What if England nver became on empire?

Re: What if England nver became on empire?


Quite....if the French had taken the USA, for instance, there would be no football or cricket over there to speak of, their leader would be almost aristocratic, thinking that he was right all the time and treating the rest of the world with contempt, their government would be filled with people who were not averse to a bit of corruption and self interest..............yes, thank god it was the Brits who got there first, eh?

The french Empire may have never fell.... North America would have been entirely French, not just Quebec...

Re: What if England nver became on empire?



BTW the Ancient Greeks weren't a state and, for much of its history, neither was Germany.

The French conquering the world isn't a scary thought. It's quite a funny thought.

They lost the Gallic Wars against Rome.
They just barely won the Hundred Years' War because of Joan of Arc.
They lost the Italian Wars.
They lost the wars of religion against the Huguenots.
They didn't fight in the Thirty Years' War, but were still invaded...
They didn't win or lose the Dutch War.
They really lost the War of the Augsburg League.
They lost the War of the Spanish Succession.
They didn't really fight much in the American Revolution...
They won the French Revolution... (Duh...)
They won a few of the Napoleonic Wars, but lost in the end.
They lost the Franco-Prussian War.
They were on there way to losing in World War I, but were saved.
They lost World War II.
They lost the war in Indochina.
They lost the Algerian Rebellion.

So the only war that the French alone completely won, without a doubt, is the French Revolution... And they were fighting themselves, so that's a given...

hahah its so true...

is it English empire or the British empire? think about it....

The Franks are a Germanic people. The First Holy Roman Empire was formed by Charlemagne the Great, the first Emperor of Europe.

Might we all be speaking Spanish or Portuguese?

This refers to the Gauls, not the Franks, it is a stretch to call them French, to put it charitably.



While Jeanne la Pucelle inspirited the French people and many of the soldiers to a new effort, Dunois and Bureau's excellent artillery were the deciding factors.



France, as was the case with Austria, frequently fought in Italy. You've said nothing here--do you mean Charlemagne in the eighth century? He won. Do you mean de Coucy in the fourteenth century? He won. Do you mean François Iere in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries? Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost--in the end he lost. Do you mean the Wars of the French Revolution, when Napoleon lead the army sent by the Directory? He definitely won. Suvarov defeated the French in Italy, and then marched into Switzerland, and retreated without consolidating the conquest--Italy remained a French appendage until 1814. Do you mean the invasion of Napoleon III in 1859? He definitely won.



This is grossly misleading--out and out war was not fought, per se--the wars of religion in France ended when Henri de Navarre, a Protestant, accepted converstion to Catholicism to get the throne, saying "Paris is worth a mass."--and issued the Editct of Nantes, granting toleration.



This is both misleading, and grossly in error. France was invaded in that time period by the Spanish, in the course of a war in the low countries which had nothing to do with the Thirty years war. When the great French soldier, Condé, defeated the Spanish at Rocroi in 1643, it both ended the war in favor of the French (subsequent campaigning was just jockeying for position during negotiations), and ended the reputation of Spanish invincibility. Richelieu decided to ignore religion in the Thirty Years War, and to support Protestant Sweden against the threat of growing hegemony by a triumphant Catholic Austria--and thereby setting a pattern for the "balance of power" struggles in Europe for two centuries. Not only were the French never invaded by Imperial forces, the great Turenne gained his spurs and his reputation in Germany during this war, and the French frequently operated in conjunction with Swedish armies.



This is another misleading statement on the order of the one about Italy. The French fought in the low countries many times. In the end, in the Wars of the Revolution, they overran Holland, and Dutch troops fought in French armies for nearly two decades. Napoleon imposed a monarchy on the Dutch.



This war, usually known in the English-speaking world as the Nine Years War (and in North America, where they definitely won, as King William's War) is part and parcel of the comment above. It is true that Louis XIV did not succeed in conquering Holland in this war--that would have to await the French Revolution.



This is another misleading statement. The purpose of the coalition which William III was forming at the beginning the war--before his death, and which was completed and sustained by John Chruchill, the Earl of Marlborough and to become first Duke of Marlborough--was, as in the case of the Nine Years war, to prevent the spread of French hegemony. In that particular case, to prevent a Bourbon from mounting the Spanish throne. Because of the military brilliance of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, the French lost nearly all the major battles, and all of the campaigns--and won the war, because at the end of the war, a Bourbon sat securely on the Spanish throne, where the Bourbons would remain until deposed by Napoleon in 1808.



This is another misleading statement. While it is true that they did not campaign to any significant extent in North America, the presence of a French fleet operating in Long Island sound, and French forces at Newport, "fixed" Clinton in place at New York, and allowed the brilliant and rapid march which put Washington and Rochambeau in the Virginia penninsula, trapping Cornwallis. When de Grasse appeared with a fleet from the West Indies, and won the battle of the Capes (tactically a draw, the Royal Navy withdrew, making it a French strategic victory, and sealing the fate of Cornwallis and his army, and therefore assuring the American victory in the war), and then returned to West Indies, the English made a deliberate decision that they were more interested in keeping their West Indian possessions, than continuing a dubious struggle in North America. Combined with Suffren's brilliant naval campaign in the Indian Ocean, the Franco-Spanish effort against the Royal Navy was enough to make the English abandon (foolishly, one might assert) North America in favor of keeping the Sugar Islands and India. The West Indian planters were a powerful force in Parliament. I find this one of the most ironic of your misleading statements, given that the French bankrupted themselves in this war, directly leading to the 1788 crisis which would precipitate the revolution.

In a wide gap between the War of the Spanish Succession and the American Revolution, you have left out the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War. In the War of the Austrian Succession, they quickly invaded Bohemia in a brilliant campaign, and took Prague with a coup de main assault at night. Surrounded in wintertime, the French marched out--which could be considered a defeat, although their march through the Czech countryside in a bitter winter, marching at night so that the entire army could fight as a rearguard in daytime if necessary, is one of the most brilliant fighting retreats on record--and fighting retreats are the most difficult of military operations. They invaded Italy in an operation which was a classic of separate and parallel columns (nine of them!) operating on separate axes, and successfully knocked the Piedmontese out of the war, driving the Austrians back decisively, and removing the Italian theater from the war. This operation was one of those crucial to the military revolution the French would work in Europe after the Revolution and during the First Empire. George II and the "Pragmatic Army" won one on the river Main, because of French foolishness, but Maurice de Saxe (Moritz von Saxe, bastard son of Augustus the Strong of Saxony) handed the Pragmatic Army it's collective ass in the low countries, and especially at Fontenoy, at which battle his tactical dispositions also presaged the brilliance of French doctrine in the Wars of the Revolution and the First Empire. Which leads us to . . .



And . . .



Because of French experience in the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, Louis XVI's Minister of War, St. Germaine, and Marshall de Broglie developed a new military document which was published and imposed on all French officers--when Napoleon was a student at Brienne and l'École militaire in Paris, it was that system in which he was instructed. The innovations of de Saxe became the new ordre mixte tactical doctrine, what we would call combined arms, which had only ever been seen before as practiced by the Swedes under Gustav Adolf, and promptly forgotten after the Thirty Years War; the brilliant invasion of Italy in the War of the Austrian Succession lead to the creation of a hierarchical unit structure--battalion, regiment, brigade, division, corps, army--with coherent staff units at all levels from brigade up, and which allowed both tactical and strategic exploitation of divergent or convergent operational axes. The revolution in the physical construction of artillery pieces and in the exploitation of artillery, especially in the use of "grand batteries" was also a crucial innovation. At the end of the Wars of the Revolution, when Napoleon managed a coup (despite his own political ineptitude) and made himself First Consul, France had overrun and still held Italy north of Rome, had overrun Switzerland, had overrun Germany to the Elbe, had overrun the low Countries to beyond the Rhine and still held that territory. This despite a coalition of England, Austria, Prussia/Brunswick and Russian aligned against them.

It was Napoleon's egocentric and personal ambition which ruined them. He was, by the way, a Corsican descended from a Genoese family, and not French. Even as late as March, 1814, the Allies were willing to give him France to its "natural" frontiers, which were seen as being the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Rhine--which would have left them in possession of a wide swath of wesern Germany, all of what are now Luxembourg and Belgium, and the southern half of Holland. It is certainly not the fault of the French that the idiot Napoleon decided to fight on, attempting to keep what he had already lost.

Napoleon lost because of the Spanish adventure. French and French-allied casualties (German, Dutch, Italian and Polish) were over a half million--hundreds of millions of francs were squandered in Spain. That France supported successful warfare against most of Europe from 1792 to 1814 is a tribute, not a smear.



You ignore the brilliant performace of the French in the Russo-Turkish War of 1853 (usually referred to as the Crimean War), you ignore their successful conquest of Algeria, and you ignore the bloody but successful campaign in Italy in 1859--after Solferino and Magenta, Austrian power had had its back broken, and this lead directly to the successful independence and unification movement of Cavour and Garibaldi. Yes, they lost the 1870 War--but as it got rid of Louis Bonapart, the soi-disant Napoleon III, and re-established the Republic, one could say that was a good thing.



That is a dubious statement, very misleading and ignores volumes of history, which i won't attempt here. Suffice it to say that they indeed did not lose.



The corrupt and ineffective crypto-fascist pre-war government lost--the "Free French" did not.



So did the United States.



This is also misleading. Granting independence to Algeria was a political decision by de Gaulle, and a wise one at that.



Horsie poop. The revolution was saved against invasion attempts by the Austrians, the Prusso-Brunswickers and the English. Having learned and profited from the lessons of the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, the French worked a sea-change in military doctrine. Under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the French had invented modern military engineering. Under Louis XIV, the French invented modern military medicine (which Napoleon ignored, to the incalculable cost of the French nation). Beginning with Bureau in the Hundred Years War, the French dominated the field of artillery and bombardment in Europe, until the Germans finally figured out how best to use the excellent artillery which Krupp was producing. Most brilliant of all was the three-part revolution worked in military doctrine by St. Germain and de Broglie, and perfected and exploited in the Wars of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. They re-invented combined arms, and exploited it tactically on a vast scale. The devised and perfected a method of fighting on separate operational axes at both the tactical and strategic levels. They created the modern military staff hierarchy.

This post of yours was another typical bash-the-surrender-monkeys slur, and is tripe.

take that by Dog.....

heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee . . .


I love doin' that . . . we will know how obsessive the member is in hating the French if he/she comes back to attempt to sustain the point.

Yup . but they haven't eh . Lets try again .

There Is And There Never Has Been An English Empire !!!

Do ya think it will sink in ?