Hacker News Reader

Comment by srge | Hacker News Reader

In France, this event is well known and taught in class (at least it was in the 80's).

As I remember it now, this was taught as a bittersweet moment in our history. We united, we were brave and fought a stronger army but still we were defeated and our chief was captured and killed by the enemy.

As a result we were colonized and we lost almost all our Celtic culture (Celtic culture remains present notably in Bretagne — Britain). But we were "civilized" by the Romans. I think this was taught as being a tough but positive thing.

Today I find it interesting to think about how "civilization" spreading if often a gruesome process and how it's seen centuries, if not (in this case), milleniums later.

View on HN

It’s always funny how the Franks are seens as “us”, when looking throught history France has been washed by waves of invasions that all left deep cultural mixes.

Going to Normandy nowadays and looking at general public exposition it’s make pretty clear their ancestry is mostly from the Vikings and Nords.

In the east it’s also clear that their frenchness is a fluctuating and partial attribute.

All around the country, each region have a very clear multi-cultural past. And Paris and its periphery is a huge Petri dish of people coming from around the world with a significant number of families that have no ancestors that were in France more than four or five generation ago.

Books still present Franks as french people’s ancestors, but I wonder how teacher make it match with the reality when they teach their students.

French people are about as Frankish as Bulgarians are Bulgars or Hungarians are Magyars (i.e., not very), right?

The battle of Alesia took place several centuries before anyone heard about the Franks. The "us" the OP is referring to, is the Gauls.

I won't argue with the essence of your point though, although, for what I know, much of the nobility up to the 1800's was of Frankish descent, while Gallo-roman blood dominated among the commoners. So some heritage was there indeed.

The Franks are not depicted as ancestors of the French people in general but rather as the founders of France.

Sorry I mixed up Franks and Gaulois, which are two different things altogether.

The part I had in mind is the old “our ancestors, the gaulois” which is not taught as is anymore, but still stays very present in the minds through an almost exclusive focus on Gaulois’ side when depicting that time period (not just fantasy depictions like Asterix, but also a lot of documentaries and reconstitutions funded publicly)

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nos_ancêtres_les_Gaulois

Well, in fairness it is true that 'modern' French have Gauls among their ancestors.

> Books still present Franks as french people’s ancestors, but I wonder how teacher make it match with the reality when they teach their students.

I think the goal of using 'our ancestors the Gauls' was to create a shared history, to promote a national identity, without any regard to the actual ancestry of the actual population.

Also you have to put back the origin of this idea in his context: it's coming from the XIXth century, when moving away from the monarchy. The Gauls served as a common ancestry, without any reference to the previous monarchies, which explain why it was pushed by Napoleon III (who started up excavation looking for the site of Alesia) and the IIIrd Republic.

> As I remember it now, this was taught as a bittersweet moment in our history. We united, we were brave and fought a stronger army but still we were defeated and our chief was captured and killed by the enemy.

Isn't modern France mostly a descendant of the Frankish kingdoms, where the Franks are quite different than the Gauls and in any case arrived in the area far later than the Battle of Alesia?

Of course, but a nation identity is built on more than just facts.

> Of course, but a nation identity is built on more than just facts.

In fact, a state's national identity is based on almost anything but facts.

Yes, but while in political terms the Gauls, Romans and Franks were distinct entities, in cultural terms the region was more of a melting pot. The Roman conquest of Gaul ended up blending their two cultures into a new, distinctive "Gallo-Roman" culture (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-Roman_culture), for instance, and then when the Franks came along their culture got blended in as well. So modern French identity has strains in it running back to all three sources.

The Frankish kings were a small minority of rulers and did not actually leave much Germanic influence.

The modern French culture is a direct descendant of Gallo-Roman culture, which is basically Roman culture with a little Gaulish influence.

"To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus.

Who remains one of the world's great historians. Sometimes we read old books because we want to understand how these books influenced the course of thought. But sometimes, old books are just genuinely good in their own right and would be just as good if published today: Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Aeschylus, and a bunch of other authors fit this latter mold. I wish more people read them.

But in this case I preferred Caesars book about the battle. Caesar had a very clear and engineer-like writing style, compared to Tacitus.

Reminder: the Franks were Germanic invaders who kicked the Romano-Gaulish in the teeth. This is like Englishmen mourning King Arthur and his Romano-British followers, ignoring that their ancestors were probably more the Hengests and Horsas of the story.

But...Is it not more like Englishmen celebrating Alfred the Great? You know, the Anglo-Saxon leader. A Germanic peoples (Alfred's army was also made up of Britons)

Alfred would not be the correct analogy to Gaul/Rome. The Gauls were "Celtic" like Arthur's Britons. They were both facing invasions.

Alfred's French analogy would be Charles the Simple, who had to fight off the Norse invaders and made a treaty to give them Normandy. Though, it has to be said, Charles the Simple had a much better time of it.

I'm a bit dubious about the state of gaul civilization. History books weren't super solid and recent archeology uncovered new commercial routes and production sites (wine jars). The Roman Empire was great, no question, but I'm not sure if other countries were so far behind.

This was taught in Latin class in the US as well, although my mental image of the spikes was very different from the photo. I thought it would be on more of a downward slope.

Isn't Breton culture really rooted in ancient Cornish culture, not the historical continental Celtic culture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations

> The six territories widely considered Celtic nations are Brittany (Breizh), Cornwall (Kernow), Wales (Cymru), Scotland (Alba), Ireland (Éire) and the Isle of Man (Mannin or Ellan Vannin).

Very roughly, Britons were the main population in southern Great Britain (roughly England, Wales and Scotland to the Firth of Forth), but were "squeezed" during the Anglo-Saxon settlement into more isolated pockets — Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall — and some crossed over to Brittany. How much of of the "squeeze" was population replacement as opposed to languistic and cultural change is up for debate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com