Scandals in Communist Frenchystan


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    So... @boomzilla is spreading fake news?

    @boomzilla doesn't recognize monarchs as legitimate leaders of democracies. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸



  • @boomzilla That still leaves you with Germany and Italy to explain away.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    @boomzilla That still leaves you with Germany and Italy to explain away.

    Um, actually, it leaves you with having to explain why you think those guys are the actual leaders of those countries.



  • @boomzilla Because I'm just surfing on the joke by @Yamikuronue? "Calm down, dear" as one former head of stateleader of the UK once said...


  • BINNED

    @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    "Calm down, dear"

    "Et alors?" as a French president once said



  • @Luhmann "Casse-toi, pauvre con" or "ça m'en touche une sans faire bouger l'autre" would be more appropriate for this forum.


  • BINNED

    @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    more appropriate for this forum

    a simple "Merde!" would suffice



  • :tabarnak:



  • @hungrier said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    :tabarnak:

    Only in Québec.


  • BINNED



  • @Luhmann

    Ironically not available in Canada, from what I can see.


  • BINNED



  • @Luhmann Interesting. I'll have to do further research later on to see if it's available for mere mortals.


  • BINNED



  • @Luhmann

    Multiple documents were proven to be forgeries, including one which appeared to be an invoice for a Bitcoin payment for mephedrone ("bath salts") to be sent to the French National Assembly

    I'm sure some French politicians do buy drugs... but would they really have them sent to the fucking parliament building?



  • @boomzilla said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    So... @boomzilla is spreading fake news?

    @boomzilla doesn't recognize monarchs as legitimate leaders of democracies. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

    They're more like "officially appointed celebrities".


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anonymous234 said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    the fucking parliament building

    Sounds like @Perverted_Vixen is running for office!


  • FoxDev

    @dkf said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    @anonymous234 said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    the fucking parliament building

    Sounds like @Perverted_Vixen is running for office!

    Does that mean we'll finally get a sexy politician? :takei:



  • @dkf said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    @anonymous234 said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    the fucking parliament building

    Sounds like @Perverted_Vixen is running for office!

    I am @perverted_vixen, and I approve this message.



  • @Perverted_Vixen I'd vote for you!


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @hungrier said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    :tabarnak:

    ...and Jalad at Tanagra?



  • I guess it's time to wake up that thread again (new ones are too expensive)!

    The next presidential election is less than a year from now, and there were local elections a couple of weeks ago, providing some material for a teaser for what might happen next year.

    Previously in Communist Frenchystan!

    Season 1 (2016-2017):

    At the end of 2016 (so a few months before the election of May 2017), the right-wing candidate (Fillon) was largely seen as the most likely to win. Meanwhile, a young upstart (Macron) was trying to capitalise on his recent experience as a government minister to create his own party, but everyone was just seeing him as overly ambitious. The incumbent (Hollande) was mulling over whether he should run again, or whether it should be his prime minister (Valls). On both extremes (left and right), shrewd and experienced candidates (Le Pen on the right, Mélanchon on the left) were hitting hard and trying to annoy everyone.

    As in any proper TV series, that season was eventful! The right wing candidate (Fillon) was hard hit by a scandal (he employed his wife as parliamentary assistant for decades), while the young upstart (Macron) struck a chord with a lot of people, and the incumbent (Hollande) not only decided not run over, but instead his party picked a rather hard-left, but mostly unknown and uncharismatic candidate (Hamon). The left and right extremes (Mélanchon and Le Pen) kept gnawing their way forward in the polls. This all culminated in a nail-biting season finale, with the first round of the election where 4 candidates (far right, right, center, far left) were neck and neck!



  • Season two (2017-2018) started well for Macron.

    Macron and Le Pen went through to the second round, and the first episode (a televised debate between the two rounds) was fun, although cringe-worthy, to watch. Le Pen chose an extremely aggressive stance, which might have worked against meeker candidates such as the out-going president, but Macron was ready for it and showed not only that he could respond, but also that he had a better understanding of all topics. In any case the outcome was obvious: Macron had a huge lead and got comfortably elected, bagging a majority of MPs in the following parliamentary election.

    Macron's term started rather well for him, despite making some PR mistakes that highlighted how young he was in political life, but he learnt quickly. He managed to get a couple of reforms through and enjoyed a fairly good standing on the international scene. Internally, both the traditional right and left parties exploded, unable to gather around a leader (and helped by a few high-profile defections to his centre governing party), while the far right lost some of its momentum due the larger-than-expected defeat in the second round of the presidential election (and the parliamentary ones after).



  • Season three (2018-2019) saw the seas becoming rougher for the president.

    First he had to contend with the "gilets jaunes", who caused a lot of turmoil in 2018-2019. It also became more and more obvious that despite claiming that he was "neither right nor left" (i.e. centre!), he actually was much more "right" than "center" (or even "left"), progressively loosing a lot of his left-wing support. His newly created party failed to gain any local foothold in local elections (in 2020). Still, he doggedly stuck to his plans and launched a large-scale reform of the pension system in 2019, which caused large protests and one of the longest public strike for decades.

    Some side-drama happened in other parties as well. The far right kept growing, albeit slowly, but got embroiled in some European parliament financing scandals. It also tore itself on whether they should keep their long-standing position of leaving the EU (and/or the Euro), ending up abandoning it in their quest to become more "responsible" (the shit-show of Brexit probably had its part in that...). On their quest to become more palatable to right-wing voters, they abandoned part of their far right positions, which created some room on their right for some more extreme voices, which haven't yet coalesced as a name (or a party) but that could happen soon... The traditional right went through various leaders who fought hard amongst themselves to not be the leader because they all knew they would all be just "transition" leaders until at least the next presidential election. The left had a similar problem, which they addressed by splitting in a thousands of tiny parties that no one even know exist. The far left leader (Mélanchon) got his share of ridicule by getting on his high horses and claiming that through him, millions of voters were attacked when his office was raided by police for some minor offense, and generally by failing to be relevant.



  • Season 4 (2019-2020) looked as if it could be a turning point.

    The president was still deep in his troubles with the gilets jaunes, and with his pension reform. It could have been the end of him. But in the end it looked like he had pacified the crowds and won on the reform, the protests were dying down and his law was set to pass through parliament.

    But the season ended on the huge cliffhanger of 2020 and the first lockdown!



  • Season 5 (2020-2021) was the same shit show as everywhere.

    On the whole, the president seems to have weathered that storm relatively well, his ratings aren't as bad as they could be and compared to other world leaders (hint hint), his management of the crisis isn't seen as his main weakness.

    After pausing for a year, he's now talking again of passing his pension reform, which could work out either way for him. It will likely cause again large protests, which is good for his left opponents, but on the other hand it will make him look as a man of his word and make him more attractive to right-wing voters.

    The last episode happened a couple of weeks ago, with regional elections. Everyone said they were obviously about local issues, but everyone also obviously saw them as both a test for the government, and a way for various contenders to position themselves for next year. Everyone expected the far right (Le Pen) to do well, and the centre (Macron) to grab a couple of regions as he built his grassroots.

    The big winner of these elections was the abstention, with a turn-out lower than any past election in France. Le Pen did surprisingly bad, and in a "that's a bold move" strategy, went on to chide her electors on TV for not having gone to the polls. Macron also did surprisingly bad, not winning a single region, which he tried to downplay as not a big deal but since many of his ministers were running, it's hard to not see it as a direct rebuke. All regions saw their incumbent re-elected, showing mostly that people are OK with whoever manages them (my own reading here is that for most people, the regional level policies have nothing to do with right or left, and they see these regional councils as more administrative than political bodies, so they don't care who's doing the job since, essentially, they believe everyone would do the job equally well -- or equally bad). Three of those incumbents are already positioning themselves to be the right-wing candidate for next year, with one of them even saying so in his acceptance speech (almost literally: "thank you for voting for me, but actually I don't care about the region and will just use it to get another post" ... classy!).



  • And so, season 6 begins...

    At the moment, the field shapes up to be led by either Le Pen on the far right, probably polling about the same as last time (25% or so), or Macron in the middle also polling reasonably high (25%). So this looks like a remake of 2017.

    On the right, all candidates to be the candidate (!) currently poll at 15-20%. On the left, the far left (Mélanchon) is starting to be seen as a has-been and fails to reach even 10%, while there is about 15-20% that is split between various moderate left and green parties, depending on who ends up actually being a candidate -- if they managed to get behind a single candidate they could become a force to reckon with, but until now they've failed to do so, sometimes spectacularly (one meeting of leaders ended up with people disagreeing even on the fact that they hadn't decided anything!). The greens also regularly poll quite high in local elections, but until now have always failed to translate that into national (presidential) elections, in part because they are absolutely unable to ever agree on a candidate, let alone a charismatic one.

    But we've all got to remember that 5 years ago (i.e. 1 year before the election), Macron was barely starting his party and was seen as not having a chance, while everyone predicted the right-wing candidate (Fillon, although the actual choice of candidate only happened a few months later) would win by a landslide.


  • Considered Harmful

    @remi 5 on LePen as part of a Balkan Trifecta. Got a book open for sales of wide-belted work shirts?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Gribnit said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    5 on LePen as part of a Balkan Trifecta.

    Deeply unlikely to win overall unless against a hard-left candidate. Won't poll over 50% in the first round unless something extremely surprising happens, and the system with a run-off between the top two candidates tends not to favour any extremists (as the more central parties supporters hold their collective noses and vote for the not-the-extremist candidate, which has happened before).



  • @dkf And which happened again in 2017, and again and again countless times in local elections. The latest case is the Provence region a couple of weeks ago, the far right candidate came top on the first round but was trounced in the second because of a coalition of everyone else.

    That has always been the issue with the RN (Rassemblement National, previously FN (Front National)). They've built their image as being "outside of the [political] system", meaning they never accepted to compromise with other parties. That worked initially as that gave them a pristine image (well if you never get to power you never make any mistakes, right?), but it also meant it was easy for other parties to reject them outright. As time went by (and the current leader took over her father), they tried to become more "mainstream" and nowadays would be more than happy to ally themselves with others, but their original image is so strong that they have yet to manage it (in the few cases where it happened, everyone considered that the other partner in the alliance had effectively moved to the RN, and that's what happened soon after).

    This also means they've never had any government position, except locally in a couple of small-ish cities. And in those cases they quickly showed that they weren't better than the others and sometimes even worse (several times a mayor elected with their support left the party a couple of years later!). Which means that they don't have any "case studies" they can spin to tell voters things are better when they are in power.

    Which means they're still stuck in this "protest party" position, and the result of that is that they can't seem to go significantly above 25-30%.

    So yeah, I think it is extremely unlikely Le Pen will win, unless maybe against a far left candidate (that doesn't seem to be how it shapes up, but who knows?), even though it is extremely likely that she will be in the second round.

    In other words: when you see headlines the day after the first round saying "could France have a far right president?", remember Betteridge's law.



  • It's a couple of months since last time and another thread reminded me of this, so here's an update. I forgot that thread wasn't in the garage, which actually is a good thing as it meant actually worked (:doing_it_wrong:).

    So, we've entered the season where everyone hints that they'll be candidates but very few people actually are.

    Legally speaking, candidates are only declared a few weeks (something like 6 to 8 weeks) before the election, so we're still far away from that (the election being in April/May). But some parties have officially declared who their candidate is going to be, some... not.

    Starting from the left, because there's slightly less fodder there. The far-left Mélenchon is running. Again. Not much to add there, he still sees himself as the Saviour of the World but fails to gather any momentum, IMO because his time is gone (he peaked 5 years ago). Next to him, there's the usual mess of communists and other far left parties who can't decide whether they'll run alone or not at all, but they'll not even reach 2% in the end so nobody cares.

    Next, we have the greens. They had their internal primaries, which was a bit of fun because on the second round there was one "mainstream" green against one typical feminist/SJW/eco-warrior. The mainstream one (Yannick Jadot) won, though not by a landslide, and the other one squirmed and gnashed her teeth a lot before admitting that, yes, she'll support him. Though she didn't totally rule out splitting from the greens and joining forces with Mélenchon, which would be fun.

    Then the Socialists (i.e. the party of the previous President, Hollande). Not much news here. A few declared candidates-to-the-candidature. Without any surprise, it's the current Paris mayor (Anne Hidalgo) who was picked. She tried a few bold proposals to shape the debate and attract attention, but she's failing to raise in the polls.

    In the centre, the obvious one is Macron, though on paper he hasn't officially announced that he'll run again. But he's obviously going to, and probably delaying announcing just so that he can still pretend that when his government spends millions on this or that special-interest group, it's just the government doing it and not the candidate. He's still doing pretty well in polls, so it's reasonably plain sailing for him until now.

    There's a funny bit with his former Prime Minister (Édouard Philippe) who resigned/was sacked one year ago and went back to being mayor of a medium-sized city. Officially he says he's backing the president, but he is not a member of his party and just launched his own party, so it's not clear what his end-game is. It sounds extremely unlikely that he will run for president, but he could be trying to position himself for the following parliamentary elections, and/or in the longer term for the next presidential election (2027). In any case, his support-from-outside keeps everyone wary.

    Further right, we have the Republicans (the other main party until 2017, and the party of former president Sarkozy). They took a couple of months this summer to decide how they will pick their candidate (internal vote, primaries etc.), which obviously meant that everybody talked about them, but nobody cared about them. They've settled on something (an internal vote of party members) but the result is still in a month or so, so they're still swimming in a sea of potential hopefuls and therefore are totally invisible in the public debate.

    The funniest bit here is that the front-runners in popular support are actually not that well loved inside the party, so they may end up picking someone who has very little popular support. Namely... Michel Barnier, best known for being the chief EU negotiator of Brexit, but totally unknown and unloved in France. But he's a party faithful (by opposition to the other main contender, Xavier Bertrand, who left the party a few years ago).

    Now the real action is actually happening on the far right, with a new contender entering the fray! Eric Zemmour is a polemicist (i.e. he's been present in a lot of media, mostly to stir shit) with absolutely no political background. His shtick is to say out loud all the usual far-right stereotypes, in the bluntest possible ways. Doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, as long as everyone talks about him. To give you an idea, one of his "ideas" is to ban "non-French" names for babies. Doesn't matter that no-one knows what a "French" name is, or that this would obviously be unconstitutional, or even that this doesn't make any shred of sense whichever way you look at it. It makes headlines.

    The end of summer was quiet enough politically speaking that he managed to grab all attention, to the point where some polls put him more or less on the same level as Le Pen (the declared far-right candidate, and other front runner with Macron). He's now fading a bit, but whether it's just a lull or because his :wharrgarbl: style is starting to be seen as such, who knows?

    He hasn't officially said he wants to be candidate. That could be because he's waiting to join forces with someone else, using his support to negotiate a good position. But there's some doubt as to whether he actually truly wants to go in politics (after all, his past is all about stirring shit, not actually doing things). But there's been weirder candidates. But there's also been quite a few cases of non-political figures raising in public attention but in the end not running.

    The other thing is that to actually become candidate, you need to gather the support of 500 elected officials (MPs, mayors...). That's trivial for candidates with the backing of a party, but across the years there's been various examples of more or less crazies not getting this backing. But that could hit Zemmour pretty hard: his pool of potential backers are probably the large number of right-leaning mayors of small villages, and those are probably going to be pressured quite hard by both the Republicans and Le Pen to not back Zemmour. So again, who knows?

    Polls are currently giving quite a comfortable lead for Macron (25% or so) over either Le Pen or Zemmour (15-20%), with nobody else even reaching 10%. If so, the second round would very likely give another win for Macron. But we're still far away from the vote and in particular the Republicans not having even picked their candidate means all potential ones poll very low because they have no media presence.



  • @remi Barnier is the only face there other than Macron I know anything about and while I can imagine him being unloved in France, he is reasonably well respected by the Brits (at least those who tried to read as unbiased news as possible) because he seems the type who comes prepared, who is willing to try to make it work while being fair about it. The “safe pair of hands” so to speak.

    Gotta admire, if nothing else, the patience to not just throw the Brit negotiators out until they have their shit together.


  • Considered Harmful

    Hey, enough with this in the Internet of Shit thread.

    ...

    :oh:

    As you were, folks.



  • @Arantor Objectively speaking, Barnier probably wouldn't be the worst possible choice for a President, as he has indeed shown some maturity (i.e. he's not just throwing tantrums and :wharrgarbl:ing about everything), as well as some strength of character and the ability to get what he wants in a shitty situation. You might disagree with his ideas (if you know what they are, given how little he has said about it, which is part of the issue), but he sounds like an adult, which is better than quite a few other people.

    His main problem is that he has barely more charisma than Hollande, and that's really putting the bar extraordinarily low. And also that he's been wedded for so long to the EU that if people even know his name in France, it's as an EU politician, not a national one (he was minister in some government, but wasn't well-known by then). He's trying to break his image of a pure EU technocrat but that implies saying that some stuff the EU does is bad and since he's been involved, if not leading, in the EU doing that stuff, it's a tricky position, to say the least!

    Also, and that's a wider thought on Brexit than just on French politics, there is a huge asymmetry between France and the UK about how they see each other. Brits are hugely focused on the EU (through Brexit, understandably) and on France in particular, and they seem to assume that French have the same focus on Brits, but they don't. We love shitting on Brits, but ultimately we have other foreign politics issues and don't give much thoughts about the UK. So in particular, Barnier might be better known in the UK than in France because most people didn't give a shit about Brexit negotiations.



  • @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    all about stirring shit, not actually doing things

    Sounds indistinguishable from a typical, experienced politician to me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Arantor said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    the patience to not just throw the Brit negotiators out until they have their shit together.

    If he'd done that, we'd still be waiting for them to get organised enough to get back in the room. I don't know if that would have been better than what actually happened though.

    But this has almost exactly nothing to do with French politics.



  • @dkf no but it tells you something about the man himself, if he ends up coming to one of the parties as a leader and what that might mean if against the odds he ends up as the next French president (unlikely as it might seem)


  • Banned

    @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    Doesn't matter that no-one knows what a "French" name is

    Weird. The rest of Europe has no problem spotting French names. :half-trolling:



  • @Gąska you can usually tell because the surname will frequently be written in CAPITALS because there's a habit of using 'names' for both first name and last name.

    I once had it reported to me as a bug with the HR importer process I built that 'all the last names are uppercase', and I'm like, no, that's their source data, it's intentional.



  • @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    what "French" name

    That's simple: there is a Jean- prefix (for boys) or -Marie suffix (for girls).

    Now, seriously, this is something I've always wanted to know: is there a fixed list of these names, or is it possible to create any combination?

    In the later case, would the future law consider "Jean-Muhammad" a French name? 🤔



  • @Kamil-Podlesak And what about Aisha-Marie?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @BernieTheBernie I was thinking that “Jean-Marie” would therefore logically mark people who are intersex…



  • @Kamil-Podlesak said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    Now, seriously, this is something I've always wanted to know: is there a fixed list of these names, or is it possible to create any combination?

    No, and yes. I did see some unusual combinations, though I can't remember right now.

    (on the topic of weird-but-French names, there was a well-known journalist, that nobody would have claimed wasn't a "proper" Frenchman, whose name was "Jean-Edern" (look for that name to find his full name, he's the only one with it). No, "Edern" isn't in any way a usual name, neither French nor anything else (that I know of). It's supposedly the name of a village in Alsace where a branch of his family was from.)

    But the line is sometimes blurry between a "true" composed name (Jean-Marie) and someone having (and using) several of their names (Jean Marie). At some point and in some groups (e.g. small rural communities 70 years ago, i.e. my grand-parents), almost all girls were named "Marie <something>", or "Marie-<something>", or "<something> Marie" or "<something>-Marie." Later on, many of those decided to drop the "Marie" part in day-to-day life because it wasn't distinctive-enough.

    Somehow the same did not happen for boys, though quite a few did get a "Marie" in their name (e.g. "Jean-Marie", or "Jean Marie", and in a few cases "Marie <something>" though that's more unusual). But quite a few also use their second name in everyday's life, because they prefer it.

    In the later case, would the future law consider "Jean-Muhammad" a French name? 🤔

    Until 1990 or so (?? just a guess, I don't remember and :kneeling_warthog: to search), there was a restriction on names you could give. But it never was an explicit list, instead it was something like "a name that's been in use before" -- that was intended to avoid e.g. a disgruntled father naming their kid "moron" or the like (especially at a time when it was the father who officially went to declare the birth...). In the majority of cases, "allowed" names were those of the Catholic saints used in the calendar (which, incidentally, is also how a large number of Africans were called "Nativity" or "Assumption", just because they were born that day!). But "allowed" always was a very loose thing.

    That law was sometimes used to try and squash some regional names (France tried that very hard!) such as traditional names from Brittany (Yann, Loïc...), but even then the law had an intentionally built-in loophole of "traditional use" that would allow parents to use a name if they could prove some previous familial use (because, I assume, the legislator would wrote that one was entirely dumb (:doing_it_wrong:) and knew that they couldn't ever make an exhaustive list). Before, and after, that drive to squash regional cultures, the law was mostly ignored, and that's why it was ultimately removed.

    Incidentally, I have a connection to that law. I was born at a time where parents didn't know the sex of the baby before birth (:belt_onion:), so they had prepared both a boy's, and a girl's name for me. The girl's name would have been one of the ugliest I've ever heard ("Marie-Clossine", hey, see, here's another Marie!), but the point is that it was entirely invented. Except... not quite. One of my (female) ancestors was called "Clossine" (allegedly, in family history, because his father was called "Clovis" (that one was reasonably common at the time) and she got called "like her father" so someone suggested that Clossine would be the female form of Clovis... which also goes to show how that law about names wasn't taken seriously in most cases, since she shouldn't have been allowed to use it, but there you go...). So my parents had prepared a copy of this ancestor's birth certificate, so they could prove a previous use of the name "Clossine" and have me named like that.

    I can't see how a new law would work by setting a list, there are too many existing names that are in use. And if picking some sort of "traditional use" rule, well again the list would be very large, and wouldn't prevent the :airquotes: foreign :airquotes: names that this polemicist would like to ban. But anyway it doesn't matter to him, he's not interested in putting forward sensible ideas (even if that idea could work, how would it ever work to curb immigration/improve integration, which is his main topic? nothing prevents someone from using a different name in everyday's life if they want to (and that's fairly common amongst Islamic extremists!), and banning that would be impossible: not only a lot of artists or "normal" people (see above) do it, but how would you even regulate how people call each other???).

    (I also believe the law would likely be unconstitutional as an unreasonable restriction of personal freedom but IANAL and it's likely that polemicist would brush that away by saying he would rewrite the Constitution anyway, so it's perhaps not the best argument against it)



  • @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    which, incidentally, is also how a large number of Africans were called "Nativity" or "Assumption", just because they were born that day!

    I forgot the quirkiest (IMO) of those, which is some people called "Fetnat" (not sure how they write it). Can you guess why?

    They were born on July 14th, which is the French national holiday. Or "fête nationale" in French. Often abridged on calendars because there isn't much space to write it, and thus written as... "Fet. Nat."


  • Java Dev

    @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    Somehow the same did not happen for boys, though quite a few did get a "Marie" in their name (e.g. "Jean-Marie", or "Jean Marie", and in a few cases "Marie <something>" though that's more unusual). But quite a few also use their second name in everyday's life, because they prefer it.

    I've heard that one in Dutch as well: All catholic kids get named "Maria", even the boys, though usually not as the first name.



  • @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    "Edern" ... supposedly the name of a village in Alsace

    Oh dear, the German legacy of Eastern France. How did Paris fail to eradicate it during the last century that Elsaß-Lothringen is again under French occupation? :half-trolling:



  • @BernieTheBernie said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    Oh dear, the German legacy of Eastern France. How did Paris fail to eradicate it during the last century that Elsaß-Lothringen is again under French occupation? :half-trolling:

    My German teacher in high school used to tell us a joke (despite teaching German she was French, so I guess she was allowed to do so? :trollface:) about that.

    It's about a guy in Alsace, around 1850, who's named Mr. Garde (="guard"). When the German occupy Alsace in 1871, they decide to squash any remnant of French and thus to germanise names. "Guard" in German is "Wache", so he becomes Herr Wache. In 1918, France regains Alsace and they just "correct" the way his name is written to match how it's pronounced and he (or his descendant) becomes M. Vache (which phonetically is close to the German Wache, but also means "cow" in French). But then the German invade Alsace once more in 1940 and again translate his name! He's now Herr Kuh (=cow in German). Comes the liberation of France (and Alsace) in 1945, and again the French just change the way his name is written...

    At this point our teacher would wink and smirk and let us guess what the name has become, the joke being that the German pronunciation of "Kuh" is very close to the French "couille", which is slang for "balls."



  • @remi The fun of having ancestors from the Rhine valley. My paternal line supposedly comes from a town in Germany "on the Rhine". But I can't find any town by that name anywhere in modern Germany, much less on the Rhine. The closest thing I can find is a town that was settled by the Romans with a somewhat similar Latin name, near Köln/Cologne; unfortunately it was almost completely destroyed in 1945, so the chance of ever being able to confirm that it was the origin of my family is basically zero.

    My mom always said there was French on her side of the family, from Alsace. But my research hasn't turned any shred of evidence of this. All I can find is Bavaria (traceable in the church records of one town back to the 1400s).



  • @HardwareGeek Researching ancestors is a good way to become very quickly very humble about historical records. In most areas of France you can reliably get back to the mid-19th century, but there are some glaring holes (IIRC, one of those is that a lot of Paris' archives got destroyed during the 1870-71 siege), sometimes indeed as recent as 1945 (after that I think there shouldn't be any holes, though I'm pretty sure there still must be a few). Before 1850... all bets are off. Two places next to each other might have records going back to the 16th century, or no records at all. One register might be there but all newer ones gone. And that's assuming that records are correct.

    Historians like to say that rats make history... (i.e. history is written from what rats didn't eat)

    It seems unlikely you'll be able to fill the gaps... even if the documents still exist, you'd likely need to spend days trawling through old records from one place or the other to try and patch things together, and you may never get an actual ironclad proof.



  • @remi said in Scandals in Communist Frenchystan:

    It seems unlikely you'll be able to fill the gaps... even if the documents still exist,

    Yep, I don't expect to ever find out where that Rhine branch came from. (BTW, I just realized that's not really my paternal line. It's my father's mother's line. My really paternal line is probably from England (although family legend has them coming from Scotland, that's demonstrably wrong). I can trace them reliably back to New England in the 1640s, but where they came from is still a mystery to me. I once got an email from someone claiming to have found their origin in England, but I never followed up on it. Damned :kneeling_warthog:.)

    you'd likely need to spend days trawling through old records from one place or the other to try and patch things together, and you may never get an actual ironclad proof.

    The records I have of my mother's mother's family from Bavaria is due to a distant cousin doing exactly that. He found church records of the family in one particular town going back continuously to the 1600s, and with a few gaps back to the 1400s (or something like that; I'm going from memory, so I may have the dates wrong; :kneeling_warthog: to pull up my database).

    OTOH, there are other gaps I could almost certainly fill. I know hardly anything about my mother's father's line, but there is at least one published book on the [redacted] family, which probably includes his line, but I have never gotten around to looking it up. And there's one notable gap in my paternal line, my great-grandfather. I know who he is, who his parents and children were, and where he was born, but not when he was born or died. I could almost certainly find some more details of his life if that warthog would get out of the way.