Posted on 03/24/2005 6:00:38 AM PST by John Jorsett
France's military reputation has taken a beating over the last three years due to their attitudes towards Iraq. Whether or not this record is deserved is up for debate. A famous website, set up as a “Google bomb,” so that when one searches for French military victories and hits the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, takes potshots at France, particularly citing the twentieth century. But the REAL story is much different.
First of all, the Battle of the Virginia Capes, from September 5-9, 1781 was an unambiguous win for France. This is important for Americans to keep in mind – this was the battle that sealed the fate of the British garrison at Yorktown (and thus American independence). So, France has achieved victory at least once, and it mattered big time for the United States.
In the 20th Century, the French record is also much better than some people would lead a person to believe. In World War I, the French did not fold up. If anything, the French carried a lot of the burden of the ground war from 1914-1917, halting the German invasion at the Marne. The French also outfought the Germans at Verdun in 1916, holding the line against a vigorous German offensive.
In 1918, the French forces took part in major offensives in the Balkans and in France itself. Both of those were victories. This came after France played a major part in repelling the powerful 1918 offensive by Germany. In other words, the French did their fair share in World War I. Only natural, since France was where most of the fighting occurred. It was Marshal Ferdinand Foch (commanding French Forces in the Second Battle of Marne) who said, “My center is giving way, I cannot move. Situation excellent, I shall attack.”
In World War II, France is often judged by the 1940 German offensive. This is unfair in some aspects. France had 3 armored divisions – Germany had 10, which was a decisive edge in one of the earliest mechanized campaigns in history. After France surrendered, Free French forces took part in the African battles, and played major roles in Operation Dragoon (the landings in southern France in August, 1944). The French also carried out the liberation of Strasbourg, and took part in the final defeat of Nazi Germany.
Since World War II, France has taken part in the 1956 Suez War, which was a military victory. France only backed off due to political pressure from the United States and USSR. France also did not lose the Algerian War of Independence from 1954-1962 on any battlefield, but instead in terms of politics. The only real loss was the Indochina War, which was highlighted by the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.
France today has a reasonably capable military (they operate the only CVN outside the United States Navy, and the Rafale is one of the best combat aircraft in service at the present time). French forces recently carried out a brilliant operation in Cote d’Ivoire, in which aircraft, that had launched attacks on UN peacekeepers, were quickly and efficiently destroyed.
France has, in these wars, lost as many as two million killed in action. Far more often than not, France has won major battles in the past century, and in some cases, paid a dear price to do so. French military forces have gotten a bit of a bum rap as a result of the weasel-like positions of certain French political leaders. – Harold C. Hutchison (hchutch@ix.netcom.com)
...which underscores the point that the French fought on both sides of the war, realigning their loyalties with the shift of the winds.
I've never heard of that at all.
The Ardennes were thinly defended (and the elite Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais, who the French thought would cover the area, went north into Central Belgium without telling the French what they were doing, leaving it even more thinly defended.)
The French were basically obsessed with getting as far into Belgium as possible and got obsessed with the idea the decisive battle would be in Central and Northern Belgium. They considered the Ardennes as poor tank territory (which they were, if defended. Even minimal air strikes killing ONE tank at the head of a column could have screwed up the whole German attack and even lost them the war.)
The 1940 Battle for France was a very close shave. The Germans very easily could have lost. Not only did the British and French have better and more tanks, and lots more artillery, they had more men, and arguably better trained men...and even the Luftwaffe wasn't nearly as superior to the French and British as they are made out to be.
And before the battle started the French arguably had better morale than the Germans, believe it or not.
And even after the attack started the Germans were lucky. There are several incidents you could point to where if they'd gone the other way the Allies would have won.
From November 1939 through May 1940 Hitler wanted to attack France; his Generals were sure Germany would lose, and kept getting him to postpone the attack every two weeks; the plan during most of that time was to attack through Belgium, exactly where the French expected it. The Ardennes attack wasn't adopted till the last minute, and only because the French captured the original German plans for the Belgium attack from a crashed airplane.
There was a great deal of intermarriage. You'll notice most Normans have French names.
In 1940 the quality parts of the French Army (which was most of it) performed well. They kicked the living crap out of the German tanks they met in central Belgium; destroyed hundreds of them.
The problem was the main German attack fell on the non-quality parts of the French Army. It wasn't an issue of the French not wanting to fight or being sympathetic to the Nazis; they simply lost because they had a bad plan and the Germans managed to come up with the perfect plan to exploit the bad French plan at the last minute.
Merely Viscount, of a defunct monarchy.
Ergo "citizen".
"The source of the real defeat of France and the French Military after WWI... a lack of political will and a government which fully and continuously favored Liberal public opinion so that the Military was not prepared to face the increasingly belligerent and patently overt German mobilization. The German onslaught was a long time coming and a long time ignored by the French government. For that they paid."
In 1938, during the Czech crisis, the french had over 100 active duty divisions mobilized on the border with germany. The Germans has 12 reserve infantry divisions facing them. The entire german army was outnumbered 2 to one and was parked on the Czech border.
All the french needed to do was march. They instead SAT.
You are most correct. The Normans (Vikings) were doing pretty well for themselves for a while. Then along came Cristianity and intermarriage with the French. It was all down hill from there :)
This is a misconception.
The Norsemen arrived on the coast of Armorica in the early 900s, and were granted a fief there by the King of France in 911. They were vassals of the French King. Unruly vassals, to be sure. But then, there were no kings anywhere outside of Byzantium who had any centralized control. The Norsemen owed their fealty to the French King and were given a fief in the land.
Had the conquest of England happened at that time, it would have indeed been a Viking conquest of England.
But there is an important piece of that story which is missing, and which changes everything.
The Vikings who landed in Armorica were overwhelmingly MEN. Pagan warrior men. They did not load up their boats with the comely pagan women of Scandinavia and sail to the coast of France. They landed, like Spaniards in Mexico, and they stayed. Unlike the Spaniards in Mexico, they did not take the French capital. The French King, to buy peace, gave the Vikings a fief in exchange for a theoretical suzereinty over these pagan Viking men.
But that was 911.
The Norman Conquest of England was in 1066, one hundred and fifty-five (155) years later. What happened in that intervening century and a half?
Well, what DIDN'T happen was a mass migration of Scandinavian women into Armorica. And absent that, the Vikings would have ceased to exist in one generation.
What happened was that the Viking men of 900 married French, Catholic women. The Viking men went off to war: that what Vikings did, and well too. But their wives and children were in Armorica. And their CHILDREN were not Vikings. They were half French. Their mothers were French. Also, tellingly, their religion was not the pillars of Wotan, but Catholicism. And their language was not Norse, but French. That takes us to about 940. Then the next generation came. Still no Scandinavian women. Now men who are half-Viking and half-French, with their fathers' taste for battle and bravery, but their mothers' religion, language, and manners of court, married French women. Their children were 3/4ths French and 1/4 Viking. Both their parents spoke French, were Catholic, and had Catholic manners of court. That takes us to 970.
Then they married, and the kids became 1/8 Viking and 7/8ths French by blood, more or less, but were 100% French by language, courtly customs, food, and religion. And all still vassals of the French King.
They preserved, of course, the particularly militaristic organization of their Viking roots. But they were not Vikings at all in any sense of the word. Actually, they FOUGHT against Viking raiders.
That takes us to 1000.
Cycle two more generations, and we are at 1066. The men are French speaking, have French customs and cultural mores and law. They hate paganism and are fired up with Catholic zeal (the Vikings are still pagans at that time). They kill Vikings who come ashore. They have peculiar organized military customs of Normandy which are not like the rest of France, but Normandy looks NOTHING like Norway in any sense: different language, different religion, different mores, different food, different laws, different customs and beliefs.
The Normans were proud of being Norman, and Norman was a very distinct and dangerous breed of Frenchman (much like a Texan is, because of his history and culture, a very distinct and dangerous breed of American), but after 6 generations and 155 years he is no more a Viking than someone whose great, great, great, great, great grandpa who fled Prussia to come to America is a German.
The Norman piece of France had its own nobility, of the lineage of the Viking men who settled there. And their own tough military customs. But this was France.
What happened to the Vikings in France is what happened to the Germanic Franks before them, or all of the invaders of China: male warriors settled and were culturally absorbed.
As to Normans not being "French", none of the French are "French". All of the pieces of France are some other ethnic culture subsumed into a French norm. The East is Germanic. The Northeast is Flemish. The South is Italian or Catalan, The Center and Britanny are Celtic and ethnically more Irish than Latin. Normandy descends from a mixture of French women and Viking men, with French culture, language, and religion completely absorbing Norse culture, language and religion.
The only thing "Norse" about the Normans by 1066 was the proclivity for war.
Normans are still aware of their origins. I am Norman myself. But Normandy is France, and it was France in 1066. The invaders of England spoke French. They had the laws and mannerisms of the French court, not Scandinavia.
Their religion was Catholicism, not sacred poles and Odin. And William was a vassal of the King of France.
He ended up being the French King's RICHEST vassal, and ultimately the 100 years war was about the English-French aristocracy trying to gain possession of the whole of the rest of France. But that age was before nation states. If you asked a Kentish Saxon, or a peasant in Brittany, or a German orchard tender in Swabia what he was, the Saxon would not have said "a Saxon" or "an Englishman", and the Breton or the Parisian would not have said "a Frenchman", and the Swabian certainly would not have said "a German" or even "a Swabian". They would have all answered "a Christian". And if you asked them about politics, they would have told you who was their lord and who was their king. If you asked a Norman in 1066, he would have called himself a Christian (and he would have said it in French). He would have said that his lord was Duke William, and that his King was whoever the French king in Paris was.
Modern nationalism didn't exist. The Norman conquest was not a French political conquest of a political nation, England. It was a noble political conquest of Norman-French nobles over Anglo-Saxon nobles that resulted in a cultural conquest of England.
The extent of that political conquest is visible by dissecting this very sentence and noting the number of French words that predominate in it.
"There was a great deal of intermarriage. You'll notice most Normans have French names."
There was nothing BUT intermarriage. Viking men did not sail around in their longboats with Viking women. The Vikings who landed in Armorica when the route of the Hsiung-Nu in China: absorbed.
Answer: Duplicitous weasels. AKA Cheese eating surrender monkeys.
"French forces recently carried out a brilliant operation in Cote d’Ivoire"
Let's also not forget that this "brilliant" military action was unilateral and not sanctioned by the UN, thus, using the French government's own reasoning, it was a war crime.
Way to go France!
Oh, I like your post. It's just that your time line makes every "Norman Generation" taking a fair pure French maid to wife. Making them "French" when they went to England.
I just think there was a lot more "Norman" in the blood line and memory when they went England. Of course it was all down hill from there for the Normans in France.
Wives and Christianity can ruin a good time every time:).
That's a fair criticism.
So let's redo the math, continuing to assume 30 year generations, which gives us 5 generations to 1066.
Scandinavian women weren't walking off the longboats, so the FIRST generation of children of the Vikings were all 50% "French", 50% Viking. (Of course "French" doesn't really MEAN anything other than the synthesized culture and language of French. Ethnically, the people of Armorica at the time of the arrival of the Vikings were about as Celtic as the Irish. They were "French" because of language and who their king was.)
If we assume that 100% of the French men were driven out of Normandy, and no new French women came in, then after 5 generations each Norman male or female was 50% Viking and 50% French, but 100% French speaking and Catholic for the previous 4 generations.
Of course ancient provinces were not like modern states with border guards. And the Norman leaders were nobles, did participate in the life of France, did participate at court. French women did continue to marry into the stock.
And no Scandinavian women got on boats and came to Normandy.
If we assume that 10% of the first Normandy-born generation married French women, and the other 90% married the 50/50 Viking/French women of their own generation, then 90% of the population was 50% French, and 10% of the population was 75% French, giving us an aggregate total of 62% French blood in the second generation.
Assume the same thing for the succeeding 4 generations, with a 10% marriage rate outside of the mixed Viking-French stock, and you get folks who are very, very French, by "blood"...if there WERE such a thing as French blood.
But actually, France is an idea, and not really an ethnicity. The last time the territory that is "France" was ethnically homogenous it was called "Gaul", and it was disunified and didn't think of itself as a country. By the time Francia became a concept, the ethnic mix was a totally muddle of Celt, Latin and Teuton, welded together by a common language (more or less), religion, and monarch.
I think once you get back into the middle ages, the modern nationalist "capture the flag" arguments become almost meaningless. The Kings of France and England were the most successful at welding together durable states. The ethnic states are all small, except for the very latecomers Italy and Germany, but they came together really in the age of the Republic (though they started as kingdoms or empires), with very fierce nationalist passions firing their union.
France is the shape it is not because of ethnic boundaries, but because of the reach of ancient royal armies.
Like China.
Well some might say therein lies the problem of their lousy record.
France today has a reasonably capable military (they operate the only CVN outside the United States Navy, and the Rafale is one of the best combat aircraft in service at the present time). French forces recently carried out a brilliant operation in Cote d’Ivoire, in which aircraft, that had launched attacks on UN peacekeepers, were quickly and efficiently destroyed.
So maybe someone can explain why it took them a week to get Tsunami aid to Asia via rented Russian helicopters, a scandal reported in the French press which bemoaned the fact that such incapacity does not support French claims to being a world power.
They spend their money on social programs and the US is expected to foot the bill and spend the human capitol on European and world defense. The French military might is predominantly power of the mouth.
I agree and posted as much before I read your response.
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