It is a truth universally acknowledged that, en masse if not individually, E2 has a slight nagging tendency towards anti-French sentiment. For the Brits it’s sort of traditional/historic, dating back to the Hundred Years War and all that (in which the English gloriously won, as they will be sure to note, at Crecy and Agincourt; strangely, at the end of it all, the French owned all of France, including the bits that the English had owned previously) and quite a lot of subsequent ones, mainly fought in Belgium, while for the Americans it seems to be something to do with the fact that they needed French help to run a revolution properly, along with the proximity of uppity Quebeckers and the fact that the French are marginally less prepared than the rest of the world to roll over and be McDisneyfied™; not being one I can’t say definitively. But I digress.
When it comes to military history, this particular bias mostly comes out in references to three weeks in May 1940, and specifically one piece of particularly crap judgement by General Gamelin and one bypassed fortress line. The fact that that the allied participants — France, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium — have spent most of the time since blaming each other and trying to work out who sold out whom has been allowed to mask the fact that this particular campaign was successful beyond all reasonable expectations for the Germans, and that when the French actually had troops in the right places, they were perfectly capable of fighting the advancing Panzers to a standstill at a tactical or operational level. Visitors to Paris may wish to note that the big — rather bigger than you think until you actually see it in the flesh — structure at one end of the Champs Elysées is called the Arc de Triomphe, and not the Arc de Defaite; it bears an admittedly tedious and tasteless, but indubitably long, list of battles at which the French did rather well. The fact that your school history lessons may have taught you rather more about Paul Revere or Clive of India than about Charles Martel is not relevant in the greater scheme of things.
Albert Herring, “Why neither the French nor the Italians are the worst military nation”, Everything2, 2002-01-07.
August 16, 2019
QotD: It’s not really accurate to call the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”
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