Explaining the French Empires

Summary

Summary of "Explaining the French Empires" Episode from History 102

Release Date: May 25, 2025

In this engaging episode of History 102, hosts Rudyard Lynch from the popular YouTube channel WhatifAltHist and Austin Padgett delve deep into the complex history of the French Empires. Through their insightful discussion, they explore the rise and fall of France’s three distinct empires, examining the cultural, political, and strategic factors that shaped their trajectories and left lasting impacts on global history.

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1. Introduction to the French Empires

Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett kick off the episode by outlining the scope of their discussion on the French Empires. They identify three primary phases:

• First French Empire (1620–1765): Centered around the Nantes to Quebec axis.
• Second French Empire (1798–1815): Dominated by Napoleon Bonaparte’s expansionist campaigns.
• Third French Empire (Mid-19th to Mid-20th Centuries): Focused on West Africa, Algeria, and Southeast Asia.

Austin notes, "[...] France probably has the best geography out of any European country..." [02:42], highlighting France's natural advantages yet explaining why these did not translate into sustained imperial dominance.

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2. The First French Empire (1620–1765): Nantes to Quebec

The discussion begins with the First French Empire, established in the early 17th century. This era saw France expanding its territories from Nantes in Western France to Quebec in North America.

Key Points:

• Colonial Strategy: Unlike the British, who had expansive colonies in India and America, France's empire was more concentrated.
• Geographical Blessings: France benefitted from fertile lands, navigable rivers, and a temperate climate, facilitating initial success.
• Lack of Consolidation: Despite these advantages, France struggled to maintain a consistent imperial strategy, often pulled in multiple directions without the commitment needed to sustain long-term growth.

Notable Quote: Rudyard Lynch states, "France was a generalist, where it could be a land power, it could be a sea power, it could be a manufacturing power, it could be a cultural power. But the French didn't really commit to any one given strategy." [07:15]

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3. Cultural and Social Dynamics

Lynch and Padgett delve into the cultural aspects that influenced the French Empires, particularly focusing on societal norms and attitudes.

Adultery and Social Structure:

• Unique French Attitudes: Austin remarks on the high rates of adultery in French society compared to Anglo-Saxon societies, attributing it to a cultural disconnect between the rural population and the urban centers of power.
• Impact on Empire: This societal trait was seen as a reflection of broader cultural deficits that hindered France's ability to sustain its empire, as Rudyard notes, "Urban culture became progressively more degenerate as time passed, which rubbed off on the population." [14:27]

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4. The Second French Empire (1798–1815): Napoleonic Wars

Transitioning to the Second French Empire, the focus shifts to Napoleon Bonaparte's rise and the expansive wars that defined this era.

Key Points:

• Napoleon’s Strategy: Napoleon aimed to dominate continental Europe, stretching France’s influence from the Mediterranean to Russia.
• Military Innovation: Introduction of total war, mobilizing the entire society for the war effort.
• Downfall: The disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 significantly weakened the empire, leading to Napoleon's eventual defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Notable Quote: Austin reflects, "Napoleon attacked Spain, which was his only real ally because he was getting annoyed with them. Napoleon tried to conquer all of Europe at once and it backfired." [70:25]

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5. The Third French Empire (Mid-19th to Mid-20th Centuries): West Africa and Beyond

The Third French Empire marks France's attempts to rebuild its imperial stature through new colonies, primarily in West Africa and Southeast Asia.

Key Points:

• Colonial Administration: Unlike the British indirect rule, France pursued direct control with the aim of cultural assimilation, often establishing bureaucratic governance systems.
• Challenges: The French struggled to maintain coherence and effectiveness in their vast colonies, leading to instability and eventual decolonization.
• End of the Empire: Significant losses in regions like Vietnam (Dien Bien Phu) and Algeria culminated in the dismantling of the French Empire by the mid-20th century.

Notable Quote: Rudyard Lynch explains, "The French method as more humane. But when you zoom out and think about it, you're like, wait, the English don't actually care about whether you assimilate or not." [111:57]

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6. Impact of French Colonialism

The hosts examine the long-term effects of French colonialism on both the colonies and France itself.

Key Points:

• Cultural Legacy: French influence persists in former colonies through language, cuisine, and administrative systems.
• Economic Consequences: Many former French colonies remain economically challenged, a legacy of inconsistent and often exploitative colonial policies.
• Modern Reflections: The episode touches on contemporary French involvement in Africa, highlighting ongoing military interventions and the complexities of maintaining relationships with former colonies.

Notable Quote: Austin mentions, "France five years ago, they were fighting more than six wars in Africa at once..." [107:56]

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7. Conclusion and Future Topics

Rudyard and Austin conclude the episode by reflecting on the cyclical nature of empires and hinting at future discussions, such as the Napoleonic Wars.

Final Insights:

• Patterns of Rise and Fall: France's inability to sustain a unified strategy led to the repeated rise and fall of its empires.
• Cultural Fragmentation: Internal social and political divisions severely impacted France’s imperial ambitions.
• Learning from History: Understanding these patterns provides valuable lessons on the dynamics of powerful civilizations.

Closing Quote: Rudyard invites listeners, "History 102 by Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine... Let us know what else you want us to cover." [133:39]

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Notable Quotes with Attribution and Timestamps

• Rudyard Lynch: "France was a generalist, where it could be a land power, it could be a sea power, it could be a manufacturing power, it could be a cultural power. But the French didn't really commit to any one given strategy." [07:15]

• Austin Padgett: "Napoleon attacked Spain, which was his only real ally because he was getting annoyed with them. Napoleon tried to conquer all of Europe at once and it backfired." [70:25]

• Rudyard Lynch: "The French method as more humane. But when you zoom out and think about it, you're like, wait, the English don't actually care about whether you assimilate or not." [111:57]

• Austin Padgett: "France five years ago, they were fighting more than six wars in Africa at once..." [107:56]

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This episode provides a comprehensive overview of the French Empires, blending historical facts with engaging commentary and personal anecdotes from the hosts. For those interested in the intricate dance of imperial strategy, cultural influence, and geopolitical maneuvering, this discussion offers valuable insights into why France, despite its significant strengths, struggled to maintain lasting imperial dominance.

Transcript

[Austin Padgett]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Austin Padgett]

Hi everybody. Welcome to the new episode of History 102, which is about the French empires with our co hosts, Austin Padgett. Have you been attaining a mindset of inner love and inner self acceptance?

[Whatifalth]

No, only French love and French superiority.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, the French have a lot of, a lot to love, so that shouldn't be hard.

[Whatifalth]

It is the language of love, they say.

[Austin Padgett]

I think you mean adultery. You know, the whole thing that the French government's banned paternity tests for decades because it might disrupt the family.

[Whatifalth]

Oh wow. Because they knew, they were like, okay, this is going to blow everything up.

[Austin Padgett]

Adultery has been a really long tradition in France, where in the. The next episode we're covering is the Napoleonic Wars. And when you read Napoleon's biography, Merch. Show the merch. We have merch. Click the link in the description. We have mugs, we have maps, we have many different things.

[Whatifalth]

Lots of primary colors.

[Austin Padgett]

Exactly. So click the link below for the merch. Apologies for the, the derailment. But it's interesting that. Oh yeah. So in the Napoleonic Wars, Josephine was cheating on Napoleon. And Napoleon asked his minister Talley Rand what he should do about it. And Talleyrand said, caring about getting cheated on his lower class behavior. He said, if you act like you care, you're going to appear lower class. And that's not my attitude. I think that creating a society like that's disgusting. But that was a French thing that wasn't really common in other European societies. And it's interesting on a genetic basis how much adultery varies by society. So as a rule in most of Anglo Saxon history, as in the English speaking world, you have a 1% adultery rate every generation. So once you get to a hundred generations, at least one of them is probably going to be illegitimate. But in the modern Netherlands, it's 10% every generation.

[Whatifalth]

Wow.

[Austin Padgett]

And I'm thinking the French will be up by the Dutch's numbers, but I can't imagine that the current 10% number is that old, because if your number's that high for long enough, you're not going to have a functioning society.

[Whatifalth]

So this is where all the Continental and French romance, you know, sexual, more degenerate society narratives came from. From the English perspective.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. So the English and the French hated each other for obvious reasons, because they're the other's biggest political competing power. The French called the English perfidious Albion, where they saw the English as hypocrites and cunning, and they called the English a nation of pirates and shopkeepers. The English, meanwhile, thought the French were women. They thought they weren't masculine. They thought that they were deceptive and not overly emotional and those things.

[Whatifalth]

I can't think of a cooler compliment than pirate and shopkeeper. I'm pretty sure I've described myself that way.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, because Napoleon said that I can beat the English. They're a nation of shopkeepers. And Hitler also said the same thing. And what do Hitler and Napoleon have in common? They lost the English.

[Whatifalth]

Well, the shopkeepers, turns out, can make boots and weapons and stuff like that.

[Austin Padgett]

The Nazi command in World War II. The thing I said on America is America is the place where razors are made, not tanks.

[Whatifalth]

Turns out you can convert a razor factory.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. So the thing with the French Empire, and one of the interesting mechanisms is, is that different societies frequently have multiple empires. So when we talked about the British Empire, there's the first and the second British Empire, the first based around North America and the second based around India. In Germany, you have the three Reichs or the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, and then Nazi Germany. France has this to the highest level of any empire I can think of, unless you're counting China or Persia, which have just been there for thousands of years. And the first, the way I'm going to phrase this, is the first French empire was roughly 1620 until 1765, or roughly the start of the 17th century until the French Revolution. And I like to say that that French Empire was built off the Nantes to Quebec axis. The second French Empire was based around wherever Napoleon happens to be. And it was a continental European power that stretched out to Russia, and that was 1798 or 1799 until 1815, it was less than a generation. Then the third French empire was. They got Algeria in 1830. But after the war, after the loss of the Franco Prussian War, the French carved out this huge empire in West Africa and Vietnam and a few other Places. So I say that that's the Dakar based empire. Dakar is a city in Senegal. So first French empire based out of Nantes to Quebec from 17th through 18th centuries. Second French empire, start of the 19th century, based around Napoleon. Third French empire, mid 19th to mid 20th centuries, built out of West Africa.

[Whatifalth]

You got it. And for this episode we're focusing on the first one, 1600 to mid, we're.

[Austin Padgett]

Focusing on all three.

[Whatifalth]

Okay. All right. We got a lot to go through.

[Austin Padgett]

It's easier than it sounds because there actually aren't that many populous territories in the French empire. It's not like Britain where you have India and America and those places. Because the biggest issue with France as a power was that it is a strong generalist, but it's not an extreme player. And what I mean by that in video game terms is if you look at the European continent, the English are completely optimized to be a colonial empire. They're an island, they're facing out into the Atlantic. England's got a really strong naval geographic advantage. Germany is built up to be a land power. And whenever Germany strayed from being a land power, it was a strategic error because they're in the middle of the map and Germany has to be good at land fighting to survive. The Russians are naturally geographically built to be this enormous step empire transcending Eurasia. And with thing with the French is that France probably has the best geography out of any European country where it had the most people of any European country by far. In the pre industrial world, it had the most fertile lands barring places like Russia. It's filled with navigable rivers, it's in the temperate zone where it stretches from a Mediterranean through a more cold climate. So France is very blessed in a lot of ways. The issue though is that the French were never able to commit to a single strategy because they would always get pulled into one direction or another and would be incapable of consolidating their gains. And that's thing we'll talk about later where France was a generalist, where it could be a land power, it could be a sea power, it could be a manufacturing power, it could be a cultural power. But the thing is, the French didn't really commit to any, any one given strategy. So they'd experience success in one strategy. France would have a political crisis or a crisis of leadership, which is how each of the three empires died. France would lose that empire, then another generation of French leadership would form another empire based around a different context. And when you're looking at the French empire You're looking at an innately incredible nation consistently get stopped from reaching greatness where France is a great country, but they were always on the edge of breaking through the threshold the Anglo Saxons reached to becoming. Because I think the Anglo Saxon and the British Empire, it's been like a new Rome where roe there you have these great empires like Rome or the Arabs or the Chinese who build this international order based around their culture. And for France, when you look at the end point of their empire and it's just the hexagon, a few African countries that speak French and a small group of less than like 5 million people in North America. So when you look at the French empire and you look at its long term consequences, it's lots of thrashing about. An epicness without the long term impact that you'd see in Spain, Britain or Russia.

[Whatifalth]

Right. That is interesting. I wonder if the source of the adultery stuff is the big disconnect between the large rural population and then the urban center of power in France. Because kind of like how China has these wealthy areas and then the rest of the country is kind of underdeveloped, rural, and then Thailand is like Bangkok is basically the entire economy. And then there's a giant rural agrarian area. Yeah, higher percent than normal. So I'm wondering if that created this like larger cultural gap which would lead them to associate, you know, strong values found in the countryside with lower class behavior just based on the economic situation.

[Austin Padgett]

That definitely happened. It's ironic that this video starts basically when the last video ends. The last video ended in the 17th century, right when this video starts. And the French are a very dynamic people. So once they conquered the modern hexagon, they had to spill out of France. Populations are either waning or waxing. And if you're not actively growing, you're shrinking. And a dynamic nation will spill outside its borders organically. And Western Europe in this time period had a lot of dynamism. And what you're describing definitely happened. Where there's a word I love a lot that I wish people would know is urbanity. And urbanity has two meanings. One is it's a term for ghetto black populations. The other term, the one that I use it as is urbanity, is when you are so sophisticated, you feel as if you are not too cool to live, or you feel as if you're too cool to live. Because I had a realization last year, I'm like, wait, in this current society, you're supposed to be too cool to support your country. You're supposed to be too Cool to believe in God. You're supposed to be too cool to have kids, to have meaningful relationships, do adventurous stuff. And I'm thinking people today think they're too cool to live because most human, humans are animals. And most of our actions are basically animalistic. Most of the human condition is working, sleeping, socializing, sex, status games. And so what happened in France, and this is a roundabout way of saying it, is that France was the first country in Europe to become urbane. And that was due to the cultural effects of the establishment of Louis the 14th court, where Louis the 14th. And this is probably the most important event in French history, besides the initial unification under Philip Augustus, is that France became a system where in order to counteract the enormous regional diversity, they unified everything through Paris. And then the King of France, in order to keep the previously incredibly powerful nobility down, he made the nobility move to Paris and party with him. And they would live in these expensive mansions, they make up new fashions, they make up new cuisine. This was a cultural golden age invention of so many things in modern cuisine, a lot of modern art, modern philosophy. With the Enlightenment, the wealth of the French court dropped in Paris, made France the cultural hegemon of Europe. People in Russia and Romania and Prussia, the nobility is there, spoke French before they spoke German or Russian. The Russian nobility spoke to each other in French, not Russian. Same thing is like even the Moldovan nobility under the Ottoman Empire. So French cultural dominance spread across all of Europe, but it was at the expense of their dynamism and of their long term potential. Because when you look at England, England's greatest technological revolution and sociological revolution didn't occur in London. Isaac Newton was based out of, I believe, Oxford or Cambridge. Then the Industrial revolution happened in the northwest around Manchester, Liverpool. The Scottish Enlightenment was some, in some ways more important than the English Enlightenment. So when you're looking at the British Isles, which didn't have this, where the aristocracy was divided across the social structure, rather than just being in London with the King, Britain gains dominance from that. Well, for France, everything got siphoned into this urban culture. And the urban culture became progressively more degenerate as time passed, which rubbed off in the population.

[Whatifalth]

Right. It's the same thing as the eu. People are attracted to the immediate benefits of, you know, the regions not fighting or a unified trade, trade zone or something like that. But then it doesn't take very long for that centralized structure to prevent adaptation. That would have sent you on an actually larger growth track.

[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Whatifalth]

Foreign.

[Austin Padgett]

So.

[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Austin Padgett]

So this is a funny transition because the start of the first French empire is one of the few things that was coordinated. It's one of the last major shifts in France that didn't occur from direction from Paris, where the First French empire or North America occurred due to merchant interests in Normandy and Brittany, the whole the northwest of France, Normandy, Brittany, Poitier, where the French populated North America at the exact same time as the English did. I think the settlement of Quebec and the settlement of Jamestown were like two years apart.

[Whatifalth]

So you mean the English part of France?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, the area that is genetically and ethnically identical to British people. Because in northwest France is genetically closer to the British than it is to the French. And it's funny that having lived in Canada, I mean, Canadian citizen, the Quebecois, caused so much trouble for them to be genetically identical to Anglos. Because it's funny, people are like, oh, we should accept Somalians, we should accept immigrants from Guatemala. And I'm thinking if the Dutch immigrants, if the Dutch whites of South Africa viciously fought the British whites of South Africa and the Dutch and the English are genetically nigh, they're genetically identical. Practically lots of Danish people or Dutch people, when they take genetics tests, they come up as English because they're that close. Like, I have a Danish friend where a lot of his friends come up being half English, even though they're pure blood Danish. And that was the older 23andMe data. Their 23andMe's data has gotten better since. But that whole northwest region of France, their descendants, have caused so much strife in Canada. It's just the existence of Quebec has become the most difficult thing in Canadian history for all of Canada. Canada's period since independence, where I was reading through Conrad Black's history of Canada and the entire thesis of the book, and this has more to do with Conrad Black's political things he cares about, is it's all about these various treaties to keep Canada, to keep Quebec inside Canada. So the most popular and I think famous history of Canada today is all about negotiating to keep Quebec from leaving. So you could write the history of Canada as just the hassle of keeping Quebec from leaving.

[Whatifalth]

It is really funny that both the royalist French and the royalist English, after fighting for hundreds of years on the continent, ended up stuck together up in the snow, while the free populations took the rest of it.

[Austin Padgett]

It's because we took the good land, because we wanted it. The settlement of Quebec that occurred on a roughly similar timescale to England to the British North America, although they were completely different, different in scale. So at the time of the American Revolution, the 13 colonies had like 7 million people and Quebec had 100,000 people. So the 13 colonies got a vastly larger amount of settlers from Britain as the French Canadians got from France itself. And the large reason for that is that England called the settlers of America undesirables. That was a term they used at the time where they saw the losing factions of the English Civil War that would migrate to America when their faction England loss of the Cavaliers and the Puritans, the religious fundamentalists, again, like the Puritans or the Quakers, the Scots Irish backwoods tribes, the Irish poor people, debt slaves, convicts, all of which went to America. They were called. No, sorry, they were called non productives, not undesirables. The non productives built the most successful society in history. The thing with the French colonies is that Louis XIV was obsessed with power, which is one of the things you see in his policies in Europe, where he was all about unifying France due to the horrific civil wars in his when he was a teenager, in which the nobility backstabbed him. So the French and the Spanish both built their colonial empires around. We want to filter for a specific type of person, and if you don't fit this cookie cutter, you don't get to migrate to the colonies. So in order to move to Quebec, you had to be a Catholic. And their ideal was they would recreate feudalism in Canada where they divided up the St. Lawrence Valley between these people called seigneurs or lords. And these lords were supposed to bring peasants in from France and then populate this region. And so the entire St. Lawrence Valley around modern Quebec became settled by these French settlers really quickly. And they settled along the banks of the river where there was this thin strip of settlement down the valley. And then once you left that it got depopulated very quickly. And the thing though is that social structure, it wasn't able to actually hold in America because the land was so scarce. Sorry, the labor was so scarce against the land that these seniors or lords ruled in abstract, while in reality, the peasants who moved out there, they were pretty free. They weren't as free as British Americans, but they were definitely freer than Europe. And so the ruling class of Quebec was a combination of the seniors or the lords, and then the note and then the church. So when the British conquered the region, they were able to strike a deal with both of those demographics. So that Quebec became one of the most loyal provinces of the British Empire, more loyal than even the British Americans.

[Whatifalth]

So that's how it originally fused with the English up north was just that it was easy to get. You'd only have to interface with the leadership, basically.

[Austin Padgett]

So what happened is that Anglo Canada was populated by Americans where Anglo Canada was not settled by people straight out from England. The Nova Scotia, that area was a economic dependency of Boston. So Yankees would migrate into Atlantic Canada and they settled it. And then you had some other groups like the Scots in the Germans, where northern Nova Scotia is practically pure blood Scottish, where they have their own variety of Scottish music, which it's very good. Kate Breton and the English depopulated that area in the War of Austrian Succession where there was this French population in what they called Acadia or modern New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. And in the 1740s, 30 years before the conquest of the rest of French Canada, the British took out Acadia and they forcibly migrated nearly all of the French population out of the province to replace them with Anglos. And this is one of the bits we forget about colonialism where we say colonialism was hyper racially motivated. But no, the English would happily kick out French settler populations to move in English settlers. So Americans filled the void. And interestingly, those Acadians, they sailed down the coast of the thirteen colonies. Every British colony rejected them. So they sailed all the way down to French Louisiana, which the French had claimed, but they hadn't populated yet. So these French Canadians from modern Nova Scotia ended up in Acadian to Cajun. And so they're the origin of Cajun culture.

[Whatifalth]

Right. What would have happened? Because I. I think one of the reasons why they picked Quebec strategically was the rivers and then the Great Lakes. And they thought that that might eventually spit them out on the Pacific and then tie their empire trade zones into Asia, which maybe would have been a more valuable strategic move. But the river bent and spit them out in a swamp.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. This is one of the really funny things where the Europeans got the terrain, the climate of North America wrong. Where the fre. The reason they went out to. So the French and the English probably knew about Newfoundland before Columbus discovered the New World. I've spoken that about that in the age of exploration video. But we have significant evidence that the Europeans knew about North America before Columbus. But with the way that society worked, where governments would keep their navigational charts secret that they didn't tell anyone till Columbus called the Europeans bluff or it moved in game theory terms where a game where it was the incentive to hide information to Once the Spanish showed up and something's here, it immediately flipped over to a game where the incentive was to claim it. So that's why within three years of Columbus discovering the New World, the English happened to reach Newfoundland and the Portuguese happened to reach Brazil. And the thing with that is that the. For Newfoundland, for Both the English and the French and the Basques, they were sailing off the coast of Newfoundland because there's this oceanic deposit, there's this massive banks of fish called the banks of Newfoundland, which had these huge amounts of just fish that apparently it was just incredible. It was fish everywhere. And since then, we've basically fished the banks of Newfoundland into extinction. None of it's left now, which is sad. But the English and the French both claimed half of Newfoundland, where they had some fishermen on Newfoundland or a big island that's way out into the Atlantic. And the English had the eastern half and the French of the western half, but it was super lightly populated, and the English took the whole thing in the War of Austrian Succession. But the thing with Quebec is that they thought it would have a climate comparable to France's because they were going straight west and they didn't think of the Gulf Stream, where the Gulf Stream makes Europe is significantly north of America. So Philadelphia, sets of the latitude of Naples and Smyrna and Turkey and Spain, New York City, sets of the latitude of like, central Italy. And then so when you go straight west from Brittany and Normandy, you're going to hit Newfoundland, you're going to hit Quebec. And the French thought, if we just sail west, it's going to have a climate similar to France. And they really got screwed over in the first winter in Quebec. The French settlement of Quebec was just as hard as the British settlement of Jamestown, which nearly failed. And when the British settled in Jamestown, at the same time, they thought that Virginia would have a climate like the Bahamas. They thought it would be a tropical climate where they grew fish. Sorry, where they could grow sugar and those kinds of crops. But also they didn't know how heat actually worked because they were English. So they didn't pack any. Anywhere close to enough liquid or beer for them to drink. So in the British settlement of Newfoundland, they burned through their entire beer deposits very quickly because they were drinking so much just to get through the heat of the Virginia summer.

[Whatifalth]

That's really strange because I would think they would pick up at least some knowledge that climate didn't stay completely consistent to the climate zone from exploring all around Asia. But the North American exam, climate variations per latitude are pretty extreme compared to the rest of the world. If you think about it, like, yeah, I guess we have some kind of unique ocean currents. And it was also even colder back then. Like, I don't know exactly how much colder, but the Northeast was way colder in the 1600s than today. It was probably like 2 degrees Celsius. Cold, colder or something.

[Austin Padgett]

That's one of the things David Hackett Fisher talks about. And it was pretty significant where the northeastern U.S. interestingly, the area on the Chesapeake in Virginia had a climate roughly comparable to today, but the northeastern US and Canada it was dramatically colder due to the mini Ice age and the St. Lawrence would freeze over pretty regularly where modern Boston had a climate equivalent to Newfoundland in the 17th century. So what that means is that Quebec must have been icy cold in this time period.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, I can't believe I was wondering why they settled there. I guess like you said, they didn't know and they made a mistake and they made a strategic commitment and then the lakes and the waterways were enough to keep them there and the English were kind of dominating the coast. So it's kind of like maybe if we go above and then through the water, it's our way into the continent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

[Austin Padgett]

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[Whatifalth]

That's so funny, because when my French friends visited in upstate New York, we were driving and there were some farmers out in a cornfield or something, and they said, oh, look. They're like, oh, look, peasants.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Whatifalth]

And I feel like it's. I don't know if it's exactly connected, but it's funny.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

They still use the word peasant for farmer. Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

The French look down on peasants. The French look down on manual labor in a lot of cases, although they. The French have put an enormous amount of their money into supporting their agriculture, which I think is actually a good decision for a variety of reasons. So the thing is that after the British conquered Quebec, their entire merchant class were Anglos, where the Quebecois didn't really get off the land. And the Quebecois had a sort of stultified, not really modern outlook, where it was super Catholic. Until the 1960s, Quebec was one of the most Catholic places in the world, where the Quebecois had a lot of kids. Not that many French moved over. But then the French that did come to Quebec, they had a lot of kids, the numbers were really high. And Quebec had this fascinating event in the 1960s, which is one of the most rapid rises in atheism anywhere in the world, where over the course of a single decade, Quebec went from one of the most Catholic societies in the world, easily one of those religious places in the Western world, to being one of the most atheist places in the Western world, where over the course of.

[Whatifalth]

The delayed French Revolution.

[Austin Padgett]

Exactly. Over the course of a single generation in the 1960s, the. The Quebecois went from one of the most religious populations in the Western world to one of the least.

[Whatifalth]

And this is where Trudeau's political dynasty comes out of. Right. His dad probably was the end point of that movement.

[Austin Padgett]

The thing with Trudeau is he's the. He is the son of probably the most important Canadian prime minister of our lifetime, Cadel Castro.

[Whatifalth]

Speaking of infidelity in the French.

[Austin Padgett]

His mom was Anglo. Trudeau's half Scottish, half French, and so his dad's one of the most. Probably the most important Canadian prime minister of our lifetime. And. And that's the thing Americans don't notice, but Daddy Trudeau established the structure of modern Canadian politics, where Daddy Trudeau's stuff was all about unifying Quebec with the Anglos to produce this thing that Canadians pundit, pundits called the Laurentian elite, where the modern Liberal Party that dominated. Has dominated Canada for my entire lifetime. The Canadian Conservatives are such cucks, it's disgusting. The Liberal Party are based out of urban people in the St. Lord, urban leftists in the St. Lawrence Valley who will vote for the Liberals no matter what. Which is why Trudeau, which is why Trudeau, the Trudeau the Younger, has been able to continually get reelected until he wasn't because this demographic gave him fanatical support. So one of the biggest fault lines in Canadian politics today is that the east is a sink for money and the west produces more money. We're in the current equilibrium where Daddy Trudeau was capable of unifying Ontario, the Maritimes and Quebec into a single coalition at the expense of the west is getting progressively more dissatisfied with a ruling coalition whose main focus is keeping Quebec part of the country, which they never. If you live outside Quebec, Quebec, you never even process Quebec's existence. When I was in Ontario, I don't think I met a single. Besides like one or two hitchhikers, I don't think I met a single French Canadian there.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, it is pretty. I mean, because it's not. It's the intra British differences in the US is one thing, but it's pretty stark when it's French and English.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

Different populations. And it's really interesting how the politics. So you basically had the atheist movement in the French zone, which means there was less of a Catholic resistance to merging with the Anglo like the English Protestants. And so basically the liberal atheistic English teamed up with the French atheists. And then that created the source of unity. And today it's breaking down where increasingly the French populations and the Albertan, like Scotch Irish, are increasingly aligned towards decentralization, whereas previously the French aligned with the Puritan English towards centralization after their atheist movement.

[Austin Padgett]

So Eastern Canada, that's New England ancestry. Quebec is from Brittany and Normandy. Ontario was settled by people from Pennsylvania and upstate New York. And so when I lived in Ontario, there were lots of streets that had similar place names as Pennsylvania. And you would notice similarities in behavior, you'd notice similarities in architecture. So there is a cultural link from Pennsylvania to Ontario. Then once you get further west, you are correct that Alberta is heavily Scottish ancestry. The Scots predominate. The further west you get Although there's a huge Scottish impact on Canada. In total, you got a lot of Germans and Ukrainians and Romanians in the middle because the Canadian government had this active mission to settle the Canadian plains with Eastern Europeans so Americans wouldn't settle it. It's comparable to the rail companies in America. Literally went to Scandinavia and, and recruited Scandinavians to populate the American plains because Anglos didn't want to move to Minnesota or the Dakotas because it's too cold. And then once you get further west it's British Columbia. Similar demographic makeup to Alberta, but it's English. And huge amount of Asians in Vancouver right now. But the reason that Canada exists is that the French settlers were monarchists and socially conservative. And to be socially conservative in our world is to be a socialist because the we come out of the age of socialist dominance while the big filter for Anglo Canadians was people fleeing the American Revolution. And so Canada's always prioritized order over chaos and America's always prioritized chaos. So there was this huge diaspora out of America with the success of the American Revolution to Canada. And they in that short period immediately demographically overpowered the Quebecois. Where just the single loyalist migration from America to Canada after the Revolution. Past that point the Anglos were already a demographic majority and it kept growing. Where as of now in Canada you have three English speakers for every French speaker.

[Whatifalth]

Right. They basically were like, okay, we lost America, let's go take over Canada just by pure numbers.

[Austin Padgett]

I was, I felt bad we didn't cover Canada before because I was considering. We haven't talked about Canada in any, in really any history, one or twos, except for really sparingly. And I felt bad about that. But I'm glad we were at least able to cover some of Canada. And in the future I'm considering making a British Commonwealth history. One or two where we cover Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. But I'd have to read a few more books on the Antipodes especially. But first French Empire was a. You were correct when you say it's a water based empire where their goal was to reach the Orient and they thought North America could be this tiny Japan like strip and on the other side of is the Pacific to sail to Asia. But that didn't work. And so they were sailing up the St. Lawrence where they thought that this river would lead to the Pacific. But they actually got to the Great Lakes and the French really used water to their advantage in the first French Empire where the French empire stretched from with the two Great Navigational triage points of the North America, of North American continent, that being New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi river and then Quebec at the mouth of the St. Lawrence and in between them. And this is part of the reason why North America is a geographically blessed continent. You can sail the whole distance from New Orleans to Quebec with a few different points where you take your canoe out. So you go up the Mississippi from New Orleans. The Mississippi goes. It's over a thousand miles. It stretches from New Orleans, which New Orleans sits at the latitude of Egypt, and then it goes up to Minnesota, so that's Egypt to like Central Europe. And so you sail up the Mississippi to where the French had a big base in southern Illinois. I keep forgetting its name. I think it's like Cascade, Cascaikia, and then to the west of it. The French had a very tentative hold on the Great Plains, where most of the French empire was not populated by French people. But the French said, we claim the entire Mississippi and St. Lawrence Basin as our property. And then they'd periodically talk to the natives and trade with them and that stuff. So most of the French empire was a bluff. But then. So to finish the journey, sail Mississippi to Illinois, get off at Chicago, which was a city made by the French. Then sail through lake. Through what's the. It's not Lake Ellen. So what's the lake that Illinois is on? There is Superior, there's Huron, there's Erie, Lake Michigan. So, okay, you go through Lake Michigan, you go to Sauce Samari, a French city. Actually, I'm just going to show all. So, Mrs. New Orleans to St. Louis, a French city. St. Louis to Chicago, a French city, Chicago to Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, a French city, Chicago to. Sorry, Sault Ste. Marie to Detroit, Detroit, another French city, Detroit to Buffalo, which was Fort Niagara, which the French also founded. Fort Niagara up the Lake Ontario until you hit Quebec. And so the French were really good at ceding these forts in the middle of the North American wilderness, where so many of America's most important cities are of French origin, whether Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Des Moines, or in French, Des Moines, Sauce Sa Marie, Buffalo, Louisville, Kentucky, Quebec, and probably loads of other cities that I think of these through the French names. It wouldn't surprise me if loads of cities that have had Americanized. Pittsburgh was a French city initially, and Mobile, Alabama, French city. And so you'll see these French names in North America. And you can see that the French had this huge empire that was staffed by fur trappers, where the main agent of The French empire was the fur trapper, which was funny because much like the Cossacks, the fur trappers left France for freedom because they were highly individualistic people who didn't like the state or the government. And the fur trappers would mate with the local women. And you had these large mixed race populations where Canada's only major race war, Canada's only major Indian war was with the Metis population of Manitoba who were mixed race, half French, half local tribes. And so these French Canadians would go out into the deep, into the continent, going out to Montana. The French in the 18th century were out in the Rockies. So the French were out in the Rockies as mountain men, possibly even reaching the Pacific decades to over a century before the Anklos did. And they built up these relationships with the natives where the natives trusted the French more than the English because the French didn't have enough people to place the natives and take their land. So in most cases, with a few exceptions like the Cherokee or the Iroquois, most of the natives in North America in this area were allies of the French. And so that's why the war with the French lost. North America is called the French and Indian War.

[Whatifalth]

Right. It's funny to think of if France took North America, it might look something more like South America, but French mixed with North American Indians instead of Spanish mixed with South American Indians.

[Austin Padgett]

That's a good point. Yeah. It's hard to imagine that white people wouldn't steamroll North America because it's so much fertile land that was lightly populated.

[Whatifalth]

Right.

[Austin Padgett]

But also lots of things don't happen in history. I'm surprised the Chinese haven't seen steamrolled Siberia and filled with a hundred million people. It's surprising that Russia didn't develop Central Asia more. There are lots of things that could have happened in history that didn't. And so across the French empire to go from one axis to another in New Orleans, the Cajun settled there and they saw a complete cultural shift. Where I was in New Orleans a month ago and I like to tell people New Orleans is one of my favorite cities in America. I tell people that New Orleans is an extension of the Caribbean French culture, like Haiti more so than it is the rest of North America because Louisiana is this strange aberration where the rest of the American south is very Anglo culture, very morally concerned, very conservative socially. The culture of the American south is not a quote, spicy culture, so to speak, although they do season their food well. French Louisiana was the blackest place in the North American continent in the year 1800. It was 80% African. And so when you look at the Cajuns, the Cajuns were less than 20% of the population, and they were Africans pulled from Senegal, from the other French. St. Louis. There's the city of St. Louis in Senegal, which was also a French colony. St. Louis is one of the most important French saints. He was one of their Kings in the 13th century, who they revere. And so New Orleans is fascinating, whereas also the least health. The place in the North American continent. When I say north and I say North American continent, I mean, not including the Caribbean islands, it's the place in the North American continent where a white person was most likely to die of disease. And it's just the bottom of this swamp. But New Orleans was the most important city in North America for a little bit. Philadelphia was more important in numbers and in industry and science. But New Orleans was geostrategically the most important place, which is why New Orleans was fought over so many times and traded hands between different European powers.

[Whatifalth]

Right. It gave the French an entrance into the continent in the areas where the English didn't dominate the coast. And it connected their loop, basically. So key part of their strategy. I didn't know the French founded Chicago. That's really interesting. It's really. Because that's the big meat packing beef city. Cowboy city, Cowboy Funnel Point. And then they were out on the Great Plains 100 years before. It's funny to think of with their fascination of American cowboy culture that they actually glimpsed that a little bit before us.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. When I was in Brittany, they have Brittany, which seeded most of the French Canadians, where the Cajuns are from Poitier in the west coast of France. And the Quebecois are from Normandy and Brittany. They have cowboy restaurants. And it's weird to see their concept of cowboy culture is this mix of Quebecois and Anglo American culture. And the. It's funny that the French on America a lot, but you can tell that they're obsessed with us. Where French youth, they listen to rapid. They eat hamburgers, they dress in blue jeans, they think like Americans with their words. They say that they hate America, but with their actions, they're obsessed with us.

[Whatifalth]

A good example of this is I went back to France to some of my old friends, maybe I was 18 or something. And we were in Lyon, and it was like, okay, what are we going to get? And I said, you know, baguette sandwiches. And they were like. And so we went to McDonald's. And then we also would go to a place growing up called Buffalo Bills in France, which had, you know, a big Indian with a cigar and a bunch of cowboy stuff and they served ribs and things like that.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. When I was in France, I saw this clothes store called Gartelbach. It's just the name quarterback as a clothing store.

[Whatifalth]

Oh, oh, yeah. So they wear American big fashion Frances to wear American high school senior sports jackets. Even older people will do it. So they don't have like an actual badge on them, but it's just. It's like the high school varsity sports jacket. Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

It's funny what things are considered low class in America get popularity outside here because they don't have the cultural context we do. When I was in China, I was staying with the host family and it was this wealthy family and the kid who was a teenager, he was wearing a Snoop Dogg T shirt, but he didn't know Snoop Dogg was. And when I was in China, I saw these stores that just had every single hat for every American baseball team.

[Whatifalth]

When I was in China, maybe only 10 years ago, I saw multiple times, many, many times people walking around in American flag clothing, American flag pants, American flag shirt, whatever.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it's funny that the French, I saw that they too liked going to McDonald's. But one of the things they don't get is that fast food is highly class correlated in America. So if you're upper or middle class, you basically won't get fast food. And as of now, the lower classes are being squeezed out of fast food due to cost, which is why the fast food companies are not doing well. But it's. I always find it funny when Europeans would be like, I have some, and I have some extra money, I'll go to McDonald's. And they see McDonald's is expensive too, which it's euro pores. And then they're looking forward to it. And I thought I would never look forward to going to a McDonald's in America.

[Whatifalth]

It's because McDonald's is part of the boomer economy.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

So even if it's cheap, it's never cheaper than like rice and chicken, street food or whatever. Local food supply.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Whatifalth]

Established.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. So French Caribbean, this is more important than people give it credit for because the French, much like the English, had staked a claim in the Caribbean in the 1600s. And a lot of the craziest pirates were French. The island of Tortuga off the coast of modern Haiti and Haiti was majority white at this point. That was the biggest center for piracy in the 17th century. And over time, the French realized they could grow sugar in the Caribbean, which made these islands incredibly valuable, Especially Haiti, where Haiti is large in the Caribbean context and small in the American context. And Haiti was worth probably something equivalent to Saudi Arabia today. It was such an incredible asset because I like to say sugar is to the 18th century what oil is to today. And so in the French's islands, like Haiti, which they called Saint Dominique, with Guadalupe, with a few other places in the Lesser Antilles, the French just filled it with black people for the sugar agriculture. And sugar is the most horrifying, one of the more horrifying crops to grow, where you work 18 hours a day, seven days a week in the peak season, and then you burn the sugar in these enormous blast furnaces to melt it down. So the logic of the sugar trade, import slaves, work them to death, buy new slaves off the money, work to death. So it's one of the more morally abhorrent things we've done.

[Whatifalth]

Plus side is you can bite right into the sugar cane and that's a pretty nice boost. Can't do that with cotton.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And so in the French and Indian war, when the English conquered Quebec, the French were willing to offer all of Canada in exchange for the island of Guadalupe. And Guadalupe is in the Lesser Antilles. It's one of those tiny islands you forget about. I can name every country in the world off the top of my head, except the Lesser Antilles, which is the area north of Venezuela and the Pacific. I can never memorize all of the Lesser Antilles or the Pacific, and frankly, I have no reason to. But the. So with the French and Indian War, where first French empire was crushed by the Anno Mirabilis, and the same year that made Britain the world superpower was the year that destroyed France, where the anna Mirabilis In 1763, the French lost all of their possessions in continental North America and in India, where the French had colonies in India. And there was definitely a time when the French could have conquered India, where, much like the British, the French colonies were established by basically VC capital. Where it was, you had the French East India Company, you had the French the settlement of Quebec, which was another company, and French East India Company. There were several points where they had a leg up on the British, where they held the south around Tamil Nadu, as well as having lots of allies with the local Indians, because much like North America. Ha ha. Indians and Indians, North American Indians and subcontinent Indians both work with the French because they were less of a threat than the English, because the French East India Company was significantly poorer than the English one. Where the British were better at trading. Although the French did have a larger army. And under Clive, who was a brilliant British commander, he was able to wipe out firstly, the Indian armies that were working with the French at the Battle of Plassey, and then the French forces itself in South India, where the British conquered all of the French's possessions by the end of the Seven Years War. And if the French had won in India, where they were doing really well at the start of the campaign, they could have. France would be a great power. If France had conquered India, which was one of the wealthiest places of the world, that would have completely changed the history of the world because it would have shifted. France would become an Indian Ocean power. They would have an infinite amount of money to prop up the loss of regime longer, all the. All that stuff. But the British won in India. And then in the same year, the British defeated the French in Quebec at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, where Wolf, the British commander, he Quebec is. It's the only major fortified city in North America. The city is inside walls. And so the British were. They had to take Quebec over the winter started. So what Wolf found is that there was this pass to get behind the walls of Quebec where they could load cannons up there and attack it from a different angle. He went up to this pass, beat the French army there, and took Quebec. What happened was that in an instant, the French lost their entire North American empire, where they kept Haiti and they kept the Antilles, but everything east of the Mississippi went to Britain. And then the French gave everything west of the Mississippi, like New Orleans or St. Louis to the south, Spanish for, like, 20 years, because the Spanish were under the same monarchy as the French were the Bourbons. And so the first French empire died practically within a single year. So the only French colonial possessions left were in the Caribbean and a few forts along Africa.

[Whatifalth]

Did this impact their ability to import lumber and build ships and decrease the competitiveness of their navy? Because that was a big North American resource. Perhaps the French had it somewhere. But. Yeah, go ahead.

[Austin Padgett]

So you. In Europe, you got lumber from Norway and Scandinavia. They were the big export. For better types of lumber, you had to get it from North America. So the hardwoods were from the Caribbean and the tropics. Then America had, I think it was oak. Oak and several other trees where there was a sticking point where New Hampshire was a huge. New Hampshire was a huge origin for oak production for the British navy. And one of the instigating events of the French Revolution was the Americans saying, no, Britain, we're not going to make oak for you. This is oak for us. You got to grab your.

[Whatifalth]

That's a big power play. Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

I don't have a stick. I need to. I need a big stick.

[Austin Padgett]

You're not wizard maxing.

[Whatifalth]

Exactly. It's hilarious that the French and Indian War. There were two French and Indian wars happening at the same time. And I guess this is why they kind of call it more. Well, because they were fighting the Indians in North America and in India and in Europe, where there were Indians in Europe.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, you mean you're fighting two Indians at once.

[Whatifalth]

Right, Exactly. But you're right. They were fighting in Europe also. So it was like a world war. And it's interesting to think of the colonies, because from our perspective, what would be the most valuable colony does not match up to theirs, because we're thinking of legacy, which is like America, Canada, the populations that grew. And then it was more valuable areas to own later on. But in the colonial period, they really valued those spice islands. Right. Which is why the Dutch traded Nutmeg island for New York. And like you said, the French were. Were more interested in their sugar plantations than in all of North America. And this is why India is so big, because it's like the giant. The biggest spice island. And, of course, it's the biggest prize, the jewel of the British crown, the biggest thing the French are fighting over. The most consequential fight, because it's the origin of colonialism. The whole point was to get to India.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

So it makes sense that it started with India and it ended with India, which was the last significant colony for the English to get rid of.

[Austin Padgett]

And that's a good point. The. The first French empire. Oh, yeah. I wanted to say this. I always find it hilarious that the thing that started the Seven Years War, where the Seven Years War was an incredibly important war in India, solidified the British control in Europe, because it's. It. Frederick the Great kept Prussia alive. And as a great power, that wasn't. That was a huge war that was really influential because it meant modern Germany could later unify, which, if that didn't happen, it would have changed everything. And then in North America, I find it funny that this enormous conflict was started by a young George Washington trying to take Pittsburgh from the French, because I'm from Pennsylvania, and I'm always shocked that this foreign power settled western Pennsylvania, where the Anglos had to take western Pennsylvania from the French, where the first attack on Fort Duquesne failed. Then Braddock, who was this British commander, he brought this field army across the Appalachians to Pittsburgh, which were all slaughtered by the French. Then the attack afterwards was able to finally take Pittsburgh. So the French were able to knock the English out of taking Pittsburgh multiple times. And the French also fought really hard for upstate New York with places like Fort Niagara and Fort Oswego. So these places that I think I don't even think about, they seem like home.

[Whatifalth]

Fort Niagara is huge. It's a big stone. It looks like a castle you find in Lisbon or something.

[Austin Padgett]

Have you ever been to Fort Ticonderoga?

[Whatifalth]

That was the one I was talking about.

[Austin Padgett]

Ticonderoga, that's huge. That's on Lake Champlain. And yeah, it's insane. So. End of the first French Empire. There's, I think there's some detail I'm forgetting here, but I can't remember it. Then you see this period of soul searching and heartbreak in France where the French saw the loss of the Seven Years War as deeply humiliating and it stung at them. Where the French Revolutionary generation, which occurred a generation afterwards, a big part of the momentum for the French Revolution was a sense of betrayal that the Lien regime had lost the empire out of incompetence because the French military was all based off the nobility. And so people thought the nobles are driving this country to hell. And one of the big motivators for the French Revolution also was that the French funded the American Revolution where the British and the French were in near constant war for over a century, from late 17th century until the early 19th century. It could be described as a Hundred Years War. Between the Nine Years War, the War of Spanish Succession, the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the French Revolutionary War, Napoleonic Wars. So whenever one of them had issues, the other one tried to butt in. As an example, a big reason the British lost the American Revolution and they could no longer wage an offensive campaign is that when France declared war on Britain to support the American colonies gaining independence, the French were threatening to invade England itself and also the Spice Islands. So the British had to pull out their offensive forces from the thirteen colonies to protect either the Spice, sorry, either the Sugar Islands or Britain itself. And the French navy was pretty good by world standards. However, pretty good is not good enough when your dominant rival has the one has the best navy in history and the French would fight with the British, but consistently the British had control of the oceans. Where, however, the French scored a naval victory over the British that became incredibly historically decisive at the right moment. That being the Battle of Yorktown, where after seven years, the American Revolution had bogged down into these wars, into guerrilla campaigns, where the big crux of the American Revolution was America was too big for the British to take, but at the same time, the British had too disciplined a military for the Americans to wipe them out. And so, after years of wandering around the American south trying to capture each other, the British walled themselves off on this isolated peninsula in Virginia. And they were operating off the assumption that, which was normally correct, that the British Navy would protect them. What then occurred is that the French wiped out the British Navy, surrounded the British force, and since they were walled off by both the Americans who controlled the bottleneck of the peninsula, and the French control of the Chesapeake, that British army was wiped out in America got independence. However, the cost of supporting the American Revolution is what caused the French Revolution because their debts had piled up to a point where they defaulted on their currency because they realized they wouldn't be able to pay it off.

[Whatifalth]

I would disagree a little bit with the fact that it was a cause. I think that's more narratively inserted because I think it represented 3% of the French treasury. But it was the big political talking point. For example, like with Ukraine, we spent like $200 billion on Ukraine. It's a big political talking point. It's a source of revolutionary fervor. But it's not the real reason that the, the financials of the system would collapse or that people are poor, etc.

[Austin Padgett]

The real. Yeah, the real reason was the series of bureaucratic, bureaucratic and monopolistic incentives that the French government built from Louis the 14th onwards, where the French Revolution was reaping what Louis the 14th sowed in the mid 17th century. And France had so many issues between most upper class people didn't pay taxes. There was a complete legal clusterfuck on every single level of French society. And also this is a huge difference in Britain and France. The French government, when they had a financial crisis in the early 18th century or the Mississippi crisis, what happened was that the monarchy supported France, had this company. France and Britain both had financial crises in the early 18th centuries. Britain's was the South Sea crisis. And that was a financial bubble that destroyed the British economy because it was based upon the assumption that Britain would be able to make a legal deal soon where they could trade with the Spanish Empire or the South Seas. That was completely incorrect. The Spanish never made a deal. And so the entire British economy, or a large part of it, was shoved into this false assumption that they would get this trade deal with the Spanish that they never did. For The French, they had another comparable bubble about settling Louisiana with French settlers. And the thing is that Louisiana is not the kind of colony where you can go there, get a lot of gold or spices, then bring the profits back to Europe. Louisiana is the kind of colony that takes decades to build up as a settler society. And so the French blew their economic load on that. The thing, though, is that in the British case, they maintained property rights and just said, sorry, guys, mistakes happen. And that resulted in confidence in the British economy. In the French case, they sided with the scammers trying to populate Louisiana. Then they would confiscate money from the public to pay off the debts, and they purposely diluted the currency and they purposely broke property right laws to support their buddies, which destroyed the French government's ability to raise money until the French Revolution, because the French government had this consistent pattern of not respecting property rights, not paying off their debts, and not maintaining a constant currency.

[Whatifalth]

What's the point of going to live in the snow if you're not going to be that much more free or in a swamp if you're not going to be able to escape some of those dynamics? I know they tried to make up for the lack of organic settlers by doing things like they had the King's daughters, where they sent like 3,000 women into a colony, and the population doubled from like 3,000 to 6,000. But those kind of things aren't enough if you don't have the organic.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, I've used this. I've used this example before. But Vauban, who was Louis the 14th commander, he was Louis the 14th strategic genius who worked under him, where he made several incredibly prescient claims. The first is he said that France needed to have the Agricultural revolution, which they didn't, where the English and the Dutch were able to double their quality of life. They're using the Agricultural revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries to make food dramatically cheaper. And France, that didn't happen. So the French peasants careened more towards starvation and complete poverty. Vauban also said he designed Louis XIV star forts, which were the best forts in the world. He was mostly a fort. He was a mathematician and a fort designer. Vauban also tried to reestablish the tax code, and he wanted to make a fair tax code more based off the English standards. And Louis XIV kicked him out for that. But Beauvauban also said, if we send 10,000 people a year to Quebec, which was less than the British were sending, that there will be 200 million Quebecois in the year. 2000. And that turned out to be accurate. And it's incredibly prescient where the British, the British commanders were Pitt the Elder, the British Prime Minister during the Seven Years War or the French and Indian War, as well as the North American leadership, people like Ben Franklin, Washington, they said whoever controls the Ohio River Valley controls the world because they knew that it would get populated. So they said we need to control the Ohio River Valley and Pittsburgh is the entry point for that. So we need to see as Pittsburgh, because Pittsburgh is where three rivers meet together and it's also at the edge of the pass from across the Appalachians. So the British were aware of the importance North America would have and the French never really figured it out. Where Louis the 14th waged like seven wars on his eastern frontier just to get Franche, Compton, Alsace, which are areas that are the size of like New Jersey and Delaware combined, as they're like Maryland. And so he wasted all this time and effort in European wars, which was a consistent failing of European powers. The Spanish did it too, many others did it. Well, France could have used that time and effort. Where France had a significantly larger economy, population than England's did. But because England played its cards smarter colonially, the English built up a global empire.

[Whatifalth]

And it's. It was a little easier to do being on the island. Right. They can kind of sit out of the continental scuffle. There's less historical desire for Alsace Lorraine competing over Alsace Lorraine.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah. We're on the second French Empire now, which I'm not going to cover that much because our next videos on the Napoleonic wars. What I will say though is that with the fall of the Lucian regime or the monarchy, you saw a complete political clusterfuck that was French revolutionary politics, where France went through probably a dozen government systems between right wing parliamentary democracy, left wing parliamentary democracy, removing the king or keeping him as a puppet. For years you saw triumvirate like communist councils. You saw a women's advocacy group or the Jacobins take over power, military dictatorship, empire. If you look at a 20 year period, France went through all the political systems. And the interesting thing about that is that the second French Empire was European focused. Where the French Revolution resulted in a nation in arms. And what that means is that the French invented total war, where they would say we are a society where all the young men have to fight. The women have to work on the home front to make industrial materials. The old men need to work too, and so should the children. And that ideal wasn't reached, but their ideal is that Everyone will serve the state and their symbol was the beehive because they thought we want to turn people into sort of be hive animals. That was their ideal.

[Whatifalth]

That's just like leftists today who are like look how bees operate, look how ants operate collectively. And it's like we're not bees. It's funny they use that same example.

[Austin Padgett]

Leftism scarcely changed since the French Revolution. It's the whole take that the Jews invented the left, almost every single take. You'll see a shitlib make today. Someone would make an 18th century France. They believed in the blank slate, they were atheist, they believed in Reddit style rationality, they believed in progress. I mean Saint Simon. Saint Simon's one of the. He is one of the most underrated thinkers ever. Where he was a thinker in France of the era of the French Revolution and his ideal was we needed to make a society where the experts become a new priest class where you have secular rituals and it's all about making the new man who is stripped away from family, culture, ethnicity, sex. Where St. Simon talks about trans concepts of trying to turn from a man to a woman, he talked about the need to establish a mythology of the science thinkers of his generation. Talked about using a war of liberation in the third world to send these third world hordes to liberate the first world. And any given idea, you'll say French thinkers 250 years ago like Saint Simon believed.

[Whatifalth]

Yep. And the English were not too far behind them, sharing a relatively similar religious and cultural backdrop minus the differences. So yeah, like we said, if it's the shadow of Christianity then obviously it's organic, predictable development within the culture. And you see flashes of these same things happening throughout all the last 2,000 years, same ideas, maga kind of more, more crystallized on either way, either side. And it's interesting it switched after they lost their. I never put it together. It was the loss of their colonial empire that shifted their focus to continental warfare. Yeah, and total warfare and nation states. So basically this was the origin of the World wars trend. Yes, you had Napoleon leading to the unification of Germany and then the large state continental total war.

[Austin Padgett]

I read an interesting book by an author called Bell about the Napoleonic wars which is called the first total war. It makes that exact claim where the first French empire was an aristocratic empire because France's ruling class were aristocrats, although it failed at implementing aristocracy outside Europe. The second was a statist empire based around firstly worship of the state and then secondarily worship of Napoleon. And so to simplify this the first wave of conquest which occurred under the Directory, where Napoleon was a commander on the Italian front, where he practically single handedly conquered all of Italy for France, which is why he became popular enough to later become emperor and launch a couple. The French conquered everything west of the Rhine river, where they installed these, they made them legal parts of France, but they also installed these puppet states of the Batavian Republic, the CIS Alpine Republic. They weren't actually republics, they were military dictatorships governed by France. And interesting side note here, Napoleon invaded Egypt largely because he was bored. This was 1799 where Napoleon was the most popular figure in France, that he didn't want to launch a coup yet. So he just told the French government, I want to invade Egypt with my own private army. They gave heads up. And so Napoleon invaded and conquered Egypt from the local Mameluke governance, where he tried to establish an enlightened state. And he even conquered as far north as Syria, through Palestine. And there's a few important historic notes. The first is that this invented the field of Egyptology. And 19th century Europe and into the early 20th century was obsessed with Egyptology in large part because through the cultural importance of masons, there was a profound influence from Hermetic philosophy. And the Hermetica is a philosophic tradition that stems back to Egypt. It was the Greek rendering of Egyptian values. And when you look at the US currency and the US government symbolism, it's completely covered in Hermetic symbolism. So this was a huge idea at the time. So they studied Egypt to see the origins of these ideas. And the French scholars in Egypt, they found the Rosetta Stone in this time period. And so the Rosetta stones, how we got the hieroglyphs, they brought obelisks back to Europe. They brought Egyptian artifacts because the Europeans didn't really know that there was a much greater ancient civilization in Egypt. And the French maintained their relationship with Egypt for a while. They got kicked out after a few years because the British under Admiral Nelson defeated the British fleet at the battle Nelson under the British defeated the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. And so Napoleon had to strand his army in Egypt mostly to die, while he fled back to France on a smaller fleet. But the French built the Suez Canal. And this was kind of a dick move where the French built the Suez Canal with the understanding that they would conquer Egypt afterwards and reintegrate it as a colony once again. The British said, psych. Thanks for all the work. Egypt is ours now. And.

[Whatifalth]

Why did the French build canals so much? Didn't they start the Panama Canal, too.

[Austin Padgett]

The French have a kind of autistic tendency inside them. You can see when you talk to French men, because in French philosophy, the French have sort of autistic logical obsessions where Anglo Saxons try to mediate our worldview through common sense and the Germans try to mediate it through whatever ideal ideology they have at that given time. For the French, they build their ideas off reason. The problem is that reason untrammeled from common sense gets pretty silly. And so you'll read French philosophy, and I think a significant amount of French philosophy is just a shit test. It's a shit test or its intellectual masturbation, where they're just trying to prove how smart they are with no relation to reality. So the French have these. The French invented a lot of mechanical stuff. A lot of the biggest inventions a century or more so ago were the French. And so the French have this. They'd have. They like trains. They like trains and canals.

[Whatifalth]

That's funny, right? The train joke. You. You can totally get that analogy. Yeah, I forgot what I was going to say about it, but that's hilarious.

[Austin Padgett]

So the British seizure of Egypt caused the Fashoda incident In the late 19th century, where it wasn't clear World War I had to happen, but it was unclear who would be on whose side. Where the British and the French nearly had a war between each other in the 18. In the 1890s, over this skirmish between. In the land between Sudan, Sudan and the Central African Republic. I like pointing this out because how the hell were these two European countries that have a border with each other nearly starting a war over the Central African Republic? Because the French were trying to unify their entire Saharan empire, where they're trying to go across all of the Sahara, through Sudan, Egypt, from Dakar out to Djibouti, when France had this tiny area called Djibouti in the Red Sea down by Ethiopia. Their goal was to connect Djibouti out to their West African empire. And the British said, no, this is ours. And the French backed down in Fashoda, although it definitely could have caused a war because Britain and Germany were allies at this point. So if they fought Britain, the Germans would attack their Eastern Frank. And they knew they'd lose that war.

[Whatifalth]

Oh, so that's why they never kind of engaged directly with Britain. I was. I was wondering. It seems kind of similar to how stable the proxy war dynamic is in the modern era. Like, you can have proxy wars all over the world for 50 years against someone and still never have a Direct conflict was it kind of a similar dynamic with France and England.

[Austin Padgett]

They waged pretty constant war until the Napoleonic Wars. Then after a few few decades they Britain and France switched over to being good allies because they were first scared of the Russians where the British and the French fought together in the Crimean War and a few more wars against the Russians and then they were scared of the Germans together. And we don't give Bismarck enough credit for delaying World War I because Bismarck, Germany's minister for a lot of the 19th century he built up these brilliant strategies about keeping Europe in equilibriums that would not start wars. Because his logic was that Germany should avoid wars when possible when it wasn't in Germany's interest because Germany's position made them strategically weak. So Bismarck did a lot of things to stop war. And he always said you're not going to have a war if he said there are five great European powers. If you can be on whatever the side of those three are you'll be fine. If you have three powers gang up on you that's when you're screwed. And so Bismarck he purposely kept Europe from having a major war like World War I. Then Kaiser Wilhelm in his foolishness did things that got Germany to end up in a really bad place of waging a three front war in World War I where Kaiser Wilhelm Bismarck point to a lot of effort to make Russia Germany's ally. And then Kaiser Wilhelm threw that away because he wanted to conquer Eastern Europe. Then Kaiser Wilhelm also destroyed Bismarck's alliance with the British because Bismarck had said hey Britain, you're a colonial power, we respect your decision. In that were a continental power. Kaiser Wilhelm wanted the best navy in the world as well as African colonies. And that terrified the British and made the British work with the French and the Russians against Germany. Because the British thought process was if Germany has this navy they can attack Britain.

[Whatifalth]

Aren't the entangling alliances what led up to these big wars blowing up?

[Austin Padgett]

So yes. But at the same time said entangling alliances had kept Europe at peace for longer than it should have. Of the fact there was nearly a century 99 years from 1815 to 1914 when Europe had no had very few major wars is historically unnatural. People like to say how come the Roman Empire fell. The real question is why didn't it fall way earlier at a smaller scale. It's like when you look at a century of peace. Have some friggin gratitude for the people who made sure that century of peace happened. It's why I try to express gratitude. The cold War didn't get hot for that reason.

[Whatifalth]

Right. Especially for the people alive in the time. And the Cold War is hard to see as not being just catastrophic in itself, no matter when it erupts, just because of the technology and the weaponry. But yeah, you can still conceptualize it as a fragile strategy. And maybe there was no way out of this emerging entangling alliances because you see the point like well, Lichtenstein was the only part of Germany that didn't join Bismarck's confederation and they're doing pretty well now. But if they were all separated, I mean it probably would have centralized anyways. There's a lot of. I don't pressure to compete.

[Austin Padgett]

I don't want to get into this because it would take me a while to explain, but I definitely think World War I was necessary. I don't see a Europe where it doesn't happen. But so second French Empire. I'm going to phrase it in these terms. There were three lines in Europe Napoleon tried to hold because Napoleon made himself first Consul and then emperor of France. And the first line is the Rhine through Italy or the former Frankish Empire. These are the borders I think France can naturally hold. I think Napoleon could have turned Western Europe into an extension of France. However, the second line is Prussia to the Black Sea with Moldova. So Napoleon was never able to fully subjugate the lantern. The first and the second line where he had to wage like five different wars against Austria and Prussia where he would consistently beat those countries. But the issue as well was that he never had the men to occupy them. And this huge issue with the French in this war was the French just didn't have enough men for this. Napoleon was really scraping the bottom of the barrel at the end of the war because he just didn't have the young men to fight. And the French were pretty good at getting other people inside their empire to fight for them. They'd have huge Italian, German, Polish armies, especially with Napoleon's attack on Russia. But those men weren't loyal in the same way the French were. Where Napoleon's empire didn't work due to the simple calculus that there were not enough French to conquer all of Europe. And Napoleon made a few other decisions. Where he attacked Spain, which was his only real ally because he was getting annoyed with them. Napoleon tried to conquer all of Europe at once and it backfired. But the third line, which is the AA line the Nazis talked about Astrakhan to Archangel, which is the limit of European Russia. Napoleon's attempt to invade Russia break past the second to the third line was insane, where Napoleon's invasion of Russia is what undid his empire, because he went in with the largest army in European history up to that point, and only a few thousand out of hundreds of thousands of people, only a few thousand made it back. And after that, Napoleon could have won, but he was fighting a defensive campaign. And so after decades, imagine if you're a French guy, 1789, the French Revolution starts, then the Napoleonic wars ends in 1815, and then after that, it was a profound economic recession across Europe. So if you're 18 years old in 1789, and then 25 years later, it's the Battle of Waterloo and then there's economic recession. Congrats, kid. Your entire youth has been spent in war and poverty, Right?

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. There's probably a silver lining there somewhere.

[Austin Padgett]

But it was the glory where.

[Whatifalth]

That's a brutal.

[Austin Padgett]

It was the glory where, as I've read from various authors, I've gotten a relatively good psychological portrait of what Frenchmen at this time period were like. Where de Tocqueville, writing In the mid 19th century, he said, for our grandparents or that generation, he said they were innately more individualistic, more libertine, and also more heroic and dramatic than us Today. De Tocqueville talks about how the rise in religiosity, the Napoleonic wars, the industrial Revolution, had made the average French person more industrious and more moral, but had gotten rid of a lot of their personal character. And the book by Bell, he says that the main emotion that glorified the French's conquest of Europe under Napoleon was glory. French men were happy to fight for glory. And so if you had shown the French Napoleon, they would say all of this suffering was worthwhile to attain glory, which is the highest good.

[Whatifalth]

Right. And they needed a pretty strong motivation because, like, after Russia, I think they lost 5% of their population, some of those Napoleonic wars, but, like 20, 25% of the youth. Yeah, you can't do that that many times.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it's awfully anticlimactic where Napoleon's story ranges from Egypt to Moscow and Moscow to the Atlantic, and then finally to the tiny rock of St Helena, where he spent his last few years under British capture. But Napoleon's the next episode. He deserves his own video. And so 1815, you see, France is once again pushed back to the hexagon, where at this point, the French even lost Haiti, because during the French Revolution, there was enough instability in France that the French were incapable of holding Haiti because Haiti was 95% black. And then not even the final 5% were white. Whites were. It was a lot of mulattoes where whites were a tiny minority in Haiti and they were on top of this huge, genuinely horrifically treated black population. And there was a period where Haiti was under local white governance, where the French. There was a bait and switch, where the French Revolution abolished slavery, then Napoleon brought slavery back. And this was a sticking point in Haiti where they did not trust the French to actually give them freedom. And the rhetoric of the French Revolution, when black slaves heard it, they thought, me too. And the. So Haiti was one of the most brutal wars I've heard about in history. Dan Carlin talks about it where you hear stuff about cannibalism, burning your enemies in vats, putting your enemies on spikes. And there was a tremendous amount of brutality with Haiti devolving into a failed state. But under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, a local slave leader who is very good at his job, the Haitians are able to beat the French, where Napoleon even sent an army of, I think 20,000 guys to conquer Haiti under a lot of Polish troops, because Napoleon had split off Poland from its previous conquerors as his own, independent, as its own state under his governance. And 80% of them are wiped out by disease in the first few months. So the Haitians were able to defeat a French field army. And Haiti, after it gained independence, being the only black governed state in the new world for over a century. Over a century is it immediately devolved into being a failed state where north and south Haiti became independent countries, where north Haiti was under mulatto leadership or half blacks, half whites, who enslaved the black population. And then south Haiti was under a local black warlord who forced the rest of the population to work as slaves.

[Whatifalth]

Right. And the French didn't exactly leave them with any great legal traditions to work off of. And it's a complete disaster to this day. I think the last person who tried to conquer it was Hillary Clinton.

[Austin Padgett]

The last person to conquer it was Lord Miles.

[Whatifalth]

Oh, nice. He's next. Yeah. Maybe he'll fix the mud pies.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. It's also funny to compare the. So there are these charts where you look at tree cover. Dominican Republic versus Haiti. And Haiti has no trees. Well, the doctor is covered in trees. And it was because the French imported black slaves for sugar agriculture, where they packed all the population into Haiti. And in the Dominican Republic, it's the normal mestizos with some black ancestry. And so Haiti was overpopulated and they lacked government systems or tradable skills in the tropics. Haiti is one of the most cursed nations on earth, if I'm honest.

[Whatifalth]

But the cannibalism reminds me of. They're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Whatifalth]

Specifically in reference to Haitian immigrants. So consistent trend.

[Austin Padgett]

Sorry, I'm just thinking about how wacky Haitian voodoo is it. Voodoo is a really weird form of magic. It's. I don't want to get into it, but it operates under really different principles from other philosophies of magic. So, third French empire in the 19th century and 19th century, France had a real failure to launch because France had a political crisis where none of the. No one was able to solidify political authority, where it was constantly batted back and forth between monarchy, republic, aristocratic republic, even. You had even had a. Paris became a communist state in the 1870s. And Les Mis, which is one of my favorite. Les Miserables, one of my favorite books ever. It goes through these different factions between, oh, France is briefly a democracy. Oh, it's a monarchy now. Oh, another relative. So France went through industrialization, and it was a wealthy and highly cultured country, but it was incapable of breaking through towards political stability, which is why the 19th century was the era of the Pax Britannica, where it was an era of just British excellence and British domination of every major continent on earth. Well, the French felt profound resentment at this. And the first French colony that they took in the Third Empire was Algeria. They took Algeria generations before anyone else. The Americans had opened up Algeria through winning the Barbary wars, where a group of Americans hired mercenaries, wiped out the Barbary Corsairs, which dominated Algeria, Tunis and Libya, just because the Americans refused to pay the tribute money, the rest of the Europeans paid the Barbary Corsairs.

[Whatifalth]

Right. Which is a big political topic today. Always brings it back. But, yeah, I like. I like the private fleet. Go mess them up. It's interesting that the. I'm surprised that the colonial European powers didn't wreck the Mediterranean like 200 years before us. You think they would have had dominance, Navy dominance over the Ottomans?

[Austin Padgett]

The Spanish really tried where the Spanish launched dozens of attacks on the Maghreb and they failed. Because keep in mind, the Europeans only got a consistent military advantage over the Turks in the 18th century. As late as the 1690s, the Turks could terrify Europe with the Turkish guns that went up to Vienna. But once you get to Napoleon's era, the Europeans could unilaterally wipe out any Muslim army. And the French took Algeria. And Algeria is a kind of special Colony where there were over a million European settlers in Nigeria, in Algeria. In the mid 20th century, Algeria was 10% white. So the French had their own settler colonial society. And lots of the cities of Algeria were seen as highly cultured, civilized places where you might as well be in the south of France. Lots of French thinkers were based out of there.

[Whatifalth]

And it's like the Visigoths. It's a common place for Northern European settlers to settle.

[Austin Padgett]

And Algeria was difficult to conquer, where I think it took over a million lives to conquer it. And then the Algerian war of independence was also exceptionally bloody. And the French took a lot of time and effort to conquer Algeria. But after that, Algeria became probably the most important French colony. Then what happened a generation later, in the mid 19th century, was that Napoleon II, I believe, who was a distant, who was the nephew of Napoleon, the original, he made himself monarch of France after the first failed democracy. And so it's not Napoleon ii, it's Napoleon iii. Yeah, Napoleon iii. Napoleon III was monarch of France. And he tried a lot of different schemes because he was trying to build up a French empire to compete with the British, where he invaded Mexico during the time of the US Civil War, where the French, under a Habsburg king, they got a European Habsburg to become the emperor of Mexico. They seized Mexico City, they seized Veracruz. But the issue was that the French were not willing to get involved in local warlord disputes that would have allowed them to conquer Mexico. And the local Mexican elite, the local Mexican conservative elite supported the French's conquest. But also the Americans, after the end of the U.S. civil War, threatened militarily to cross the Rio Grande to Mexico. And the French military left upon that threat, leaving Maximilian in Mexico to be killed.

[Whatifalth]

Right. And that reminds me of. Why did the Spanish and the French never team up? Because they feared the English more like. Oh, they did okay, yeah, not too directly. Like you said that the French expected some treaty from the Spanish and they didn't give it to him.

[Austin Padgett]

Over the 18th century, over the 18th century, the French and the Spanish were consistently allies because they were both under the Bourbon monarchy, where the end point of the War of Spanish Succession was that the Spanish ended up under the French ruling family. What happened, though, is that from the 17th to the 18th centuries, Spain became so pathetic that its ally status was useless. Spain, from the greatest power in the world to a complete joke over the course of the 17th century. So the French got very little practical benefit from working with the Spanish.

[Whatifalth]

Got it. And then it makes sense that Italy was the first place Napoleon conquered because France had been stomping through Italy since the 1400s and it was even weaker than Spain. As a natural kind of starting point.

[Austin Padgett]

Napoleon was also ethnically Italian, which adds another weird variable onto it. And Columbus, yes, Italians have done much. And so Napoleon III also, he was trying to conquer Italy as well, to speak to your point, where Napoleon III controlled Rome and he finally gave Rome to the Italians in exchange for Savoy or a great border area around the French Italian frontier. But Napoleon III's endeavors were largely failures and he was kicked out of power with the Franco Prussian War. And the Franco Prussian War is the real start to the second, the Third French Empire, where Bismarck got France to declare war on Germany so that he could use the external threat to unify all the German states together, integrate modern Germany. Then he crushed the French at the Battle of Sedan and then even seized Paris, where this was complete humiliation for France. And Paris became a communist state after the government fell apart. Which is interesting because it's funny to see communism in the 1870s, which was decades over the rise of the Soviet Union. And that had a huge impact on Nietzsche's philosophy, actually, because Nietzsche followed it closely. And it's how Nietzsche predicted the age of the last men because he saw how left wing the French were already.

[Whatifalth]

Well, this is so much like the World War II, because the first Marxist political party was created in Germany in 1870. So the. And just like when the German National Socialists invaded France just in the 1940s, very similar to the late 1800s where they were both kind of actually pro Marxist. The north of France was very amenable to National Socialism. There was like National Socialist parties throughout all these countries which became the rulers. And the south of France was very much, very different from that. So this like German, French, northern French, German ideological compatibility, where they're not even actually upset about the ideology of their invaders is kind of a consistent pattern.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, France of this era was highly politically polarized. The average Frenchman was super socially conservative. Where late 19th century France was a. It was a very socially conservative society because from Napoleon onwards the military had become the dominant ruling class of France, where France was run by the bureaucracy, but mediated through the military, through a bureaucratized military. And an example of this is the Dreyfus case at the end of the 19th century, which was a huge social issue in France, where the French military had falsely convicted a Jewish officer for being a German spy. And there was a lot of anti Semitism around this story. Why the French liberals reacted against this. This became a huge polarizing issue because for The French conservatives, this was an insult to the honor of the military, where even to insinuate the military could do something wrong was an insult to the French nation. And for the liberals, they saw this as a breach in justice because Dreyfus got sent out to French Guiana, which was a very lightly populated jungle territory next to Brazil. France's largest border in the world is with Brazil, actually. And so Devil's island, which this horrific jungle prison that the French sent their worst criminals to. And it eventually turned out that Dreyfus was innocent. And this was a huge loss for the cultural right in France, and it was a huge victory for the cultural left. But the cities were largely socialist or urban. Were France the biggest population of communists or socialists of anywhere in Europe, while the countryside was rural. The countryside. The countryside was very socially conservative. And you did have some classical liberals like Lafayette or de Tocqueville, but they only rarely gained dominance in France, where at the time of World War I, France was a hyper militaristic, hyper nationalist, Catholic conservative country, where France was actually more warlike in more militaristic than Germany was in World War I. Yeah, totally makes sense.

[Whatifalth]

They're very much have that in their history. And the, the separation between the urban and then the rural, more culturally intact areas is just the same as today. And as in Rome, where Augustus was like, hey, I'm from a small town. Politicians today are always like, I grew up in a small town. I'm from a middle class family. It's supposed to show their morality against the. The urban.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Whatifalth]

And I don't think you have that. That tendency as much in France. I don't think they care as much.

[Austin Padgett]

France also went through a huge socially conservative wave in the 19th century, where in the mid 19th century the average Frenchman was significantly more socially conservative and religious than they were, than their grandparents were, which is something that French authors of that era touch on between de Tocqueville or Victor Hugo or Gustav Lebon and. And that happened across Europe. But there was a kind of a sense of clarity after the French Revolution of this is not cool. But.

[Whatifalth]

Right. So it would have been cool again to be from a small town for a period.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah. The. So the Franco Prussian War was the start of the Third French Empire because the French got completely beaten in that war by superior German military and supplies and even medicine, where the French were completely destroyed and the Germans took Alsace from French France, where the Alsace is an ethnically French region, or it's an ethnically German region that the French conquered in the 17th century. But the French became very attached to the borders of the Hexagon. And Bismarck did not support taking Alsace because he thought it would have the political effects it did.

[Whatifalth]

It's the reverse of Versailles.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, yes. But the French completely obsessed over Alsace for the next generation. 1870, 1871-1914. And that was their biggest political issue across France is they saw the loss of Alsace as a defeat of their sacred honor.

[Whatifalth]

And historians think about it, they fought over that. They prioritized that region over their colonies not long ago.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Whatifalth]

Like we've just talked about.

[Austin Padgett]

And historians have argued that the Franco Prussian War was the seminal moment for the scramble for Africa because France started trying to compensate elsewhere for the loss of Alsace, where they started carving out West Africa. And as the French started doing that, the rest of Europe tried to get involved because there was a real FOMO that. And the scramble for Africa was not profitable for any European power involved. And it happened within mostly a decade or 20 years. 18. 1888-1900. You saw almost all of Africa go from native governance to European governance. And the French spurred that. And it created this chain effect where the Belgians took the Congo, then the Germans and the British got involved. And then you have the Treaty of Berlin, which Bismarck organized of dividing Africa up between the Europeans, which caused a lot of the current border issues, because the Europeans never expected these to be independent countries. They were making it out of their own strategic decisions, often based off factually inaccurate information. But the French's big grab was in West Africa, where the French had a huge empire in West Africa stretching from the Mediterranean to their former slave trading centers in Ivory coast and in Senegal, where I said the third French empire is based out of Dakar, which was their base for French West Africa, which was a huge territory in modern Senegal. And they grabbed it all pretty quickly. There were several spots where they had scruffles with the English between the Fashoda, where the French were trying to take Sudan, between Egypt with the English took. The French were trying to take northern Nigeria, but the English ended up winning there. And so you saw this huge francophone area of Africa that is still French speaking today.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, it's all the. A lot of the immigrants in Paris and France are from that area. West Africa. They speak French all throughout their interesting accent. There's the. They still use the currency. I think up until re. I think recently there were some changes that weekend. The French control currency, the franc.

[Austin Padgett]

The franc offright has become dramatically weaker in the last five years due to Wokeness where after the French lost their empire, they kept it indirectly with this huge area of West Africa called the Franc Africa, where their currency is controlled from Paris by the French. The French approve whoever the military dictator is. And France five years ago, they were fighting more than six wars in Africa at once, where the French military would constantly intervene in Africa. And a lot of it was positive because they were stopping groups like Boko Haram. Boko Haram's Nigerian. But that you've got dozens of group like them in the Sahel. And it's funny that it was completely ignored until it was completely ignored that the French have this huge de facto empire even until very recently in West Africa, where in the last five years, due to wokeness, the French have practically given up their attempts to maintain their power in West Africa.

[Whatifalth]

Right. So now it's being filled in by Russian mercenaries because people don't quite understand how Africa works. A lot of the dictators rely on basically mercenaries and technology from foreign. Western, not Western powers, just foreign, more advanced power. So yes, like if you have a fighting Russian squad. Right. They can. They have the technology and the capability and the training to dominate an area for a local ruler. Cheaper than he could do himself. Yeah. And so that. And then when you have these, Russia is not woke, so they're all over it. France was in there for a while and then the US is all over Africa too. But like you said, when it's the. When it's. The direct military has to be involved and we don't like that, then it's not going to happen. So basically, unless we shift to private, because I doubt we're going to return to direct military action, then. It's just that role is going to be filled in by Russia and other. And China and other people.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Wonder if Blackwater will get involved. The.

[Whatifalth]

If the US government lets them. I think that's the big limiting factor.

[Austin Padgett]

I'd prefer them to the Russians.

[Whatifalth]

Right.

[Austin Padgett]

The thing with the French empire in Africa is it's so geographically huge, but I can't really say how it's impacted Western history because the thing with the African colonies is they're huge and Africa will probably end up becoming an important place. But as I've said before, they were less than 1% of France's foreign trade. And the French built this huge empire where the French structure of leadership was different from the British because the British would get these aristocrats to send them down out to the colonies and they'd work with the local chieftains. And so the British had indirect rule through the parliamentary tradition done by the locals. And the French technically ran things directly through France, where they had a French bureaucracy. And their goal was the cultural assimilation of the colonies into being French, like the Roman Empire. The French drew a lot of ideas from the Roman Empire and the French went to a lot of efforts to avoid having direct racial discrimination. They were the best European power for that. However, there was de facto racial discrimination and they actually ended up being heavily dependent on local regimes because the French weren't capable of governing without the local tribal chieftains. Although you'd have French officials that would pop up, have total authority over the local tribes than go somewhere else.

[Whatifalth]

Right. It's kind of almost a failure of multiculturalism. Just because they were trying to extend the Francophony through getting their culture incorporated in these other areas versus some of the English colonies like Rhodesia or South Africa were more isolated populations.

[Austin Padgett]

It's funny that most histories I read in this topic portray the French method as more humane. But when you zoom out and think about it, you're like, wait, the English don't. The English don't actually care about whether you assimilate or not. The French are actively trying to get you to assimilate. Assimilate under this principle of. Under this sort of multicultural facade.

[Whatifalth]

Exactly. And it just didn't result in a functioning state.

[Austin Padgett]

So yeah, the French were worse at establishing institutions than the English were. Where a lot of the poorest countries in world. In the world are former French colonies in the Sahel and West Africa. I don't want to fully.

[Whatifalth]

So maybe it worked. Maybe it worked too well. Instituted the wrong culture.

[Austin Padgett]

I don't want to blame the French that much for it because when you look at how the French governed versus the Spanish or the Russian or those peoples, it wasn't that bad. The French empire was fairly humane and competent. I just think that that region of the world, this hell is going to be poor for cultural and climactic and other reasons. And the. The other final French colony we should talk about, the French had Madagascar, which they took from a local sadistic queen where she did a lot of weird stuff. You should look her up on Wikipedia. And then Vietnam, other French colony where the French conquered Vietnam and the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos in the late 19th century. And it was the most populous French colony which they held throughout this time period. And it's interesting to see the cultural intermixing where as an example, Vietnamese French fusion cuisine is big in France. And there's this. There's a. There's A real cultural influence from France to Vietnam.

[Whatifalth]

Oh, huge.

[Austin Padgett]

All the.

[Whatifalth]

All their food is French pastry shops, sausages and rolls, just kind of like sweeter.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

I mean, they have churches, they have French buildings everywhere.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

But down to their. Their fundamental food culture is very, like, connected.

[Austin Padgett]

The most popular Vietnamese dish in America, Phoenix. It's from the French word or fire.

[Whatifalth]

Oh, I didn't know that.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

The. The Bah Mi is a very famous one because it's a baguette sandwich with shredded, you know, carrots and sweet meat and, you know, Asian vegetables.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. The French were also instrumental in breaking up the political equilibrium that existed beforehand because Thailand had made itself the local power. And then what happened was the French cut off half of Thailand's territory, gave it to them. Thailand survived as a buffer state between the English and the French. The English in Burma and the French in Vietnam. And the French also brought Laos into this shared, shared polity where Laos was. They were jungle hill tribes and Cambodia had gone into decline. But. But now we have hit World War I and World War I was a brutal war for France. It killed off so many of their young men. France became a war zone itself. The Germans nearly took Paris twice. So World War I was just a nightmare for France. And the French ended up pulling significant amounts of African troops from the area around Senegal to make up for their loss of young white men.

[Whatifalth]

Interesting. I didn't know there was Senegalese in the French army in World War I. I hadn't. I don't know too much about those stories. How did they. How did they fight? How did they incorporate in the army?

[Austin Padgett]

So this is one of the weird anthropology facts is the studies the French use to compare the psychological effects of World War I on white versus black soldiers actually became instrumental to a lot of, like, ethnic research we have today where the French put a lot of time and effort to see how black troops fought differently versus white troops and implementing different tactics and that stuff. And, and what. What they consistently found is that the African troops could bear greater physical suffering, but they would face psychological issues faster.

[Whatifalth]

Interesting.

[Austin Padgett]

So stuff like PTSD or the. The monotony of the front line or the weather even more so that had a bigger toll on African troops than it did for Europeans. But the other thing as well is that although there were African forces, a woke person would get you to believe that there were more than there were. Where, for example, you had some Muslims in France in this time period, but that you would like one or two mosques in all of France. France. So there. There was An African component, but it wasn't like a third of the French army was black.

[Whatifalth]

Right. Yeah. It's just interesting in World War I and World War II to think of all the. How many colonial troops were in those wars, because it's more than you realize. And they all have a little bit of a different flavor. Like the Australians and stuff.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. So the British, they were using their white colonies as shock troops by the end of the war because the British themselves had become so, so worn down. So they would, they would use Australians and Canadians to launch shock attacks on the Western Front. The French had a kebaqua regiment in World War I where the British would let them recruit French Canadians to fight for the French, although the French had. They were the officers. And World War I, France is one of the most rapid cultural shifts ever. Where France went from this hyper militaristic nationalist country to after the war, being the center of pacifism and nihilism and socialism of everywhere in Europe, you had these two psychological tendencies inside France and you flip from one to the other. And so a lot of the culture we associate with the left today or modernity or Weimar came out of France in the 1920s.

[Whatifalth]

It's the same thing that happened to Germany after World War II, where they became nihilistic, super peaceful, like the most woke. Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. And yeah, you're right. And, and so When World War II started, France had been so overtaken by pacifism that they didn't really fight hard. And it's sad that France. It's sad that France has been one of the greatest military powers ever, only to get relentlessly mocked for World War II.

[Whatifalth]

Because I think that. Yeah, go ahead.

[Austin Padgett]

They fought heroically in World War I. And the sad thing is that the French commander who is the hero of World War I, PETA, he. He became the leader of Vichy France. So their great hero of World War I betrayed them to be the Vichy leader in World War II.

[Whatifalth]

Oh, well, that makes so much sense because he probably appreciated the Nazis politics more than the way that the French politics went after World War I. I.

[Austin Padgett]

Never thought of that.

[Whatifalth]

Amenable to national socialism like so many of them were. This is like an opportunity to. Anyone who was a National Socialist welcomed the German invasion because that just put them on the top and it got their ideas back. But it's. I think it's a really interesting case study, the French reaction to World War II, World War I, into World War II, because like you said, they're one of the most militant, established glory based, you know, Countries ever. And there's something undeniable about watching, you know, a certain percent of your population die in brutal trench warfare over a period of time where you're like, wait a minute, this is. Is. It's like the question of it's always worth it. It's like, wait, maybe it's not worth it.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

And what were the consequences of them doing that? You know, they like, they, you know, World War II ended for them and they didn't have as many people die. Maybe it wasn't that bad of an idea.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. It's funny as well. For World War I, where the French dominant theory of war before the war was that the ella, or the spirit of a military could trounce military advantages. So they thought if an army has enough motivation, it can crush a better army. And they also thought that offense would have the advantage in the war. So the French played their cards in the exact wrong way, because World War I was a war where the defense had an enormous advantage. But French military study had been taken up by these theories that motivation and offense would be the. The way of the future. And so they just got butchered in a way that other Europeans were able to adapt faster away from. Right.

[Whatifalth]

They probably couldn't philosophically recover from that. They were probably just too much of a place of uncertainty, because the basis of their entire philosophy was that cut out from under them. And then it's like, what are we gonna copy what they do? But not as well, and we don't know what to do ourselves. Yeah, there's a bit of frozen through uncertainty.

[Austin Padgett]

The other thing as well is that out of any country, France was the one in World War I where the most people died. So it was fighting over. Over the French territory, which a lot of it ended up looking like the moon or Mordor.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And French France also lost its dominant industrial base because. Which was in the northeast of the country. So In World War I, the French were fighting without most of their industry.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, that's not fun at all. So there's. There's a good reason, you know, for them to. To make those moves. Possibly.

[Austin Padgett]

So with World War.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

With World War II, the Germans launched a strike through the Ardennes, where the. The French had built up this enormous wall of fortifications called the Maginot Line on their border between France and Germany. If Germany invaded again, the Germans just bypassed the wall, attacked through the forest and hit the French from behind. Then after that, in 1940, the French lost within a matter of weeks, giving up when the Germans seized Paris and the French have been ruthlessly mocked for this. While parts of the French Empire followed the Vichy government with Petain, and then other parts went with de Gaulle, where de Gaulle was a French officer. I don't think he was particularly important. He was in one of the colonies, either Syria or Gabon, where he said, I am the new French leader. All those who support Free France should follow me. And I think Syria, Gabon, and maybe somewhere else went for the Free French. But most of the French Empire actually sided with Vichy. So the French could have reformulated in Algeria and kept the war going there. Instead, all of French West Africa, the Maghreb in Madagascar, went for the French. The Vichy government, its name's Vichy, as it's based out of the town of Vichy, and it controlled the southern half of France, while the Japanese took Vietnam. Instantaneously. Vietnam fell into communist insurgencies, where the same Vietnamese army which fought the Japanese later beat the French the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, killing the French Empire, and then beat the Americans in the Vietnam War. It was the same guys, right?

[Whatifalth]

It's interesting to think of the north of France so consistently dominating the south progressively for such a long time that the fact that the north aligned with the Germans was put the south in a position of, like, moral superiority relative to the nation of France for the first time in maybe the. Since they were conquered by the North. And I wonder. Yeah, go ahead.

[Austin Padgett]

I think that that just the shame of. Of collaborating with. Whenever I say collaborating, I think of YouTubers collaborating. So whenever I hear collaborating with the Nazis, I think Hitler featuring Pata or it's like Vichy France featuring Goring. And I just imagine it's a YouTube video with creators collabing. But there was a tremendous amount of shame because you'll see that people who you thought you could trust will actually betray the system and support conquerors. And so it created this sense for decades afterwards. And one of my favorite TV shows, Service de la France, which is about the French secret service in the 1960s, is people are very careful to cover up their collaboration with the Nazis.

[Whatifalth]

Right.

[Austin Padgett]

And it's.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, it's the same thing as France and Germany, like post war period, is very internal shame because they had, you know, a lot of collaborators.

[Austin Padgett]

And the other thing on top of that is that the. A lot of Sartre's philosophy and the postmodernist philosophy is. Which came out of France in the post World War II period, is that we're all offered a stark choice in life whether we follow meaning or not. And I heard an interesting philosopher Say that that's an outcome of France in World War II. You were given a choice, do you work with the Nazis or not? And so it was this real moral test.

[Whatifalth]

Right. Because for some of them, it was a practical thing. For some of them, they were opportunistic, you know, betrayers. It's. There's a. You have the whole spectrum because in many situations, you're not really given the choice. But I wonder if it created a revival and French culture towards the south post war. Like, or like asterisks and obelix against the Roman occupiers.

[Austin Padgett]

Not really like that.

[Whatifalth]

And. Well, yeah, yeah, probably not, but it's curious to think about. And then going to school in France, one of the reasons why we moved back to the US was I came home from school one day and was like, hey, dad, did you know without French resistance, we would have never won World War II? So there. There is a big. There's still these sense of, you know, shame at the same time that maybe it was a good idea. But it gets translated through the. The merit of the French. They get to have it both ways, right? Yes, but it's. It's from the perspective of the north versus the south, because the south fought and the north didn't.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. When I was a kid and I was reading a French history book, it said the exact same thing, that.

[Whatifalth]

No way.

[Austin Padgett]

No, really? Yeah. It said that the. And this was a book written in French. And I've read French history since, where they're operating under the delusion that they are the reason France is liberated, where for a frame of reference, the army which conquered France at D day and Normandy, pushing across all of France, was almost entirely Canadian, American and British. There was not barely even any French troops. The only French troops were. Were under the Leclerc division, which the French. The Americans allowed the Leclerc division to liberate Paris for symbolic reasons, but they did not do the fighting. The reason the French gained independence is the Anglo Saxons conquered France and the French cope a lot about that even today.

[Whatifalth]

And sure, they helped. Like, I'm glad you told us where the infrastructure was and did some sabotage and things like that. And I. I'm proud of your valiant effort. But of course, yeah, it's. It's not all that it took.

[Austin Padgett]

After the war, the French were one of the European countries that tried to maintain their empire the best. They lasted for a few years longer than the British Empire, where the British just gave up, but the French did not. They lost it. Dien bien Fu, which was a battle in the jungle mountains of Vietnam where they were fighting over airstrips. And the Vietnamese guerrillas were able to surround the French armies based around the airstrips and just murder them. So the French lost a field army in Vietnam, which forced them to give up their Southeast Asian empire, which then got split between north and South. Capitalist versus Communist. America got involved. It's all part of a single historic process. But then the loss in Dien Bien Phu resulted in Algeria rebelling. And the war in Algeria was horrible, where the French fought for years and they finally succeeded at crushing the war in Algeria. And Charles de Gaulle was the president of France at the end of this war. And he made the decision, we're going to hold on to Algeria. No, he made that decision first. Then he made the decision, we're going to lose Algeria. And this sparked a crisis in France where the left was violently against keeping Algeria. And then when de Gaulle made the decision to work with the left, although he was a conservative, there was a military coup where former Algerian soldiers tried to launch a coup against de Gaulle. And that ultimately failed. But there was this constitutional crisis in France in the 60s, which we forget can happen in a modern Western country. France moved from the Fourth Republic to the Fifth Republic.

[Whatifalth]

Right. And what was. What were the political implications of that legal system?

[Austin Padgett]

So France gave up all the empire, where after the loss of Algeria, they gave up all the African colonies. And France just became progressively more gay and effeminate, which is the path of all West European countries over the 20th century, where France has tried to resist being a part of the American empire. They're the one European country that pushes back against it the most, besides Russia, of course. But France has been sucked more so into the American and the European orbit. Whereas a symbol for this, the European Union, an organization made by the Americans. No, literally, it was built by.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah, no, I know.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah. And you're. God, that was not a smart idea. We were so naive. And now the European Union hates us. But so they started working with the Germans and the European Union started over a coal and industrial manufacturing treaty between France and Germany, which later spiraled out to be the European Union. And so France became part of the European Union's empire after. After they lost their colonial empire. And in the European Union you could see it as an alliance of Germany's industrial power and force of will with the French's pre established imperial skills as well as the French were more socially palatable after World War II. So the Germans and the French worked together to keep the European Union, where the French were the public facing side and the Germans were the machine behind it.

[Whatifalth]

Ed. Right. So they basically didn't even break up after World War II. They just, they. Yeah, it's kept together as pretty strong allies.

[Austin Padgett]

When I was in high school, I wrote 500 pages of fantasy lore when I was bored in class. People, the teachers thought I was taking notes. And in one of those fantasy lores, there's two kingdoms called Avalanchium and Snare that are ethnically close to identical. But one of them pick a different religion and the other one picks a different religion. And they waged centuries of internecine warfare and they periodically formed together under a different. Under different incentives. And the point I was trying to make there is that like the Germans and the French, who are ethnically very close but picked different ideologies or different powers, that among culturally comparable peoples there is the potential for both intense hatred and cooperation. Where there have been points in the French and the Germans worked together and also killed each other. I think that's symbolic of the human condition.

[Whatifalth]

Yeah. I mean, you can see this example with your friends or people on your sports team or something. Yeah. You have stronger opinions about them than people on the other team. And then. Yeah. It's funny how with the eu it's like it always starts with free trade and then ends in a centralized globalist regulatory bureaucracy or something.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

But that's another example of like shared ideology and cooperation between France and Germany. And it's funny with France because it's like they were too. They were embarrassed about World War II, so they were too embarrassed to just give up their colonies after that. So they needed to fight these big wars just so that it was their choice to give up their colonies.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, exactly.

[Whatifalth]

We're not doing this because you're making us. Yeah. We could hold on to our colonies if we want to, but we're nice.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Whatifalth]

Which is funny. That's a relevant psychological theme because you're not good unless you have the strength to make that decision. Right?

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. Huh. So that's the French Empire. Next episode is the Napoleonic Wars.

[Whatifalth]

Very cool. I'm excited. Yeah. And then I'll be curious to break down, like, how it went from the Republicans briefly after the crazy revolutionaries and how they failed to achieve progress, which left room for Napoleon.

[Austin Padgett]

You will get seven hours of French excellence in a three week period.

[Whatifalth]

Very cool. All right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen Live. Players and Econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.