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KULTURALIA

by Posted by Addison dePitt March 25, 2018

March 25, 2018 0 comments 6 minutes read

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Has France ever won a war?
Amswered on Quora

Kevin Dolgin, Entrepreneur, writer, musician, humanist

Answered Jan 19 · Upvoted by Armen Kaladzhyan, M.S. History, Moscow State University (2000)

I’m going to answer a different question. Forgive me, that’s undoubtedly poor Quora etiquette, but I think your question raises a somewhat larger issue that kind of bugs me.

I’m going to assume you’re American. I too am American, as well as French, and it strikes me that it’s really only Americans that propagate this idea of France being somehow substandard because they lose wars (e.g. Norman Schwarzkopf saying that going to war without France is like going bear hunting without your accordion… which is a really, really witty line but still gets my goat).

Very few people outside of the United States (and perhaps to a degree, Great Britain) still ascribe to this philosophy that the worth of a country is a function of its military capability. I actually believe that this is a significant problem for the United States, which tends to approach international diplomacy by boasting about the size of its button and building aircraft carriers… while China buys up the governments of countries with rare earth mines and is content with one aircraft carrier they bought from the Ukrainians.

But on to your actual point about France winning wars. Many of the other answers here present a number of interesting and entirely relevant facts about France’s 1200 year history of warfare, listing its many wins and losses over a period five times greater than the existence of the United States. Draw your conclusions from that. But the source of all this is really the French defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany in 1940. The world was stunned that the victor of the first world war rolled over in six weeks (believe me, the French were the most stunned of all). The defeat was total and earth-shattering and yes, they screwed up. France then lost a couple of ill-advised colonial wars, like everyone else who tried to hold on to their colonies.

But please do consider the second world war in the context of the times, particularly given the French experience in the first world war, just twenty years before.

The United States has never been close to experiencing the trauma that France lived through in the first world war. The French lost almost 1.4 million men in that war, with a further 4.3 million wounded. Six out of ten men of military age were killed or wounded in that war. Think about that. Imagine if the United States’ war in Iraq had, in the first four years, resulted in the death of 11.7 MILLION American soldiers, with a further 36.3 million horribly wounded. Given our population, that is the equivalence. That kind of trauma significantly reduces nationalistic fervor in a country, particularly since France had seen almost a quarter of its own territory utterly destroyed, something the United States hasn’t had to deal with since 1865. I’d point out that by comparison, the United States lost just over 50,000 men in the first world war.

Even in World War II, despite surrendering after only six weeks, France lost 210,000 soldiers, just about half of the US casualties and a considerably higher percentage of the population. It also lost almost 400,000 civilians, a trauma that again, the United States thankfully has not faced since the Civil war. As such, when in 1940 Paris was occupied, the country overrun by a tactically superior and seemingly unstoppable foe, and a hero of the first world war, Philippe Petain, said that it was over, yes, the French all too readily agreed. The fact that so many fled the country to join De Gaulle and fight on (300,000 French soldiers refused to accept the surrender and fought side by side with the allies against Germans) is a fact that the French should be more proud of than if they had managed to stave off the Germans in 1940.

Again, forgive me for not really answering your question, but I did want to address the sentiment behind it.

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report