The Kingdom of France [AMW]
Posted: Thu May 16, 2013 11:21 pmLe Royaume de France {‘Ceremonial’ counties of England, Wales}
Motto: Montjoie Saint Denis!
Anthem (de jure): None
Anthem (de facto): Vive le Roi!*
Population: 43,121,031
Capital: Château de Versailles, Versailles (St. Albans)
Largest City: Londres
Official Religion: Roman Catholicism
-Religious freedom for ‘minority’ religions was granted by King Louis XIV in 1969 in the Edict of Versailles
Patron Saint: Saint Denis
Languages: French (official), Welsh, Breton, Valendian, several Congolese dialects (Londres)
Currency: [₣] la Livre française**
Government: Absolute Monarchy (House of Bourbon)
King—
-1215: Henri I ‘the Well-Beloved’
-2001 to Current: Louis XVI***
Chancellor: Charles Alexandre, vicomte de Calonne
Legislature—
Estates General (dissolved in 1801), tricameral legislature with votes counted by house rather than by members
First Estate – Catholic Clergy
Second Estate – Aristocracy
Third Estate – Commons (both urban businessmen and rural gentlemen)
GDP 2012 estimate
- Total $1.014 trillion
- Per capita $15,489
Drives on the right
Calling code: +33
Internet TLD: .fr
Synopsis:
The Realm: The Kingdom of France is in 2013 still largely rural, at least by European standards. Over one half on the population lives in the well-populated and neatly ordered countryside, famous the world over for its mild climate and fertility. It is by no means a stretch of the imagination to call France a ‘green and pleasant land’, like a garden it is watered by frequent showers and boasts soil as rich and moist as gâteau au chocolat. French cheese, milk products, beer, wheat flour, and produce are greedily consumed domestically and prized throughout Europe for their quality. Market villages and small towns sprout out among the endless stretches of tidy farms and green forests, always with their parish church or perhaps monastery…connected haphazardly by roads and railways drawn up by bureaucrats who earned their position by birth rather than by merit. Despite the inefficient way into which the realm’s transportation network was planned, France is legendary for the trains, at least, ‘running on time’.
If a backpacker were to hike across the width and breadth of the realm they’d encounter everything from a plump farmer—usually gregarious, eager to lean over a hedge and chat as a gitane hung from his mouth—to country gentry ahorse and hunting, to school children at sports, to a shepherd leading his flock across a damp lane; they might also encounter a travelling friar as he waddled along, preaching the goodness of Rome and King Louis as he filched apples from a low-hanging branch.
Cities are the exception rather than the rule, and negate the pleasant tableau a visitor might get from strolling through rural France: the largest of these (save the capitol) would be the grim urban sprawl of Neuchâtel (Birmingham), the kingdom’s industrial center and Londres, capital of the realm in all but name. Neuchâtel thrives from the coal and iron brought in by rail from le Pays de Galles (Wales), and is the realms leading site of heavy industry. Its population of some five million lives and work amid startling inefficiencies. With trade unions never legalized in France the workers are often at odds with the bourgeois managers and factory owners, who are in turn at odds with the aristocrats in charge of the whole disorganized affair. The crown is interested in profit before environmentalism, so in addition to the haphazard nature of production in Neuchâtel pollution is rampant and working conditions range from modern to primeval, it all depends on whether one works in an air-conditioned office tower on company accounts or in a factory…where recalcitrant workers often get a good hiding for stirring up their compatriots or slacking off.
Londres is the most modern city in France, and indeed contains dozens of arrondissements or districts. It is denotatively cosmopolitan, with significant populations of both Congolese and Shieldian expatriates. Although there is industry in Londres, the city is not dominated by it as is Neuchâtel, for Londres is also the realms commercial, financial, and cultural capital, housing both the kingdom’s richest and poorest denizens. The legendary First Arrondissement, site of the ancient medieval city of Londres, is also the location of the infamous Bastille Prison (Tower of London), the notorious prison where political criminals and other victims of His Majesty’s displeasure…often his own family members…find themselves lodged.
The People: Politically France remains a classic example of absolute monarchy, with the realm (in theory) under the total control of the Bourbon monarchs, presently, Louis XVI. The monarchy used the Glorious Revolution in neighboring Valendia, which shares a common history and in many respects culture with France, as a pretext to dissolve the realm’s semi-legislative body, the Estates General. Although it was a weak form of parliament, it had on occasion threatened the direct rule of the Bourbons, so it was with some pleasure that in 1801 King Louis X dismissed the institution. From then on the kings have ruled France alone, using local agents, Intendants, to enforce their will. The symbol of French royal absolutism is the magnificent Château de Versailles, built over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Situated outside of the town of the same name, the palace complex comprises hundreds of hectares of palaces, parks, gardens, artificial rivers, and symmetrical forests—although the Grand Château itself is what comes to mind when most people think of Versailles. It was begun by Louis IX as a way for the monarchy to escape ‘the mob’ in Londres, but major construction was formally begun by Louis X, who wished to make a statement about royal power after he had done away with the Estates General.
Taken as a whole the kings of France have always been fairly popular, although some individual monarchs have been popular to lesser or greater degrees. This dynamic has been slowly changing, however, as the urban poor blame the Bourbons for royal l’aissez faire economics and their overt penchant for luxury. Liberal sons and daughters of the aristocracy, however, some even from the realm’s most prestigious families, constitute the greatest collective force of royal dislike—they feel France should have never lost the Estates General, and it has become somewhat fashionable to criticize the monarchy in some Londres salons. King Louis XVI, following twitter ‘flash-mob’ riots in Londres during the summer of 2012 (which themselves followed the Revolution in the Shield), even had his own cousin Philippe cast into the Bastille—as president of France’s largest telecommunications company (and as a marked liberal) Philippe refused to shut down the network at the king’s request, and paid the price.
Nonetheless the absolute monarchy remains popular in the countryside among the real Frenchmen, as they’d style themselves. The people of France, by and large, though not materially rich, are fairly comfortable, and hesitant to change the status quo, especially after the traumatic events in the Shield. However, the younger generation may have different views, and as the prevalence of smart phones, high speed internet, and in general social media has creeped across the realm progressive ideas have travelled alongside.
Beneath the king exists the Church and aristocracy. France, next to Rome, remains the most devoutly Catholic country in Europe. Despite limited religious freedoms granted by Louis XIV, most Protestants or other minority religions are restricted to Londres; besides, local aristocrats still have the power to enforce Catholic religious worship. One notoriously devout matron, the Comtesse de Corton, regularly has the local police round up stragglers for Sunday Mass. The clergy has traditionally been a way for ambitious sons and daughters of the lower classes to gain political power and material comfort, and so, rather ironically, having gained it ‘with the cloth’, they become among the most devoted adherents of France’s political system. The French institution of kingship is inextricably linked to the First Estate, the Catholic Church, and has become over the centuries the largest private landowning entity in France. The primate of France in the Archbishop of Canterburé, who resides officially in Londres at the Lambette Palace, but who is enthroned at Canturburé Cathedral.
The Second Estate, the aristocracy, in reality comprises a vast number of social strata in France. An aristocrat might be a duc, a “Noble of the Sword” (noblesse d'épée), a member of the traditional or old nobility that wields great influence at the Royal Court and who maintains rooms at Versailles, several châteaux in the provinces, and a town house in the fashionable Third Arrondissement (Mayfair) of Londres. An aristocrat might also be a “Conciliar Noble” (noblesse de chancellerie), as is the case with the majority of Intendants, who earn their title through civil service to the king. Nobility can also be earned through military service (noblesse militaire), through distinguished service in the legal profession—specially, as judges who sit on the king’s bench and render favorable verdicts—(noblesse de robe), and even through a specific desire of the king of the royal family, (noblesse de lettres). However, the vast majority of France’s aristocracy, the basic “lords”, seigneurs, are little more than country gentry who, if they are lucky, have a decent château in their fief and a flat in Londres and are not in debt to a local banker or behind in their credit card payments. In any case, all these types of nobles really have in common is the right, as the formula goes, to “a coat-of-arms, a sword, and their own good name.”
The commoners of France, traditionally the Third Estate, are even a more diverse group than the churchmen/woman and aristocrats. There exists in Londres a typical office worker, say in a bank or other commercial firm, who takes lunches in the cafes and receives a month vacation per year, who would be indistinguishable from their counterpart in Valendia or Nibelunc, or even Walmington. A French farmer might even be considered to have a decent lot (good clothes, plenty of good food, livestock, access to modern medicine) but his difference to an English contemporary would become obvious when one examined his low level of tangible money, his dependence on and deference to the local seigneur, the miniscule prospect of improving his condition, and the fact he had never voted in his entire life. A tenant farmer would have a position lower again and of greater—near total—dependence on the seigneur. An undignified if lucrative position for (attractive) commoners is to find a position in service. Although modern conveniences have made large domestic staffs redundant, in houses of quality aristocrats of means always maintain large numbers of servants. Yet the prospect of having to wear a livery, of having to be at the beck and call of some titled fop, and of facing a real chance to be physically or sexually abused make a career in service fairly undesirable.
In Neuchâtel one might encounter a businessman several times wealthier than a genteel provincial, perhaps a multi-millionaire, who nonetheless was restricted from expanding his business or conducting a merger until he had groveled to a functionary at the Court in Versailles far less intelligent and far more arrogant than he; additionally, he had no say whatsoever in governmental policy, always a hard blow for the entrepreneurial breed.
Then one might examine the factory workers, born with no land to work and no seigneur to take them on, the urban poor have certainly been dealt the most wretched lot in France. They work a varying schedule that remains forever grueling, yet capricious. Their bourgeois employer cares little for them, the aristocracy less. However they don’t tend to turn the Church for succor, their glimpses of articles on science and atheism in an internet bar they can ill afford make them likely to blame the political system and not original sin for their ills. Yet when someone tries to organize the workers, or complain to management, then comes an episode where they ‘slipped on the way home from work’, and return to work the next day bruised and sullen.
To be sure, state welfare efforts under the reigns of Louis XV (1995-2001) and the current king Louis XVI have seen the plight of the industrial poor and the unemployed…a number that has risen as the population of France has risen…somewhat improve. Starvation and basic, basic, basic medical care are no longer fundamental worries. However, ironically, the increase of the dole has driven the king’s government to its spending limit. The present Controller-General of Finances, Archbishop Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, has forecasted that His Majesty’s government will have to raise taxes significantly by fiscal year 2015 or risk serious inflation. This will force the king, unless something miraculous happens, to tax the Church and aristocracy, and to do this without risking serious consequences he will have to convene the Estates General. A troublesome prospect to say the least.
Lastly, to add insult to injury (sometimes, literally) members of the Third Estates, or ‘commoners’ are subject still to a notable medieval law in France, the corvée. This requires any commoner to perform free services for the king upon his request, and is broad enough to cover everything from military service to computer programming. A businessman might be forced to work, for free, on assisting the king’s government in settling up an efficient export dynamic where as a factory worker or farm hand might be drafted to help in the road repairs or (perhaps more pleasantly) horticulture in Madame Royal's apple orchards.
*”Long live the King”, set to “God save the King/Queen”, I will write up some French lyrics when I get time.
**’The French Pound”, n.b. it is worth noting last time around as a ‘France’ people thought livres meant ‘books’, which they do, but it also was the unit of currency in Ancien Regime France. Difference being, the money is feminine where as books are masculine. Don’t ask me why.
***Seen in this picture with Queen Elizabeth de Callahan (left) and Madame Royale Josephine-Henriette, the king’s only sister (right)
Motto: Montjoie Saint Denis!
Anthem (de jure): None
Anthem (de facto): Vive le Roi!*
Population: 43,121,031
Capital: Château de Versailles, Versailles (St. Albans)
Largest City: Londres
Official Religion: Roman Catholicism
-Religious freedom for ‘minority’ religions was granted by King Louis XIV in 1969 in the Edict of Versailles
Patron Saint: Saint Denis
Languages: French (official), Welsh, Breton, Valendian, several Congolese dialects (Londres)
Currency: [₣] la Livre française**
Government: Absolute Monarchy (House of Bourbon)
King—
-1215: Henri I ‘the Well-Beloved’
-2001 to Current: Louis XVI***
Chancellor: Charles Alexandre, vicomte de Calonne
Legislature—
Estates General (dissolved in 1801), tricameral legislature with votes counted by house rather than by members
First Estate – Catholic Clergy
Second Estate – Aristocracy
Third Estate – Commons (both urban businessmen and rural gentlemen)
GDP 2012 estimate
- Total $1.014 trillion
- Per capita $15,489
Drives on the right
Calling code: +33
Internet TLD: .fr
Synopsis:
The Realm: The Kingdom of France is in 2013 still largely rural, at least by European standards. Over one half on the population lives in the well-populated and neatly ordered countryside, famous the world over for its mild climate and fertility. It is by no means a stretch of the imagination to call France a ‘green and pleasant land’, like a garden it is watered by frequent showers and boasts soil as rich and moist as gâteau au chocolat. French cheese, milk products, beer, wheat flour, and produce are greedily consumed domestically and prized throughout Europe for their quality. Market villages and small towns sprout out among the endless stretches of tidy farms and green forests, always with their parish church or perhaps monastery…connected haphazardly by roads and railways drawn up by bureaucrats who earned their position by birth rather than by merit. Despite the inefficient way into which the realm’s transportation network was planned, France is legendary for the trains, at least, ‘running on time’.
If a backpacker were to hike across the width and breadth of the realm they’d encounter everything from a plump farmer—usually gregarious, eager to lean over a hedge and chat as a gitane hung from his mouth—to country gentry ahorse and hunting, to school children at sports, to a shepherd leading his flock across a damp lane; they might also encounter a travelling friar as he waddled along, preaching the goodness of Rome and King Louis as he filched apples from a low-hanging branch.
Cities are the exception rather than the rule, and negate the pleasant tableau a visitor might get from strolling through rural France: the largest of these (save the capitol) would be the grim urban sprawl of Neuchâtel (Birmingham), the kingdom’s industrial center and Londres, capital of the realm in all but name. Neuchâtel thrives from the coal and iron brought in by rail from le Pays de Galles (Wales), and is the realms leading site of heavy industry. Its population of some five million lives and work amid startling inefficiencies. With trade unions never legalized in France the workers are often at odds with the bourgeois managers and factory owners, who are in turn at odds with the aristocrats in charge of the whole disorganized affair. The crown is interested in profit before environmentalism, so in addition to the haphazard nature of production in Neuchâtel pollution is rampant and working conditions range from modern to primeval, it all depends on whether one works in an air-conditioned office tower on company accounts or in a factory…where recalcitrant workers often get a good hiding for stirring up their compatriots or slacking off.
Londres is the most modern city in France, and indeed contains dozens of arrondissements or districts. It is denotatively cosmopolitan, with significant populations of both Congolese and Shieldian expatriates. Although there is industry in Londres, the city is not dominated by it as is Neuchâtel, for Londres is also the realms commercial, financial, and cultural capital, housing both the kingdom’s richest and poorest denizens. The legendary First Arrondissement, site of the ancient medieval city of Londres, is also the location of the infamous Bastille Prison (Tower of London), the notorious prison where political criminals and other victims of His Majesty’s displeasure…often his own family members…find themselves lodged.
The People: Politically France remains a classic example of absolute monarchy, with the realm (in theory) under the total control of the Bourbon monarchs, presently, Louis XVI. The monarchy used the Glorious Revolution in neighboring Valendia, which shares a common history and in many respects culture with France, as a pretext to dissolve the realm’s semi-legislative body, the Estates General. Although it was a weak form of parliament, it had on occasion threatened the direct rule of the Bourbons, so it was with some pleasure that in 1801 King Louis X dismissed the institution. From then on the kings have ruled France alone, using local agents, Intendants, to enforce their will. The symbol of French royal absolutism is the magnificent Château de Versailles, built over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Situated outside of the town of the same name, the palace complex comprises hundreds of hectares of palaces, parks, gardens, artificial rivers, and symmetrical forests—although the Grand Château itself is what comes to mind when most people think of Versailles. It was begun by Louis IX as a way for the monarchy to escape ‘the mob’ in Londres, but major construction was formally begun by Louis X, who wished to make a statement about royal power after he had done away with the Estates General.
Taken as a whole the kings of France have always been fairly popular, although some individual monarchs have been popular to lesser or greater degrees. This dynamic has been slowly changing, however, as the urban poor blame the Bourbons for royal l’aissez faire economics and their overt penchant for luxury. Liberal sons and daughters of the aristocracy, however, some even from the realm’s most prestigious families, constitute the greatest collective force of royal dislike—they feel France should have never lost the Estates General, and it has become somewhat fashionable to criticize the monarchy in some Londres salons. King Louis XVI, following twitter ‘flash-mob’ riots in Londres during the summer of 2012 (which themselves followed the Revolution in the Shield), even had his own cousin Philippe cast into the Bastille—as president of France’s largest telecommunications company (and as a marked liberal) Philippe refused to shut down the network at the king’s request, and paid the price.
Nonetheless the absolute monarchy remains popular in the countryside among the real Frenchmen, as they’d style themselves. The people of France, by and large, though not materially rich, are fairly comfortable, and hesitant to change the status quo, especially after the traumatic events in the Shield. However, the younger generation may have different views, and as the prevalence of smart phones, high speed internet, and in general social media has creeped across the realm progressive ideas have travelled alongside.
Beneath the king exists the Church and aristocracy. France, next to Rome, remains the most devoutly Catholic country in Europe. Despite limited religious freedoms granted by Louis XIV, most Protestants or other minority religions are restricted to Londres; besides, local aristocrats still have the power to enforce Catholic religious worship. One notoriously devout matron, the Comtesse de Corton, regularly has the local police round up stragglers for Sunday Mass. The clergy has traditionally been a way for ambitious sons and daughters of the lower classes to gain political power and material comfort, and so, rather ironically, having gained it ‘with the cloth’, they become among the most devoted adherents of France’s political system. The French institution of kingship is inextricably linked to the First Estate, the Catholic Church, and has become over the centuries the largest private landowning entity in France. The primate of France in the Archbishop of Canterburé, who resides officially in Londres at the Lambette Palace, but who is enthroned at Canturburé Cathedral.
The Second Estate, the aristocracy, in reality comprises a vast number of social strata in France. An aristocrat might be a duc, a “Noble of the Sword” (noblesse d'épée), a member of the traditional or old nobility that wields great influence at the Royal Court and who maintains rooms at Versailles, several châteaux in the provinces, and a town house in the fashionable Third Arrondissement (Mayfair) of Londres. An aristocrat might also be a “Conciliar Noble” (noblesse de chancellerie), as is the case with the majority of Intendants, who earn their title through civil service to the king. Nobility can also be earned through military service (noblesse militaire), through distinguished service in the legal profession—specially, as judges who sit on the king’s bench and render favorable verdicts—(noblesse de robe), and even through a specific desire of the king of the royal family, (noblesse de lettres). However, the vast majority of France’s aristocracy, the basic “lords”, seigneurs, are little more than country gentry who, if they are lucky, have a decent château in their fief and a flat in Londres and are not in debt to a local banker or behind in their credit card payments. In any case, all these types of nobles really have in common is the right, as the formula goes, to “a coat-of-arms, a sword, and their own good name.”
The commoners of France, traditionally the Third Estate, are even a more diverse group than the churchmen/woman and aristocrats. There exists in Londres a typical office worker, say in a bank or other commercial firm, who takes lunches in the cafes and receives a month vacation per year, who would be indistinguishable from their counterpart in Valendia or Nibelunc, or even Walmington. A French farmer might even be considered to have a decent lot (good clothes, plenty of good food, livestock, access to modern medicine) but his difference to an English contemporary would become obvious when one examined his low level of tangible money, his dependence on and deference to the local seigneur, the miniscule prospect of improving his condition, and the fact he had never voted in his entire life. A tenant farmer would have a position lower again and of greater—near total—dependence on the seigneur. An undignified if lucrative position for (attractive) commoners is to find a position in service. Although modern conveniences have made large domestic staffs redundant, in houses of quality aristocrats of means always maintain large numbers of servants. Yet the prospect of having to wear a livery, of having to be at the beck and call of some titled fop, and of facing a real chance to be physically or sexually abused make a career in service fairly undesirable.
In Neuchâtel one might encounter a businessman several times wealthier than a genteel provincial, perhaps a multi-millionaire, who nonetheless was restricted from expanding his business or conducting a merger until he had groveled to a functionary at the Court in Versailles far less intelligent and far more arrogant than he; additionally, he had no say whatsoever in governmental policy, always a hard blow for the entrepreneurial breed.
Then one might examine the factory workers, born with no land to work and no seigneur to take them on, the urban poor have certainly been dealt the most wretched lot in France. They work a varying schedule that remains forever grueling, yet capricious. Their bourgeois employer cares little for them, the aristocracy less. However they don’t tend to turn the Church for succor, their glimpses of articles on science and atheism in an internet bar they can ill afford make them likely to blame the political system and not original sin for their ills. Yet when someone tries to organize the workers, or complain to management, then comes an episode where they ‘slipped on the way home from work’, and return to work the next day bruised and sullen.
To be sure, state welfare efforts under the reigns of Louis XV (1995-2001) and the current king Louis XVI have seen the plight of the industrial poor and the unemployed…a number that has risen as the population of France has risen…somewhat improve. Starvation and basic, basic, basic medical care are no longer fundamental worries. However, ironically, the increase of the dole has driven the king’s government to its spending limit. The present Controller-General of Finances, Archbishop Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, has forecasted that His Majesty’s government will have to raise taxes significantly by fiscal year 2015 or risk serious inflation. This will force the king, unless something miraculous happens, to tax the Church and aristocracy, and to do this without risking serious consequences he will have to convene the Estates General. A troublesome prospect to say the least.
Lastly, to add insult to injury (sometimes, literally) members of the Third Estates, or ‘commoners’ are subject still to a notable medieval law in France, the corvée. This requires any commoner to perform free services for the king upon his request, and is broad enough to cover everything from military service to computer programming. A businessman might be forced to work, for free, on assisting the king’s government in settling up an efficient export dynamic where as a factory worker or farm hand might be drafted to help in the road repairs or (perhaps more pleasantly) horticulture in Madame Royal's apple orchards.
*”Long live the King”, set to “God save the King/Queen”, I will write up some French lyrics when I get time.
**’The French Pound”, n.b. it is worth noting last time around as a ‘France’ people thought livres meant ‘books’, which they do, but it also was the unit of currency in Ancien Regime France. Difference being, the money is feminine where as books are masculine. Don’t ask me why.
***Seen in this picture with Queen Elizabeth de Callahan (left) and Madame Royale Josephine-Henriette, the king’s only sister (right)
