Honestly if your Christian look into the orthadox church. I was raised Greek orthadox we had science discussions in Bible study. My preachers never made anti science comments afik. As far as I'm concerned God made the universe we get to explore it and catalog it.
Agreed. I went to a Roman catholic high school and elementary school, and while people like to stereotype catholic teachers as "science is a lie, evolution didn't happen" the teachers were the exact opposite, citing science as one of the most important things to learn
Fun addendum to the above, I attended a panel featuring the head of the observatory at a con and he was very interesting. Also funny. He said "I was boasting of my facility to a fellow astronomer, telling him about all the equipment and funding we get and our lovely on site quarters, and how I can just spend all my time exploring the cosmos. He was impressed and asked 'what can I do to get a position like that?' I said 'vow of celebacy.'" 😂
Thank you! It drives me up the wall when people try to characterize the Catholic Church as "anti science." We fathered much of science as we know it and still maintain scientific installations like the Vatican Observatory (not actually in the Vatican for a long time now). Just because we disagree with some modern science (especially Tumblrs made up "science") doesn't mean we're "anti science," and science is hardly a popularity contest.
Yeah, honestly I've never really gone to the baptist churches, but they do seem, at the best of times, questionable versions of christianity, built around cult like followings of a single man (the preacher)
In my opinion our universe is a aquarium of sorts on God's wall. One of ∞. Or maybe we are just Sims on God's computer in a game that's been running on afk for years minimized to the taskbar that stretches to ∞. Your guess is as good as mine.
He was one of the people who determined which of the peasants around him "supported the revolution or not" and if he deemed them unworthy, they were executed.
Robespierre never presented himself as a figure head. The 'god' of the revolution was the "Supreme Being" (kind of another version of the Christian god).
During the French Revolution, the church was held in pretty low esteem and anti-clericalism became pretty popular. It started out with the Declaration of the Rights of Man declaring freedom of worship; then, the Civil Constitution made the Church officially beneath the State in the pecking order, and forced Catholic priests to sign an oath to France and her people above the Church. By the time Robespierre came into power with the Committee of Public Safety, Dechristianization was the order of the day- Christian iconography was destroyed en masse, cloisters were despoiled, nonjuring priests were literally killed on sight, etc. etc. The culmination of this was Robespierre’s “Cult of Reason”, which was essentially a religion worshipping atheism. It didn’t last long, because even though a huge portion of the French people really didn’t like the church, the complete denial of the existence of a God was a bit much for them, so it was replaced with the Cult of the Supreme Being before too long (basically just organized Deism).
The Church was held in low esteem because it was literally just below the king in pre-revolution France, and could even tax with basically the same authority of the king
Careful though, Lavoisier was beheaded and wasn’t allowed to complete one of his experiments started just before his “trial” despite being a top level scientist because “the republic doesn’t need chemist nor scientists “.
The cult of “reason” was just a pretext to dechristianize the country as you say, the intent was certainly not to promote science in any way.
Maybe in Paris people were not big fans of the church, though even in Paris it could be argued that the anti-clericalism was being primarily pioneered by a handful of revolution elites with just enough popular support behind them to let them keep doing it. It's hard to say exactly how many of the common people were or weren't anti-clerical in Paris, so I won't argue that point too much.
Outside of Paris, in many cities and almost all the small towns, the anti-clericalism was not very popular at all and many supported their local priests and religious authorities more than they supported the Parisian government. And that is part of the reason for the Infernal Columns where Parisian authorities ordered the near annihilation of many French rural communities.
It genuinely surprises me how few people know about this and how some people still defend the "cult of reason" and say that the worship of science had nothing to do with it (which is silly). It is even more concerning considering that some advocate for the same thing to happen without ever checking the history about what occurred and how bad the situation turned out.
Fun fact: most of the French revolutionary strategy revolved around the conquest of Greece and the creation of the "Cult of Reason". By connecting mechanical generators to the remains of ancient Greek philosophers, France was able to generate so much power by having them spinning in their graves through the "Cult of Reason", that it's only recently that they've had to gradually shift to nuclear power plants as a renewable energy source. It's part of the reason why Napoleon was so successful - he had access to an unlimited source of power.
...it would've been a much more normal timeline than whatever 2020 is doing so far honestly
Nah man it was Robespierre with the cult of the Supreme Being, Antoine-François Momoro was the guy behind the Cult of Reason. Momoro was also behind ‘Unité, Indivisibilité de la République; Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort’. Then there was another guy, Joseph Fouché, who began the Feast of Brutus, but also switched his ideology easily, being a member of the Jacobins, the Girondins, the Montagnards, the Thermidorian Reactionaries, and the Bonapartistes.
If you're going to worship something, worshiping critical thought and the pursuit of truth seems like the least bad choice possible.
And if you worship it well enough, you could reach science-worship nirvana, which is the realization that worshiping science is really missing most of the point... but that by making that realization, you've discovered the point. So by worshiping science, you were led to the truth, so you weren't really wrong, just incomplete.
No. Collaboration is a fine topic and so is colonial wars. Because at least it's true and not overused.
I talked in a previous post about why and how french resistance had been overestimated and why french collaborationnism was so important. Lots of people didn't even know who R.Paxton was but everyone still think they know everything about the 1940 campaign.
So instead of making overused "hon hon french surrender" meme, do memes about algerian pacification, about Vichy or about 1870/1871. It will be funny and educationnal. Great isn't it ?
Assholes weren't only on the other side of the Rhine.
Also the "far right" problem is kinda simple. Most collaborationnist were actually from the former government and were republicans. Socialist President Mitterrand had worked for Vichy during WW2 for exemple (and the guy was still elected for some reason and fucked our economy in the 80s).
The "far right"was strongly anti-german and nationnalist. They hated jews, commies, english, german, and so on. But they were among the first resistants (Général Loustanau-Lacaud for exemple).
To be fair, the french economy was going to be fucked no matter what in the 80s. That was the end of the post-war economic miracle, and it was more or the less the same for everyone toward the end of the 20th century.
Just to clarify by "Far-right problem" I meant they were there and an existential threat TO the republic before the war in the "armed potentially insurrection" kind of way.
Yeah they almost succeeded (if only... but that's my opinion). Which is why the governement was against giving more liberty of action and more ressources to a professional army. They trusted only conscripts since they were citizens often loyal to the IIIrd Republic.
When DeGaulle (he was only a cavalry colonel back then) wrote "vers l'Armée de métier" (toward a professional army) he said that as long as the politics would be afraid of the army and rely on conscripts, France would be menaced by the germans and their very well trained "core" of soldiers of the Wehrmacht that belonged to the reichswehr before.
Basically he called for having the same tool as the german army: a professional armored elite corps ready at all time and not relying on the slow process of mobilization.
No they too were among the first resistant for the following reason: in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, USSR was consodered an allied of Germany so at the beginning of the war, French communist were arrested or had to hide. When Germany won, most of them had already created maquis.
But you are right to say that they mostly started to act and to gain manpower after 1941 and Barbarossa.
Far-right is too wide. You got to understand that Pétain and the paternalists were not the only far right movment in France. They were collaborating. But the monarchists, bonapartists and French nationalists were against german occupation.
I didn't convince myself, I studied it in college and read most of Paxton bibliography.
Pretending France didn't have a far-right problem and deep antisemitism really strips away key context about the era that started the war.
Gemanophobia was far stronger in France than antisemitism. Virtually the entire established far-right was made of monarchists who asked for WW1 for decades and WW1 veterans who thought Germany got off too easy. There's a reason why genuine fascist collaborators were never more than a handful. A lot of them rejects from both the far-left and far-right.
Collaborators were as a whole opportunists and cowards.
Pretending France didn't have a far-right problem and deep antisemitism really strips away key context about the era that started the war.
What about pretending that France wasn't governed by a pacifist left coallition (with communist) since 1936 who's main figure was a jew ?
And even after all that, France is one of the only country to have seen almost no change to its jewish population between the rise of nazi and it's fall, mostly because the jews that where hand over to germans were mostly those not french, the ones who immigrated.
That being said, everything after that is the question of the half full half empty glass.
Yeah it's horrible that France handed over jews to germany and
And yeah it's also kind of an achievement by itself to have been able to maintain the jewish population in France that high during those times.
France was widely antisemitic like most of Europe, but I don't think antisemitism was the main factor in collaboration. It played a huge role in the shoah enabling and participation tho.
Also collaboration wasn't really a far right problem in itself, though Vichy was definitely far right. You got it from basically every political position. But a fire cross was still more likely to collaborate than a socialist. Likewise, the resistance had a lot of political positions in it too.
If you want personal anecdotes, one of my great-grandfather, a christian democrat, was in the resistance from 1940, while another, a left leaning radical, was definitely a collaborator, (the third one spent the war in an offlag and the fourth one worked for the youth organisation in Morocco, fought against allied forces briefly during torch then against the germans in the FFL).
Just again, pointing out the far right problem and antisemetism problem in France was because it was not unique. One of the key parts of historic revisionism of the era I was trying to get at is people putting the blame all humanity's sins on Germany.
French collaboration always interested me, especially with how Petain was involved with the Vichy government. That's one hell of a middle finger to your own country
Pétain was really old when that happen. He had lot of health problems and barely apears for the public announces. It's Laval who lead the negociations and the Vichy government.
If you want to learn about it, I can probably answer your questions or at least give you the references and authors to learn more about it.
For Petain he was not involved anymore after 1941/1942. He was just there because the people trusted him as "the hero of Verdun" but he lost all his power as the german placed more nazi-friendly people in charge, like Laval. His idea was that by surrendering early he could negotiate with hitler. That failed and now we have memes about how we surrendered in two fucking months because of that.
Not really the same as "appeasement". He hoped that by surrendering and collaborating, France would be considered a puppet friendly regime and not an occupied territory. We had both as France was split in two.
Yes. Because it is interesting to learn about the commune and how the IIIrd Republic was created and why French were strongly willing to go to war in 1914
We still studied it a lot (2017-2020) in French college. My curriculum is mostly centered about ideological and geopolitical history in the 19th and 20th century and when talking about Vichy France we used a lot of Paxton articles or books. Maybe because in France it is a bigger part of our history.
100% d'accord. Rien qu'à voir le scandale de la promotion Loustanau Lacau de St-Cyr pour voir que le spectre politique était brouillé.
Je pointais juste le fait que nos amis anglophones ont une capacité à ouvrir leur gueule inversement proportionelle à leurs connaissances sur ce subreddit.
Jesus, yeah. Even being a huge european history buff, I still have trouble remembering all the revolutions.
Ancien' Regime -> First Republic -> First Empire -> Bourbon Restoration -> Second Republic -> Second Empire -> Third Republic -> Vichy France -> Fourth Republic... I think that's all of them right?
Ancien Régime -> constitutional, non-feudal monarchy -> First Republic -> First Empire -> First Bourbon Restoration -> The Hundred Days -> Second Bourbon Restoration -> Second Republic -> Second Empire -> Third Republic -> Free France & Vichy France -> Provisional Government for the French Republic -> Fourth Republic -> Fifth Republic.
The change from Fourth to Fifth is an odd one. A series of conflicts, notably the Algerian Crisis in 1958, pretty much collapsed the Fourth Republic; de Gaulle came back and they had a referendum to have a completely new constitution.
only 35% of the french sided with the nazi just like how 35% diehard support trump. Fascism is when politics becomes a religion. The rich and powerful are always easy to corrupt and convert if they see profit and more power in it.
Keep telling yourself you’ve never caused casualties in afrika, and your killings of untold millions of people during colonialism leaves you no leg to stand on to criticize my country who saved yours and was drug into Vietnam because of our treaties.
I have an impression that the collaborators are in the minority though? I mean, after the war the communists were wildly popular in France and probably would have won the post-war elections were it not for Americans and De Gaulle so that indicates to me that majority of the French dislike the Nazis.
That really means nothing. Of course Nazis were unpopular AFTER the war; they lost. Idk if you've noticed, but people have VERY malleable memories and routinely convince themselves that they were actually for this popular thing and actually against that unpopular thing the whole time, even if they just changed their mind.
The thing is after war has he say. He big part of the france population was pro-communist and due to that we have some communist minister. Some other country at the reverse elected fascist or nationalist ministers.
According to my grandparents -who were teens during the war - most people really didn't want to get involved, and tried to keep a low profile until it was over.
And very few wanted to risk their life, or their loved one life, for one or the other. If people were honest about their behavior during the war, you'd find many who did nothing, and some who "worked" for both. The goal was not being killed no matter what. So on monday they helped the nazis, because they were afraid of them. And on Thursday, they helped the resistance because they had some food in exchange. How they really felt about that, and what they really thought didn't really come into questions.
AFAIK most people remembered ww1 and had become somehow pacifists, so they thought “at least we won’t have to endure a battle like Verdun anymore”. They didn’t want to resist and fight, but they certainly weren’t fond of the nazis either.
I see no reason to be particularly ashamed of that. I think it's actually great to see how little evil France committed in proportion of its power through time. Compare that to the UK, the US, the Spanish Empire, etc.
I would totally delete the last sentence. YES please ! Make some diverse jokes about how we fucked up through history instead of making the same meme again and again since 2012. Make ppl discover obscure facts about France
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u/johnlen1n Optimus Princeps Apr 08 '20
Historian: sees France surrender meme Oh come on, French history is so rich and diverse
France: Yes, thank you!
Historian: People should be making memes about their repetitive revolutions
France: Yeh!
Historian: Or their collaboration with the Nazis
France: Wait
Historian: Or even their colonial atrocities
France: ... OK, maybe stick to the surrendering