The French monarchy fabricated a Gallic-Frank continuity to justify annexing the Rhine.
Evidence
- “A ‘nation’ is etymologically a ‘birth,’ or a ‘being born,’ and hence a race, a kin or kind having a common origin or, more loosely, a common language and other institutions… . There is not only an original and individual birth for each system but a continual birth of new institutions within it, a continual transformation of old institutions, and even a rebirth of the nation after death.” Max Fisch’s introduction to The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1970, p. xxiii; see also Friedrich Hertz for an example of the length to which the monarchy was willing to go to produce the appropriate illusion: “The theory already put forward by Bodin that the Franks were a people of Gallic stock who had wandered into Germany, and from there had returned later as deliverers of their brothers from the Roman yoke, came into favour under Louis XIV. Within the French people there was, therefore, no racial difference, but national unity of the kind so much desired by the absolute monarchy. This theory very conveniently lent support to the desire for the annexation of the Rhine, the restoration of which, as old Frankish territory, he affected to demand,” op. cit., p. 5. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1529