[WeylandYutani]

France has always been pretty bad at running an economy.

Ofcourse for the rest of Europe this is a good thing- French military ambitions have been consistently sabotaged by this oversight. Good military, brilliant engineers and capable bureaucrats but terrible merchants. And wars are won on the stock market.

[Yoric]

I'm not so sure about that.

For one thing, France is and remains one of the richest countries in the world. For a second thing, I seem to remember that France is currently outperforming both Germany and the UK (I read this in both German and British newspapers, but I don't remember the details).

Is it perfect? Far from it. But French bashing feels pretty counter-productive.

[ever1]

They are so terrible that they manage to get the 2nd place in arms export... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/13/france-challen...

[bombolo]

> Ofcourse for the rest of Europe this is a good thing

For the kings sure… for the people much less.

Imagine england being defeated and india being free of colonialism.

[pmontra]

Almost no part of the world was free from European colonialism. France was one of the largest colonial powers. If England lost to France maybe India would be speaking French instead of English now.

[bombolo]

And we can all agree that french revolution values are much better than whatever crap the rest of europe was pushing?

[pmontra]

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité: yes. What actually happened, the Terror and an Emperor: no.

[bombolo]

I mean, study some history… with the emperor they still fared much better than before. Which is why they loved the emperor.

But I understand that the anglosaxon history might be a bit biased and edited.