{"id":2922,"date":"2011-03-16T15:40:56","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T20:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=2922"},"modified":"2011-05-08T15:26:10","modified_gmt":"2011-05-08T20:26:10","slug":"the-french-national-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2011\/03\/16\/the-french-national-character\/","title":{"rendered":"The French National Character"},"content":{"rendered":"

What this is about, including full list.<\/a><\/p>\n

In spite of all that France has given the world, few nations are as heartily disliked in the English speaking world. French has become synonymous with snobbish, pretentious, rude and cowardly. This is a twentieth century opinion of course; in the 19th century France was full of overly emotional romantics who would start a war at the drop of of a hat.<\/p>\n

Though much of America insists on seeing France as “cheese eating surrender monkeys”, its quick collapse in the face of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in 1940 shouldn’t blind us to the immense and catastrophic sacrifices of French youth in World War I, not to mention the feats of French arms and culture in the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods and the fun of the Versailles court.<\/p>\n

Even the negative stereotypes about the French have the veneer of civilization – that the French look down on tourists and foreigners because they are convinced of their own superiority. There is an abiding fear among non-French people that the Parisians may be onto something, that French food and literature and art and love are in fact the pinnacle of Latin evolution. Even Napoleon is hailed as a cultural giant instead of the brutish Philistine he probably was most of the time.<\/p>\n

Strategy games have generally reflected this internalized concept of the French as being more civilized than their compatriots. Where Germany (as we will see later) has a hard time escaping its World War 2 legacy, strategy games throw aside the persistent popular opinion of France as weak kneed cowards in order to embrace the idea that maybe all those notions about wine and cheese and the Louvre and Cocteau and Monet and Moliere making a France worthy of admiration have something to them.<\/p>\n

Like most types of soft power, culture is hard to model or make inherently interesting. Victoria 2<\/em> has the culture research tree and France (with a couple of other continental powers) starts with Romanticism researched while Britain doesn’t. Culture helps you gain prestige, but it’s hard to make it as sexy or useful as another National Focus slot or breech loading rifles.<\/p>\n

Civilization has culture, of course, and it is turned into a land grab mechanic, and on the face of it only Civ 4’s Louis the XIV (who has the creative trait) and Civ 5’s French power of “Ancien Regime” seem to embrace the idea of the French as a cultured people. But in Civ 4, the salon unique building gives the city a free artist. The French wonders in both games (especially the Eiffel Tower) have major cultural bonuses. There is no escaping the idea that if any nation cared about art and music and haute couture, it is France.<\/p>\n

But being cultured is more than being artistic. It’s a framework that avoids violence and uses soft power to seduce or delay conflict. With France, this is most evident in games that focus on the Age of Exploration, a period when France was continually in conflict with its European neighbors over scraps of land in both Europe and overseas. If any nation is going to get along with the natives they encounter, then it will be the French. Because they are civilized.<\/p>\n

You see this in Sid Meier’s Colonization<\/em>, of course. Relations with natives will degrade regularly in that game as you expand and start grabbing land, but this tension grows more slowly for the French. In the under-appreciated Conquest of the New World<\/em>, France starts with a 30 point bonus to its relations with natives – a significant boost in a game where random raids can slow down exploration and expansion. The unspoken assumption is that the French weren’t really conquerors of the New World. Drawing on the alliance with the Huron, the coureurs des bois and the French crown’s reluctance to promote settlement colonies like their English rivals, France becomes a power that can slowly grow in power because they are too cultured to worry about brutalizing whatever “savages” show up.<\/p>\n

Of course, French colonial history in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia was far from “live and let live”, but the overwhelming success of Britain and Spain in the rush for overseas territories makes it easy to imagine France saying “Well, we didn’t want that anyway. We have Paris.”<\/p>\n

There are always exceptions. The Franks in Age of Kings<\/em> get stronger cavalry, as do the French in Rise of Nations<\/em> (they also get a very civilized bonus – supply wagons that heal.) In Civ 5, even, the French get two unique gunpowder units – the musketeer has been there since Civ 3 and is likely to stick around in future versions; nothing like the power of a good book.<\/p>\n

But the problem of the power of French culture remains. How do you convey a national character that is about the power of ideas and art in a genre that has always preferred science and conquest? It’s not just the French – Greek culture is reduced to science bonuses, Roman culture is ignored in favor of legions, American and English cultural imperialism is never modeled…national personalities that center on the less tangible or easily militarized attributes never really come into focus well. We end up with nice guy mini-Champlains and the Eiffel Tower or Versailles or the Louvre underscoring how amazing France can be.<\/p>\n

It may be hard to appreciate, but it’s better than being considered the pushovers of 1940. (Screenshots to follow)<\/p>\n

Next up, the great power of central Europe, Germany<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What this is about, including full list. In spite of all that France has given the world, few nations are as heartily disliked in the English speaking world. French has become synonymous with snobbish, pretentious, rude and cowardly. This is a twentieth century opinion of course; in the 19th century France was full of overly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[138],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-L8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2922"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3118,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922\/revisions\/3118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}