France and The Low Countries
From the middle of the 19th century until 1914 the fortress city of Antwerp was the official National Redoubt of Antwerp in Belgium, and until 1940, the "Fortress Holland" was that of the Netherlands, although in neither case did the "redoubt" prove defensible — even though the same area of Holland proper did manage to stop the advances of the French troops in the Rampjaar 1672, providing the Dutch with much-needed time to eventually gain the upper hand. In 1940 Brittany was briefly considered as such in the last stages of the Fall of France, but again proved impractical.
Read more about this topic: National Redoubt
Famous quotes containing the words france and/or countries:
“It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world—and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish—she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)