Baguettes and Baloney

French peasant family, 18th century

I’ve been thinking about the extreme right’s current obsession with “The Great Replacement”, and their deep interest in the preservation of a “white European race”…

Even if a person could demonstrate that ALL of their ancestors came from Central or Northern Europe, this still would not mean that they are in any sense “racially pure”.

Let’s take a look at French people to explain why…

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What is a French person?

The largest “ethnic group” in the modern state of France is the group of people who speak the Central/Northern dialect of a language which only came into being over the course of many centuries – through migration, invasion, and immigration.

The oldest attested ethnic group in France were the Gauls, who spoke a Celtic language. The conquering of Gaul by the Romans under Julius Caesar in 50 BCE saw the development of a Gallo-Roman society over the subsequent four centuries. In other words, the Romans settled their new frontier with people from all over the Roman Empire, which stretched from the Middle East to NW Europe to North Africa.

It is worth mentioning here that Iraqi soldiers in the Roman army were scribbling graffiti on walls in Scotland nearly 2,000 years ago, and the Mediterranean city of Marseille (Massalia) had been founded by Greek traders 600 years before the time of Julius Caesar.

In what would only be called “France” many centuries later, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century CE saw a mass inward migration of Germanic tribes from the east such as the Burgundians, Franks, Suebi, and Visigoths, with a late influx of Vikings during the Middle Ages.

Before the age of the printing press began to unify it linguistically, France was a patchwork of ethnic groups speaking innumerable languages, dialects, and mixed sub-dialects.  Evidence of this can be seen in the many languages and regional dialects still spoken today:

Alsatian (Alemannic) [Germanic]
Auvergnat (Occitan) [Romance]
Basque (Palaeo-European) [no known linguistic relatives]
Breton (Brittonic) [insular P-Celtic]
Catalan [Western Romance]
Corsican (Italo-Dalmatian) [Romance]
Franco-Provencal [Romance]
French Flemish (Dutch dialect) [Germanic]
French (official langues d’oïl) [Romance]
Gascon (Occitan) [Romance]
Lorraine Franconian (West Central German) [Germanic]
Norman (langues d’oïl) [Romance]
Occitan (langues d’oc) [Romance]
Picard (langues d’oïl) [Romance]
Poitevin-Saintongeais (langues d’oïl) [Romance] one of the main groups ancestral to Acadians/Louisiana Cajuns

Because the majority of the “French” Huguenots (French Protestants) who ended-up in North America were from the south and southwestern parts of France, this means many of them almost certainly spoke a language other than “Standard French”.

All of this perfectly encapsulates why ethnic or “racial” purity was an illusion long, long before the concept began to take root in places like Anglo-America. A “French Huguenot” arriving in Virginia during the 1600s might be lighter-skinned than most Africans, but nonetheless could be a mixture of genes from anywhere across the Northern European, Eastern European, and Mediterranean world – including the Roman Middle East and North Africa.

When people used the words “England” or “France” during the 1600s and 1700s, they were describing a POLITICAL identity which was only partly related to the ethnic or cultural identities on the ground at the time.

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Those who romanticise the Vikings would do well to read books like “The Viking Way” by Professor Neil Price.  The nature of Scandinavian magic and religious practice during the Middle Ages is far too gruesome and depraved to include here.  Those inclined to say we should not measure past societies by today’s standards?

Contemporary Arab travellers among the Vikings were utterly horrified by the things they saw in a so-called “Christian” society.

And “white” Christian nationalists who see themselves as the descendants of Frankish crusaders?  They are living in cuckoo land.

Warlords and later European royalty are almost never the class of people whose descendants ended-up on ships to America.

The origins of many more Americans are to be found among religious extremists, indentured servants, smugglers, speculators, and transported criminals (including beggars, vagrants, and prostitutes).  Almost all underclass people intermixed at some stage with African and indigenous American peoples.

White supremacy is not only wicked.  It’s downright ill-informed and stupid.

#realhistory