Today’s flag, that of France,
continues the theme of the countries mentioned in the opening of one of our favorite Broadway plays, The Book of Mormon.
I have covered some of the basics of this production in previous posts about both Uganda and Norway, so I won’t repeat it here.
Suffice it say that, at least for the Mormon missionary boys, their ideas about France are that it is “the land of pastries and turtlenecks!” That is as may be, and having been to France several times, I can concur that the pastries, especially the pain au chocolate,
are truly divine, I can’t say that I saw a great many, or even any, turtlenecks. Didn’t those go out in the 1970s anyway? If so, France is MUCH too fashion forward to be repeating mistakes of a previous era. And, if the boys were by chance referring to the slang use of “turtleneck” to refer to an uncircumcised penis,
well, that would be true of all of Europe, and actually most of the non-Jewish and non-United States world, so I’m going with the fashion interpretation. The boys also declare that “Satan has a hold of France; we will knock him off his perch!” So, you can’t believe everything they say or think with their absolute conviction.
While we know that the area now known as France was settled by pre-literate people for thousands of years prior to a written history because of the famous cave paintings
left behind, the written history referencing any part of what is today France first appears in the Iron Age, around 500-300BCE and results from both the Greeks and Phoenicians settling the area near today’s Marseilles. In Roman times, the bulk of what is today France was called Gaul and it represented something of a western frontier land. France, or the area we now call France came under the rule of Charlemagne following the dissolution of the Roman Empire. It was in this time that the first use of any place name remotely resembling today’s France appeared as the area was known as West Francia while under the rule of Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire.
By 987 a French royal house had been founded by Hugh Capet and the earliest beginnings of the Kingdom of France were laid.
As is true of much of Europe during medieval times, war and disease were commonplace facts of life. War would dominate much of French history right up to the end of World War II. Perhaps the two most famous conflicts in French history are the revolution of 1789 and the multiple reigns of the Emperor Napoleon
until his ultimate defeat and exile to the British island of Saint Helena