WATERLOO AND THE END OF FRENCH COURAGE: JED BABBIN
http://www.epictimes.com/londoncenter/2015/06/waterloo-and-the-end-of-french-courage/
Thursday marks the 200th anniversary of the British and Prussian victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, a battle that changed Europe temporarily and France, perhaps, forever.
We all know the jokes: “Why do the French plant trees on the banks of the Seine? So the Germans can march in the shade.” “Used French army rifles: only dropped once.”
Since World War Two, there has been a sneering arrogance that characterizes our French ally, an arrogance unjustified by past achievement in peace and war. Their foreign minister at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion was Dominique de Villepin. When asked who he hoped would win in Iraq, he refused to answer. But, as I said on Chris Matthews’ program “Hardball” at the time — before he went nuts – going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion: you just leave a lot of noisy, useless baggage behind.
It wasn’t always this way. Hundreds of years ago they weren’t “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” It’s taken centuries for the French to become what they are today.
To understand why France is what it is, you have to study both its national psychology and its history.
Nations have psychologies just as individuals do. One of the pioneers in analyzing national psychologies is Dr. Vamik Volkan, now retired from the University of Virginia. In a 2006 paper, “Large-Group Psychology in its Own Right,” Volkan wrote about how losses in war – lives, land and national prestige – are shared traumas at so forceful that they may result in the creation of ideologies that can last for centuries.
Volkan calls this “transgenerational transition of trauma.” That’s a mouthful, but that’s a large part of what’s been going on in France for the last 200 years.
Before Waterloo, France had been like most other European nations, except that at times of its greatest outpouring of national pride, they suffered their greatest defeats. Even before France was French, when Vercingetorix the Gaul led a rebellion against Julius Caesar’s Roman legions in 52 B.C., he and his forces fought well, but were defeated. Vercingetorix was held captive and in 46 B.C. was paraded through the streets of Rome and executed.
The defeat of Vercingetorix wasn’t enough to establish defeat as a French tradition. But defeat came, again and again, when France was at its most prideful. In 1415, English King Henry V defeated French forces at Agincourt in so thorough a manner that many of the French royals were killed and much of French territory surrendered to England. France’s tradition of defeat continued in the Hundred Years War with England when – after leading French forces to brief victories — Joan of Arc was captured and burned at the stake in 1431.
But neither were the French permanently defeated then nor their tradition of defeat permanently established in its national psychology. The French Revolution in 1789 gave birth to a fervor to export revolution throughout Europe that was much feared by the remaining European monarchies. War followed almost immediately, which brought about the quick rise to power of a young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte.
From 1803-1815, Napoleon led France in a series of wars against a series of alliances. He was, in a sense, the conqueror of the world. French pride in its army and its emperor had never been as great, and hasn’t since. But the British discovered a great general in a man named Arthur Wellesley, known to history as the Duke of Wellington. In several battles in 1814, Wellington and allied forces defeated Napoleon, who was exiled to the island of Elba.
But Napoleon escaped and returned to power in March 1815. French soldiers quickly flocked to his banner and Napoleon began another war of conquest. Wellington, joined by a Prussian army under Blücher, brought Napoleon to his final battle at Waterloo, now a city in Belgium that was then a part of the Netherlands. It was a series of battles that stretched over four days.
Napoleon, outnumbered if Wellington and Blücher could have united their forces, first brought the British to battle at a critical crossroad before the allied armies could unite. Had he succeeded, the allies would have been split and could have been defeated in turn. But that fight was inconclusive. The Prussians fought – and lost – a battle with the French at Ligny, about a dozen miles away, but French commanders failed to stop their march.
For more than a day, the armies were separated, not by each other but by weather. The heaviest rain in living memory pelted down. On the final day, June 18, Wellington and Napoleon faced off near Waterloo, between two short ridges leaving the French to attack uphill. Blücher was still hurrying to the scene.
The battle went on all day, with thousands of soldiers killed on both sides. Napoleon’s marshals failed again and again to break the British line. By early evening, Blücher’s force had arrived and Prussian troops were pouring onto the battlefield when Napoleon launched his final attack: the charge of his most elite troops, the hitherto undefeated Imperial Guard.
They were the pride of France. Shouting “long live the emperor,” the Guard charged the British line in column, facing a line of musket-wielding British soldiers. The Guard was not just repelled but resoundingly defeated.
On July 4, 1815 the allied forces marched into Paris. Napoleon, disgraced, was exiled to St. Helena and there he remained. French pride was broken.
The Prussians marched into Paris again in 1871. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 was another blow to French pride, which proved so resilient in the 19th Century. It took World War One to finally extinguish it.
France, still smarting from its 1871 defeats, wasn’t in 1914 what Churchill said of it before World War Two: armed to the teeth but pacifist to the core. Like every other major power before World War One, France was shifting alliances quickly. Most of all, it desired British assurance of military intervention if Germany attacked.
France had taken few steps to prepare for the war either strategically or economically. Its generals – many over the age of sixty by the time the war began – had adopted what was really a non-strategy that was perfectly French. They convinced themselves that nothing more was needed because the fighting spirit of the French soldier – they called it “Élan vital” – was so fierce that no strategy could be planned except one of constant attack. French troops – and British, and German — were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands.
When the spirit of “Élan vital” was broken, so was France. Some 1,700,000 Frenchmen were killed in that war. France has yet to recover, and it may never do so.
World War Two saw little from the French. After the Germans drove their tanks around the Maginot Line, France had little ability to resist. Fight they did, but the Germans marched into Paris – for the third time – in June 1940. The French navy, rather than flee to British ports, was partly scuttled and the rest sunk by the British because they feared the collaborationist Vichy government would have surrendered it to the Germans.
After World War Two, France demanded and received a permanent membership in the UN Security Council along with the US, Britain, Russia and China. Historians say that the Security Council seat was given them only because French leaders were terribly angry that they had not been invited to a key meeting at which the UN was being formed.
History hasn’t been kind to France. Its psychology is precisely what Dr. Volkan named transgenerational transition of trauma. If you want to set a date on which the decline of modern France began, that day was June 18, 1815, the last day of the Battle of Waterloo.
« Previous 1 2 3
Comments are closed.
