This is in answer to the following question:
How has modern France become such a military powerhouse? When did they become more powerful than Britain and Germany?
France did this by having the correct mindset, which has been necessary to the apparition of a large, unified military power where France and its Gallo-Roman predecessor has been for 20 centuries.
Arguably, France is, by far the country most involved in war. Ever. And there are three excellent reasons for that: location, location, location.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_France
France declared war to Hitler on September 3, 1939. The British army was tiny even smaller than the 400,000 men US army. So World War Two, initially was a duel between the French Republic and the unholy alliance of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, fascist Japan, and the fascist Soviet Union of Stalin. By 1945, Italy, Japan and Germany had been utterly vanquished, thanks to France and her Allies. They had no more army. However, France had reconstituted the strongest army in the West, behind the US and UK. The USSR had been forced to switch sides.
For reasons I will now expose, France is, first of all, all about her military.
Paul Jamin’s Gallic King Brennus “and his share of the spoils”. He contemplates Roman ladies at the ready. The Battle of the Allia was a battle fought c. 393 BC between the Senones (a Gallic tribe who had invaded northern Italy, who lived at the source of the… Seine, hence the name) allied to the Averni (modern name: “Auvergne”) and the Roman Republic. The battle was fought at the confluence of the Tiber and Allia rivers, eleven Roman miles (16 km, 10 mi) north of Rome. The Romans were routed and Rome was subsequently sacked by the Senones, who were bought out by Roman dictator Camille, to bring them to leave.
France is a Republic built at the crossroads. Some may sneer that it is only a Republic since September 21, 1792… But that’s overlooking the REPUBLICAN way political power in France was built and justified itself. Even before the Romans came, many of the 60 polities in Gaul had senates, and were de facto republic. Each of them struck coinage. After five centuries of Roman unification, invasions broke the unity. The latter, though was quickly rebuilt by the Franks, who were Roman Confederates.
Thus the Frankish army was a Roman army, and beat the Goths at Vouillé (507 CE). Far from being savages, the Franks endeavored to rebuild the State, using the general program of the “Christian Republic”… To understand the “Christian Republic”, one has to backtrack to the Fourth Century, when Christianism was imposed onto the empire: the excuse for that, among intellectuals, was that a “Christian Republic” would be established. The idea goes on, to this day.
The “Founding Fathers of the Church” tried to establish the “Christian Republic” after emperor Theodosius I’s death in 395 CE: the bishops were in charge and governed (the Jew-hating bishop of Milan, Ambrose, after excommunicating him, got Theodosius I on his knees, begging forgiveness). That first attempt at establishing a Republic that would be “Christian”turned into a disaster. Indeed Theodosius’ military alliance with the Goths, plus the empire-ruling bishops’ hostility to military force, and funding the latter by force, brought the main Germanic invasions, in 406 CE. The most important thing the Roman Bishops’ government did was to formally put the Franks in charge of defending the three Roman provinces of the north-west: the two Germanias and Gallia.
The mass murdering Catholic fanatic, emperor Theodosius I, had hated the anti-Christian Franks (the Parisians had elected the de-Christianizing “Julian The Apostate” earlier). To the point that the god crazed Theodosius allied himself with the Goths, to defeat Arbogast, head of the mostly Frankish occidental Roman army at the battle of Frigidarius,in 394 CE. This destruction of the Occidental Roman army led, within 12 years, to the fall of the Occidental Roman empire… The catastrophic defeat of the Roman Occidental army at Frigidarius in 394 CE of secularism against Goths allied to fanatical Catholicism should be seen as the real moment the Roman state was mortally wounded in Occident.
The Franks, who were very fierce and free (that’s what their name means) understood, and all could see, that the Republic (Christian or not) could only be established by military force. In 507 CE, they did what Rome had never done before: they beat the Goths, and threw them out of Gaul. In the next three centuries, they would establish, through military force Western Europe as it is today (completed by the conquest of England in 1066 CE). The Franks also did something the rest of Roman power had been unable to do: they repel three invasions of the Muslim raiders between 721 CE (battle of Toulouse, huge Muslim defeat) and 748 CE (battle of Narbonne, another victory of Charles the Hammer, his phalanx and heavy cavalry). The Umayyad Arab Caliphate, based in Damascus, deprived of its army destroyed in France, then fell (750 CE).
In the Ninth Century, two things happened: disunion (think Brexit), leading to the monster (first) battle of Fontenoy, of Franks against the Franks, when the streams ran red (848 CE). Around 50,000 were killed in this fratricide (the second battle of Fontenoy would be of the French against the British, nine centuries later).
Soon enough, left without enough of an army, the “Renovated empire of the Romans” (aka Carolingian empire) was invaded on three fronts: Viking, Hungarians, Muslims. This showed to the collective French mentality, once again, as circa 400 CE, that military weakness led to devastating invasions. Disgusted by the attitude of the emperor, who negotiated with the Viking instead of destroying them during the siege of Paris, the Parisians and then the French, seceded from said empire (“Frexit”; turned out to have been a very bad idea, as it led to 1,150 years of war)… France didn’t secede formally, but by refusing to elect a Roman emperor, preferring to elect a French King “emperor in his own kingdom” as the official formula had it (so the elected French king was equivalent to the elected Roman emperor).
In the next millennium, that means in the thousand years prior to the present times, it would be proven again and again: the key to comfort, health, survival, morality, happiness, let alone sufficient food, was a strong French military. Everything else was secondary. (When the Germans invaded France in WWII, they stole as much food as they could so that the French would still be able to produce food and other stuff for them, Nazis…)
Why is France attacked so much? For the same reason as French is a melting pot, morally and intellectually superior: France is at the crossroads of Europe, it’s how one went conveniently from north to south in the last 12,000 years. If one is in the Mediterranean (thus coming from the Near East, or even further: Indies, Silk Roads, etc.), the way to reach the Atlantic or Northern Europe was through France (one route is to travel north of the Pyrenees, the other two go up the Rhone valley, one branching up right to Germany, the other, straight up to the Northern European plain and Great Britain.
The defeat of May 1940 occurred in a few days, when drugged out Nazis full of amphetamines, broke through where the Second British armored division was supposed to be, and was not, where the Prince of Wales, inspector of the British armed forces, had told his dear friend Hitler, that the French front was the weakest. Indeed, the French Front was held there by just one reserve infantry division, and three elite Panzer divisions attacked, helped by the elite Gross Deutschland regiment, and the entire Luftwaffe, concentrated their assault on a few kilometers. The French Republic had started a nuclear bomb program in January 1938 to drop bombs on Germany (it would take seven and a half year for the first bomb to be ready). The French were the first to bomb Berlin (the Nazis called for execution of the French fliers… although that was in retaliation of the bombing of French cities).
Ultimately British heavy bombers fleets (followed by US ones, years later) wreck havoc with Germany (one million soldiers had to man air defenses and German industry had to be relocated in the woods, underground…) This showed, once again, that if one is the most intelligent civilization, military superiority is all the moral right one needs to crush infamy.
The Romans purchased, for centuries superior Gallic armor and swords. At the battle of Poitiers in 732 CE, superior French steel and superior heavy cavalry on genetically formidable horses, destroyed the Muslim army (Muslim corpses were left to rot, out of contempt). The so-called “100 year war” finished when the Bureau brothers engineered the first battlefield guns. The 75 mm gun was indispensable in WWI. During the French Revolution, superior French artillery, with superior French explosives did much, if not most of the work (in particular at the crucial Battle of Valmy, September 20, 1792). Hot air balloons, invented in France, were militarily used. One of the first planes was also militarily financed, and flew, long before the Wright brothers. The first cars also made in France were the fruit of a military program: what was specified corresponded actually to tanks. The French taught the USA how to mass produce them with the required precision (this is how precision mass engineering was introduced to the USA). So the connection between superior tech and superior military was long ingrained.
The defeat of May 1940 was due in part to the exploitation by the Nazis of a few tricks which took the French military by surprise: amphetamines, good connection between the air force and ground forces, the usage of radios inside tanks… And lack of practice and arrogance of the top commanders. Morality: the Righteous should make war all the time, so as not be surprised by Evil.
All of these Nazi tricks could be fixed quickly, and they were, but not before the Franco-British being defeated in the most major battle of the Western front in WWII (the Franco-British never suffered a major defeat after that). The lesson for the future here was simple: if the French Republic had fought the Nazis in Spain in 1936, as it was asked by the Spanish Republic to do, it would not have been surprised in May 1940, and superior French military might would have done the rest. Why did France not attack the Nazis in 1936? Because the Anglo-Saxons asked France not to attack Hitler, who was, at the time, a source of enormous profit for the most major US corporations. So what is the meta lesson here? In spite of the affectionate parent to child relationship between France, England and the USA, the latter two self-obsessed buffoons should not be taken seriously all the time. France has 30 centuries of institutionalized, partly oral and behavioral tradition, that the UK and the US do not have. Only China or maybe India can reflect as deep upon the errors of history…
After World War Two, which started with the betrayal of the USA, France observed more betrayal, as the US Deep State was firmly intent to replace the French empire by an American one.
So now here we are. The defense of the West is mostly insured by a reconciled France and the US… which are at war in a dozen countries. This is good: in Libya, the French air force demonstrated it could overwhelm Russian air defense using stealthy Rafale fighters (the US is now using the same method in training with the stealthy F35). Recently, in the attack on French and US ally Saudi Arabia, the powerlessness of the most sophisticated US air defenses against drones and cruise missiles was demonstrated: now the US and France are scrambling to find counter-measure (it’s no coincidence, and entirely related, that the laser which blasted rocks on Mars was French made).
France has no oil, no gas, and no more coal. France can have only ideas; it is the only large country with a large economy which produces so little CO2 per capita that, if all countries did it, the CO2 cataclysm would be much delayed (only 4 tons/person/year for France; US is at 16 tons, and Canada and Australia are even worse). Ideas which can create technology enabling military superiority. The USA and Britain long embraced the same credo.
To be a real, thoughtful French citizen, steeped in history (as they used to be) is to learn that the Republic needs to be defended by force, that this is mission number one… of the Republic, something that the cultural ancestors to the French Republic, the Athenian and Roman ones, discovered 25 centuries ago. And just as 25 centuries ago, this superiority has to rest upon military and thus technological superiority.
As the ice caps melt, great wars are coming… And if they don’t happen this will be simply because potential aggressors understand they can’t win (as they do now). And the climate catastrophe is a war too, and only superior technology can win it. Same old, same old: if one wants a better existence, or existence at all, one has to fight for it.
Patrice Ayme
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P/S: Although the preceding is centered around France, it fully applies to her child, the USA. We have peace now because the relatively better guys (France, US, UK) have had military superiority, and the bad guys (Russia, China) aren’t that bad (although Putin engaged in invasion lately) and other guys surrended (Japan) to what passes for democracy, and the rest of the world is pretty powerless…
World peace depends upon the military might of that trio, another reason to look at Brexit with fear and suspicion…
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