Les Monquiez Surrendeurellement aux Consommez

Les Monquiez Surrendeurellement aux Consommez du Fromage - The French have been getting a lousy rap lately.

Much of it's deserved.

Yesterday's edition of Fraters Libertas did an able fisking of the execrable Molly Ivins' latest take on the French.

In her latest piece, Ivins proves that those who decry others' knowlege of history had best be up on it themselves. Ivins is not up to the challenge.

This is going to be just a tad redundant - the Fraters did a fine job - but I have no problem piling on Molly Ivins:

George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: "How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it's never been tried."

That was certainly amusing.

One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Adolf Hitler.

Ivins gets part of it right - and some of the critics of France get it partly wrong.

Germany and Russia both lost greater numbers of men in action than did France. But France had a smaller population than Germany or Russia. Roughly 65% of all Frenchmen of military age were killed, wounded, captured or declared missing in World War I. That's nearly 2/3. The other combatants suffered grievously as well - Germany nearly 50%, Britain 35% and the US roughly 8%.

The gutting of an entire generation affected all Western societies - but the French worst of all. Although they remained a world power, they suffered from a malaise from which, in some ways, they never recovered. Picture America's post-Vietnam hangover, only 100 times worse.

This is the last part where Ivins is even close to the truth, though.

On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Mr. Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny.

Wrong on most counts.

• The French Army was as large as the Germans. Combined with the Dutch, Belgian and British armies, they far outnumbered the Germans.
• "Outgunned?" French artillery was excellent. Their 155mm howitzer was adopted by the US Army during WWII. The German 88mm anti-aircraft/anti-tank gun was excellent, but available in tiny numbers in 1940.
• The French suffered from war-fighting doctrine that was outdated compared to Germany's (as did Britain and the US, as it happens). But many French generals - DeGaulle and Leclerc among them - were superb, and gave up little in skill to the Germans. France suffered more from its national demoralization than from any generalized lack of skill on the part of its generals.
• Ivins is wrong. The French not only had more tanks - but on a tank by tank basis, French tanks were better; the Char B1 was better-armed and armored, the Somua was both plus much faster. Either is faster and smarter than Molly Ivins.

In the few places where they had tanks, they held splendidly.

Simplistic in the extreme. The French held out just fine in quite a number of areas - but it was irrelevent. The German Blitzkrieg was built around, as Nathan Bedford Forrest put it, "hitting 'em where they ain't". The Germans would force a breakthrough ( in the Ardennes mountains in Belgium), then force all their tanks through the hole. The French spread their tanks evenly over their entire front. Where the French held, with or without tanks, it was in a place the Germans weren't attacking.

And as the Fraters mention, there were a few armored counterattacks by British and French troops. They managed to win some localized successes (as the British did at Arras) that were overwhelmed by the German advance everywhere else.

Relying on the Maginot Line was one of the great military follies of modern history, but it does not reflect on the courage of those who died for France in 1940. For 18 months after that execrable defeat, the United States of America continued to have cordial diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany.

As irrelevant an observation as it is stupid.

Not as stupid as what follows:

For those of you who have not read Paris 1919, I recommend it highly. Roosevelt was anti-colonialist. That system was a great evil, a greater horror even than Nazism or Stalinism.

And with this, Ivins proves her own gaping cretinism. Naziism, Stalinism, and their offshoots, as well as the wars they started between them devoured as many as 150 million people in the last century.

If you have read Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild, you have some idea. The French were in it up to their necks.

Instead of insisting on freedom for the colonies of Europe, we let our allies carry on with the system, leaving the British in India and Africa, and the French in Vietnam and Algeria, to everyone's eventual regret.

Ivins is again raving.

Roosevelt in 1919 was an Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He had no power over colonial policy, to say nothing of that of other sovereign nations.

Or does Ivins mean after 1945? When the British began divesting their colonies almost immediately? Let's look into this:

Surrender monkeys? Try Dien Bien Phu. Yes, the French did surrender, didn't they? After 6,000 French died in a no-hope position. Ever heard of the Foreign Legion? Of the paratroopers, called "paras"? The trouble we could have saved ourselves if we had only paid attention to Dien Bien Phu.

Then came Algeria. As nasty a war as has ever been fought. If you have seen the film Battle of Algiers, you have some idea. Five generations of pieds noirs, French colonialists, thought it was their country Charles de Gaulle came back into power in 1958, specifically elected to keep Algeria French. I consider de Gaulle's long, slow, delicate, elephantine withdrawal (de Gaulle even looked like an elephant) one of the single greatest acts of statesmanship in history. Only de Gaulle could have done that..

So, which is it? Is colonialism worse than Naziism, or is the French defense of their colonies, and DeGaulle's foot-dragging and horribly bloody disengagement from Algeria proof that they're a tough, pugnacious people? I'm confused.

The other night on 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney, who fought in France and certainly has a right to be critical, chided the French for forgetting all that sacrifice. But I think he got it backward: The French remember too well.

Apparently not. They learned in the fifties and sixties that appeasement of terrorists was a one-way trip to a fiery death.

I was in Paris on Sept. 11, 2001. The reaction was so immediate, so generous, so overwhelming.

Not just the government, but the people kept bringing flowers to the American embassy. They covered the American Cathedral, the American Church, anything they could find that was American.

They didn't just leave flowers -- they wrote notes with them. I read more than 100 of them. Not only did they refer, again and again, to Normandy, to never forgetting, but there were even some in ancient, spidery handwriting referring to WWI: "Lafayette is still with you."

Nobody doubts that many, maybe most, French people have their hearts in the right place. Their government is where the problems come in.

This is where I think the real difference is. We Americans are famously ahistorical. We can barely be bothered to remember what happened last week, or last month, much less last year.

The French are really stuck on history. (Some might claim this is because the French are better educated than we are. I won't go there.)

Nor should Ivins "go there". Any putative French "historicism" is based on a collective national dogma - the same as Russian "paranoia" and Japanese "isolationism" and German "Volk". The French "knowledge of history" is neither particularly objective (not that Ivins is fit to comment) nor necessarily healthy.

Does it not occur to anyone that these are very old friends of ours, trying to tell us what they think they know about being hated by weak enemies in the Third World?

Yes, it does.

France gets a bum rap in the US, in some respects. The Germans swept them aside in 1940, largely because they were a demoralized people, many of whom felt more sympathy for authoritarian Vichy than their own republic. Their military is the butt of jokes, even though many of their special forces are among the best in the world. They have experience being hated in the Third World, largely because they were among the most brutal and autocratic colonizers.

The French story is neither as craven as the likes of Jay Leno would tell you - nor as monochromatically courageous as Molly Ivins would have you believe.

Posted by Mitch at February 21, 2003 12:26 PM