If you ever feel academic discussion has gotten polarised & politicised today, think back to the time Nicolas Fréret, an 18th-century French scholar, was thrown in the Bastille for several months for asserting the Franks to have been a Germanic tribe, and not adventuring Trojans. 
Clearly, philology was a slightly heftier topic back then.
Why yes gospodin komissar, my latest readings indicate the Rus were indeed in origin a Norse tribe from eastern Scandinavia, a fascina- wait, where are you taking me?
Nor did the issue go away soon after, though it morphed. The Franks had long been associated with the aristocracy (contrasted with the Roman/Gaulish peasantry).
Thus, come the French Revolution, even supposing the French to be descended from the Franks was politically unsavvy
Thus, come the French Revolution, even supposing the French to be descended from the Franks was politically unsavvy
This part is particularly amusing - come the 19th century and the advent of scientific racialism, and you get French republicans and royalists smearing each other with insults of portraying the Gauls and Franks as respectively dull and placid and savage and war-like.
There's something surreally hilarious and indescribably 19th-century about feuding academics boiling down the French Revolution to a conflict between different cranial-shapes.
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