Is France the beginning of the collapse?

[easy]

I think we have bigger worries here in the US than to be discussing France's problems.

[Onepoint]

Meh, we can multitask.

[Hodgie]

What the world needs now is a good old hostile Alien invasion to pull us all together.

[Griz375]

"France went into WWII screwed from the get go. They lost nearly all of their young men in WWI, even England had issues coming back from the losses. In ways I can't blame them, in others they should have fought. But France, and all of Europe was looking at losing pretty much every male from the age of 16 to 55 years old in its population if the second war dragged on. "

France in WW1 and 2 was a case of lions led by donkeys. France suffered from one government cabinet after another falling apart, almost yearly. So no consistent leadership. Communism was rampant in the country, furthering division. Communist resistant fighters strove to take over Paris first before the Allies liberated it, so as to establish a communist nation. They went as far as betraying a fellow french resistant leader who was for the Republic to the Nazis to get him out of the picture. I read this in Is Paris Burning?

In WWI, French Generals only knew of one tactic, Attack! So they sent millions of brave French soldiers to their deaths in human wave attacks against German machine guns over and over. The soldiers got tired of being slaughtered, and mutiny followed in 1917.  They would have done the same to our troops had they been given full command. As it was, we suffered 100,000 casualties for them and the rest of Europe, only to have them plant the seeds for WW2.

By WW2 France's army was still being run by the same generals who led it in WW1. These guys were over 80 years old, and did not adopt combine arms of artillery, tanks, and planes like the Germans did. So they fought like they did in WWI, and the french soldiers got creamed again. Call it class warfare or socialist materialism, either way French troops were treated as expendables by Generals who resided in Chateaus from from the front drinking champagne and moving flags on a map, as far from reality like Hitler was in his final days in his bunker.

So don't call the French soldiers cowards. They were in a losing situation like our guys in Vietnam. When well lead, they could fight as well as anyone. They just got tired of being thrown away by a government that could not make up its mind what it stood for to make them fight for.

A very long time ago, I read a book on French Military Successes. Bonaparte took up a lot of the available space bu IIRC, t, post-Napoleanic militry success was fairly scant unless Le Legion Etranger were involved. While the officer & NCO Corps were primarily French, the troops were, post-WWI, mostly German. After WWII, apparently there were a lot of Russian & Slavic types in the mix too.

I will grant you the French General staff of those eras were not generally regarded as leading critical thinkers or strategic genuises.

I'm not entirely certain I'd like to rely on a French unit to have my flank; at least the Anglo speaking members of NATO & SEATO are probably way more reliable

JMHO

[Workingzombie]

France may have suffered the fate they built for themselves.  Regardless,  the France of now is not the 'French resistance' France, its become soft in it's nanny statism.   Except for Jean Reno,  he kicks ass.

We choose to intervene, and failed to learn from their mistakes. It didn't help us win friends there when the OSS helped supply and train the Viets to fight the Japanese, leading them on that they would gain independence, only for us to allow the French to take over Vietnam again as a colony. To add salt in the wound, the French who ran Vietnam before they turned it over the Japanese where Vichy who sold out to Germany.  One can see why why the Viets didn't trust anyone to have their best interests at heart when they were used by all the big powers. It's just a pity they choose communism as a Ideology.

If our leaders had read Bernard Falls books on the French Vietnam war, they would have learned that it was impossible to beat insurgents with modern mechanized forces, no way to win the hearts and minds of a people who were tired of having everyone occupy their country, and most importantly, there was never a so-called "Domino strategy" where the VietMinn had any intetion to play as a proxy puppet for either China or the USSR to make the rest of Southeast Asia into a communist satellite like the Warsaw Pack.

Ho Chi Mihn was a commie, sure. They did bad things. And I hate commies. But he and his cronies only cared about one thing, and that was uniting Vietnam and kicking out the French, US, and everyone else out to become an independent nation. Both the USSR and China had brushed aside Ho Chin Minh decades before, when he was a eager follower of communism. Vietnam and China hated each others guts going back thousands of years. The only reason those two nations helped Vietnam was to fight a proxy war against us. So in short, they used Vietnam, and Vietnam used them, with no love lost after the conflict.

If South Vietnam truly cared to fight to stay free, I could see helping them like we helped the South Korea. But they were corrupt as hell, stole from their own people, and had no sense of nationalism outside of Saigon. Everybody outside of the cities were tribes and small villagers who were only paid attention to by thier leaders when taxes were due.

We should have stayed out of it, or declared war to invade North Vietnam and defeat them in six months with everything we had. But we didn't want to incite China, so we fought a half-assed war that guaranteed we would lose fighting a war of wills and attrition that favored the commies.

[Onepoint]

 I don't necessarily disagree, except China only sent cursory aid to Vietnam, that was mostly a Russian proxy war.  The 1st real direct contest between super powers.  They failed in their attempts to force us out, only when we tired of being a suppressing force did we quit.   When they entered Afghanistan they saw how boots on the ground dominated both in Vietnam and in Europe where they used it themselves, and tried that, and then realized that cost where populations are not already war weary and lost the will to fight.  Something it seems we still have yet to learn.

Vietnam struggled with resisting being a satellite state of the USSR, but kept them only so far away as China was eager to roll them up, and relations between China and Russia were only professional, not really amicable.  Vietnam only emerged to become its own master when the soviet union collapsed. 

The problem with Vietnam, like many places, is they did not consider themselves Vietnamese as the lines were drawn post WW2, there were several regional affiliations, the communists simply used ancient warfare tactics of killing dissenters and enslaving the rest, and then used the Chinese model of "reeducating" population for compliance.

Anyway, France is not even the France it was under De Gaulle prioritizing sovereignty.  They have lost any spirit at being independent people and become more like Spain, or Italy etc, just a ghost of former selves, much of that through social engineering.

[retcolusa]

Rioting in France is the national pastime.

That's because the only people they can whip in a fight is themselves.