I am pretty doubtful that the people in England who started using "pansy" to refer to effiminate men spoke French anyway. They probably had no clue of the French meaning.
--- On Sun, 3/1/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> From: shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>
> Subject: [lbo-talk] pansy power
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, March 1, 2009, 8:56 AM
> from reading around, I suspect that the use of flowers to
> symbolize an effeminate man may have simply been a way of
> associating something considered feminine (flowers in
> general) with an effeminate man, and probably having little
> to do with the pansy as symbol of thought, thinking. I still
> don't have much of a clue as to the claim about pansy
> meaning effeminate man during Elizabethan times, but it sure
> seems the case that, since the late 1800s, the use of the
> word pansy (and flowers more generally) to symbolize gay men
> by equating them with the feminine was the dominate meaning,
> and it had little to do with associating gayness and/or
> effeminancy with thought, thinking. Consider the following:
>