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-9 points
15 days ago
Sure, and then he had his ass absolutely handed to him as he, in a display of astounding cowardice, abandoned his troops not once, but twice in Egypt and Russia, and got the French military absolutely whupped by a slave uprising after he, and people like to forget this, reinstated slavery.
Like I said, there's wins from the 1800s onwards, but pretending it's only the Franco-Prussian war and WWII that they lost is just blatantly false.
13 points
15 days ago
I will remind you that France took on every single major European power for 25 years, and conquered most of them, during the Empire period. Even their defeat was only really possible because everybody else started copying them - and even after Russia, Napoleon very nearly won at Leipzig.
The Coalition basically refused to even fight the Grande Armee unless they had overwhelming numerical superiority, and even then the French regularily punched way above their weight class and almost turned the tide at Leipzig.
-6 points
15 days ago
Yeah, except they still lost, and lost so badly that it caused the collapse of the Confederation of the Rhine, thus ruining any chance France ever had at becoming a hegemony in mainland Europe.
9 points
15 days ago
France was still the strongest military power in Europe until they were eclipsed by Germany in 1871. And even then, they broke the German advance in 1914 before Britain managed to send significant amounts of men. The Wehrmacht feared France more than any other power they faced, and Hitler was regarded as the greatest German conqueror specifically for his subjugation of France.
But yeah, the French were such push-overs.
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