The Austro-Prussian War would prove to be the last of the Iron Chancellor’s ‘great successes.’
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The year is 1903, 32 years after the conflict that shaped the European Continent. The Kingdom of Prussia, so confident after her successful wars against Austria and Denmark, manipulated the French Republic into a declaration of war. With the North German Confederation at her back, the Prussians marched off in honour and glory, to solidify the unity of the German people and carve their long deserved place in the sun: the time of France’s dominance would come to an end.
The French Republic, jacobin and ferocious, heir to the revolution, did not succumb to the quick victory that the Prussians had envisioned. Through Belgium, a French territory, did the Grand Army of the Republic lay siege to Cologne and best the Imperial Army on the relief at Bonn. Helmuth Von Moltke lay dead, the German Confederation in confusion and the Southern Germans suing for peace.
Europe has remained in the ‘MacMahon Peace’ ever since, German plans of unification shattered as the French Republic proclaimed hegemony over the continent.
The Americas see a giant in the South, as the Empire of Brazil - the so called ‘Portuguese Empire’ - looms over the affairs of her northern sister continent, the self proclaimed ‘Guardian of the Free Peoples of the Americas’. Britain and France remain stalwart, their possession on the continent secured by their navies - and British politicking has kept the Thirteen Colonies, once on the cusp of unity, at a hateful bicker ever since the failures of the Articles of Confederation.
The Orient, once a land of Confucian Tranquility where all nations bowed to the Middle Kingdom, lays in chaos. Japan, a feudal backwater all but forty years ago, rose in the fires of nationalism and European desires to reinstate their Emperor - until his authoritarian nature saw the Japanese turn against him, too, and proclaimed a republic in the name of ‘Jiyū, byōdō, yūai’, much as the French had done. Now the relentless ambitions of the Island Republic see it meddle in the affairs of the dying Qing Empire, but their mettle may well be tested by the Russian Empire.
The Ottoman Empire, subject to the carvings of numerous powers and national uprisings, sees itself as a husk of its former self. To the east, Persia encroaches across Mesopotamia while Greeks and Armenians have, under Russian auspices, declared their own Pontic State. To the south, the Egyptians have risen against them and claimed their southern territories, though French and British ambitions threaten their own control of the Nile. And now from within do the fires of republicanism burn, for ‘The Young Turks’ desire the reforms that the French instituted all but over 100 years ago.
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