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Or perhaps it's just old left wing subversive nonsense? Now French 'conservatives' herald this old subversive nonsense as the ideology they are nostalgic about, while calling 'reactionaries' or 'ultra-mecha-final-form far-right' those calling it left wing nonsense.
That was a cope.
That type of French does not seem to be reproducing much.
Who can quote Voltaire ?
That'd probably get you jailed, better not try it.
Why not the Bible? In Latin? French people used to be Catholic.
Most foreigners who care about the so-called 'French culture' don't seem to really care about the modern, left-wing stuff in my experience. Tourists come for Versailles, Le Louvre, Notre Dame... Perhaps they are interested in Napoleon's achievements.
Nobody's buying a 'French' brand of globohomo that they can get straight from the tap almost anywhere now.
The biggest cultural achievement of the 'values of the Republic' seems to be convincing a large share of the French people that they are a significant human achievement, better than their competitors, worth preserving and expanding the world over. But not by breeding. Just writing strongly worded letters about their 'diverse' sports teams.
White, mainstream French people likely have the highest fertility rate of any secular whites in western Europe. Yes, the Faroese and laestadians and Dutch Calvinists and tradcaths are all higher, but secular mainstream French probably have a higher tfr than any other secular mainstream group in Western Europe.
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I'd imagine a good 1/4+ of people here could quote at least two things from Voltaire off the top of their head.
That bit about the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest; was that him or Robespierre?
Sounds more like a Robespierre thing to say but I'm not certain
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Diderot, I think
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You seem to be under the strange impression that these things, Napoleon, the Ancien Régime, la fille aînée de l'Eglise, that these are somehow separate from the Republic and the Nation, that these achievements, good and bad, are not part of an unbroken through-line that is entirely recognized as our patrimony.
Napoléon c'est la France, Robespierre c'est la France, Louis c'est la France, Gambetta c'est la France, Maurras c'est la France, la Commune c'est la France.
One can deplore the sorry state of our country and how much we have erred over the centuries or in recent times, but even the ultra-mecha-final-form far-right would immediately detect a silly American infiltrator in one that would deny this proposition. The best you'll get is people saying the continuation of the ethnic French stock is necessary for the continuation of the French culture, and I don't even disagree with this, but no self respecting Frenchman would deny Alexandre Dumas nationhood.
And to get back to the original point, I don't think we should take lessons on solutions from people who haven't solved the problem either.
They necessarily are, considering the Republic and the Nation came much later and are killing these other things.
Not really. Why not add the soccer team to that? Or Vichy? Or Algeria? Somehow Vichy which gave current France its retirement system is not 'la France'. Nicely played!
You can't have both absolute monarchy and republic at the same time, for example.
If you're going to include everything and anything into your patriotism, why restrict yourself to some arbitrary borders from a thousand years ago or so? At least the early French saw themselves as people of God, in communion with a greater Christian community, from Rome to Byzantium.
Why are you so triumphant about a culture that is sterilizing that very people then?
Do you include the millions of Frenchmen that lived and died before Alexandre Dumas ever wrote a word?
You can add traffic laws, identity cards, national police and a whole lot of other things.
But I thought it went without saying that those are part of it as well. Pétain c'est aussi la France. Though our claim to Algeria is, as you know, a bit more complicated because of the multinational nature of Empire.
I wouldn't say I am. But you don't really get to pick your culture, ironically. I am what I am and if that leads me to oblivion, so be it. I couldn't bear to be anything else.
I still think there is hope we can deal with this problem. And frankly I think we already would have if the American thumb wasn't pressed so hard on European populism.
Well it's a bit weird asking physically impossible hypotheticals, but what you're really asking is a spiritual question: whether the spirit of France before the Revolution would still have recognized him as one of ours.
I think it would. But I can see how one would disagree. Ultimately it's not really the sort of question that can be resolved through reasoned argument, is it? Nationhood is magic, it works on faith.
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