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Community Notes strikes again
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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France was (and I'm using past tense here because relations are strained due to......gestures generally) one of USA's first allies. They provided political, navel, and monetary assistance during the revolutionary war. They were one of the first counties to acknowledge us as an independent country once the war was over.
The statue was commissioned as a gift to the US, not to the president. It doesn't have any listening equipment and it sits as a tourist attraction, along with information about our long standing alliance.
It wasn't a fucking bribe!!!!!
Something that provides a whole lot of modern context is realizing that America was France’s early “Proxy war”. They wanted to give Britain a hard time, and so they gave colonials weapons to do it. Both of us won out from that exchange.
The key part here is that France didn’t keep an iron stranglehold of us. It was enough to win us our freedom that we would want to be their buddies without being forced. Fun story for anyone who insists the US wants to control the Ukrainian government.
You might want to look into what happened to the French government and its leadership shortly after funding that little proxy war. Let me give you a quick rundown, because I enjoy history:
The American Revolution was incredibly expensive and put France into an extreme financial crisis. Of course, the court's extravagent personal spending didn't help things (and made for better revolutionary propaganda), but in reality it was about 6% of total government expenditure, while loan payments, mostly from the war, represented around 50%. Even with very high taxes, it was impossible to balance the budget. A report from March 1788 estimated a deficit of 20% of expenditures, which could only be made up by more borrowing
This financial crisis led to the king calling the Estates General, something that hadn't been done in hundreds of years, to bring representatives of the three estates (nobility, clergy, and everyone else) together to work out a solution. When an agreement could not be reached, the representatives of the third estate left the Estates General and declared that they were creating a "National Assembly," which claimed to represent the popular democratic will, and started work on a new constitution. The royal family ended up declared traitors and got their heads chopped off. And the rest is history. (My source for this is an old book I own called The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre)
So, dumping a bunch of money on a proxy war in a bid to raise their geopolitical status and undermine their rival didn't really work out so well for France. They were so focused on playing geopolitics against Britain, but by failing to address declining conditions at home, they created a much more dangerous domestic threat which brought about the government's downfall.
I think autocorrect got you, unless there was a secret bellybutton supply we don't know about?
Aye, the Navel Reserve.
I would like some navel assistance.
Belly button lint was used as a cartridge if paper wasn't available.
You ever been on a ship from that era? If you’re over 5’ tall you’ll spend a lot of time bent over staring at your navel