Radio War Nerd EP #180 — Annibale's The Hundred Years War, Part IV: France Victorious

Annibale or you guys - are there books/authors you recommend for further reading on political history of the Middle Ages? Stuff to stay away from?

This was very good. I particularly like the discussion of the rise of the French Nation state at the end. The one hundred years war clearly had a monumental effect on France though what those effects were, might be difficult to quantify. Druon mentioned that France under Philip IV was a centralised state, though maybe one that depended on the personal power and charisma of the monarch to function and once that monarch was gone the power reverted to the mean. The French state stamping its iron boot on regional differences (as compared to the later Italian state) might be seen as a central response to how strong those regional differences were and perhaps still are. De Gaulles comment about the difficulties of ruling a country with 300 types of cheese comes to mind. In his book, The Discovery of France, the author, Graham Robb makes a case that Regional France is a very different place from the French state. He argues that, in the past, though you might have spent a lifetime studying French, once you travelled a mile outside Paris, few people would have understood a word you said. France had hundreds of languages ranging from languages like Alsatian and Basque to weird languages that evolved in mountain valleys like a whistling language and a shouting language which evolved to allow news to be conveyed accross long distances. These very different communities grew to regard their neighbours with great distrust and little mini-wars between isolated communities were not uncommon and French xenophobia stems in part from this. His depiction of the origins of the Tour de France is very interesting. He further argues that the French only really became French with the advent of the bicycle (and I guess the railway) which allowed people to discover France for themselves and to make it practical to learn standard French. Annibale's depiction of one of Jean Darc's earlier trials where she jokes about one of her accuser's poor command of the French language shows that people were waking up to being French though I suspect this was the start of a long process rather a sudden conversion. I've grown to view France as a place where a cold, logical state rules a people who are not. You can view Dien Bien Phu this way as a strategic calculation by the French colonial government who acted on the result and withrdew from the North while French soldiers, embedded with the non-Vietnamese tribes were still fighting ten years later.

Naturally Shakespeare wrote for patronage. If we Anglophones know of the wars of the roses almost exclusively through Shakespeare’s history plays, it is because it just happened that Shakespeare was a poetic genius. Anyway, I am going to try to read Commines now for a different perspective.

I always had the passing knowledge of the Hundred Years War that was prevalent in the Anglosphere, but this has been great. I have played a bit of the game 'Europa Universalis IV' and now all the 'events' in the game that get triggered around this conflict make some sense. (Which means, the developers at Paradox Interactive really deserve a lot of credit for their attention to detail)

The Spider King. I had no idea he had refurbished the French army. I am glad Annibale said something about the cathedral. In the nineteenth century they became symbols of unalienated labor, even of Socialism, of art that served a public purpose at least, for all sectors of society. Today many people who ought to know better cynically dismiss this as mere “Romanticism”, as if that explained anything.

Lacan? Next RWN guest Zizek

I think drugs vs therapy discussions are largely pointless, whatever seems to work for people, though the overprescription of SSRI's and shit is certainly an environmental hazard, when that stuff ends up in the watercourses. For me psycho dynamic therapy was certainly much more helpful than the crazy psychiatrist who gave me all sorts of weird shit; I was like a walking laboratory for the guy. Didn't do me much good. I know people say there's actually very little clinical clinical evidence that psychopharmacological drugs work, and that's true, but they tend to discount the empirical results from people saying they feel much much better on the pills, which when it comes to intangible things like mood and day-to-day functionality is just as good. I tend to be sceptical of the medicalisation of everything.

I grew up steeped with both Anglo and Franco tales of Normandy and this war, and honestly, Annibale's outsider perspective has been revelatory, and for me it finally brings together the two mythologies into a functional history. ...My own history; I can trace my surname all the way back to Jersey, some time in the early 1340's.

Was medieval Venice a magic realist novel?