France is actually the mother country of not just the USA. For the USA, billions were secretly spent by the doomed French king Louis XVI to vanquish the British, and he established a republic in North America (in spite of warning by his advisers not to establish a republic!). For years, 90% or more of the bullets of the American army were made in France (among other things). In the end, at Yorktown, two converging French armies helping the US army (one headed by Lafayette), and the blockading French fleet, forced the surrender of the British army, ending the American war of independence.
France was the mother country of the USA in still another sense: the Duke of Normandy led a large French army and conquered England in 1066 CE. The 20% slaves found in Britain were immediately freed, as per French law (slavery had been outlawed in France, by a ruling queen, four centuries earlier). William proceeded with in-depth reforms promoting the English Parliament. The French barons, who were not vassals of the Duchy of Normandy, thus not forced to obey him, then forced the Magna Carta onto the king, followed by further, durable, powers for Parliament as the Count of Toulouse tried to be elected king of England. England was another France, a France freed of an all too absolute king.
The Franks had earlier united and created Germany, as a nation, and also the German language and not just the Carolingian minuscule, as they imposed their rule all over Europe. Thereafter the Franks proceeded to free Rome and, 2 centuries later, southern Italy and Sicily from the savage Muslim invaders, whom they had also thrown out of northern Spain…
France has been the West’s most prominent military power since before the Franks put the Huns to flight at Orleans (they were thereafter decisively defeated in Champagne). Julian the “Apostate” was proclaimed “Augustus” (supreme Roman emperor) in Paris in 360 CE. Julian, who had attended Athenian schools, was a top philosopher, not just an amazing general; he saw clearly the danger of Christianism. Thus the anti-clerical and rebellious French mentality is from way back. (Julian died in combat in Mesopotamia in 363 CE; a bit like France in May 1940 a military event not supposed to happen did happen; however Rome didn’t recover, whereas France was soon reborn… thanks in part to her network of affiliated powers she had parented over the centuries…)
Julian’s anticlerical election in Paris was no accident: at least four Franks became Roman commander-in-chiefs , at the time, and fought against theocracy and its allies, the Goths: Richomer, Arbogast, etc… however, at the Battle of the Cold River, in 394 CE, the Occidental Roman army, mostly Frankish, headed by a Frank, was defeated, partly thanks to hurricane force winds blowing the wrong way: another example of a military defeat which was not supposed to happen. That defeat had a very durable effect. It brought thousands of years of theocracy by that slave religion sustaining plutocracy, “Catholic Orthodoxy”.
Thus the fanatical Christians and the Goths won, for 110 years, seizing Rome (410 CE) and destroying the Roman state. But in the end, the Franks defeated them both under Roman Frankish Consul and King Clovis (Battle of Vouillé, 507 CE, where the hyper soldier Clovis himself killed the Gothic king Alaric)…
The rebellious, liberty loving French mentality resulted in:”Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”… All what plutocrats hate. Remember the plutocrats? They hold the media, the politicians, the “economists”, and the most prestigious universities… So plutocrats hate France, and can’t stop to heap villainous notion onto her.
In truth, France is the rebellious and military core of European creativity, and has been thus, ever since Julius Caesar intervened in the “Gallia Comida” (Long Haired Gaul). Raging against France is, at least partially, raging against rebellion, fraternity, liberty, equality, the very essence of a free humanity, all what plutocracy hates… Infant mortality in France is a small fraction of that in the USA. That costs plutocracy a lot.
Right, the French Republic was defeated in six weeks in May-June 1940. But that Battle of France was the deadliest on the Western front for the whole war. More than 50,000 elite Nazis died. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and combatants died. Two years later, a French army, in Thermopylae style, prevented Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the Italian Army to encircle the defeated and retreating British army in Libya, at Bir Hakeim: so the French military eclipse was short-lived (by then the USA has still not engaged Nazi Germany in battle).
Right, France had declared war to Hitler in 1939: respect. While the US plutocrats were helping Hitler in all ways: infamy.
The elite, vast, and well-armed French armies and the professional British force got pierced from behind May 10–15, mostly because they had not been at serious war for 21 years, whereas the Nazis had trained by conquering Spain. The second-in-command of the french army told his superior the Germans may just do what they did. Gamelin, the C in C, just didn’t believe the Germans could be that smart, and that fast, and that invisible prior to action. War in Spain would have enlightened him.
Moreover, among other problems, French and British air crews were rusted, for the first few days; to boot, the Brits didn’t engage all their air force; somewhat related, the British Second Armored division was late arriving just where the Nazis broke through… Just where the inspector of the British army, the Prince of Wales, had informed his personal friend Adolf Hitler he should breakthrough… At Sedan…
So why didn’t France intervene in Spain as the Spanish Republic had requested her to do? And get the little military action the French army needed to refresh itself? Because the French leader, the Jew and Socialist Leon Blum, got intimidated by French hater F.D. Roosevelt, and his Anglo-Saxon plutocratic cohorts who absolutely didn’t want France to defeat Germany in 1936. And so on. US and Anglo-Saxon plutocrats loved doing business with Hitler, and some, like IBM, did business, crucial business, business which, had it been absent, the Great Reich would have collapsed without, throughout the war, all the way to May 8, 1945.
One can’t understand the travails of France in the Twentieth Century without understanding in-depth the machinations of US plutocracy to defeat what it hates in France. And this is a warning for the future, as, arguably, US plutocrats are mightier than ever… And indeed, an ex-banker, a collaborator of US plutocracy (he overviewed the gift of the French Alstom to its US competitor GE) is now in power in France, playing Thatcher-Reagan. Sure enough, Macron, as French president, while part of the global plutocracy, has been busy accusing France of “crimes against humanity“.
Patrice Ayme
Note 1: the preceding was expanded from an answer to Quora:
Why do some people consider France as a nation of cowards without any army?
Yes, indeed, why are so many people so stupid? To better control and enslave them….Oh, BTW, France has the world’s third nuclear force, with 600 nuclear ICBM warheads for nuclear subs, plus nuclear attack subs, plus supersonic nuclear strike capability, and her army is arguably, in some ways, more active than the US Army itself… The French deterrent is also independent of the US, which the much weaker British deterrent is not…)
Note 2: Macron has been busy excoriating French “colonial” past… when much of the French population (including yours truly) has a colonial past (all colored types have it, and that’s a majority if not of the country, certainly of the French soccer team, as the whole planet, even Obama, knows…) Moreover “colonial” troops fought superbly in WWI and WW2 against the real racists and criminals… Germans and Senegalese, even in WWI, made no prisoners. The Senegalese, part of this “colonial” army Macron and those who accuse France of cowardice, in the end, won.
