French vice

French vice

English

Noun

the French vice (uncountable)

1. (derogatory, potentially offensive) Euphemistic form of lust.
   • 1988, Jasper Ridley, A Brief History of the Tudor Age:

     The Englishman had a reputation throughout Europe for gluttony; it was said that overeating was the English vice, just as lust was the French vice and drunkenness the German vice. Some Englishmen became very fat, and were famous for being so. Henry VIII ate enormous meals, but as a young man he was slim, perhaps because he always took a great deal of physical exercise. By the time that he was forty-five he was suffering from painful ulcers in his leg which prevented him from riding or walking without the greatest difficulty; but though he ceased to take exercise, he ate as much as ever. He then became very fat.

2. (derogatory, potentially offensive) Euphemistic form of homosexuality.
   • 1994, Arnold Bennett translating Lise Noël as Intolerance: A General Survey, p. 95:

     Sexuality is frequently associated with foreign places in the dominant discourse, especially when the phenomenon being considered assumes an automatically negative connotation. The Romans held the Greeks responsible for homosexuality, while the latter attributed it to the Persians and the peoples of the Near East; in the Middle Ages, westerners blamed the Muslims... Depending on the period and the context, love between men would also be denounced as the "Indochinese vice" or the "Arab vice" (by the colonizers)... and the "English vice" (by the French) or the "French vice" (by the English)... when everyone did not agree that it was the "German vice".

   • 2005, Mark Caldwell, New York Night, p. 133:

     Of the dozen or so surviving articles, squibs, and letters to the editor, the most remarkable appeared in the Whip and Satirist’s February 12, 1842, issue, and disclosed the existence of a cabal of gay men in New York's otherwise wholesome nightscape of brothels and riots. Moreover it identified the spider who minced so delicately along the wide-flung strands of the sodomitical web. "There is not one so degraded as this Captain Collins, the King of the Sodomites." He was a foreigner, an Englishman, in the long tradition of blaming homosexuality on the influence of aliens. Among the syndicate of perverts, the writer announced, "we find no Americans as yet—they are all Englishmen or French" (the English called homosexuality the French vice and the French the English vice; for the Whip it was the French and English vice).

3. (derogatory, potentially offensive) Euphemistic form of vanity, excessive self-pride.
   • 2011, Nicholas Freeling, Criminal Conversation, p. 97:

     The national character, he thought vaguely, is a thing about which a lot of nonsense is spoken and believed. They are very proud of what they call 'sobriety'—spoken of as the national virtue daily. Looking at both-sides-of-the-penny, down-to-earth, you-can't-fool-me... If hypocrisy is the English vice, and vanity the French vice, and obedience the German vice, then surely sobriety is the Dutch vice.

Coordinate terms

• the English vice, the German vice, the Oriental vice