ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the power relationships between the two cultures, French and British, as shown through the traumatic events of D-Day, the Landings, and the early days of the Liberation of Normandy. It explains the constitutive nature of language itself in the framing and reframing of experience. The chapter examines the grammars of these Franco-British accounts in two key respects: the types of verbs that are used, and the grammatical positioning of the British and the French in each other's accounts. The main lines then of the grammar of representation of the 'other' in Franco-British participant accounts are shared by the two groups – movement versus stasis, action versus inaction, the onlooker status of the French, and the French as objects of the verbs. Broadly speaking, in French postwar texts, there appear to have been two main ways of dealing with this grammar – one by avoidance, and one by what we might call the tactic of subversion.
