These sorts of things teach important lessons about history and identity. Naturally, some take it a bit far.

It’s similar, within its domain, to the important insight that just because something is “socially constructed” doesn’t actually make it not useful, or even not real. Everything outside physics, chemistry and biology is socially constructed.

It’s tough to be of British ancestry and not know that it’s a superstructure over English, Scottish, Welsh and part Irish, each far older, that these identities themselves have deep structure even if more buried, or that the impulse toward unity among them by hook or crook has had a lot of drivers going back a millennium, just as the impulse to separate has had. It’s like “Europe”, in that regard. And all of them have had millions of people for whom they were real, just the same.

With France, the impulse toward uniformity started with the kings [Tocqueville more or less taught his compatriots that it didn't start with the revolution] but accelerated with republicanism, an ideology of centralism and uniformity among other things.

Tough to read of the Hundred Years War without remembering that whole regions didn’t think of themselves as French the same way the Ile de France did. The Gascons and Guienese thought themselves nations, by ethnicity, law and language. Sometimes so did the Provencal. The former remembered themselves as a separate kingdom with separate laws. And it was true enough, in part from once being Visigoth and Latin, not Frank and Latin, in part as a trifling artifact of the constant division of the Frankish crown.

Without belaboring, which I am not equipped to do, one question that has always interested me is the chicken and egg aspect of this, and the role played by the extremely long centuries involved and the extremely low preservation of historical information over that time- when and how did the ethnic, linguistic and cultural distinctions precede, or instead follow and build on, the more legalistic divisions imposed by arbitrary rules of inheritance and feudal division?

[I suspect that medievals weren't stupid and that these things were just as often conscious, self-serving choices. If Aquitaine was always a separate kingdom according to its learned greybeards, then it would be just for it to remain separate from Paris and linked to its trading partner and wine consumer England. It's not unlike how French lawyers of the same era deliberately, in all self-awareness, invented the idea that the Salic Law barred succession in female line to the French Crown, and then proclaimed it part of the eternal and unchangeable constitutional law of France. And English lawyers in turn called them on this BS and invented their own. Good times.]

That and, of course, France and England in particular managed to get enough common identity together to self-identify as such right down to the common man level during the course of the Hundred Years War. So the persistence of regional culture and dialect isn’t exactly a spear through the heart of national identity as a concept, any more than it would be today.

FOr clarification, I’m currently reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company on Project Gutenberg, and just completed its prequel, Sir Nigel. Good, flowing writing full of references to things like “stout Gascons”. So really living the glory of the Aquitaine here.

Words to live by.

Of course, I half suspect at this point that I learned of this book from Isegoria — searching for “Graham” or “France” is no help — in which case I’ll say “thanks,” as the book’s a really enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

That line (which will live in infamy) was penned by an immigrant in 1883 just as a huge wave of her low-rent brethren from Italy and the Pale of Settlement were beginning to break on American shores.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/immigration-dataviz.jpg

But the chart looks looks more radical than it is, since the vast majority stayed in the cities and failed to penetrate the institutions, so as late as 1956 the Ivy League was still a recognizably Puritan institution, and as late as 1993 you could still trivially visit any one of many small towns and things were just… normal.

Today, of course, there are Somalis in Minnesota, Muslims in Congress, the crown jewel of America is a banana republic, and the staunchest Virginian defenders of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms pledge their steadfast commitment to the pidgin communist moral order in the most egregious and embarrassing way.

(The pidgin communist moral order is itself an embarrassment to the communist moral order. Give me one Trotsky before a million pidgin-communist invertebrates.)

He was a bit overdoing it but some of the lesson stuck.

First, to note I’m still pretty net positive on the US.

Second, to clarify. Where I come from on this is that I think of the progressive vision of America and the world as every bit as much quintessentially American as any other, and could not really have been produced anywhere else. Sure, Marxism is German, but the version of the future the American left is offering could have been compiled nowhere else. It mixes in stuff that could not have been concocted in the old world.

Still onside with other aspects of the US.

Bruce reminds me of something I thought of Americans as a kid. Everybody from retail personnel to people on the street were just that increment more friendly and outgoing than even in such a similar place as Canada. I visited Watkins Glen in New York circa 1981 with my parents and we met an old couple who started to chat. When my dad explained we were from Toronto, Canada, and how relatively close that was, I’m not sure the old man actually recognized the place. But he said, “We’re from Illinois. Welcome to America.”

SO there’s always that side of things.

As to Haldeman, I like him better than you, and recommend him without hesitation, but no, he’s not comparable to the best WWI writers. In two ways- one, no he’s not as good, and two, comparing his style to the best of WWI writers is comparing apples and oranges. To Haldeman, good writing is Hemingway’s flatted, taut melodramatic phrasing. Compared to the flowers of Storm of Steel or Blunden or TE Laurence he’s just not trying to do the same thing. Hemingway was reacting to bad WWI writers; compared to them Hem and Haldeman rule.