The Great War
Published 19 Aug 2022The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 meant that it got its own peace treaty like the other three Central Powers. But the emerging Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal resisted the Treaty of Sevres and occupation by various Entente Powers. Their successful resistance led to the creation of modern Turkey and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
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August 20, 2022
How Turkey Fought a WW1 Peace Treaty – The Greek-Turkish War 1919-1923
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August 19, 2022
Why Quebec rejected the American Revolution
Conrad Black outlines the journey of the French colony of New France through the British conquest to the (amazing to the Americans) decision to stay under British control rather than join the breakaway American colonies in 1776:
Civil rights were not a burning issue when Canada was primarily the French colony of New France. The purpose of New France was entirely commercial and essentially based upon the fur trade until Jean Talon created industries that made New France self-sufficient. And to raise the population he imported 1,000 nubile young French women, and today approximately seven million French Canadians and Franco-Americans are descended from them. Only at this point, about 75 years after it was founded, did New France develop a rudimentary legal and judicial framework.
Eighty years later, when the British captured Québec City and Montréal in the Seven Years’ War, a gentle form of British military rule ensued. A small English-speaking population arose, chiefly composed of commercial sharpers from the American colonies claiming to be performing a useful service but, in fact, exploiting the French Canadians. Colonel James Murray became the first English civil governor of Québec in 1764. A Royal proclamation had foreseen an assembly to govern Québec, but this was complicated by the fact that at the time British law excluded any Roman Catholic from voting for or being a member of any such assembly, and accordingly the approximately 500 English-speaking merchants in Québec demanded an assembly since they would be the sole members of it. Murray liked the French Canadians and despised the American interlopers as scoundrels. He wrote: “In general they are the most immoral collection of men I ever knew.” He described the French of Québec as: “a frugal, industrious, moral race of men who (greatly appreciate) the mild treatment they have received from the King’s officers”. Instead of facilitating creation of an assembly that would just be a group of émigré New England hustlers and plunderers, Murray created a governor’s council which functioned as a sort of legislature and packed it with his supporters, and sympathizers of the French Canadians.
The greedy American merchants of Montréal and Québec had enough influence with the board of trade in London, a cabinet office, to have Murray recalled in 1766 for his pro-French attitudes. He was a victim of his support for the civil rights of his subjects, but was replaced by a like-minded governor, the very talented Sir Guy Carleton, [later he became] Lord Dorchester. Murray and Carleton had both been close comrades of General Wolfe. […]
The British had doubled their national debt in the Seven Years’ War and the largest expenses were incurred in expelling the French from Canada at the urgent request of the principal American agent in London, Benjamin Franklin. As the Americans were the most prosperous of all British citizens, the British naturally thought it appropriate that the Americans should pay the Stamp Tax that their British cousins were already paying. The French Canadians had no objection to the Stamp Tax, even though it paid for the expulsion of France from Canada.
As Murray and Carleton foresaw, the British were not able to collect that tax from the Americans; British soldiers would be little motivated to fight their American kinfolk, and now that the Americans didn’t have a neighboring French presence to worry them, they could certainly be tempted to revolt and would be very hard to suppress. As Murray and Carleton also foresaw, the only chance the British would have of retaining Canada and preventing the French Canadians from rallying to the Americans would be if the British crown became symbolic in the mind of French Canada with the survival of the French language and culture and religion. Carleton concluded that to retain Québec’s loyalty, Britain would have to make itself the protector of the culture, the religion, and also the civil law of the French Canadians. From what little they had seen of it, the French Canadians much preferred the British to the French criminal law. In pre-revolutionary France there was no doctrine of habeas corpus and the authorities routinely tortured suspects.
In a historically very significant act, Carleton effectively wrote up the assurances that he thought would be necessary to retain the loyalty of the colony. He wanted to recruit French-speaking officials from among the colonists to give them as much self-government as possible while judiciously feeding the population a worrisome specter of assimilation at the hands of a tidal wave of American officials and commercial hustlers in the event of an American takeover of Canada.
After four years of lobbying non-stop in London, Carleton gained adoption of the Québec Act, which contained the guaranties he thought necessary to satisfy French Canada. He returned to a grateful Québec in 1774. The knotty issue of an assembly, which Québec had never had and was not clamoring for, was ducked, and authority was vested in a governor with an executive and legislative Council of 17 to 23 members chosen by the governor.
Conveniently, the liberality accorded the Roman Catholic Church was furiously attacked by the Americans who in their revolutionary Continental Congress reviled it as “a bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed … a religion which flooded England with blood, and spread hypocrisy, murder, persecution, and revolt into all parts of the world”. The American revolutionaries produced a bombastic summary of what the French-Canadians ought to do and told them that Americans were grievously moved by their degradation, but warned them that if they did not rally to the American colours they would be henceforth regarded as “inveterate enemies”. This incendiary polemic was translated, printed, and posted throughout the former New France, by the Catholic Church and the British government, acting together. The clergy of the province almost unanimously condemned the American agitation as xenophobic and sectarian incitements to hate and needless bloodshed.
Carleton astounded the French-Canadians, who were accustomed to the graft and embezzlement of French governors, by not taking any payment for his service as governor. It was entirely because of the enlightened policy of Murray and Carleton and Carleton’s skill and persistence as a lobbyist in the corridors of Westminster, that the civil and cultural rights of the great majority of Canadians 250 years ago were conserved. The Americans when they did proclaim the revolution in 1775 and officially in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, made the British position in Canada somewhat easier by their virulent hostility to Catholicism, and to the French generally.
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How Accurate is Saving Private Ryan? – WW2 D-Day Special
World War Two
Published 16 Aug 2022How accurate is that famous beach scene in Saving Private Ryan? Is it true to the history or just another Hollywood story? Seeing as we’re about to start the filming for our massive D-Day project, we figured we’d break it down, shot by shot.
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August 16, 2022
QotD: The first casualty of political campaigns
Truth is the first casualty of war, no doubt, but so it is also of elections — or perhaps of political life tout court. During elections, though, lying changes from the chronic phase to the acute. Impossible things before breakfast are shamelessly promoted and emotive slogans intoned in the hope and expectation that they will be uncritically accepted.
Walking in Paris just before the French election, I was handed some leaflets and stickers by partisans of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the demagogic left-wing candidate. “The rich pollute,” said one of them, “the people pay.”
Am I one of the rich, I wonder? Or one of the people? What about the customers chatting over lunch in the nearby café? Are they rich or are they of the people? Mélanchon’s slogan is founded on the old lie, as Wilfred Owen calls Dulce et decorum, etc., that society is divided neatly into two distinct categories with interests diametrically opposed.
No lie appeals more to the dissatisfied than this, offering as it does the illusory hope of a confiscatory solution to life’s little problems. The best that can be said of it is that it permits the dissatisfied an access of hatred and moral outrage, which is always enjoyable and gratifying to experience.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Election bumf”, The Critic, 2022-04-29.
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August 13, 2022
The lure of old wines
In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys admits his continuing love for mature wines, even past the point most people would consider them drinkable:
For some people wine appreciation is like big game hunting. It’s about ticking off the prizes: Latour, Petrus, Romanee Conti. Whereas for others it’s about chasing unicorns, looking for mythical wines so rare that they are almost impossible to obtain. I don’t have the money for either, but even if I did, I still think I would take the greatest pleasure in opening a strange old bottle and being surprised by how delicious it is.
I’m fortunate in having friends and relatives who think wine is more for keeping than for drinking. When my grandfather died, we inherited all kinds of strange things that he’d been saving including a half bottle of 1937 Army & Navy claret.
I’ve certainly never had the deep pockets to go after any of those tip-top wines, although I used to be able to go to LCBO wine tasting events where there’d occasionally be opportunities to try a few ultra-expensive wines (Petrus, Château Margaux, Nuits-Saint-Georges, Chassagne-Montrachet, Puligny-Montrachet, etc.). If I’m totally honest, in a few of those cases, the bouquet of the wine promised far more than the taste could deliver … I appreciate and enjoy better quality wines, but I don’t taste enough difference between a $50 bottle and a $500 bottle to justify paying the premium.
Oddly certain people get quite upset at lovers of very old wine. On Twitter recently a sommelier wrote “your taste sucks” to someone who expressed an enjoyment of such wines.
The French look at this peculiarly British habit as close to necrophilia. Americans, too, drink vintage port after a couple of years rather than waiting a generation as is customary.
There’s something magical about what decades can do to a wine. Quite austere clarets become heady and exotically-spiced while sweet wines begin to taste dry. I also relish the flavours that some might find less appealing: the tang of vinegar, the cooked taste of caramel and the whiff of sherry in wines that definitely are not sherry.
Maybe my taste sucks too but sometimes I prefer a wine to be old than to be particularly good. You adjust your palate, it’s like having a conversation with an elderly relative who’s a bit deaf but with great stories to tell.
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August 10, 2022
“Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well.”
Ed West on the historical divisions of the many regions in what we now know as “France”:
France is gigantic, like a continent in itself, and the most visited country on earth. It is four times the size of England and until the 17th century had a population four to five times as big (today it is 67 million v 56 million). Yet “France” until relatively recently extended not much further than Paris, in the area under the king’s direct control called the Île-de-France — beyond that, regional identity was distinctive and dialect pre-dominated.
As Robb writes, at the time of the Revolution just 11 per cent of the population, or 3 million people, spoke “French”; by 1880 still only one in five could communicate in the national language. Even with decades of centralisation, today there are still 55 distinct dialects in France; most are Romance, but the country is also home to Flemish, Alsatian, Breton and Basque-speaking communities. (Tintin has been translated into at least a dozen French dialects.) No regional identity in England, except the north-east, is as distinctive.
Many famous French historical figures wouldn’t have even understood “French”, among them St Bernadette, living in the then obscure village of Lourdes. She described the figure she saw as un petito damisela (or in French une petite demoiselle), the name for the local forest fairies in the Pyrenees. The Demoiselles dressed in white, lived in caves and grottos and were associated with water. They were also seen as being on the side of the poor, Robb points out, because here as is often the case there was a political underside to this folk belief. Indeed, a peasant conflict with the authorities from the 1830s to the 1870s had been called The War of the Demoiselles. But then conflict with the authorities — with Paris — almost defines French history.
[…]
If you like Robb’s work, you’ll also enjoy Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France, published in 1986 and supposed to be part one of a series by the great 20th century historian. Unfortunately, Braudel was already dead by the time part one was published, and so the series was never finished.
Braudel loved his country and believed in a deep and abiding Frenchness, yet he was also fascinated by its divisions, the various different pay — from Gallo-Roman pagus — which translates as land, although it can mean either country or region. Within this, dialects can be very varied: Gascon is “quite distinct” to Languedocien and Provencal, he wrote, but in Gascony “two completely different patois” were spoken. Near to Salins the language spoken in each village “varies to the point of being unrecognisable” and “what is more extraordinary” the town “being almost half a league in length, is divided by language and even customs, into two distinct halves”.
France’s regional identity is defined by language, food — the division between butter and olive, wine and cider — and even roof tiles. Braudel was essentially a geographic determinist and, citing Sartre’s line that France was “non-unifiable”, the author lamented that: “Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well.”
To illustrate the rivalry, compare the words of two 19th-century historians: Jean-Bernard Mary-Lafon, who contrasted the “refined and freedom-loving” southerners with “brute barbarism” of “knights from across the Loire”, violent, fanatical and pillaging. And Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1872: “I may be mistaken, but there is a view derived from historical ethnography which seems more and more convincing to my mind. The similarity between England and northern France appears increasingly clear to me every day. Our foolishness comes from the south, and if France had not drawn Languedoc and Provence into her sphere of activity, we should be a serious, active, Protestant and parliamentary people.”
He was surely mistaken, for it’s the south which is more Protestant and the north more Catholic. Just like in England, where regional and religious identity are intertwined.
Yet it is true that France’s great bounty was also its curse; this western European isthmus forms a natural unit within which the most powerful warlord could dominate, and that man was bound to be based somewhere on the Seine or Loire, close to the continent’s richest wheat-growing area. Yet in the early modern era this unit was far too big to govern effectively — 22 days’ ride from north to south — compared to England or the Netherlands. The author quotes an essayist who suggested that: “France is not a synchronised country: it is like a horse whose four legs move in a different time.”
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August 9, 2022
The Never Ending Failures in France – WW2 – Spies & Ties 21
World War Two
Published 8 Aug 2022The typical image of the French Resistance is of a man, beret at an angle, cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, captured MP40 across his chest. But one of the most successful resistance leaders is a woman – Marie-Madeline Fourcade. And right now, the Germans have her on the run!
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August 2, 2022
M34: The Berthier Converted to the 7.5mm Rimless Cartridge
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Aug 2017http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
With the end of World War One, it was finally possible for the French military to replace the 8mm Lebel cartridge with a modern rimless cartridge, and they wasted no time in doing so. By 1924 a new round had been adopted, and along with it a new modern light machine gun. Next, the arsenals would start working on converting 8mm rifles to the new cartridge. The first candidate was the Lebel, and in 1927 a conversion was approved and a batch of a few hundred made — but this was a more expensive and time-consuming process than anyone wanted. After some brief trials, it was decided to work on adapting the Berthier instead, and in 1934 a conversion designed from St Etienne was approved as the 1907/15-M34.
This new design used a new 22.5″ barrel (570mm), a Mauser style internal 5-round double stack magazine, and new sights. The receivers and trigger parts were retained from the rifles being converted, along with the nosecaps and barrel bands, but not much else. Still, these conversions were put into production alongside the manufacture of new MAS-36 bolt action rifles. By the time of the German invasion about 63,000 M34 Berthiers had been converted, and were issued to frontline troops. They would fight in the Battle of France, and would also be used by German occupation forces as the Gewehr 241(f).
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August 1, 2022
Hamburg’s Citizens Burnt Alive – WAH 071 – July 31, 1943
World War Two
Published 31 Jul 2022In Italy the Fascists fall from power in a peaceful coup, while in Germany the RAF and USAAF bring down a rain of fire of biblical proportions in Operation Gomorrah, launching the Firestorm of Hamburg.
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July 30, 2022
Alexis de Tocqueville
In The Critic, Paul Sagar reviews a new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz:
Alexis de Tocqueville came perilously close to never existing at all. His parents, married in 1793, spent 10 of their first 18 months of matrimony in jail — arrested for the crime of being aristocrats during the height of the French revolutionary Terror. Tocqueville’s great-grandfather was guillotined in April 1794, after being forced to watch the beheadings of his daughter and grandchildren. His newlywed parents were in the queue, awaiting the same fate, but the fall of Robespierre in July meant they were spared.
Alexis, the third son of the family, would be born in 1805, and go on to write not one, but two, of the most influential works in the history of ideas. His two-volume Democracy in America (published in 1835 and 1840) has been hailed as, variously, the first work of political science, a founding text of sociological analysis, and a landmark in the history of political philosophy.
It remains a touchstone for those attempting to understand both democracy and the United States, as well as post-Revolutionary France (Tocqueville’s animating point of comparison). His later The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) attempted to locate the long-term causes of the events of 1789, and inaugurated a school of French Revolution historiography that remains alive and influential to this day.
He also enjoyed a moderately successful career as a practising politician, directly involved in France’s tumultuous political upheavals from the 1830s to the early 1850s. Constitutionally frail, and wracked by tuberculosis for the final nine years of his life before dying at just 54, he nonetheless packed a lot in.
As a narrative biography, Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy succeeds tremendously. The details of Tocqueville’s life — and the events he lived through — are rendered with engaging clarity. The detailed reconstruction of Tocqueville’s nine-month trip to America in 1831–32 is especially valuable, shedding a great deal of light on what Tocqueville saw and, crucially, who he spoke to and took his lead from. Zunz does not shy away from dissolving the myth to reveal the man. Sometimes treated as though he were a gimlet-eyed sage who saw through to the very soul of the fledgling United States, Zunz shows instead the extent to which Tocqueville tended to take too much at face value, especially regarding what he was told by less than impartial interlocutors, frequently failing to scratch below the surface on his whirlwind tour.
Thus, for example, he went on to write in Democracy in America that the liberty of the United States meant that secret societies were unknown there, entirely failing to recognise not only the extent of Masonic influence in local politics, but also how objections to Masonic influence were a core feature of contestation. A young man, dazzled by the hustle and bustle of the New World, he tended to see what he wanted to see — or what others hoped he would.
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July 29, 2022
Why Ghost Division? What did Rommel do?
Military History Visualized
Published 5 Feb 2019Why was Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division called Gespensterdivsion – the “Ghost Division”? From all we know it earned this name during the Battle of France.
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July 25, 2022
QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte, the Great Man’s Great Man
That’s because Napoleon was a Great Man, possibly the Great Man — a singularly talented genius, preternaturally lucky, whose very particular set of skills so perfectly matched the needs of the moment. There’s no “social” explanation for Napoleon, and that’s why nobody mentions him — the French Revolution ends with the Concert of Europe, and in between was mumble mumble something War and Peace. The hour really did call forth the man, in large part, I argue, because the Directory was full of men who were philosophically opposed to the very idea of elitism, and couldn’t bear to face the fact that they themselves were the elite.
Since our elite can’t produce able leaders of itself, it will be replaced by one that can. When our hour comes — and it is coming, far faster than we realize — what kind of man will it call forth?
Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.
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July 23, 2022
Still living, still breathing, still walking around … but “legally dead”
I missed this from Alistair Dabbs last weekend, but it’s still just as concerning as it was then:
Zombies walk among us – until they need a nice sit-down, of course. It can be tiring to be undead. No wonder they drag their feet around and do all that moaning.
One such moaner is 58-year-old Michel from Montpellier. He has never stopped complaining since the postman delivered a letter one morning in June to offer him condolences on his recent death.
It was, as you might imagine, an administrative error: someone had probably clicked in the wrong checkbox or filed a request in the wrong folder. It was unlikely to be the result of a concerted Kafka-esque conspiracy to erase Michel from existence. Uncheck that box, drag the file out of the folder. It should be easy enough.
Evidently not. Once you’ve been declared dead, it sets in motion a sequence of automated digital-only procedures that sprint towards completion with alarming rapidity. You may have heard of France’s notoriety for officious paperwork and the snail-pace of its bureaucracy when you are living and breathing. But once you’re a stiff, it’s the fast lane electrons all the way.
Michel discovered that his bank accounts had already been frozen. His social security file had been closed immediately. His national health ID card was no longer valid and his top-up health insurance was cancelled.
He nipped over to his local social security office to see if they could put the brakes on the process but apparently it was too late: everything had already been done to kill him off, bar physically shoving him in a box and inviting friends and relatives around for beer and sandwiches.
Surely there’s a rollback option?
Ah now, it’s not that simple. The system architect that designed the automated process did not think of making [Alive] and [Dead] a pair of either-or radio buttons. They did not envisage a situation in which death, our ultimate existential destination, could be reversed by choosing Edit > Undo. There are no second- or third-life Power-Ups IRL. Instead, the system architect not unreasonably assumed that dying would be a one-way trip from which nobody is expected to return.
The system is not a complete disaster, though. The woman at the desk of the social security office was able to use it to find that a French national with exactly the same name and birthdate as Michel had died – albeit 4,500km (c 2,800 miles) away in Israel – and the two strangers’ records had probably been mixed up by a poorly trained official. So the error has been located. Good. Can it be corrected, please?
Yes, she said, before booking him in for a meeting to discuss it in two weeks’ time. No doubt he was also asked to bring documents that explicitly state when he didn’t die.
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Tank Chat #152 | Swiss Centurion | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 25 Mar 2022
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July 22, 2022
Why Did The First World War Break Out? (July Crisis 1914)
[My 2014 series on “The Origins of World War I” can be read here. Although I’d read a fair bit of history on the period, once I began researching the period, even I was surprised at how many different contributing causes there were.]
The Great War
Published 15 Jul 2022The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 kicked off a crisis among the European Powers. Tensions that built up in the decades before erupted and in early August 1914 the world was at war. But what happened in these fateful July weeks 1914?
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