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Comment by jdmoreira | Hacker News Reader

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yes, France has won a lot of wars. France and England basically divided most of the world between themselves at one point. Germany being a distant runner up.

But on the other hand Groundskeeper Willie on The Simpsons said a funny thing one time so Americans now think they must be wimps.

It is a whole lot more complicated than a Simpsons joke. While it is still pretty much completely unwarranted, French bashing has been a thing that started way earlier in history. Check this Reddit thread for a well documented summary : https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vmkpr1/when_...

> But on the other hand Groundskeeper Willie on The Simpsons said a funny thing one time so Americans now think they must be wimps.

Is this a deep-cut joke I'm not getting about Scotland?

No, it's a joke about how Americans are so ignorant about history and the rest of the world that they form their worldview entirely based on memes and pop-culture references, and the Simpsons is where the phrase "cheese eating surrender-monkeys" came from.

Which is ironic because historically the Scotts and the French were teamed up against the English. They swapped a lot of royalty.

I would love to hear your understanding of French military history. Genuinely curious to know what year you would choose to begin with.

Americans vaguely know from war movies that they capitulated to the Nazis and then the US (and the US alone, of course) had to come rescue them, and that they refused to participate in the US's illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which then led to a propaganda campaign against France, including Freedom Fries and other nonsense. (France absolutely did partake in the war in Afghanistan, deploying several thousand troops in 2001, so nobody can say they didn't come to aid when requested.)

As an American I am unfortunately very familiar with that narrative.

There is one war France won so comprehensively that everyone in this forum is still using words with a French origin in almost every sentence.

You mean the cultural war between Britain and France that lasted hundreds of years? Yeah pretty sure the Anglo world won that one. Since you are writing in English in an internet forum and all

No, I meant the Norman conquest (conquête) in 1066, in which the English aristocracy (aristocratie) was replaced (remplacé) by French warlords, who kept speaking French until well in the 14th century, and changed the English language (langue) beyond recognition (reconnaissance), to the extent that Dutch or Scandinavian speakers find it easier to understand Old English than English ones do.

You might view the Hundred Year War as quarrels (querelles) of different (différent) branches (branches) of the French aristocracy.

Therefore, the current (courant) Anglo-Saxon hegemony (hégémonie) has its roots in France.

Here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Franc...

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