Don't forget the Rule of French Culture: When in doubt, imitate the Italians, and then do it badly.
This is sort of funny. But a bit misleading.
A bunch of Italians called the Romans kicked the butts of just about everybody in Europe and adjoining Asia and Africa for several hundred years.
Charlemagne was not really a Frenchman - he was a German - a Frank. And he kicked the Islamic butts, beat the pagan Saxons in several campaigns - forcibly making them Christians and wiped out the Magyars - a not inconsiderable feat. He was referred to as "Iron Charles"
for good reason. And if you called him Charles instead of Karl, he probably would have laughed his silent laugh and cut your head off with his own sword.
At one time the Gauls of France were a much feared enemy and kicked Roman and German butts. But they wound up wasting too much time changing their minds and fighting among themselves. But then, again, they were not really "French".
During the Thirty Years War, the French, led by a Catholic Cardinal no less, pumped money into the Holy Roman Empire (modern Germany and Central Europe) which was really fighting a civil war between the Catholics and Protestants. When it looked like the Catholics were winning, the French paid money to the Protestants, and vice-versa. The reason? To keep a united Germany from potentially threatening them and to keep Germans killing each other. The result? Horrific civilian casualties and a disunited Germany until Bismarck came along in the mid 1800s and kicked the French butts, taking back Alsace Lorraine - a German Territory - which the French had stolen a couple of centuries earlier. MOst unfortunately, we gave Alsace Lorraine back to the French after WW1 and again after WW2.
This would have been funnier were it more accurate historically.
The French are not really the laughing stock we try to make them out to be. Their history has been a mixed one, and under another Italian, a Corsican, Napoleone Buonaparte (his real name), they produced the first modern megalomanical dictaroship which threatened the stability and security of all of Europe, and even were a threat to us.
Read "France's War Against America" a new book which covers the entire sordid history of Frnech prefidy and violence against America from the French and Indian Wars (1689-1763) up to the present. It is most revealing.