Oups. �toiles.

It's interesting that he leaves out the Hundred Years War, because while the "French" did indeed win that conflict�, the fact of the matter was, their victory came about largely as a result of Charles VI's decision to reign in his knights and hide behind castle walls, until all of his enemies either got bored or died of old age.

It's also fun to watch him try explaining away the Second World War, possibly the only war in history which a single country (France) managed to lose *twice*.



� (sneer quotes are intentional, because it was not actually a war between England and France, as modern revisionist historians like to portray it, but rather a dynastic struggle between the rightful French king, Edward III, and usurpers from the House of Valois)

He *didn't* leave out the Hundred Years War.... he mentioned it, and correctly stated that the French won it, largely by strength of arms.

By the way... "reining in your knights and hiding behind castle walls".... that's called "good military tactics". It's what they should have done. And the enemy didn't "get bored"; they were unable to remain in the field.

He mentioned in passing, and IIRC the context of his mentioning it, was specifically so he could explain why he wouldn't be mentioning it.

And of course hiding behind their walls was a good military tactic! I never said it wasn't! In fact, I am a big fan of Charles VI, BIG fan, and I think he was a great military leader - it's just that he happened to hit on the one strategy to which the French are imminently suited, that is to say, running away and hiding.

He's a traitor, this is an obvious false flag operation. You can practically see the onion he lodged in his colon. I never saw him take a single sip of tea.

Fuck this bald imp.

It's easy and common for shitty, lazy jokes to get repeated often enough for people who don't care to fact-check to just assume they're true, and that intellectual laziness is what seems to be sticking in his craw here. It's like jokes about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen(quite the opposite, he was cremated) or his purported anti-Semitism (A bit harder to pin down beliefs sometimes, but he didn't write long-winded screeds and receive Nazi medals for it like Ford, and his children and people who worked with him have vehemently and repeatedly denied it and blasted such insinuations, and anyway I'm of the mind that a megalomaniacal control freak like Walt would've abided by anyone, no matter their creed, as long as they jumped when and how high he told them).

Kind of funny that he didn't go as far back as Charlemagne's rule, or the Norman domination of England, but this feels like an off-the-cuff, "I just downed a few and now I got opinions to share" kind of rant anyway.

Man, now I want an international edition of Drunk History.

*sigh* Maybe I am just too smart for the general pea-brained masses that make up the internet. I fact check EVERYTHING againt thier wikipedia articles, many of which I wrote. I assumed the rest of the slower minded populance did the same but it appears that I am once again the exception. The lonley exception.

Oddeye - Matt has a tendency to get worked up, especially when people backtalk to him. I don't think he deals well with trolls, and he's a little high-strung, possibly due to his warrior lifestyle.

He's a great scholar and a brilliant swordsman, but sometimes he's a bit of prig.


Sanest - he's shown a marked deference for Charlemagne in the past, which is a little surprising, given that he considers pagans to be rotten and bloodthirsty for their habit of ransacking Christian settlements, yet evidently sees no problem with Charlemagne's genocidal tendencies.

At any rate, neither Charlemagne nor the Normans count, because Charlemagne was a German, and the Normans were Norse.

Also, Napoleon was a Corsican, which makes him *a Corsican*, not French. I really don't see why people like Matt insist that Napoleon was a Frog, when pretty much straight up until Napoleon's birth, Corsica had been an independent republic - and prior to that, part of various Italian merchant states for a thousand-some-odd years. It'd be like calling a kid born in Iraq "an American".

I almost posted a pedantic comment abut how the Corsican revolution was like 150 years before the Italian unification, but then I reread. I should've known Evilhomer was too crafty to let that slip by.

Ah yes. I was originally going to type "part of Italy", but then I thought to myself, "Homer, if you aren't careful to be pedantic here, someone will call you on it".

Seriously? Napoleon was French. It doesn't matter what he was ethnically or originally, he was culturally French. There's a reason why the French lay claim to him.

Ditto for Charlemagne & the Normans. (Actually, Charlemagne should probably be described as proto-French, since there wasn't much of a "French" identity back then.) But the Normans were culturally French, regardless of their Scandinavian ancestry.

Please. Culture is a construct; poorly defined at the best of times, and able to be twisted around to fit any old agenda we might wish to pursue. Was Richard the Lionheart French, or English? Was Bertrand du Guesclin French, or Breton? By resorting to the "he's culturally French" argument, we could try to claim "Frenchness" for historical figures as disparate as Raimond Roger Trancavel (Occitan), Alfred Dreyfus (Jewish), Franz Fanon (Algerian), Ho Chi Mihn (Vietnamese), and about half the population of Switzerland and Belgium. Napoleon was, what? Educated in France, lived in France (for a little while at least)? I'd say "big deal", it's clear from history that Napoleon considered himself to be a proper son of Corsica, but then I guess by your logic, Ho Chi Mihn was as Gallic as Louis XIV.

I am glad that you amended your views on Charlemagne and conceded his not-Frenchness already, thank you, that was very gallant of you. And as for the Normans - well, no, they were culturally Norman. They spoke French (more or less; it was a different form of French back then, so question for consideration: could the medieval French really be considered "culturally" French, in the way we moderns understand the word?) and they'd adopted the foul god of their soft southern neighbours, but they were culturally distinct enough that at the time everyone in France (and elsewhere) still thought of them *as Normans*, rather than as part of the bland melange of Paris and its environs. Hell, even today, centuries after genetic mixing wiped away most trace of their Scandinavian heritage, many Normans refuse to lump themselves in with the rest of France, and while Normano-French relations aren't as fragile as Bretono-French, Catalan-Castillian, or Scottish-Anglo relations, there are still local independence movements and deep-seated regional resentments against their "properly French" overlords. Are YOU going to tell THEM that, oh, they're "French"? huh. The Normans can decide for themselves, thank you!

"EvilHomer
Ah yes. I was originally going to type "part of Italy", but then I thought to myself, "Homer, if you aren't careful to be pedantic here, someone will call you on it"."

Yeah, I fact checked and everything, I thought I had you there for a second.

5 star comment