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Thread: Is there a French ethnicity?

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    Default Is there a French ethnicity?

    I have read here posts by French people with different opinions on the French national question. Some are of the opinion that there isn't and never was such a thing as a French ethnicity and that the French nation is artificial and was created by the French revolution and subsequent regimes. I have heard before such opinion from Romanian intelectuals, but I wondered what explains the Joan of Arc phenomenon. Wasn't the gathering of troops under her command and the elan of the French in battle against the English, showed that there was a French nation already? A nation is not defined only by a common language, but by a national self-consciousness. What is your opinion? Is there a French ethnicity and how old is it and how do you define it or what populations belong to it? What about a French nation, which is not the same thing as an ethnicity.

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    Racially they are not a specific group, 23andme put them with Germans



    Like every countries they have a national identity so they are a ethnicity

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    [QUOTE=Numidia;4150112]Racially they are not a specific group, 23andme put them with Germans



    Carolingian facade.

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    bump

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    Veteran Member Fantomas's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Foreigner View Post
    I have read here posts by French people with different opinions on the French national question. Some are of the opinion that there isn't and never was such a thing as a French ethnicity and that the French nation is artificial and was created by the French revolution and subsequent regimes. I have heard before such opinion from Romanian intelectuals, but I wondered what explains the Joan of Arc phenomenon. Wasn't the gathering of troops under her command and the elan of the French in battle against the English, showed that there was a French nation already? A nation is not defined only by a common language, but by a national self-consciousness. What is your opinion? Is there a French ethnicity and how old is it and how do you define it or what populations belong to it? What about a French nation, which is not the same thing as an ethnicity.
    Unfortunately this is just one more myth created at "age of enlightenment" in modern historical era about dark, ignorant ancient and medieval times and that people then were too primitive to create at least something, including the concept of national unity.

    Gallic Wars.V. 55 BC.

    Before them Ambiorix spake as follows. He admitted that he was very greatly indebted to Caesar for his good offices towards himself; for it was by Caesar's instrumentality that he had been set free from the tribute which he had been accustomed to pay to his neighbours the Aduatuci, and by Caesar's action that a son and a nephew, sent to the Aduatuci as hostages, and kept in their country in slavery and bondage, had been sent back to him. He declared that his action in assaulting the camp had been the result, not of judgment or intention on his part, but of compulsion on the part of his state; and that the conditions of his own sovereignty were such that the people had as much authority over him as he himself over the people. The state, moreover, had gone to war because it had not been able to resist the sudden conspiracy of the Gauls. He could easily prove that by the insignificance of his own position; for he was not so ignorant of affairs as to believe that by his own forces the Roman people could be overcome. No, there was common consent among the Gauls: this was the day appointed for assaulting all the cantonments of Caesar, so that one legion might not be able to come to the support of another. It would not have been easy for Gauls to refuse Gauls, especially when they considered that the design they had entered on was for the recovery of their common freedom.

    Richer of Reims. 10 century AD



    I'm not sure what the language they're talking about, maybe that was Celtic or French, doesn't matter, anyway self-identity of Frenchmen and their opposing, culturally and linguistically, to Germanic ethnic group was a reality already in 920's AD. And it's not surprising becuase self-identity tradition was a commonplace there even 1000 years before that.
    So by the Joan of Arc times this tradition had at least 1500 years history.
    Last edited by Fantomas; 01-07-2017 at 08:21 AM.
    DE OPPRESSO LIBER


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    Quote Originally Posted by Fantomas View Post
    anyway self-identity of Frenchmen and their opposing, culturally and linguistically, to Germanic ethnic group was a reality already in 920's AD. And it's not surprising becuase self-identity tradition was a commonplace there even 1000 years before that.
    Not at all.
    The idea that a Nation is a State and a territory unified under a common language, a common culture and ethnicity, didn't surface before Renaissance times, when book printing was invented and Latin being substituted by vernacular languages in public administration (actually, to be more specific, the first European scholar who envisioned a culture-based nation was Dante Alighieri of Italy).

    As for France, from the 6th to the 13th century, the French king didn't call himself the King of France, but the King of the Franks — the Franks being tautologically defined as the subjects of the Roy des Francs, Rex Francorum, whatever the language they were using.

    Quote Originally Posted by Fantomas View Post
    So by the Joan of Arc times...
    In her short life, Joan of Arc travelled across all the provinces core France is made of:
    · born in Lorraine,
    . came to Orléanais,
    . was sent for some time in Poitiers,
    . rode across Champagne to get the King crowned in Reims,
    . fought on the borders to Berry and Burgundy,
    . failed to take Paris,
    . was caught in Picardy,
    . detained in Artois,
    . burnt on the stake in Normandy.

    This has for us a very high symbolic value.


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