Thread:Charles Murray/@comment-5080468-20170729135627/@comment-25309944-20170729181024

When it comes to Sporewiki!France, the French Empire is an... odd multicultural construct. Basically, the French have always been (in our time as in theres) highly formulaic, proud, conservative, and even hegemonic with their culture, mores, and language. These things are much more closely tied with the French state because it is the French state which gave birth to them. Through education and government policy, Louis XIV's France turned what was back then a patchwork of languages and jurisdictions into a single, governable, unified, and codified language, state, and corpus of laws. This set the groundwork for the French to identify themselves as one people during the French Revolution, and for Napoleon to complete the centralization and codification of the French state whose institutions, laws, and habits France still uses in our time.

Sporewiki's France is an evolution of this, but it's gotten a little out of control. It's grown far beyond the ability of a single, centralized, unitary, codified government to govern it. Instead, it's shifted naturally, in stages, and almost by accident first into a federalized system with French regions being given autonomy and self-government as a matter of necessity and practicality (governing something so big from Paris is hard). Then, during the Great Xonexian Schism, it broke. Metropolitan France became a satellite of the Human Superstate, itself a dependency of the DCP, and became the plaything of a small and radical group of utopian unificationists and leftists who sought to remake the French state in their image. The French colonies banded together in what was then a confederation, the French Colonial Empire, to continue waging war against the DCP. The shape of the current French Empire arises from the interactions of this structure and the necessities of waging intergalactic war against the Gigaquadrant's premier hyperpower.

In other words, the French Empire is a complex and utterly baffling (to outsiders) system with many moving parts and different types of components, each animated by and vying for their own interests within a capacious system which is jerking painfully by degrees in the direction of centralization, and resisting every inch. This structure accommodates, empowers, regulates, protects, and harnesses difference, competition, and contention between groups of people with different ideas and identities. The fact that nobody agrees on what the hell it means to be French anymore is concerning, yes, but the most French thing you can do is argue about it until you're blue in the mouth. Many ascribe narrow cultural traits to their definition of French, but many, even those who do not speak French as their first language and don't consider themselves French first (the Gran Columbians, for example, whose main language is Spanish, the Siranians, whose language is Turkish, the Borderlanders, who speak a mixed Franco-Drodo tongue), take immense pride in their system of government and in being French citizens. What is commonly thought is that being French is partaking in this heated, complicated, tumultuous, and utterly nonsensical form of government whose genius is evident only in its results: an immensely powerful, dynamic, sprawling, prosperous, peaceful, and Gigaquadrantic-spanning nation at peace with its neighbors and with itself.