User:Calthinus/Quod valet salutaris

If anything in Romance peoples is worht saving, here is what a Modern History section, which I would rather see converted to just a "history" section as the ancient and medieval sections are just Pop copy-paste essentially.

France
Important points to make:


 * 1) . After the 6th century demise of Gaulish, and the assimilation of Germanic and Iranian (Alans) incomers, medieval and early modern French writers were unaware that the Gallo-Romance, Old French, and modern French languages in fact came from Latin -- see Blom, Lingua Gallica. Although lingua gallica and lingua celtica originally referred to the Celtic Gaulish language (kfor "celtica", that of the central zone of Gaul specifically, as opposed to Belgica or Armorica), it was used in the Middle Ages to refer to French, and even as late as the early 19th century, French was commonly believed to hail from Gaulish rather than Latin, or some sort of mixture of the two -- cite Blom. Other French writers also averred that similarly unlike other Romance langauges, French came from Germanic, or Greek -- cite Posner Romance languages. Early German linguists similarly considered the French people and their language to either not be Latin or not entirely Latin -- cite Posner -- but with the advent of historical linguists, the position of French among the Romance languages was decisively determined.
 * 2) . In the Middle Ages, the upper classes in France including the nobility and the clergy had identified with the Franks, while the lower classes identified with the downtrodden but defiant Gauls. However, after the French Revolution, this traditional paradigm was discarded in favor of a "unifying" universal "Gaulish" identity which asserted that hexagonal France had been a single nation since time immemorial, while de-emphasizing all the subsequent waves of invaders and migration -- cite Krepps. The popularity of the Franks took a hit as French relations with Prussia/Germany progressively worsened -- I'm sure someone says this, idk who.
 * 3) . After this point, French writers popularized pan-Latinism for various purposes, identifying as Gauls who were culturally Latin with a burden to spread the gift of civilization they had received. One use was asserting natural superiority over "barbaric" Germanic speaking rivals including the "Anglo-Saxon peoples", the Hapsburgh Empire, and the ascendant Prussian Empire and ultimately Germany. (Forgot the cite for this) when G.I. Ascoli popularized his substrate hypothesis, the elite in Paris reacted with irritation; although they did not dispute the influence of non-Latin Gaulish "barbaric" origins, they felt insulted that Ascoli had not chosen to focus on their attainment of civilization and their subsequent refinement. In this way, the French identification with both Gaul and Rome was utilized for colonialism, as the French, grateful for being (coercively) civilized by the Romans, had to spread the "gift" around the world. The Latin civilizational lineage was used to assert the right of Latin peoples including the French to world domination, but after the defeat by Prussia, French writers began to assert more modest goals, including Latin domination over Africa and South America, while acknowledging Anglo-Saxon, Slavic, Germanic and other domains over the rest of the world.
 * 4) . Under Napoleon III, Pan-Latinism was promoted internationally, and exploited to justify French interference in Mexico.
 * 5) . By the end of hte 19th century, French nationalism, while still acknowledging Latin, Gaulish and Frankish contribution to French heritage, became increasingly civic rather than cultural or ethnic, epitomized by the Breton-French writer E Renan's What is a nation?. This became more the case after large waves of immigration in the 20th and 21st centuries.
 * 6) . The "Latinness" of the French was used in the 20th century by separatists, who associated the French with Roman tyranny, while asserting the necessarily for freedom for non-Romance separatist regions, such as Brittany. However, at the same time, Breton supporters of union with France as well as French writers asserted that not only were the Bretons French, but they were in fact descended from Gauls rather than British Celts (Breton comes from Brythonic, however), and such the Frenchest of the French, making separatism beyond absurd. Blom -- I think -- discusses this specifically -- and points out spefcifically the irony of the Breton nationalists using the term "Celtic" to differentiate themselves from the French, since before the emergence of Pan-Celticism in the 19th century, the term referred specifically to Central France, often not including Armorica (Brittany).

Romania

 * 1) . The Romanian and Aromanian ethnonyms are descended from Latin romanus, while Orthodox priests asserted that Vlachs had come from "Rim" (Rome). In Albanian, the archaic term for Aromanians as rëmër, which similarly is a descendant of "romanus". Nevertheless, the exact details of the Origin of the Romanians remain disputed.
 * 2) . Pan-Latinism and the modern sense of being a "Romance people" with kinship to Catholic peoples who had before been denounced as heretics emerged due to the rise of Romanian nationalism, and were utilized to counter threats from Pan-Slavism and Hungarian nationalism by asserting Romanian cultural superiority and a degree of relative autochtony, since Hungarian and Slavic migrations post-dated the Roman conquest of Dacia.
 * 3) . In the 19th century, identification with being a "Romance people" were used by the political left in Romania to push for economic and social reforms that would bring Romania more into line with Western European nations.
 * 4) . In Romania, alliances with France and Italy were justified on grounds of a sense of kinship.
 * 5) . In World War II, fascist leader Ion Antonescu convinced Hitler that Romanians were superior to Slavs because of their Roman origins, though he failed to secure equality to Germanic peoples in the Fuhrer's mind. Antonescu later attempted to form the Latin Axis (World War II), but failed to get Mussolini interested in the proposal, and severely irritated Hitler with it.