Both the Danube and the Rivers marked the northern frontiers of the Roman Empire the fifth century, while the former continued, at least intermittently, to be the European border of the "Byzantine" Empire.
After the fall of the Western Empire, both banks of the Rhine became the domain of speakers of Germanic languages and dialects. In the early modern era, the increasingly centralized French Kingdom attempted to expand towards the Rhine, especially under Louis XIV, in order to break the Hapsburg encirclement and give a larger buffer to Paris. During the French Revolution, the concept of the "natural borders of France" (those being the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees) was formally developed and achieved until Napoleon's defeat (he even had been offered to keep everything west of the Rhine before the defeat that preceded his first abdication).
Notwithstanding French ambitions, some brought opposite arguments:
From The Nation (New York), an argument in 1870 that rivers can never form "natural" boundaries between nations:
>NATURAL BOUNDARIES
By Michael Heilprin
(September 1, 1870)
When the power of Napoleon I was rapidly crumbling away after the crushing defeat at Leipzig, the allies, halting at Frankfort before entering upon the last campaign, offered him, for peace, the undisturbed possession of France, with her limits extended east to the banks of the Rhine. The France thus offered him would have been almost coextensive with ancient Gaul, which was bounded by the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, and would have embraced, besides the French Empire as it now is, the whole of Belgium, portions of the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Rhenish Prussia, Hesse, and Bavaria. Napoleon, in his unreasonable pride, spurned these terms of peace, and when, a few months later, he presented them as his own to the Peace Conference at Chatillon, they were rejected by the allies. Napoleon fell, and the kingdom of the Bourbons was ultimately reconstructed as it had been before the wars of the Revolution. But since that time France has not ceased dreaming and talking of her natural boundaries β the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine. And this has not been the idle dream and idle talk of popular vanity and demagogism merely; statesmen, historians, publicists, and poets have vied with each other in making France believe that she had a natural right to all the lands west o
Itβs something that I never really thought about before. Shouldnβt they have spoken some language derived from proto-Germanic? Furthermore, if they originally migrated from the lower Rhine, does that mean they have more in common (in terms of recent ancestry) with Germanic groups than they do with the Gauls?
Both the Danube and the Rivers marked the northern frontiers of the Roman Empire the fifth century, while the former continued, at least intermittently, to be the European border of the "Byzantine" Empire.
After the fall of the Western Empire, both banks of the Rhine became the domain of speakers of Germanic languages and dialects. In the early modern era, the increasingly centralized French Kingdom attempted to expand towards the Rhine, especially under Louis XIV, in order to break the Hapsburg encirclement and give a larger buffer to Paris. During the French Revolution, the concept of the "natural borders of France" (those being the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees) was formally developed and achieved until Napoleon's defeat (he even had been offered to keep everything west of the Rhine before the defeat that preceded his first abdication).
Notwithstanding French ambitions, some brought opposite arguments:
From The Nation (New York), an argument in 1870 that rivers can never form "natural" boundaries between nations:
>NATURAL BOUNDARIES
>
>By Michael Heilprin
>
>(September 1, 1870)
>
>When the power of Napoleon I was rapidly crumbling away after the crushing defeat at Leipzig, the allies, halting at Frankfort before entering upon the last campaign, offered him, for peace, the undisturbed possession of France, with her limits extended east to the banks of the Rhine. The France thus offered him would have been almost coextensive with ancient Gaul, which was bounded by the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, and would have embraced, besides the French Empire as it now is, the whole of Belgium, portions of the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Rhenish Prussia, Hesse, and Bavaria. Napoleon, in his unreasonable pride, spurned these terms of peace, and when, a few months later, he presented them as his own to the Peace Conference at Chatillon, they were rejected by the allies. Napoleon fell, and the kingdom of the Bourbons was ultimately reconstructed as it had been before the wars of the Revolution. But since that time France has not ceased dreaming and talking of her natural boundaries β the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine. And this has not been the idle dream and idle talk of popular vanity and demagogism merely; statesmen, historians, publicists, and poets have vied with each other in making France believe that she had a nat
