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In France, this event is well known and taught in class (at least it was in the 80's). As I remember it now, this was taught as a bittersweet moment in our his
by srge 7y ago
In France, this event is well known and taught in class (at least it was in the 80's).
As I remember it now, this was taught as a bittersweet moment in our history. We united, we were brave and fought a stronger army but still we were defeated and our chief was captured and killed by the enemy.
As a result we were colonized and we lost almost all our Celtic culture (Celtic culture remains present notably in Bretagne — Britain). But we were "civilized" by the Romans. I think this was taught as being a tough but positive thing.
Today I find it interesting to think about how "civilization" spreading if often a gruesome process and how it's seen centuries, if not (in this case), milleniums later.
- Athas 7y ago> As I remember it now, this was taught as a bittersweet moment in our history. We united, we were brave and fought a stronger army but still we were defeated and our chief was captured and killed by the enemy. Isn't modern France mostly a descendant of the Frankish kingdoms, where the Franks are quite different than the Gauls and in any case arrived in the area far later than the Battle of Alesia?
- m_t 7y agoOf course, but a nation identity is built on more than just facts.
- chimeracoder 7y ago> Of course, but a nation identity is built on more than just facts. In fact, a state's national identity is based on almost anything but facts.
- smacktoward 7y agoYes, but while in political terms the Gauls, Romans and Franks were distinct entities, in cultural terms the region was more of a melting pot. The Roman conquest of Gaul ended up blending their two cultures into a new, distinctive "Gallo-Roman" culture (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-Roman_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-Roman_culture), for instance, and then when the Franks came along their culture got blended in as well. So modern French identity has strains in it running back to all three sources.
- seszett 7y agoThe Frankish kings were a small minority of rulers and did not actually leave much Germanic influence. The modern French culture is a direct descendant of Gallo-Roman culture, which is basically Roman culture with a little Gaulish influence.
- arethuza 7y ago"To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
- PeterCorless 7y agoTacitus.
- quotemstr 7y agoWho remains one of the world's great historians. Sometimes we read old books because we want to understand how these books influenced the course of thought. But sometimes, old books are just genuinely good in their own right and would be just as good if published today: Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Aeschylus, and a bunch of other authors fit this latter mold. I wish more people read them.
- rurban 7y agoBut in this case I preferred Caesars book about the battle. Caesar had a very clear and engineer-like writing style, compared to Tacitus.
- boudewijnrempt 7y agoNo. You are not a descendent of "celts" who lived what is now "France". Your culture wasn't lost. Any Celtic culture that might have been present in France in pre-Roman times has nothing to do with you or your ancestry. It was not "your" culture. The Celtic culture in Brittany is not something that survived from pre-Roman times, it's a later re-import from the British isles. Stop making up silly, false, fake identities.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThat's not really how conquest works though. At least some of those original Celts reproduced with the Romans, and thus some genetic heritage continued.
- chimeracoder 7y ago> That's not really how conquest works though. At least some of those original Celts reproduced with the Romans, and thus some genetic heritage continued. That's not really how nations or ethnic groups work, though. The fact that some "genetic heritage" from the Celts may be found today doesn't actually mean that Celtic culture has anything to do with the modern nation-state of France.
- alexhutcheson 7y ago> Stop making up silly, false, fake identities. I think this is an unnecessarily negative framing. All national and regional identities are mostly socially constructed "imagined communities"[1]. For example, most Americans aren't descended from colonial settlers, but they still identify with the colonists when they read about or discuss the Revolutionary War. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community
- adger 7y agoI would go further than say it is an unnecessarily negative framing, this idea always seemed pretentious to me, nowadays it seems supressive. Are they really imagined? Or is this idea mostly a "social contruct" that is not really accepted as reality outside of a few "intellectuals". They seem to be describing their delusions of grandeur. Is it not them that have the problem?
- agumonkey 7y agoI'm a bit dubious about the state of gaul civilization. History books weren't super solid and recent archeology uncovered new commercial routes and production sites (wine jars). The Roman Empire was great, no question, but I'm not sure if other countries were so far behind.
- hrktb 7y agoIt’s always funny how the Franks are seens as “us”, when looking throught history France has been washed by waves of invasions that all left deep cultural mixes. Going to Normandy nowadays and looking at general public exposition it’s make pretty clear their ancestry is mostly from the Vikings and Nords. In the east it’s also clear that their frenchness is a fluctuating and partial attribute. All around the country, each region have a very clear multi-cultural past. And Paris and its periphery is a huge Petri dish of people coming from around the world with a significant number of families that have no ancestors that were in France more than four or five generation ago. Books still present Franks as french people’s ancestors, but I wonder how teacher make it match with the reality when they teach their students.
- adger 7y agoIt is almost as if you have an agenda of trying to suppress the identities of european people for the sake of your political delusions. You are trying to legimtise the current invasion of France. Of course French identity does not match non-french people.
- hrktb 7y agoNot sure to get what you are pointing at by “invasion”, but I was talking about french residents with french nationality. PS: for additional context, vikings were around the 9th century. I am not pointing at just current trends.
- adger 7y agoNormandy is a small region in the north east of France. Brittany is a small region in the north west of France. Some Vikings were exiled from what was Wessex, East Anglia etc., but became England. This is why posh people in England sometimes call their dog "Rollo", Rollo was the Viking leader that the Normans descended from. The people that went on to invade England. None of this invalidates the idea of France or England or French or English. Ps. You were pointing to current trends, hence pointing toward Paris and peripheries or "four or five generations ago"
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- PeterCorless 7y agoReminder: the Franks were Germanic invaders who kicked the Romano-Gaulish in the teeth. This is like Englishmen mourning King Arthur and his Romano-British followers, ignoring that their ancestors were probably more the Hengests and Horsas of the story.
- adger 7y agoBut...Is it not more like Englishmen celebrating Alfred the Great? You know, the Anglo-Saxon leader. A Germanic peoples (Alfred's army was also made up of Britons)
- PeterCorless 7y agoAlfred would not be the correct analogy to Gaul/Rome. The Gauls were "Celtic" like Arthur's Britons. They were both facing invasions. Alfred's French analogy would be Charles the Simple, who had to fight off the Norse invaders and made a treaty to give them Normandy. Though, it has to be said, Charles the Simple had a much better time of it.
- senderista 7y agoIsn't Breton culture really rooted in ancient Cornish culture, not the historical continental Celtic culture?
- ceejayoz 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations > The six territories widely considered Celtic nations are Brittany (Breizh), Cornwall (Kernow), Wales (Cymru), Scotland (Alba), Ireland (Éire) and the Isle of Man (Mannin or Ellan Vannin).
- abrowne 7y agoVery roughly, Britons were the main population in southern Great Britain (roughly England, Wales and Scotland to the Firth of Forth), but were "squeezed" during the Anglo-Saxon settlement into more isolated pockets — Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall — and some crossed over to Brittany. How much of of the "squeeze" was population replacement as opposed to languistic and cultural change is up for debate.
- cognaitiv 7y agoThis was taught in Latin class in the US as well, although my mental image of the spikes was very different from the photo. I thought it would be on more of a downward slope.