Yes, I was laughing when they talked about the need for a miracle to beat the British - the French led by a military genius and soldiers that had conquered all of Europe in the previous 20 years.
It's funny because just this morning I was listening to a guy on RU-vid reading diaries of soldiers during the Napoleonic wars and it was brutal. They said things like "a cannonball flew by my head and too the head off the guy next to me clean off his shoulders" or "the poor French lad took a cannonball straight through his chest causing the coins in his pocket to melt with his armour". A bunch of guys losing arms and legs to cannonball hits but you just have to ignore that and keep marching forward. Some russian soldier wrote that the French soldiers they captured were laughing and them saying they would soon become prisoners too because there was nothing that could stop Napoleon marching on Moscow and even the Russians said they believed he was invincible.
The worst ennemies the best allies and the funniest actors .. thanks blackadder for this contribution to the "Entente Cordiale" our two people should maintain
I think Blackadder, though "comedy", is closer to real history than historians would care to admit. The ruling aristocracies were dull dimwitted dunces who caused has much death and misery through stupidity and ignorance, as they did through evil intent. Of course, to the lower classes who suffered, they could not tell the difference. Not that it mattered.
Blackadder was absolutely brilliant, especially seasons 2 and 4. A bit of trivia, Brigadier Kenneth Gault Blackader commanded the 8th Brigade 3rd Canadian Division at Juno Beach on D-Day. Too bad his first name wasn't Edmund
@@Codex7777 I always loved 4 best. Yeah it was a little more Gallows humor in the face of honest horror, but I think that made it a little more poignant.
@5:38 For those with a sharp ear: the melody of “God Save the Czar” is intoned during the final few seconds when Blackadder wishes the Duke of Wellington good luck before the Battle of Waterloo.
It is remarkable that after the French victory at Waterloo, the English continued to speak English in the 20th century while their money is the franc. As a french I appreciate a lot english humour, especially BlackAdder.
Imagine an entire Series 'Allo, Allons-y' Where the only accent worse than the deliberately bad "French" spoken by the locals, was the French attempted by any British airmen - and the gendarme, unsubtly "undercover"
As we all know everybody in Europe only speaks English but with an accent. So those in France speak it with a French accent, in Germany with a German accent and so on. I know this because I saw it in a historical documentary called "Allo Allo". So it only makes sense that they'd continue to speak English with English accents while in England. I mean DUH! /s
Changing the money is much easier than changing the language and culture of an entire nation. Without some sort of autonomy the English would have propably rebelled a lot. Though I'd like to imagine if Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo he would have rather tried to split up the UK into smaller chunks like England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and have control over them as vassal states. He basically did the same with his other conquests.
Always loved these lines from Blackadder, From Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie: - Glaze my nipples and call me Rita - Spank me hard and call me Carla - Cover me with eggs and flour and bake me for forty minutes 😂
@@timothylyons5686are you…possibly not aware of this absolute gem: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Do-wDPoC6GM.htmlsi=mA_IHwlX0mCHbTzD
It shows Rowan's talent. His character of Mr. Bean annoyed me no end. But loved him as Blackadder. So funny and evil at the same time. The supporting cast was also great.
Black Adder S2 & S4 were the best. I still love watching it. I think this is from a short film made for the Millennium Dome 10 years after the series finished. I remember not being so impressed with it at the time, compared to the actual TV series, but it's nice to see it again. There was talk of them bringing it back but Baldrick is 76, so they'd better hurry up with that. 😅
I wish he'd do more stuff like this in stead of Mr. Bean lookalikes. Don't get me wrong. His physical humour is amazing, and I wouldn't want him to stop.... but some Blackadder lookalikes would be great too.
Actually winning at Waterloo would have at max saved Napoleon 1 more month before being defeated in a battle similar to Leipzig, fighting over 500k of russians and austrians with incredible numerical advantage.
1:30 imagine if this was the real personality and mannerisms of Napoleon and his generals, but still defeats the Russian, Austrian, and Holy Roman Empire in a single battle lmao jokes aside Napoleon is one of very, very few examples of great men in history who's ambition alone changed the world forever. Even with Alexander the Great, the conquest of the Persian Empire was already planned by his father Phillip, but without Napoleon there is no French Empire or Napoleonic Wars.. Napoleon Bonaparte fundamentally altered the course od human history and no other person could have filled his role
I don’t know what you mean here. Without the French Revolution, there would be no ‘Napoleonic’ Wars. The First Coalition was organized against Revolutionary France, because they threatened the established monarchies in Europe. Whether or not France would have succeeded without Napoleon is impossible to predict, but he wasn’t the sole origin of everything. No ruler is. And France’s status as a powerful imperial force was already cemented with Louis XIV, who Napoleon admired.
So... I'm not a native speaker, so I'm unsure if the joke is so obvious that nobody mentions it or if the joke is so obscure that nobody clocked it... but anyways: One of the items they made the bet on were ... the wellies of Wellington?!?
I kind of feel that the French winning the battle of Waterloo is kind of like the Germans winning the battle of the Bulge or the Oder Vistula offensive against the soviets in January 1945.
Why not ? The French abolished 10 forms of government from 1814 to 1958 : empire 1814, monarchy 1815, empire 1815, monarchy 1830, parliamentary monarchy 1848, republic 1852, empire 1871, republic 1940, nationalist state 1944, parliamentary republic 1958 It's rater calming down, now it's just leftist plus rightist holding half of the Assembly.
@@jshadowhunter I don't think so. The main discovery of revolution was that individuals were citizens, able to take part in the collective political decisions. Even Napoleon, who put in place an authoritarian regime due to the inefficiency of republican regime, had to cope with this and trade personal power against equal opportunity. All successive changes in political regime were due to this struggle between government by the elite - whoever it was - and government by the citizens. Napoleon was both a decisive factor to resist monarchies, and one actor amongst others in an evolution to representative democracy without nobility, predating him by one century (Enlightment philosophers).
