Mais pourquoi?
First of all, for Star Trek: Discovery fans, a delightful interview with Michelle Yeoh about playing Philippa Georgiou and women in Star Trek. No spoilers for the finale, but spoilers for all other episodes of the season.
In other news: it's a minor side aspect of the Orange Menace's wish to throw himself a military parade, complete with phallic rockets and tanks, that I've seen several US and one British commenters go "...and he got the idea after his visit to France for Bastille Day? French military hahaha surrender heh heh he..." Which had me eye rolling like a mad woman. Guys, I'm on your side re: the ridiculousness of Cadet Bone Spur's wish to compensate via military equipment, truly I am. But what is it about the Anglosaxon obsession with the "French = military weaklings/cowards" stereotype? Can't you stop that?
It makes me ponder where this comes from, and why it's so specific to Americans and Brits. Because, look: until the second half of the 20th century, there was no shortage of anti French stereotypes in Germany. (And before there was a Germany, in the German states.) (Sidenote: Thankfully, the one thing even our current bunch of Neonazis, the AFD, weren't able to bring back were anti-French stereotypes. It would have been a tough sale to their members anyway, seeing as they're best buddies with Marine Le Pen.) But that was never one of them. (Which, by US/British logic, given that Germany was who France surrendered to in WWII, you'd think there was.) Usually, French-bashing came with the "immoral decadent lecher" stereotype or the "bloodthirsty conqueror" stereotype (during the Napoleonic Wars, but also earlier in the days of Louis XIV; in those eras, the French usually show up in German poetry and drama as Romans, while the German writers go through another phase of enthusiasm for good old Arminius/"Herrmann" the Cheruskan and the battle in the Teutoburg Forest). The sheer number of wars over the centuries where everyone got to play invader and invaded, defeater and defeated at different points would have made it ridiculous to claim a tendency for victory or surrender for just one side. And when you try to rally your subjects against the neighbour on the other side of the Rhine, "omg those guys want to invade us again!" always makes for better propaganda anyway. There was also a lot of unpleasant mixture of the two stereotypes with "want to seduce/rape our women" accusations thrown about.
Meanwhile, British pop culture: it's AGINCOURT AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT, with nary a thought given to, say, the those utterly pointless British-French wars Henry VIII. indulged in (spoiler: he didn't win), the less than glorious follow up his kids had to cope with until Calais was finally gone, too, or that Waterloo was a group effort, not a Brits versus French kind of thing.) Our armchair psychologists in the newspapers declare that it's perhaps because SOMEONE never got over the Battle of Hastings and being a Norman state with French as the official language for centuries (btw: well played, Monsieur le Presidente, promising them that tapestry) or, more recently, over the loss of Empire, but that doesn't explain why the Americans picked up that stereotype with such enthusiasm and endlessly repeat it. (Independent of party affiliation.)
Last night I had dinner with someone whose job it is to trace down inheritors if someone dies without direct heirs. And he said, apropos some US clients, that one reason why British or American law is such a headache to him every time he has to deal with it is "that they don't have the Code Napoleon as a basis for their civil law. Whereas I have no problem understanding the legalese of an Italian or even Polish lawyer, because there's that common basis". And I thought, here might be another reason for the difference in stereotypes. Because Napoleon's function in British pop culture history is to show up as a threat and be eventually defeated (by Sharpe's chip on the shoulder on land and Hornblower's manpain at sea, as one person on lj memorably put it). Not to change things on a fundamental level. And this happened here on the continent. Yes, there was the eventual defeat. (Group effort.) But before that were years in which the many principalities were restructured into more or less their current shapes and a lot of them got a modern civic law for the first time, from which their current one derives. And it's all seen as the follow up to the French Revolution as the big change on the continent, the shatterer of (ancient) worlds. Now, depending on the era and its dominant attitudes, this was seen more negatively or more positively, but one thing it would never be classified as by even the most fervent anti French chronicler/poet/politician/novelist was "weak" or just intermediary.
And then, of course, there were all those earlier centuries of even the tiniest prince of the tiniest German state desperately wanting to be Louis XIV., and building his own mini Versailles (from which we derive a great many Baroque palaces and gardens all over Germany), the nobility copying French fashion, and French being spoken by some of said nobility more fluently than they could speak German. Even when the middle class started to become dominant instead of the nobility, speaking French (and being well versed in French literature) was still regarded as a sine qua non right until English took over post WWII. With that kind of background, a "muhahha, those French, always surrendering" cliché simply wouldn't have been possible. Post WWII, of course, not only was there the utter horror of the Third Reich to confront and (eventually) accept as responsibility, but the first chancellor, Adenauer, was a Rhinelander who made French-German reconciliation a key part of his strategy. All those decades later, French-German relations are still regarded as the big European sucess story in my part of the world. Which is why the recent elections in France, before their outcome, caused angst and fears on a level that Brexit did not (with Brexit, the general reaction then and now is more in the vein of Asterix' saying "die spinnen, die Briten" (il sont fous ces Britanniques)). No Europe-friendly France, no Europe, but it's even more than that, if you're German: needing the French not to succumb en masse to their demons (insert here: Front National, racism, antisemitism, post colonial baggage of all sorts) is part self interest, because, see above, we've got a historical centuries long habit of seeing them as trend setters.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1272507.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
In other news: it's a minor side aspect of the Orange Menace's wish to throw himself a military parade, complete with phallic rockets and tanks, that I've seen several US and one British commenters go "...and he got the idea after his visit to France for Bastille Day? French military hahaha surrender heh heh he..." Which had me eye rolling like a mad woman. Guys, I'm on your side re: the ridiculousness of Cadet Bone Spur's wish to compensate via military equipment, truly I am. But what is it about the Anglosaxon obsession with the "French = military weaklings/cowards" stereotype? Can't you stop that?
It makes me ponder where this comes from, and why it's so specific to Americans and Brits. Because, look: until the second half of the 20th century, there was no shortage of anti French stereotypes in Germany. (And before there was a Germany, in the German states.) (Sidenote: Thankfully, the one thing even our current bunch of Neonazis, the AFD, weren't able to bring back were anti-French stereotypes. It would have been a tough sale to their members anyway, seeing as they're best buddies with Marine Le Pen.) But that was never one of them. (Which, by US/British logic, given that Germany was who France surrendered to in WWII, you'd think there was.) Usually, French-bashing came with the "immoral decadent lecher" stereotype or the "bloodthirsty conqueror" stereotype (during the Napoleonic Wars, but also earlier in the days of Louis XIV; in those eras, the French usually show up in German poetry and drama as Romans, while the German writers go through another phase of enthusiasm for good old Arminius/"Herrmann" the Cheruskan and the battle in the Teutoburg Forest). The sheer number of wars over the centuries where everyone got to play invader and invaded, defeater and defeated at different points would have made it ridiculous to claim a tendency for victory or surrender for just one side. And when you try to rally your subjects against the neighbour on the other side of the Rhine, "omg those guys want to invade us again!" always makes for better propaganda anyway. There was also a lot of unpleasant mixture of the two stereotypes with "want to seduce/rape our women" accusations thrown about.
Meanwhile, British pop culture: it's AGINCOURT AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT WATERLOO AGINCOURT, with nary a thought given to, say, the those utterly pointless British-French wars Henry VIII. indulged in (spoiler: he didn't win), the less than glorious follow up his kids had to cope with until Calais was finally gone, too, or that Waterloo was a group effort, not a Brits versus French kind of thing.) Our armchair psychologists in the newspapers declare that it's perhaps because SOMEONE never got over the Battle of Hastings and being a Norman state with French as the official language for centuries (btw: well played, Monsieur le Presidente, promising them that tapestry) or, more recently, over the loss of Empire, but that doesn't explain why the Americans picked up that stereotype with such enthusiasm and endlessly repeat it. (Independent of party affiliation.)
Last night I had dinner with someone whose job it is to trace down inheritors if someone dies without direct heirs. And he said, apropos some US clients, that one reason why British or American law is such a headache to him every time he has to deal with it is "that they don't have the Code Napoleon as a basis for their civil law. Whereas I have no problem understanding the legalese of an Italian or even Polish lawyer, because there's that common basis". And I thought, here might be another reason for the difference in stereotypes. Because Napoleon's function in British pop culture history is to show up as a threat and be eventually defeated (by Sharpe's chip on the shoulder on land and Hornblower's manpain at sea, as one person on lj memorably put it). Not to change things on a fundamental level. And this happened here on the continent. Yes, there was the eventual defeat. (Group effort.) But before that were years in which the many principalities were restructured into more or less their current shapes and a lot of them got a modern civic law for the first time, from which their current one derives. And it's all seen as the follow up to the French Revolution as the big change on the continent, the shatterer of (ancient) worlds. Now, depending on the era and its dominant attitudes, this was seen more negatively or more positively, but one thing it would never be classified as by even the most fervent anti French chronicler/poet/politician/novelist was "weak" or just intermediary.
And then, of course, there were all those earlier centuries of even the tiniest prince of the tiniest German state desperately wanting to be Louis XIV., and building his own mini Versailles (from which we derive a great many Baroque palaces and gardens all over Germany), the nobility copying French fashion, and French being spoken by some of said nobility more fluently than they could speak German. Even when the middle class started to become dominant instead of the nobility, speaking French (and being well versed in French literature) was still regarded as a sine qua non right until English took over post WWII. With that kind of background, a "muhahha, those French, always surrendering" cliché simply wouldn't have been possible. Post WWII, of course, not only was there the utter horror of the Third Reich to confront and (eventually) accept as responsibility, but the first chancellor, Adenauer, was a Rhinelander who made French-German reconciliation a key part of his strategy. All those decades later, French-German relations are still regarded as the big European sucess story in my part of the world. Which is why the recent elections in France, before their outcome, caused angst and fears on a level that Brexit did not (with Brexit, the general reaction then and now is more in the vein of Asterix' saying "die spinnen, die Briten" (il sont fous ces Britanniques)). No Europe-friendly France, no Europe, but it's even more than that, if you're German: needing the French not to succumb en masse to their demons (insert here: Front National, racism, antisemitism, post colonial baggage of all sorts) is part self interest, because, see above, we've got a historical centuries long habit of seeing them as trend setters.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1272507.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.