History & humanities
Joined July 2023
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‘We band of brothers, for he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother...’
Happy St Crispin's Day 🏴🏴
‘Good and upstanding people must be persuaded with gentle means.
The rabble must be moved by terror.’
– Napoleon
When Napoleon arrived to command l'Armee d'Italie, his generals were put off by his youth and sensitive nature.
That is, until he put on his hat:
Interbellica retweeted
Please pray for us
Please pray for @NapoleonBonabot, his wife was just hospitalized from a car crash incident. We don't know how bad it is.
Interbellica retweeted
before you waste a lot of time in therapy trying to understand men, consider that Napoleon got volunteers to man a battery position with an almost 100% casualty rate by simply renaming it "the battery of not being a little bitch"
Because most people – everywhere, not just France –
could not tell you the first thing about Napoleon.
So, they claim to have no strong feelings about the man who brought glory and destruction to France, spread the Napoleonic Code across Europe, reintroduced slavery, etc etc
Nationally, amongst those in their late twenties, there were over thirteen women for every ten men.
I wonder how this looked in Brittany and Corsica?
Sir Douglas Haig on French military leadership:
‘These French leaders are a queer mixture of fair ability (not more than fair) and ignorance of the practical side of war.
They are not built for it by nature. They are too excitable, and they never seem to think of what the enemy may do. And they will not see a nasty situation as it really is, and take steps to meet it.’
ALT Field-marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-chief, France, From December 15th 1915.
You have the final say on the Treaty of Versailles.
Your task is to ensure lasting peace in Europe.
What revisions would you have made?
Interbellica retweeted
These same birthrates also caused panic among many leading up to the Franco-Prussian War and WW1 because French women were having 2 children while German/Prussian women were having 6.
Some Frenchmen believed that they had the lowest birthrates was because they were more civilised than everyone else.
But this was fine, since the barbarous peoples of Africa, Asia and Germany would one day, presumably, also become civilised, thus reducing their fertility:
Perhaps David Lloyd George was right about the Poles
The French should STOP worshipping Louis XIV and Napoleon.
The greatest ruler in French history was Louis XI.
It is time to admit that the French obsession with "Grandeur" has been a historical trap. Napoleon and Louis XIV were performers who loved the stage, but a ruler’s primary job isn't to look good on a horse or in a palace. It is to make the state immortal.
Look at the actual cost of the icons. Louis XIV built Versailles but left the peasantry starving and the treasury bankrupt. Napoleon won the most brilliant battles in history only to lose the map, leaving France smaller, weaker, and more isolated than he found it. These weren't successes; they were expensive ego trips that the French people are still paying for in myth-making.
Then there is Louis XI. He didn't want a crown of gold; he wanted a web of control. They called him the "Universal Spider" because he understood that a well-placed bribe or a secret letter was more effective—and much cheaper—than a cavalry charge.
While the "Great" kings were busy wasting lives in vanity wars, Louis XI was doing the heavy lifting. He broke the power of the feudal lords, annexed Burgundy and Anjou, and effectively drew the borders of the modern Hexagon. He created the national postal service and centralized the economy. He built the actual hardware of the French state that the others simply ran their flashy software on.
If you judge a leader by the stability and strength of the nation they leave behind, Louis XI is the undisputed greatest. He was unflashy, cynical, and famously dressed like a commoner, but he is the reason France exists as a coherent unit today. It’s time to stop worshipping the showmen and start respecting the architect.
The problem with French revanchism is that nothing came from it.
They thought that, if they made life intolerable in the Rhineland, then the population would ‘organically’ demand to separate from the German state, to ease their suffering.
Predictably, it had the opposite effect:
Interbellica retweeted
"If Josephine had been my mother, my father would not have been buried at Saint Helena, and I should not be at Vienna. My mother is kind but weak; she was not the wife my father deserved."
- Napoleon II
Charles Darwin, in 1836, upon seeing the thriving port of Sydney:
‘My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’
"We are a portion of the dominant family of the world — we are of the English-speaking race. Our kindred are scattered in different parts of the globe, and wherever they are, no matter how far distant apart, there is a feeling of affection — there is that crimson tie, that bond of unity, existing which time does not affect, and as years roll by it grows firmer, stronger and in the end will become indispensable." PM Richard Seddon PC 🇳🇿🇬🇧
