So after Napoleon I's fall, this is moer or less what happened to France:

So we are in a disaster.

Explains things.

You will never live in a France ruled by the benevolent Bonapartes, in a world without the "german" (prussian) huns threatening all that is fair and good in Europe.

>meme replies
Kings draw on other kings that loom large in history, as do great men in general. You recall the old yarn about Caesar weeping before the statue of Alexander? Even Wellington acknowledged Napoleon's greatness as a general - that is a completely facile argument.

>the rest of this post
He was a Frank, from Aachen, making him functionally Germanic. Just because the Germans were upset about politics doesn't change a person's ethnicity. If we discard Einhard's account, we have only the Reichsannalen which also would suggest he was from the modern Alsace region - hardly anything else by the standards of that time. Get fucked.

It should be worth noting several things about Charlemagne. He never properly handled the issue of investiture with the Church, which would become a massive issue in the 11th century. The Frankish custom of land-division was also a colossal disaster, but its roots can be traced from the Salian Franks to the Alsatians and then the rest of greater Germany, reinforcing my first point.

Eh, that's what the French education system might induce in their lessons, and I've been a first-hand witness to those, but the true decay of the Second Empire is slightly more iffy.

In its dying days, the Second Empire was to be overshadowed by the Third Republic because the Franco-Prussian had tarnished one of the main ideals of the Empire: that of liberalism and basically the idea of a state that wouldn't intervene everywhere. Even the army under the Second Empire reflected that by being a more professional army than really being an army of conscription.

With the rebirth though of French Revolution-style "people's army" (c.f. that fucker Victor Hugo rallying the people of France under disorganized shambles of an army), it pretty much meant that the Republican style of ruling (people backing them, etc...) prevailed over the Empire's way of ruling (lax control, and an army that didn't involve civilians too heavily). So I wouldn't really say that the Third Republic overthrew the Second Empire. It more should be conceived as if the war gave way to a contest between each's system, and that the Third Republic earned support by defending France more aptly in the end.

If anything, the Franco-Prussian was some powerkeg to the various ideals which had had to hibernate throughout the Second Empire, and the Franco-Prussian was a contest between them all. The Commune earned backing by Parisians for withholding Paris from the Prussians, but were ruthlessly slaughtered by republicans later (no joke, but "sweet, lovable" republicans executed 20,000 rioters without trial). The monarchists almost crowned their own pretender too, and were on their way to assembling an army, but were too late to then and by then, the Third Republic had risen up as the representants for France that Prussia would negotiate with.

The Franco-Prussian really was a shit-show for France.

>He was a Frank, from Aachen
Nah. His suspected birth place is probably Liège in Francophone Belgium. Aachen was the capital after Charlemagne moved it East from its original and traditional capital... Paris!

>making him functionally Germanic
Not functionally, he was Germanic period. The mistake you're making is based on a flaw of the English language: it does not separate between Germanic (the ethnicity/ancient tribes) and the Germans (citizens of the modern nation of Germany). The Lombards were Germanic Italians for example, and only a fool would call them Germans.

Compare the much more solid argument the French use: until the 11th century, the kings of "France" all used the same title as Charlemagne: Rex Francorum, or King of the Franks. Only under Philippe Auguste was that title changed to Rex Franciae, or King of France. Unless you want to argue that the Franks disappeared overnight like they do in CK2, there's a direct unbroken line from Franks to French. And in certain languages (including German itself!) that distinction never truly appeared.

By maintaining that Charlemagne was German you're arguing against both French and German histiography. Both agreed that he was effectively French.

>Charlemange
Saxon detected

Einhard lists his place of birth as Aachen, along with another contemporaneous source - historians are divided on the issue between there and Liège as you mention, but why not err on the side of the more immediate sources? You're also completely ignoring that the region we know as the Low Countries, &c had completely different ethnography. Calling it Francophone Belgium when we are talking about the tail-end of the Gallo-Roman period seems completely inappropriate for reasons I should think are patent.

>He was Germanic period.
Which is my point. If you have a region ruled by Germanic peoples, it's leadership is German. The key word in your rebut is "effectively" - are you seriously telling me that scholars have completely removed the Franks from their German origins completely? Because they haven't - this argument is in danger of becoming endless pedantry. The character and custom of the Carolingian emergence was Germanic, its leadership rooted in practices that were carried from further east. I have never seen an argument that this was not so, from the writings of Fichtenau and Bloch to Edward James.

To be fair Louis XVIII wasn't too unpopular after the initial purge of certain Bonapartistes, since Louis XVIII worked within the new style of monarchy that the French expected, it was Charles X who fucked it up. Charles X was ultra-royalist and he dialed back almost all the reforms that Louis XVIII & Napoleon & post-1789 Louis XVI had implemented, pissing off everyone.

>tfw living in a nightmare
oh well.
it will all be over soon

Don't spill my blood please.

>Which is my point. If you have a region ruled by Germanic peoples, it's leadership is German. The key word in your rebut is "effectively" - are you seriously telling me that scholars have completely removed the Franks from their German origins completely?
>Still equivocating German and Germanic
Germanic =/= German and this was never the case. Even the modern day Netherlands for example is Germanic in culture and language, but it's in no way German. Nobody questions the Franks being Germanic, what's questioned is if we can call them German.

This, if this thread survives till I get back home I can expand on this.
Charte of 1814 is surprisingly liberal.

From the records I've seen, there is only a minor customary cleavage between the Franks and the rest of the population of what would be Germany, but even this has variations between tribes and other groups though the fundamental character of the culture remains similar enough for them to be related. At this juncture (that is, at the time of Charlemagne's birth) there hasn't been a sufficient departure (and the geographic region of his birth was not meaningfully different from the rest of "Germany" at the time), and James' examinations of pre-Frankish/post-Frankish migration grave sites strongly suggested there wasn't a meaningful cultural break until Charlemagne was well into adulthood, and even then only in the adoption of Latin as the du jour state language and the late adoption of Christianity. I can't equate things if they aren't functionally different at the time discussed. While there is certainly a distinction between Germanic and German from the medieval period onward, again, in the immediate post-Gallo-Roman period I would say the evidence suggests there is no conflation, as there is not yet enough difference for that sort of distinction to exist.

Why was Napoleon 3 so bad?

Who says he was?

You're on a history board.

We don't greet shitposts on here.

He is -remembered- as bad because Victor Hugo hated him. In the same way that Henry V is considered a hero and Richard II a villain because Shakespeare wrote about them. In reality Richard II was okay and Henry V a war criminal who shat himself to death before achieving anything of worth.

Historically, just like today, writers have their agendas.

Why are the Germans such a failure of people?

Did Napoleon ever regret invading Spain?

>Napoleon said of the conflict, "It was [the Spanish war] that overthrew me. All my disasters can be traced back to this fatal knot".[203]
Seems so

Don't start to hate please.

Treaty of Troyes?