Basic Trope: The French are terrible at fighting and winning wars.
- Straight:
- The French (or characters representing them) are reluctant to get into/stay in fights.
- French characters lose nearly every fight they're in.
- Exaggerated:
- The French run away from kids armed with water pistols.
- French soldiers are armed only with white flags and white flag factories are seen as their main strategic resource.
- Downplayed:
- The French are reluctant to get into fights, but will fight as long as they can.
- Or vice versa.
- Bob is a bit nervous about getting into fights and identifies as "French", but he's only ethnically French and not necessarily entirely so.
- Emperor Evulz's invicible Legions of Doom are slowly but surely overrunning most militaries across the world, and the French are doing relatively worse than others.
- Justified: The enemy of the French is a hypercompetent tactician and/or strategist capable of curb stomping any army he faces, and he's pitted against the French.
- Inverted:
- The French are the only people who AREN'T cowards or hopeless fighters.
- The French soldiers are the most Badass Army in the world, and they never surrender.
- The French have Hair-Trigger Tempers, love fighting, and recklessly charge into battle.
- A French character gets a buff to his Power Level when he gets others to surrender to him.
- Gauls with Grenades
- Subverted:
- "C'est bon! Vous avez gagné! Je me rends! Mais avant que vous me fassiez prisonnier, j'ai quelque chose à dire: BOUFFEZ DU PLOMB!"note
- The French character appears to surrender... SIKE! It's a fake out move to unleash their strongest attack!
- The French are cowards ... Until you push their Berserk Button.
- A Frenchman is introduced, and characters joke about him being a possible coward... but Time Travel is involved, and this Frenchman is a ravenous Blood Knight from the medieval eras, when France was practically always at war with someone. Or worse, a member of Napoleon's army.
- Double Subverted:
- The French's I Surrender, Suckers ploy is easily beaten.
- It's very easy to beat the attack.
- The French revert to cowardice when somebody brings out their Weaksauce Weakness.
- The Frenchman from the past is, however, understandably terrified of modern weapons he can't skewer or riddle with shot in open combat, such as combat helicopters, Attack Drones, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.
- Parodied:
- The main things taught at French boot camp are how to draw a white flag quickly and make sure the enemy sees it, and how to say "I surrender" in 150 languages.
- French troops make a Last Stand because otherwise les Rosbifs note and les Amérloques note will never shut the fuck up about it, and they consider death a merciful alternative to that.
- Someone makes fun of France's willingness to surrender... to Napoléon Bonaparte's face. It goes about as well as you would expect.
- Zig-Zagged: French armed forces cover the entire spectrum of military ability from Dirty Cowards to rock-hard badasses, with the levels of competence and cowardice changing between different branches of the military, different divisions, different batallions, and sometimes even different platoons.
- Averted:
- The French are just as tough as everyone else.
- No French characters are in the work.
- Enforced:
- The executives are not fans of the French.
- It's a national stereotype joke that has been going since at least World War II and still hasn't gotten the "social justice" treatment yet, so why stop now?
- Lampshaded: "Why does France even HAVE armed forces if they suck so much?"
- Invoked: The Powers That Be make sure that the French are low on fighting spirit and will likely surrender if someone attacks them.
- Exploited: An Evil Overlord invades France before any other country, hoping that the French will surrender easily and he'll have a country to continue his campaign from.
- Defied:
- A French character realizes that the French are about to retreat, and gives a Rousing Speech to remind their co-nationals that they are the heirs to the legacy of Napoléon Bonaparte.
- "Nous ne pas se rendre, Nous sommes français, nous nous sommes rendus bien trop de fois!" note
- Combined with Parodied: Any character who attempts to make the joke about the French surrendering is invariably Killed Mid-Sentence by a machine gun burst (or at least has it pass uncomfortably close as a warning shot), and then the camera pans over to display a network of trenches, MG nests, and barbed wire with irate French soldiers peeking over the top, that always stretches from the camera to the horizon and disappears just as quickly with another pan of the camera.
- Discussed: "Ever heard of Napoleon, bub?"
- Conversed: "Why are the French always wimps in fiction?"
- Implied: Some characters mention how quickly the French surrendered, but it's never elaborated on.
- Deconstructed:
- Just like in the main real-life example of this trope, the French surrender because the incompetence of their commanders combined with the overwhelming force of their enemies meant they basically lost the war in just a few weeks, and they prefer to surrender, live, and hold out hope to fight another day rather than get wiped out completely.
- Someone cracks a joke about this while a Frenchman/Frenchwoman is in earshot, and he/she goes on a long rant about how nobody remembers any of the many wars France won, just the one time it lost miserably.
- France wants to Defy this trope at all costs and ends up making a Last Stand that gets the country torn apart with horrifying results and untold numbers of dead French people.
- Reconstructed:
- The French commanders who screwed up are replaced, but their successors aren't appreciably better or simply don't learn the lessons from last time.
- The country's culture has changed in-story to eschew military readiness, so this trope would come into effect today, which this Frenchman/Frenchwoman doesn't know or has overlooked.
- France has a nuclear arsenal and is not afraid of using it. Instead of surrendering, they take down their attackers with them.
- It's been 70+ years since WW2, and the modern French military, both soldiers and leadership, is vastly different and more competent, and modern French troops are perfectly capable of fighting, if not better than average.
- Plotted a Good Waste: The audience is led to believe this trope is in effect when the French surrender ... and then it is revealed that it only happened because of enemy spies putting all their effort into it, some of whom were presented as allies to the heroes up until that point.
- Played for Laughs: The French marching band tries to surrender when entered in an international competition of army bands. It doesn't work.
- Played for Drama:
- The main character is a French soldier who doesn't want to surrender, and his desperate attempts at fighting the enemy are juxtaposed against the defeatism of his comrades.
- A French soldier is so enraged by the joke that he shoots the insulter on the spot.
- Played for Horror: The French army's surrender leads to France becoming Hell on Earth and the stuff of nightmares.
Nous battons en retraite vers la version intégrale!note
