protect and defend his fellow mutants but being too crazy thanks to Magneto's indoctrination (and a not-too-stable powerset) to do it without hurting humans. He's come a long way, though, once joining S.H.I.E.L.D. and currently serving on the Quiet Council that governs Krakoa in X-Men (2019).

Comic Strips

• Nero: Meneer Pheip is a Flemish man of French descent who speaks mangled Dutch with a lot of badly translated French and Dutch. He is a rich arrogant, but dimwitted snob and in some stories he even turns against Nero, though he always forgiven in the end and seen as an irritating nuisance, but a friend nevertheless.

Fan Works

• Dufayel, the Big Bad of Old West, speaks with a heavy French accent. He tends to use French expressions especially when he's angry and his fake politeness slips.
• Emmanuelle-Marie les Deux-Epées, Comptesse de Lapoignard, who is principal tutor in Swords and Bladed Weapons at the Assassins' Guild School, in the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal. for most of the time she is agreeable, pleasant, benevolently disposed to most of her pupils and likeable to an extreme. However, she discovered early on that Quirmians get a by in Ankh-Morpork if they increase the Quirmian-ness and gave the host population exactly what they wish to see. Living up to expectations means that, helas and alors, one must sometimes adopt the Quirmian Jerk persona. It is, mes tres chere amies, sometimes expected of you.
• Ladybug in a Half Shell: Chloe's first appearance has her referring to April and Casey as "nasty dumb Americans."
• This is Jean Kirschstein's incarnation in A Slap On Titan, and Abridged on Titan.
• Cool Cat and the Beauty of War and Destruction: Prince Heinel is a French alien who looks down on humans and allies with General Aladeen to Take Over the World. He exclusively speaks in French and his dialogue has many easter eggs for those who understand it.
  Heinel, upon seeing the American flag: "C'est dommage qu'un si pauvre pays ait un si beau drapeau."^Translation"It is a shame that such a poor country has such a beautiful flag."
• In any My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic by Estee, expect any references to Prance to depict it as "French Jerklandia: Pony Edition", with a running gag being that Princesses Celestia and Luna allow Prance to be an independent sovereign nation because they want as little to do with the Prench themselves. It's noted in the Triptych Continuum that for professional cooks, having to study abroad in Prance is seen as a rite of passage... in that it's a valuable lesson in testing your limits to tolerate being surrounded by assholes.

Films — Animation

• Lord Nooth in Early Man has a French accent (mostly). He's also a wealth-obsessed snob who receives at least one massage. It's never stated that he's actually from France, and the Bronze Agers seem to have accents from basically everywhere, but it is notable that the main villain of the movie is also the most prominently French-coded.
• Le Frog in Flushed Away states this outright:
  Le Frog: I find everyone's pain funny but my own... I'm French! Heh heh heh...
• Hotel Transylvania: Chef Quasimodo Wilson is a culinary man with highly questionable ambitions throughout the movie, from initially trying to make Johnathan "Johnny" Loughran turn into a human pot pie, to later exposing the latter in front of the other monsters as being a human himself. Quasi's own French mannerisms are perhaps a mixture of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (where he and his pet rat Esmeralda share the same respective names as with two of that novel's leading characters) and the French cuisine in general.
• The Incredibles: Bomb Voyage is a French-speaking outlaw who uses literal (and digital) bombs for his criminal actions, such as robbery. Even his own villainous name is modelled after the French expression "Bon voyage!".
• The Little Mermaid (1989): Chef Louie has shades of this — including the obnoxious, nasal "french laugh": Hee hee hee, haw haw haw! He also sings about cutting up and serving fish for dinner, which seems intensely sadistic from to Sebastian's point of view — especially as the chef is preparing stuffed crab as the main course, thinks Sebastian is a "missed" crab, sings about him being "succulent", dips him in oyster sauce, covers him with flour, stuffs bread in his mouth, and then chucks him at the boiling pot.
• Played with in Ratatouille. Collette says at one point, "Sorry to be rude, but we're French. And it's dinnertime," which only makes sense as joke meant to reference this trope. (Were she referring only to the need to rush and prepare dinner, the first part wouldn't be necessary, but whether that's what she meant or not, the first part serves no purpose since they are in France). There are some examples of French chauvinism, like the opening narration stating that "although other nations might dispute this fact... the best food in the world is made in France," and Skinner dismissively calling corn dogs "cheap sausages dipped in batter and fried; you know, American."
  • Despite that, however, this is nonetheless played very straight with Chef Skinner himself, who personifies this trope the most out of all the movie's characters, especially given his demanding, opportunistic, and overall selfish attitude as the former head chef at Gusteau's restaurant.
• Coco LaBouche and her assistant Jean-Claude from Rugrats in Paris. In a movie set in Paris, they're the only main characters who are actually French. They're also rude, smug, greedy, and they hate children.
• Although in most retellings, Robin Hood is an English Saxon fighting the tyranny of French-descended Normans, in Shrek he inexplicably has a French accent. And is a jerk to boot.

Films — Live-Action

• In Rush Hour 3, the two heroes try to take a taxi from the airport after they land in France. The driver refuses, saying that he does not drive Americans, and begins to list the numerous ways America is second rate to France. After an exciting car chase, the taxi driver completely changes his outlook on America, chasing his newfound dream of becoming an American spy, like in the movies in America always show.
• The Rude French Knights in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• The Merovingian from The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (although he's a program, and his hat is "decadence" so he chose to sound French, because swearing in it is apparently like "wiping your ass with silk").
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: Dr. René Emile Belloq, a French archaeologist working for the Nazis, who is also the "shadowy reflection" of fellow archaeologist Dr. Indiana Jones in the film. He deserved having his head asplode.
• Despite being subject of the original page quote ("He's not a friend. He's French."), Inspector Tarconi from The Transporter series is an aversion, being a very pleasant Nice Guy who goes above and beyond to help Frank anytime he gets into a bind. When placed into police custody in the United States in the sequel, he quickly befriends with the entire precinct by impressing them all with his excellent cooking.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 once riffed a movie called 12 To The Moon, which played this trope deadly straight: the obnoxious French engineer was willing to let the moon aliens freeze North America in ice because it would knock America out of global competition. At which point the scientist from the Soviet Union gave him an Even Evil Has Standards speech and attempted to kick his ass (considering this movie was made in the mid 1950s, that's pretty serious). Of course, the character was such an over-the-top French Jerk that Mike and the 'bots didn't have to go far to spoof the trope:
  "In France we have better moons than you people!"
• Pascal Sauvage from Johnny English, an arrogant, ruthless aristocrat who plans to seize the British throne in order to continue the legacy of his long-lost royal family (as he is a long-lost prince himself), where it involves building the world's largest prison camp within the United Kingdom.
• In Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm these are plentiful, the film taking place in French-occupied Germany. (Now there's a thought to chew on.)
• The French aren't afraid of satirizing their own jerks, either. In Mr. Hulot's Holiday, most of the tourists and staff staying at the seaside hotel are uptight and disdainful. By the end of the film, they've taken such a dislike to Mr. Hulot (mainly because of him being The Jinx) that they won't even make the effort to say goodbye to him.
• Comedically subverted in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby in the character of Jean Girard - Ricky Bobby reacts to him as if he were a stereotypical French Jerk, but Girard is actually a pretty nice guy in an apparently well-adjusted, loving relationship. It's at the film's climax, in which Ricky Bobby consummates Girard's status as a Worthy Opponent with a very, very, VERY long kiss.
• Tomas in Black Swan gropes, taunts, and generally over exerts Nina to get the best performance he can from her. Considering she's batshit crazy, this has a less than awesome outcome.
• Money Talks: The French diamond thieves are humorless and quick to commit murder.
• In National Lampoon's European Vacation, the waiter the Griswolds run into in Paris is exceptionally rude, telling them he'd serve them dishwater instead of what they ordered (since they "wouldn't know the difference"), and eventually telling them to go fuck themselves.
• In Latter Days, Aaron uses the French reputation for being jerks to defuse an increasingly tense conversation about Mormon beliefs:
  Ryder: God hates homos.
  Christian: You're gonna come into my house and tell me God hates homosexuals?
  Aaron: And the French.
  Ryder: God hates the French?
  Aaron: Everybody hates the French.
• Played with in The Wolf of Wall Street. Jordan thinks that Jean-Jacques, the French Swiss banker who aids him in laundering the profits from his securities frauds, sees him as an "American shit" (while conversely Jean-Jacques thinks Jordan sees him as the trope). But the two enjoy a cordial relationship until a key element of their scheme falls apart, whereupon they hang up on each other saying exactly what the other thought they thought of them.
• In A Knight's Tale, the villain, and William's main rival, is Count Adhemar, a French nobleman who is also a complete and utter Jerkass.
• The Patriot (2000): Major Jean Villeneuve is a subversion. At first he seems like a snobbish sort who treats Colonel Benjamin Martin with contempt (though not without reason, as Martin killed a lot of Frenchmen in the French and Indian Wars), which Martin dismisses as typically French. However, Villeneuve later reveals that his family was killed by British soldiers, his countrymen keep their word about the ships he promised, and he and Martin become Fire-Forged Friends by the end.
• Welp: Two French go-karters are at the camping spot the Belgian Cub Scouts are supposed to be at, but they talk down to them and refuse to move from the spot. This forces the troop to camp even further in the woods, right where the evil Wild Child lives. Since this inadvertently leads to all the horrible things that occur in the film, this makes the trope all the more apparent.
• Inspector Jean-Claude Pitrel from the first Taken movie. Not only did he used to be a friend to Bryan Mills (which makes his decision to help the sex-slave group that kidnapped Mills' daughter all the more awful), but after Bryan confronts him over this, he first tries to shoot Brian and when Brian asks him why he works for that kind of men, his explanation was an annoyed-sounding "My expenses are X, the money I get from my work is Y, and Y is not enough to cover X, so I had to get funds from elsewhere". Said while Bryan is pointing a gun at him.
• Played with in Dude, Where's My Car?. Pierre, the owner of the ostrich farm, is incredibly hostile towards all trespassers and likes to keep them in cages and hose them down. However, as soon as Chester is able to answer a factoid question about ostriches, Pierre immediately becomes much friendlier and lets Jesse and Chester go.
  Pierre: In France, when a man is caught poaching ostriches, we shave his 'ead and let him run through the field... Once you see this [shudders] you are never quite the same!
• The Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker and the Four Realms speaks with a French accent and is evil.
• Downplayed in Soldier Of Fortune (a movie inspired to the Challenge of Barletta): the French knights are for the most part jerks (leading to Ettore Fieramosca and his companions to refuse to serve with them and joining the Spaniards defending Barletta, and later to the Challenge), but the rank and file troopers are simply doing their jobs and their only practical difference from the Spaniards is that they are better fed. Also, during the challenge the French knights fight by the rules, and it's the Italians who try to cheat by showing up with longer-than-regulation spears (that promptly end in the French hands when, in a sign of sportsmanship, propose to exchange spears and the unknowing Spaniard judge accepts).
• In Lost & Found (1999), Rene is a massively arrogant asshole willing to go to any lengths to humiliate Dylan in the hopes that Lila will see Dylan as a loser and return to him.
• The antagonists of Revenge are a trio of French men guilty of, or at least complicit in, rape and attempted murder of an innocent young woman. The viewer is reminded of it constantly when they open their mouths due to either their heavily accented English or their talking among each other exclusively in French.
• We're No Angels (1989): Canadian, but still. The French-speaking bishop is the most irritable and pompous clergyman in the movie.
• The French cook in Life of Pi, who seems to delight in telling Pi's vegetarian family that they can either eat meat or stay hungry.
• Prey: Big Beard's French and an obnoxious racist to the Comanche who abandons his men.
• The young bully Michel in Hancock is a snooty French brat, complete with snooty accent, who won't stop calling Hancock an "asshole", even when nicely asked not to. The movie's set in L.A., so there was no real need for the character to be a first-generation Frenchlet except to make sure the audience would dislike him as much as possible.
• Just Married is about an American couple going through Europe on their honeymoon. Their first stop is in the Alps, and Tom gets into an argument with the hotel owner, who of course is French. He throws the couple out of the hotel when a mistake with a plug socket leads to the entire village's electricity being wiped out.
• The Legend of Zorro: The Big Bad, Count Armand. He's a leading member of an aristocratic secret society trying to trigger a civil war in the United States. He's also carried a torch for Alejandro's wife Elena since their youth, moves on her immediately after their divorce, and pressures and bullies Alejandro into cutting all contact with her. And he cheats at polo.

Literature

• In Destroyermen, there's Capitaine de Fregate (roughly equivalent to a US Navy commander) Victor Gravois of the League of Tripoli. Given that the League are all fascists, you can imagine what sort of man Gravois is.
• Harry Potter: Fleur Delacour has a little of this trope when she's first introduced, but the other characters gradually warm up to her. She's portrayed as something of a snob and shameless flirt, but changes her opinion on Harry when he rescues her sister during the Second Task. By the sixth book, she's insisting she loves her husband-to-be no matter what he looks like.
• Rigaud (also known as Blandois), the Smug Snake in Little Dorrit.
• Helena Boudreau from MARZENA, she spends a good chunk of the first book refusing to talk to the point of mutism and when she does talk it's all too often just to make some Cryptic message. Beside smelling bad and having bad hairdo from months of solitary incarceration, she doesn't seem to have anything better to talk about than morals, religions and European Superiority. And let's not forget that she's really a Tri-face bitch secretly working for the United-Bank.
• The main villain of the first book in The Outlaw Chronicles (though ultimately just a Starter Villain for the series itself) is Sheriff Ralph Murdac, aka the infamous Sheriff of Nottingham. He's identified as French in his first appearance, and is a nasty enough customer to make the Sheriff of Disney's Robin Hood (1973) look tame.
• Reynard the Fox: In the Dutch/Flemish version Curtise the posh dog is identified as French, as was common with the noblemen in those days.
• A weird meta-example occurs in Smaller & Smaller Circles: Joanna Bonifacio speaks in French to help her deal with annoying and self-aggrandizing people—such as Attorney Arcinas.
• In The Traitor Son Cycle, the supporting villains in the first three books are overwhelmingly the Galles - French Fantasy Counterpart Culture. With the exception of Comte D'Eau, they're self-righteous, misogynistic, anti-magical and Holier Than Thou assholes who think they can do whatever they want with the peasantry, and their king isn't much better. This being said, it's outright stated that the ones we see in the story have been Reassigned To Alba by their more reasonable fellows.
• Detective Giraud in the Agatha Christie novel Murder on the Links. He gets throughoutly humiliated in the end by the Belgian Hercule Poirot. The point here is that Giraud and Poirot use very different investigation methods. Giraud searches the crime scene and its vicinity for any kind of physical evidence, no matter how insignificant. Footprints, cigarette butts, etc. Poirot compares his rival to a police hound. Meanwhile, Poirot calmly contemplates the psychology of the crime and of the various people involved— getting a clearer picture of what is going on and the context of the various evidence.
• The French have been bad guys in every Matthew Reilly book they've been in. In an interview, he notes that he's never been published in France.
  • He lampshades this in Hover Car Racer when after having trouble with a famous French racer who is despised by every person outside of France and another less famous French racer the main character asks "is every French person in this sport evil?"
  • Things are shaken up a little in Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves when the French characters sent to kill Scarecrow wind up teaming up with him to take on the villain, and they turn out to be seriously awesome. Renard is even set up to become Scarecrow's new love interest.
• The narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's The Vane Sisters is a French literature professor who, upon presenting someone with their sister's suicide note, makes a point of criticizing its grammar.
• Comprehensively averted in the novels of Tom Clancy, which is notable given the writer's conservative politics and American patriotism. In Red Storm Rising, French fighters score the only kills during the first Soviet attack on a Western fleet in the Atlantic. In Patriot Games, French intelligence is sufficiently grateful to CIA for helping track down a French terrorist group's Libyan hideout that they try to repay the favor by eliminating a terrorist group that's been causing America trouble. In Executive Orders, the French government provides the cover for a high-level American diplomatic mission to Tehran that can't take place publicly. And in Rainbow Six, one of the unit's members is Sergeant Louis Loiselle, a former French paratrooper who's well liked and respected by his (mostly British and American) colleagues and superiors. All in all, Frenchmen who appear in the series are generally portrayed as loyal allies and competent professionals. The politicians who command them occasionally get a derogatory comment, but the writer makes it clear that has more to do with them being politicians than French.
• World War Z: The French soldier interviewed in the book is quite rude and condescending about the failures of the American anti-zombie campaigns like the disastrous Battle of Yonkers. But the French campaign to wipe out the zombies of the Paris catacombs was one of the most hellish and most dangerous among all nations. What's worse than fighting hordes of zombies? Fighting hordes of zombies in tightly-cramped underground conditions that make most melee weapons unworkable and any firearms besides compressed air rifles hazardous to use thanks to build-up of explosive gases, while also contending with flooded sections and potentially fatal falls. Oh, and they did this in the pitch-black dark. His dismissiveness about bragging American soldiers when their action was a relative cake-walk is somewhat warranted.

Live-Action TV

• An early episode of 7th Heaven had a rather rude French exchange student who smoked and ruined everyone's illusion regarding romantic French people.
• There was an episode of Bangkok Airport with an obnoxious, bitchy and racist French tourist insulting the airport staff for the flight she just missed, even though it was her own fault she missed it in the first place by getting drunk mere hours before, and she couldn't buy another ticket because she used up all her money to get drunk.
• Henri on Cheers, who made no attempt to hide the fact that he was going to steal Woody's girlfriend. Sam endured the taunts of that very same self-aggrandizing Frenchman until said Frenchman insulted America. Sam then challenged the Frenchman to see who could collect the most phone numbers from women in the bar. When, out of guilt, Sam opted not to get the phone numbers of the two nice women who would have put his total over the top and thereby lost the contest, the Frenchman cheered, "I win! I win! France has won!"
• In an episode of Coupling, one of Susan's clients is a woman named Giselle, who is referred to as "The French Bitch" so much it might as well be her last name. We only see her for a split second at the end of the episode, so whether or not she was an actual bitch is up to the imagination.
• In the classic-series Doctor Who episode "The King's Demons", the only French character behaves in a haughty and deliberately offensive manner. Not surprisingly, he turns out to be the villain — as in the villain during this period of the series ( it's the Master in disguise). Unfortunately, the effects of his trying to be intentionally divisive are rather undermined by his similarity to the French Taunter in both atrocious accent and ridiculous dialog and behavior.
• Season 5 of The Flash introduces yet another version of Harrison Wells named Harrison Sherloque Wells. He is a brilliant French detective, who appears to be an amalgamation of his namesake and Hercule Poirot. He and Cisco are immediately at odds, he's incredibly lazy and sneaky, snobbish (takes 20 minutes to make tea), casually dismisses Ralph (a fellow detective), and he has five ex-wives (hence his exorbitant fees - gotta pay that alimony). That said, he is actually a great detective, able to Sherlock Scan the crap out of Team Flash and quickly identifies Cisco's location by listening to crickets and having Cisco describe the trees around him.
• Forever: Marisol has a French accent and occasionally makes insulting comments, such as when she blithely tells June that the things she says sound stupid but provide an interesting perspective.
• Michel Gerard of Gilmore Girls is a very obnoxious French guy who works with Lorelai at the Independence Inn. Turns out he's really a Jerk with a Heart of Gold because he's really fond of Lorelai, Rory or Sookie.
  Michel: Lorelai, I don't know how many French people you've met over the years, but most of them are insufferable.
  Lorelai: Really?
  Michel: Mm-hm. That is why I left France.
• Show up quite frequently on Good Eats, typically representative of "conventional" ways of culinary thinking and/or the restaurant industry.
• The Happy Days episode "The Duel" has possibly the jerkiest Frenchman ever depicted, an arrogant exchange student and fencing champion who insults everything from America to Joanie. Richie challenges him to a duel, but Fonz takes his place and thoroughly kicks his ass.
• In the third Horatio Hornblower series, Hornblower is saddled with Major Côtard, a French expatriate who is providing intelligence to the British against Napoleon.^note In the book, he was a naval lieutenant born on the British island of Guernsey, where French is spoken, and Hornblower simply borrowed him from another ship because he didn't have a good enough accent despite his fluency. Hornblower and Bush instinctively mistrust him because he's French, and Côtard doesn't help by complaining about shipboard conditions and trying to push them around. He does prove, however, that he's a genuine ally and seems a little hurt to have been mistrusted.
• One episode of The Inbetweeners featured Simon's French exchange partner, Patrice. He was surly and uncommunicative to everyone except Will's love interest Charlotte, whom he slept with instead.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Lestat de Lioncourt is from France, and he's a murderer and an abusive partner and parent. He also engages in Cultural Posturing; he views America as a "primitive country," looks down on banjo music (which originated among African Americans), and believes New Orleans was better when it was reigned by the French.
• MacGyver (1985): A couple of times.
  • The Road Not Taken: Gilbert Arnaud is a Frenchman running a refugee camp in Southeast Asia, just across the border from a country in the middle of a genocide. He's also on the payroll of Chantarra, a senior officer carrying out said genocide, and tips him off when Mac sneaks across the border to try to help rescue the inhabitants of an orphanage, very nearly getting him killed. Pete exposes him in the nick of time.
  • The Odd Triple: Mac and his pilot friend Jack Dalton are framed for robbing a French heiress of her jewels. The local police chief's hostility towards them is understandable, but he crosses the line into this when he agrees to torture the two of them for the jewels' location, burns their American passports to prevent any interference from their government, and denies all knowledge when Mac's boss makes inquiries. All because the heiress' chief of security suggested to him that retrieving her jewels by any means necessary would be good for his career.
  • Inverted in The Escape, where Mac infiltrates a North African prison run by a corrupt regime. Francois Villars, the only Frenchman in the prison, is also the only decent person he encounters, who helps him gain access to the prisoner he's looking for and then insists on helping him escape even after Mac says he's risked enough already. It doesn't hurt that he's innocent, only being in prison "for the crime of not bribing a judge."
• An episode of My Name Is Earl had a French character that Earl bullied in grade school. He held a grudge against Earl, and upon seeing him again, knocked Earl out with a headbutt. Near the end of the episode it's revealed that the Frenchman came to America in grade school to flirt with the women, his accent having a much sexier effect in America than in France, where it's commonplace. After Earl fulfills the Frenchman's purpose for coming, by taking him out to meet the girls he knew from grade school (including one of the teachers) and having sex^note i.e. making out with them, the Frenchman's view of Earl and America as a whole change. Then the Frenchman lets it slip that he is in fact married, and now has cheated on his wife with several women. Kinda of Jerkass thing to do.
• The Chameleon in Season 3 of NCIS: Los Angeles is revealed to be a French national in the season finale, although he goes far beyond merely being a jerk.
• Root into Europe: Mr. Root assumes all Frenchmen are arrogant intellectuals.
• Sharpe: Surprisingly often subverted. While there are of course some awful men in Napoleon's Army for Sharpe and co. to tangle with, some of the French soldiers have their own nobility and bravery about them. Like Colonel Dubreton from Sharpe's Enemy who is a dutiful soldier just trying to save his own wife Sarah from the captivity of the Dangerous Deserter and monstrous rapist Hakeswill; despite fighting for opposing countries, Sharpe and Dubreton work together to defeat Hakeswill and save the women.
  • Played very straight however by slimy French spymaster Major Pierre Ducos, who is a prick to even his allies, he cruelly insults the recently-deceased Teresa as a "Spanish whore who waged war on France", displays a nasty misogynist streak in interactions with women, and he's a cowardly Non-Action Guy to boot.
• In one episode of The Thin Blue Line, everyone at the police station is forced to attend diversity training, but when they're instructed to arrest an illegal immigrant, they get the wrong guy — causing a major incident because he is actually the European Commissioner for Human Rights (and black). The man turns out to be a French Jerk and instantly starts complaining about everything in Britain: "You British. No wonder we all hate you. Your chocolate isn't chocolatey enough. Your bananas are too long and bendy. And you insist on eating prawn cocktail crisps despite the fact that we have told you not to!"
• Enter, The Dragon of Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters. It's not known whether he is really French or is even human, but he seems to consider himself French and is fluent in the language, with frequent use of Gratuitous French.
• In The West Wing, the President's youngest daughter took on a French Jerk boyfriend - much to the chagrin of most of the rest of the cast. For most of his run he was just a little bit of a jackass, derided by the gang because he's French but mainly because he knocked Charlie out of the picture. At the end of the fourth season, however, he gives ecstasy GHB to the daughter, making her kidnapping easier for the perpetrators. Just to pile on the jerkiness, he is written as demanding immunity from prosecution before he'll help US authorities locate her.
• The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: Generally does not apply: the series' portrayal of World War One is heavy on Gray-and-Gray Morality, all countries provide their share of good and bad characters, the French no more than anyone else. The French soldier who forcibly evacuates Dr. Schweitzer and his family from Africa fits all the stereotypes, however, being rude and unhelpful to the doctor's family and responding that he doesn't take orders from Belgians when Indy^note a volunteer in the Belgian Army and his friend Remi ask him to behave better. This turns out to be a mistake, as Remi (who's much bigger than he is) immediately gets in his face and forces him to carry the doctor's wife's luggage, while berating him in French for his total lack of "French gallantry."

Music

• The Capitol Steps song parody "Euro Pest" is about having Euro Disney staffed entirely by French Jerks.
• "Genius in France" by "Weird Al" Yankovic says that French people are "snotty and rude" but still go gaga over the singer.
• "The Frog Princess"^note 'Frog' being a pejorative slur against the French[ by The Divine Comedy details a fling between the singer and a French woman about whom he has very little positive to say after the fact. According to him, she considered monogamous love to be a waste of time, and that she became a 'cow' after just one kiss. After breaking up with her, he found himself imagining her getting beheaded in a public execution. The first few bars of 'La Marseillaise' (the national anthem of France) features as a recurring theme throughout the song, to accentuate the French connection.

Pinballs

• Francois de Grimm from Medieval Madness.
  I am Francois de Grimm and I shall be rude to you!
• The Dark Queen in Pro Pinball: The Web.

Pro Wrestling

• Frenchy Martin, manager of Dino Bravo, from the Rock & Wrestling Era of the WWE. Martin though is a variation on this trope as he was a Franco-Canadian jerk. He dressed the part, wearing a beret with monocle and goatee, and waving the flag of Quebec as he made his way to the arena with Bravo.
• Jean-Paul Leveque from WCW fit this in the mid-'90s. He was little more than a mid-carder until he went to the WWF and became pompous blue-blood Hunter Hearst Helmsley.
• La Résistance, a heel stable of René Duprée and Sylvan Grenier, who usually feuded with All American Faces. Both were Canadian in real life but portrayed as being from France - which was likely a combination of this trope and WWE having an odd policy about not billing Canadian wrestlers from Canada unless they had 'Canadian gimmicks'. They later added Rob Conway to their ranks, and he insisted he be called Róbert. After René Duprée was drafted to Smackdown, he kept up the French Jerk gimmick on his own, while the other two continued the tag team now being billed from Quebec and incorporating the blue and white colours of Quebec onto their gear to differentiate them.
• Maryse is the rare female example. Although a face in developmental, she asked to portray a heel when she was called up to TV. She portrayed an arrogant Alpha Bitch who would cut promos mixing French and English (a side effect of the former being her first language and still learning while she was training to wrestle). She would flip out if she was referred to as Canadian, insisting to be distinguished as French-Canadian, and complaining about anyone who mispronounced her name. Throughout her entire wrestling career, she did not play a face until 2019, twelve years after her main roster debut.

Puppet Shows

• Marvin Suggs of The Muppet Show is a demented, egocentric jerk who enjoys abusing his Muppaphones for the sake of entertainment.
  Guest: Are you going to hurt these adorable living creatures?
  Marvin Suggs: Of course-ah! You cannot get mu-sic from dead creatures!
• The Poupons from the Dinosaurs episode "Getting to Know You" were this trope as prehistoric birds. They spoke in French accents and were extremely rude to the Sinclairs.

Radio

• According to Bleak Expectations, Victorian-era France is filled with people who sigh superciliously whenever a tourist asks them a question, and they're not above killing and cooking any Englishman they find (even if said Englishman comes in the form of a giant dinosaur). It's also how series Big Bad Mister Gently Benevolent disguises himself, complete with striped vest, beret, and an "air of undeserved satisfaction".
• Cabin Pressure: The airport manager in "Douz", who takes full advantage of the fact his airport is the last stop before the Tunisian desert to extort anyone who stops there with exorbitant fees, and ramping up the prices further if anyone complains. He strands an entire plane's worth of people thanks to this when the company they hired went bust and were unable to pay, and when MJN take them on as passengers, he charges them for that company's late fees.

Tabletop Games

• Flintloque is a Napoleonic Wars wargame set in an Earth with the usual array of fantasy races and Fantasy Counterpart Cultures. The French analogues are elves, with all that that implies. Oh, and the German analogues are dwarves and the British, orcs.
• Bretonnia in Warhammer 1st Edition was ze pre-Revolutionary Frenchjerklandia, known largely for its decadent nobility, downtrodden peasantry and rotten-to-the-core politics (though it did produce nice duelling pistols). Later editions swapped this out for a whole new identity: think King Arthur's Avalon meets The Dung Ages, a rural medieval backwater where filthy, illiterate, inbred cretins pay 95% of their income in tax to filthy rich, out-of-touch, also inbred nobles and knights who are anything but chivalrous. Still later editions toned it down a little: many lords and knights are genuinely heroic (although they refuse to look into this newfangled "gunpowder" nonsense) and a few genuinely kind to their peasants with some areas of Bretonnia being economically viable. A lord who abuses his feudal privileges such as the Droit du Seigneur may even find himself besieged by fellow Bretonnians, although not so much out of just righteousness as his making the aristocracy look bad.
• Ambuscade (real name Ancel Moreau), one of the villains in Sentinels of the Multiverse, is a French former actor who decided to start Hunting the Most Dangerous Game instead. He's so incredibly stuck-up that the "horrible scarring" that made him quit acting was a tiny scar on his cheek. He eventually pulls a Heel–Face Turn and becomes the hero Stuntman, though he's still ridicuously self-centered (his deck is based around taking over other people's turns, to the point one card literally gives him a second turn in a row).

Theater

• The French Ambassador in Of Thee I Sing.
• Doctor Caius of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.
  • Pretty much every (male) French character in Shakespeare, for that matter, though it's averted in All's Well That Ends Well and Love's Labour's Lost where nearly all the characters are at least nominally French, and possibly subverted in King Lear, in which the King of France is impressed by Cordelia's honesty and marries her despite her recent disinheritance.
  • Played especially straight in Henry V, with the French noblemen being complete and utter jerks. The only exception is Mountjoy the herald (who is not, of course, a noble).
    • Not jerks, necessarily. The king is beleaguered and Catherine is completely innocent. Plus, when you consider the pile of BS that is Henry's claim to the throne of France, the nobles' antipathy towards the English invaders is understandable...the Dauphin was always rather contemptuous, though, and not just of the English.
• Lampshaded as a one-shot joke in the West End version of Avenue Q's musical number Everyone's A Little Bit Racist:
  Princeton: Well, sure, Gary, but lots of people tell black jokes. But I bet you tell jokes about French people, right?
  Gary: Yeah, sure I do! Those French people are such assholes.
  Princeton: Now don't you think that's a little racist?

Video Games

• Audrey from HuniePop is the only girl of French descent, and is a total Alpha Bitch.
• Jean-Paul "JP" Arsenault from the SSX video game series. Self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-serving, and arrogant, JP has a gigantic but fragile ego and is easily unnerved by any hint of disrespect towards himself. Basically, he only pretends to be a jerk to hide his severe insecurity. But that doesn't mean he isn't still a jerk; His SSX Blur profile still lists his "trait" as "Arrogant.
• The Spy of Team Fortress 2 fame can be quite unpleasant to everyone else during a Kill Streak.
  The Spy: (to the Demoman) Here's what I have that you don't - a functioning liver, depth perception, and a pulse!
  The Spy: (to the Heavy) Awww, too bad this wasn't a PIE-EATING CONTEST!
  The Spy: (to the Pyro) Dominated, you mush-mouthed freak!
  The Spy: (to the Engineer) Yippee-ki-yay, my dead illiterate friend! ^*(May we point out that the Engineer's bio states he has 11 hard science PhDs, and the Spy still calls him illiterate?)
  The Spy: (to the Medic) I'm looking at your X-Ray, and I'm afraid you suck!
  The Spy: (to the Scout) Here lies Scout. He ran fast and died a virgin!
  The Spy: (to the Sniper) Perhaps they can bury you in that van you call home!
  The Spy: (to the Soldier) At least you died for honor... and my amusement!
  • Apart from his domination lines, the Spy is very polite to his teammates, and sometimes his enemies.
    The Spy: My appreciation, amigo.
    The Spy: (to an enemy Spy) I'll see you in hell... you handsome rogue!
• The Marquis de Singe from Tales of Monkey Island. And is not actually French.
  • Captain René Rottingham from Curse seems to be French.
• Cooking Mama for the Wii has pictures of children that represent all the different countries the food originates from. France is the only child that is frowning, it also wears a beret and holds a glass of wine.
• Remy, from the Street Fighter III series. Though, his Jerk attitude might stem from him being a nihilist, not necessarily French. Abel from Street Fighter IV and Manon from Street Fighter VI avert this, however. They are both friendly and polite to everyone, and while Manon does call Marisa "simple" in their fight, she doesn't seem to mean it as an insult and Marisa doesn't take it as one.
• George Stobbart's condescending, some-time love rival Andre in the Broken Sword series is arguably this.
• In the Neverwinter Nights mod The Bastard of Kosigan, the French are the bad guys and most Frenchmen you meet are less than pleasant.
• The King of Fighters gives us Ash Crimson. Snide, condescending, manipulative, and ambushes people when they're at their weakest. However, by XIII, it's revealed he's a Good All Along Guile Hero.
• Wonder-Green from The Wonderful 101, though that can be more chalked up to his age than his nationality. His file also mentions that he tends to let loose from the strict upbringing his parents enforce on him.
• Jean Pierre from Fighter's History isn't as bad as other examples, but he's still very arrogant and vain.
• Princess Sarah from the Richman series is sometimes a princess from France, and she's arrogant and selfish. She can advance to the next round in 8's Story Mode by throwing a temper tantrum when hospitalized, goes to jail or bankrupts!
• Dragon Age:
  • The Orlesian Empire, or at least its upper crust, is often depicted in this light. Besides its history of military expansionism, it's full of arrogant, complaining nobles who regularly partake in murder, intrigue, and the eating of stinky cheeses.
  • Leliana, on the other hand, is one of the sweetest characters in the game (though she does have an unsavory past).
  • Duke Prosper de Montfort (who sells Qunari intelligence to a Tal-Vashoth without regard for the bloodshed he's causing) and Baron Arlange (who attempts to kill Hawke for not going along with the fixed hunt) in the Mark of the Assassin DLC module are especially good examples.
• Subverted in Psychonauts with The Genetic Memory of Napoleon Bonaparte, who seems like this, but he is really trying to give his wimpy descendant Training from Hell, and seems genuinely pleased when he loses. His soldier pieces on the game board play the trope straight though.
• There is a very smug French croupier at the Pair o'Dice Casino in Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love for Sail!.
• Sakuya le Bel Shirogane of Hatoful Boyfriend is a Foreign Exchange Student from, yes, France. On top of that he's an aristocrat whose family's money instantly got him the position of Class Representative. He is haughty, touchy, and generally insufferable; his Hidden Depths hold something better but it takes a lot of melting or trauma to get to them. In contrast his half-brother Yuuya is always friendly to the point of sometimes being a lech, but backs off instantly if told he's crossed a line.
• The Kalos region of Pokémon X and Y is based on France so its villain organization Team Flare fits. Most of its members are petty crooks after money and power while claiming to be The Beautiful Elite. Ironically, their leader Lysandre is an aversion; he's the most polite out of the franchise's villains.
  • Averted in the rest of the game itself with many NPCs being very nice.
• In The Matrix: Path of Neo the Merovingian's jerk-ness is further explored in that he traps Neo in the chateau and forces him to fight his way out. In the meantime Neo learns that the Frenchman has his own Mooks tortured or deleted for failure.
• Played with in Saints Row: The Third; Philippe Loren is a haughty jerk with a heavy French accent... but he's actually Belgian and being mistaken for French is one of his pet peeves.
• Subverted in Saints Row IV with the Female 2 voice option. This Boss is just as much as a violent sociopath as the other personalities, and just as merciless to her enemies, but she's also the nicest and most respectful toward her allies.
• Referenced in Far Cry 3 when you first meet Citra:
  Citra: Did they teach you to speak without permission in America?
  Jason: No, I learned that in France.
• In Bravely Default, Erutus Profiteur is the very French holder of the merchant asterisk and Chairman of the Khamer & Profiteur Merchantry in Ancheim. As if it wasn't bad enough that he works for the duchy that is trying to bring down the warriors of light, he's also a corrupt businessman who charges an arm and a leg for water in a desert town. Of course, if people don't like his prices they can always go get water for free from the nearby oasis... where a gang of bandits is known to stake out in order to rob blind anyone who comes by looking for water. Bandits, as it turns out, were hired by Profiteur himself in order to dissuade people from going to the oasis and make staying in town and paying his high prices the more appealing option. Not helping his case is the fact that he's one of the three Jobmasters plotting to overthrow the duchy for their own personal gain. Come the sequel, he's still a jerk who only cares about making money, but he's at least given up trying to do so through evil and underhanded methods, which is probably the best you can expect out of him. Also, it turns out his French-ness is Just a Stupid Accent, as actual native French-speaker Magnolia can't understand a single word he says.
  • Bravely Default II has Folie, bearer of the Pictomancer asterisk and master of the Earth Crystal, who speaks with a strong French accent. A Mad Artist not content to use any old pigments for her masterpiece, she kills Roddy and Lily's daughter, Mona, in an explosion to drive Roddy into a grief-induced state of madness and force him to make blue paint from chemical waste. Additionally, she murders many residents of Wiswald to use their blood for red paint, and overgrows the trees around the town with the Earth Crystal's power to source her yellow paint, leaving their children orphaned and homeless. Not to mention she helped ransack Musa in order to obtain the Earth Crystal in the first place.
• Overwatch has Widowmaker, who while considered sexy, is a cold-blooded murderer who takes pleasure in killing and is one of the antagonists in the game, serving terrorist organization Talon. Not to mention the fact that she acts like a complete Jerkass to everyone else, and is by-and-large the cause of — or at the very least a major factor in — the major events of the game. In an interesting twist, however, she did not choose to be like this. She was once known as Amélie Lacroix, a completely innocent Nice Girl who did nothing wrong of her accord. However, she was kidnapped by said organization and was turned into Widowmaker as she is known today, through intense brainwashing and neural reconditioning. She's also the only French person in the cast, besides her dead husband Gerard.
• TRON 2.0: Eva Popoff is one of the Terrible Trio from fCon who orchestrate the kidnapping of Alan Bradley, plan the Datawraith project, and her emails are gleeful and nearly unhinged about the prospect of global domination over the human world and godlike status in the virtual one.
• Red Dead Redemption 2 has Charles Chatenay, who claims he is this (calling himself a "whole ass") but in fact is funny, charming, and a fairly nice guy, at least to Arthur. His antics typically involve sleeping with other men's wives as well as hosting art shows where people get to see their loved ones drawn in the nude. Eventually his actions get him so much heat that he is forced to leave the country for South America.
• Phantasy Star Portable 2 gives us Chelsea, the bubbly "French" robot secretary merc, who, in an aversion, is the nicest character on the space station your character is assigned to.
• Guilty Gear inverts this with Ky Kiske, who is French and one of the nicest, polite and idealistic characters in the series as befitting a Knight in Shining Armor, getting paired up as the Hero Antagonist to Sol Badguy (who is American and incarnates both aspects of the Eagleland trope). He also had a Knight Templar streak on him because of his black-and-white views, but Character Development knocked that off.
• Soul Series: Raphael Sorel is an arrogant French noble as exemplified by his battle taunts and general attitude. However, he becomes an Anti-Villain after getting an adoptive daughter, who is the only person whom he is nice to. He became much less of a jerk in the series' reboot.
• Assassin's Creed seems to love this type of character and includes them in almost entry as assassination targets:
  • Robert de Sablé, the series' very first Big Bad in Assassin's Creed has a very strong accent and typical name, and as Grandmaster of the Templars, he served as the Arch-Enemy to Altair and the Assassin's Order. Played with Garnier de Naplouse, who is also French and a twisted Mad Scientist to booth, but he has an otherwise "lovable grandfather" attitude and lacks the obvious accent, unlike Robert.
  • Baron Octavian of Valois in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is an evil nobleman in league with the Borgia family. He is exceedingly condescending towards the Italians and seems to believe that he'll eventually conquer all of Italy, or so Cesare lets him think.
    Octavian of Valois: "You must learn how to speak French. It would mask your barbaric sensibilities."
  • Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and its expansion Freedom's Cry: Julien du Casse is a French arms dealer in the employ of the Caribbean Templars. While he has a somewhat sympathetic backstory (he left the French's service after being disgusted with their brutality and slavery), he still acts like an elitist ass towards Edward Kenway, calling him a "peasant". Pierre, Marquis of Fayet in Freedom's Cry appears just like a typical foppish French noble, but then he proves to be so much worse than this, bein an evil colonialist and a slaver. He distinguishes himself in that he isn't even a Templar, but comes off as even more evil than them.
  • Louis-Joseph Gaultier, Chevalier de la Vérendrye in Assassin's Creed Rogue is an interesting variation of this trope: unlike other examples in the series who are either Templars or unrelated villains, he is actually an Assassin (i.e. one of the good guys) and he is a massive jerk towards Shay Patrick Cormac since the very start of the game, provoking a fight with him and never losing an opportunity to belittle him afterwards. It says something that when Shay joins the Templars and is forced to kill his former comrades, he expresses regret and sadness... But not for Chevalier whom he despises deeply.
• Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal: Scorpion is a big Brain in a Jar robot with a French accent. He's a gladiator and not a real villain, but he's very arrogant and quite a jerk.
• In Disco Elysium's French-inspired fantasy setting, many characters have French accents, jerks or not. However, it doesn't stop the game indulging in the stereotype for a few specific scenes, if only to play with expectations:
  • In the very early game, you get the opportunity to call your detective's police station. All of the officers (save for American-Buddy Cop Show Genre Refugee characters Torson and McLaine) have extremely French accents and all of them seem rude and unhelpful, making fun of your character's misfortunes and yelling abusive comments at him for the deadpan French-accented radio operator to pass on to you. However, over the course of your interactions, it becomes apparent they are not actually jerks - they are, in fact, responding in kind to your character's jerk behaviour, and worry about him under it all.
  • Jean Vicquemere was played in the original release with an exaggerated, flamboyant Maurice Chevalier Accent to emphasise his rage towards the player character. In The Final Cut, he was recast with an actual Frenchman with a hybrid French-American accent, causing some players to express criticism that the new Jean sounded too nice. Or that his accent sounded fake.
  • Definitely forms some of the humor in the running gag of your character attempting to rename himself "Raphael Ambrosius Costeau".
• Downplayed in Paper Mario: The Origami King. The villainous Colored Pencils has a French name (Jean-Pierre Colored Pencils the 12th) but doesn't display any stereotypical French Jerk traits or hints of his nationality.
• Wizard101: Pierre Gallantmane, Wizard City's amulet shopkeeper, introduces himself to you by telling you to buy something or get out. He also refers to the Then-Faire as a "silly little harlequinade of infants and imbeciles dressed as cavemen or something equally regressive".

Webcomics

• Mocked in one issue of Penny Arcade, with a one-off appearance by Raven, who is also an arrogant Mac user.
• Pierre, the illegal immigrant to the U.S.A. in C'est la Vie. Just very occasionally his sister Mona, who has been in the U.S.A. longer and is legally resident.
• Chloe De Sade in Rival Angels is from France, and she is a heel in a world where Pro Wrestling Is Real.
• Scandinavia and the World: Brother France, pictured above, is rude and vulgar, having no problem with urinating in public.

Web Original

• Alice Boucher of Survival of the Fittest: one of her biggest regrets about being in America is that she doesn't know any insults in English. Due to Character Development after being put on the island (as well as a change in writer), she grows out of this very quickly though.
• Channel Awesome:
  • The contributors occasionally play up Benzaie as one of these.
  • Sad Panda's persona marinades itself in this.
• Poland Ball: This is France's usual characterization (one strip has him go on strike for a few days, treating it as a vacation, and when all his demands are met, he still refuses so he can go to the Cheese, Garlic and Arrogance Festival. And then there's his treatment of his colonies...
• This entry on Not Always Working has the cashier at a restaurant in France insult a family of tourists she assumes are American, in French. To which the narrator, a bilingual Canadian, demands to see her manager, in fluent French. The manager gives them their meals for free and pries the rude cashier away from her till literally kicking and screaming.
• During the Tomb Raider review (specifically, The Angel of Darkness), the Joueur du Grenier noted that every character in the Paris level is a jackass who's rude to the main character... and notes that this is the one aspect of reality the game got perfectly right.

Western Animation

• Nanette Manoir from Angela Anaconda is Franco-Canadian rather than French, but otherwise fits this trope perfectly. Although, as the titular character points out quite often to the viewers, Nanette really isn't French at all; she's just faking it because she thinks it makes her sound cultured. Indeed, the Bilingual Bonus is that anyone listening who actually knows French can tell Nanette is often either flat-out mistaken or making it up when she uses "French" words, and the plot of one story is an actual French girl (who is far nicer than Nanette is) joins the class and nearly reveals she can't speak a word of French.
• Bob's Burgers: In "Mutiny on the Windbreaker", Bob gets shanghaied by an eccentric ship's captain who insists on making him his personal chef. On the ship Bob meets Duval, a cantankerous French chef who does the cooking for the passengers and has grown bitter and cynical after being shanghaied himself and being stuck on the ship for months.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • Le Quack, the antagonistic French duck. "Stupeed Amereecans!"
  • And the Napoleon Bonaparte look-alike, who spouts the same catchphrase.
• Dan Vs. has the main antagonist, Chef Puree in "Fancy Restaurant", who has thrown Dan in the dungeon along with the other chefs who had opposed him.
• The Davincibles: Quaba looks very French, and is very much a jerk.
• On Dilbert the title character goes to the dry cleaners only to be abused by the French-sounding owners. When he mentions that he is not there to complain, they say that they're not French, only rude, and it just sounds better with a French accent.
• In one Donald Duck short, The Trial of Donald Duck, Donald has a picnic which gets rained out, so he goes into the first shelter he spots: a French restaurant, where the maître d'hôtel, named Pierre, overcharges him for his own picnic food. Donald is unable to pay (it comes out to $35.99, and all he has is a nickel), so Pierre takes Donald to court, and the judge finds Donald guilty, forcing him to spend the next ten days at the restaurant washing dishes. Donald hits Pierre with Laser-Guided Karma, however, as the duck breaks most of the dishes after he washes them. Pierre begs him to stop, but Donald ignores him.
  Donald: You heard what the judge said: ten days!
• One Episode of The Fairly OddParents! reveals that one of Cosmo's and Wanda's former godchildren was a French boy named Pierre who has a very low opinion on Americans and is generally a Jerkass to Timmy. He even says that he wished for all French people to be rude to Americans.
• Lampshaded on Futurama, with the one-off joke about the "Republic of French Stereotypes". Nobody likes them.
• The episode "Princess Problems" of the Gummi Bears has a French-accent King and his daughter visiting King Gregor's castle. The French princess is a mean spoiled brat.
• Most of the French characters in Histeria! are portrayed in a negative light, with Napoleon Bonaparte in particular being given a Historical Villain Upgrade. This may have to do with the fact that the directors, writers, and producers had a distinctly Francophobic bias. It is for this reason why the show did very poorly in French-speaking countries.
• Horrid Henry has an episode where Perfect Peter's French pen-pal Sammy visits. Sammy is incredibly manipulative, repeatedly gets Henry into trouble, and tries to steal from Peter's family.
• The Johnny Bravo episode "Non, Oui, Oui Pour Johnny" has Johnny and his mother take a French class where the teacher is a French-accented jerk who is obsessed with stinky cheese and responds to Johnny winning the final quiz by chewing up Johnny's tickets to France as well as his passort, then messing up his hair. The last action results in Johnny's mom kicking the man's ass.
• In the Johnny Test revival episode "Johnny Test, 90210", Johnny messing with his sisters' teleporter warps reality and fuses their hometown with different locations. When he turns it into a Paris hybrid, his family all turn into mimes with his sisters assaulting him with a baguette for seemingly no reason.
• Discussed in The Looney Tunes Show episode "It's a Handbag!" after Lola offers to buy a painting for $22 from the Louvre. The French woman she tries to buy it from walks away, visibly annoyed.
  Lola (irritated): The French really are rude!
• Mr. Rude in The Mr. Men Show. In fact, every dub of him (US, UK, Australia) has him French!
• Averted in The Octonauts where the French-accented remipedes initially seem like they're going to be a nuisance to Shellington being wary of him in their cave, but prove to be wholly helpful and actually nice after he passes the literal smell test by leading the team out by smell, upside down at that. Being that it's an education show, real remipedes are actually blind and swim upside down.
• ReBoot has Cecil, who was rude to everyone but Dot, his employer.
• The Simpsons:
  • Alluded to in You Only Move Twice when Hank Scorpio, the supervillain currently employing Homer, needs to test his new Kill Sat:
    Hank Scorpio: Hey Homer! What's your least favorite country: France, or Italy?
    Homer: Uh... France?
    Hank Scorpio: Hahaha! Nobody ever says Italy.
  • In "The Trouble with Trillions", it's explained that Mr. Burns stole a Trillion Dollar Bill that was intended to re-build Europe after WWII. While waiting for the never arriving money the Charles DeGaulle knockoff declares: "I say we just act snooty to [the Americans] forever!"
  • Also lampshaded in "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner?". When a French chef tells him to "get lost", Flanders responds, "A rude Frenchman? Well, I never!"
  • In "Trilogy of Error", Lisa mistakenly winds up at West Springfield Elementary School, which looks exactly like Springfield Elementary, discovering a French class where her classroom would be.
    Lisa: I'm at the wrong school!
    Students: HA HA HA HA HA HA!
    French Teacher: [wagging finger] En français.
    Students: HON HON HON HON HON HON!
  • There was also "Bart-Mangled Banner", where a deaf Bart mooning the American flag ends up getting the family in jail. After they escape the prison through a waterway, they encounter a boat filled with French people going back to France, who tell them to come with them and "snub the country that saved (them) twice in war".
• Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM): Antoine the Coyote, who was quite rude to Sonic, though to be fair, Sonic was often hard on him. He gets Character Development in the Archie comics but never quite got there in the show before it was cancelled.
• Jean "Crook" Duprey from Spiral Zone.
• Le Spatula on SpongeBob SquarePants. Despite being a spatula, it refuses to flip Krabby Patties, preferring to cook only fancy food. It also laughs haughtily at SpongeBob and addresses the Krusty Krab customs as "peasants" and spits at them.
• Jacques and Josee of Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race are francophone Canadians; however, both of them are rude, arrogant, and ill-tempered towards the other contestants, Josee more so than Jacques.
• Jean Pierre (or J.P. for short) of T.O.T.S.. He speaks with a heavy French accent. He is extremely egotistical and even looked down on Pip and Freddy for not being storks at first. He can show his soft side at times, though. Hence, it's downplayed.
• In Ultimate Spider-Man, Batroc the Leaper (see Comic Books, above) shows up several times. His French Jerk tendencies seem to have been greatly exaggerated for the show.
• The French Peas in VeggieTales are for the most part in the show, usually friendly and kind, if not mischievous at times. However, early in the show’s run, whenever re-enacting Bible stories, they were often cast as the villainous characters, such as the Philistines, the guards at the wall of Jericho, the Egyptian slave drivers and Ninevites in Jonah.
• Victor of Victor & Hugo - Bunglers in Crime, who is noticeably ruder and more bad-tempered than Hugo (though almost invariably TO Hugo).
• Due to being given a French accent, Dick Dastardly becomes this in the Latin American Spanish dub of Wacky Races and Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines. To drive it even further, he's also given the name "Pierre Nodoyuna" to go with it.

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