by Alt Div Admin » Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:31 am
1906 : Alternative Divergence OOC THREAD 
Hello and welcome to Another Alternative Divergence, an AH/AW RP where the world is your oyster to do whatever you wish. For the sake of continuity, the time now is 1906 C.E., and nations are teetering on the edge of a world war. What would be your vision of a world shaped by the nation that you call your own? Again, for the sake of continuity, we should set a few ground rules.
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by Alt Div Admin » Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:31 am
by Alt Div Admin » Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:31 am
Announcements Date:27.03.2020 Announcements from AltDiv Development Welcome! Main OP
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by Tracian Empire » Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:36 am
by The Hobbesian Metaphysician » Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:37 am
by Reverend Norv » Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:39 am
by Oscalantine » Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:17 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Hooray!
Looking at the map, it is interesting how Burma seems to be emerging as a borderland between French/Mughal India and the Korean Empire. That will be an interesting pick for someone seeking a smaller nation, down the road.
by Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States » Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:22 am
by Remnants of Exilvania » Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:32 am
by Axis Asteroid » Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:54 am
Oscalantine wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:Hooray!
Looking at the map, it is interesting how Burma seems to be emerging as a borderland between French/Mughal India and the Korean Empire. That will be an interesting pick for someone seeking a smaller nation, down the road.
For the record, Korea is mostly maritime empire, with difficulties staging wars on especially jungles. I do not foresee Korean aggression to interior of Burma and, if anything, rule over what Koreans call "Independent District of Siam" are as loosely governed as Indirect Rule was in our timeline. I cannot imagine Korea mobilizing for the sake of Burma no matter how much resources are there.
Having said that... coastlines may be of interest to connect to maritime trades to India. Will ponder that in the future XDD
Reservation
Nation Name: Heavenly Kingdom of Transcendent Peace (太平天囯)
Territory: See Map
#AltDiv (do not delete this, it's for keeping track of the apps)
*Note: Reservations will last for 72 hours. The OP board reserves the right to be subjective in regards to accepting reservations.
by Intermountain States » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:09 am
by Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:10 am
by Tracian Empire » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:19 am
Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States wrote:Reservation
Nation Name: Kingdom of Angelond
Territory: British Isles, Cuba, Guyana, Southern Argentina, The Gold Coast, Horn of Africa, Yemen, Oman, Sri Lanka, what remains of Indonesia, the City of Antwerp.
#AltDiv (do not delete this, it's for keeping track of the apps)
*Note: Reservations will last for 72 hours. The OP board reserves the right to be subjective in regards to accepting reservations.
What is Britain? Well, whatever France isn’t.
by Reverend Norv » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:31 am
Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States wrote:Reservation
Nation Name: Kingdom of Angelond
Territory: British Isles, Cuba, Guyana, Southern Argentina, The Gold Coast, Horn of Africa, Yemen, Oman, Sri Lanka, what remains of Indonesia, the City of Antwerp.
#AltDiv (do not delete this, it's for keeping track of the apps)
*Note: Reservations will last for 72 hours. The OP board reserves the right to be subjective in regards to accepting reservations.
What is Britain? Well, whatever France isn’t.
by Reverend Norv » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:41 am
by Tracian Empire » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:58 am
by Plzen » Thu Mar 19, 2020 3:58 am
by Oscalantine » Thu Mar 19, 2020 4:40 am
by The Hobbesian Metaphysician » Thu Mar 19, 2020 4:57 am
by Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States » Thu Mar 19, 2020 5:05 am
Tracian Empire wrote:Updated the map - with the notice that European colonies in Southeast Asia will depend on whether we'll get a Japan or not, in light of that, I've left New Guinea free. Colonial claims are going to have to a bit flexible until we get all the potential colonial players in the game, but I am always open to suggestions.
by Reverend Norv » Thu Mar 19, 2020 5:34 am
by Plzen » Thu Mar 19, 2020 5:48 am
Reverend Norv wrote:Norse polytheism! I look forward to reading your history, Plzen.
by Reverend Norv » Thu Mar 19, 2020 6:02 am
Full Nation Name : Res Publica Francorum. formal/legal; La République Française, French; The French Commonwealth (not the "French Republic"), English. France, colloquial, or "la République." There is a strong political antipathy toward the idea of empire, and so France's overseas possessions are usually euphemized as Greater France, or La Plus Grande France.
Majority/Official Culture: "Metropolitan," or European, France is united by a shared French culture, though this embraces myriad regional subcultures from the Basque Country to Wallonia; notably, the homogenizing influence of Paris is much less pronounced than in our timeline, and so French regional dialects and traditions remain vibrant. Nor is the Commonwealth's French culture identical to the culture of the France that we know. True, this France is characterized by many familiar features: a love of fine food and wine, a devotion to art and literature, an appreciation for beauty and a care to nurture it, a proclivity for argument and controversy, and a demanding commitment to good taste in all matters. As in our world, French culture is seen internationally as a benchmark for sophistication and elegance.
But strong identification of French identity with the Reformed faith has given French culture a number of features that are unfamiliar in our timeline. The French are reflexively suspicious of absolute authority of any kind, political or religious. They are deeply committed to a Protestant vision of egalitarianism in which all people are equal in their sin, and therefore no man can regard himself as better than another. They are heirs to a cultural tradition in which bourgeois virtues are identified with Christian virtues - hard work, efficiency, progress, literacy, sobriety, piety, moderation - and both paupers and aristocrats are therefore regarded with suspicion. And finally, the French have long regarded themselves as a bastion of Protestant purity and democracy surrounded on all sides by ancient superstition and despotism; they are taught that they were chosen by God to light the world's way to progress, liberty, and moral redemption. And so French culture inculcates an intense national pride, a deep sense of national destiny, and a fiery commitment to the defense of both.
France's overseas colonies, on the other hand, are home to dozens of indigenous cultures ranging from the bazaars of Morocco to the jungles of West Africa. Most of these colonies also host small populations of French settlers - except for Algeria and the Cape, where this population is quite large. French policy for the last century has been to encourage the formation of fusion cultures in its colonies, rather than demanding complete assimilation to French customs, and so most French colonies are creole cultures characterized by a mixture of cuisines, fashions, languages, and even families. The one exception concerns religion, because adherence to the Reformed Church - though not required by law - remains a requirement for advancement throughout Greater France.
Finally, France's deeply complicated role in India means that more than a hundred thousand French citizens - known in polite society as colons, colonists - have lived for three generations on the subcontinent, and are as steeped in Indian culture as they are in French traditions. Millions more have spent at least some time in India, on business or in military service. And there is a growing Indian immigrant population in Metropolitan France itself. The fact that this mostly non-Protestant population is excluded by its religion from elected office and from many forms of public employment is becoming an increasingly divisive political issue.
Territorial Core : Metropolitan France, including Wallonia but excluding Luxembourg; Hispaniola; Algeria, Morocco, and Mauretania; the West African coast from Senegal to the Cote d'Ivoire; the Cape Province (constituting roughly the southwestern half of RL modern South Africa); a number of small islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans that function solely as naval bases. France directly administers much of the southwestern Indian coast and the northeastern Indian frontier, but these territories are technically leased from the Mughal court. The rest of the subcontinent is not part of France's territorial core in any real sense, but its Mughal rulers are deeply reliant on France and tied to the Commonwealth by a variety of unequal treaties. The result is a broad, deep form of influence that, at times, comes close to indirect rule.
Territorial Claim: France regards itself as possessing a European sphere of influence comprising more or less all territory west of the Rhine, including the Low Countries and Switzerland, and extending into the Po Valley and Catalonia. It has never been able to make good on this notion. It also regards itself as the preeminent colonial power in northwest Africa, and the primary naval power in the western Mediterranean. Finally, through its relationship with the Mughal court, France considers itself the preeminent power behind the scenes in the Indian subcontinent. In this much, at least, it is more or less correct.
Capital City: Paris. The medieval city on the Seine was comprehensively renovated between 1850 and 1870, creating a modern, "scientifically" designed metropolis of tree-lined boulevards and elegant plazas, concert halls and libraries. Notably for Europe, Paris is devoid of neoclassical structures, which are too closely associated with Roman tyranny; instead, it has a considerable amount of very modern architecture, with many of the world's first steel-framed, glass-fronted buildings - of the sort that will soon become known as skyscrapers. The last ten years have seen one of the world's first citywide subway systems constructed. Paris is self-consciously and proudly the city of the future, a place of elegance and good taste mingled with industrial ambition and technological audacity.
Population: About 59 million in Metropolitan France; this is considerably higher than in our timeline because, in our timeline, France had by far the lowest birth rate in Europe for most of the nineteenth century. In this timeline, France's comparatively more comprehensive industrialization and its less restrictive inheritance policies encouraged a more typical rate of population growth. An additional 27 million live in Greater France around the world, with the exception of India. The directly French-administered territories in India are home to 34 million people, of whom about half a million are French citizens at any given moment. And the Mughal Empire, with its complex web of connections to France, is home to countless millions more.
Government Type: Federal parliamentary constitutional religious republic. The most distinctive features of French democracy include the role of the Senate, which represents not the general public but instead interest groups like rural départements (states/provinces), labor unions, the Reformed Church, and the military; and the aggressive and extensive judicial review of the national courts, which apply a hybridized form of civil and common law that has evolved over time in a reaction against the perceived authoritarianism of Roman jurisprudence.
Government Ideology/Policies: The French Commonwealth is strongly ideological and moralist in character, and rooted in the political theory of the Reformed Church. It is vehemently anti-monarchist, believing that God alone can be sovereign. All political power, therefore, is illegitimate unless it is wielded to godly ends; this creates a right of revolution against immoral rulers, and therefore a deep progressive impulse toward positive social change. Because power can corrupt even good men, the best way to ensure godly - and therefore legitimate - government is to place final political power in the hands of the public as a whole, through regular elections; the virtue of the many can check the corruption of the few. Since the final safeguard of the state is therefore the virtue of the common people, everything possible must be done to ensure that the French people remain godly and principled; this can be achieved through public education and public welfare as well as through national service and religious observance. Liberty and religious virtue are two sides of the same coin; only the godly have the strength to be free, and only the free are at liberty to be godly. This core conviction is the essence of the French Reformed democratic tradition.
Government Focus: The French Commonwealth, as an ideologically motivated state, is committed to a global moral mission as well as to its own self-interest: it is an exporter of democratic revolution. (This is why France's role in supporting the Mughals is so politically controversial at home.) But France is also the lone Protestant republic on a continent of Chalcedonian empires, and so it is focused first and foremost on its own survival: the extensive militarization of French society and industry is a rational response to being horribly outnumbered in a bad neighborhood. The Commonwealth is committed to providing a decent standard of living for its citizens, but not at the cost of its financial stability; similarly, it takes a conflicted kind of pride in its colonial empire, but treats its colonies more as sources of income than as opportunities for investment. The exception, again, is India: the sheer size of the subcontinent and the depth of France's involvement there create a unique set of incentives that sit uneasily with Reformed political theology. Nevertheless, everywhere but India, France's top priorities are to defend and export its democratic and Protestant principles - no matter the cost.
Head of State: In theory, none; the Constitution asserts that the head of the French state is God. In practice, the Chancellor.
Head of Government: Chancellor of the Commonwealth Paul-Henri Maturin.
Government Description:The French Commonwealth is governed according to a written constitution that dates back to 1598, though it has been subject to amendment nearly every twenty years. In its essence, it is a parliamentary government of limited powers. It is an avowedly Christian and Reformed state, in which membership in the Reformed Church is required in order to hold office and for many forms of public employment.
Parliament is bicameral. The lower house, the National Assembly, has exclusive powers of the purse and is therefore regarded as the more powerful of the two; it is directly elected by the whole adult public, including (since 1894) women. Elections for the National Assembly are held in single-member districts, by instant-runoff voting. The party that possesses a majority or coalition in the Assembly then appoints the Council of Ministers and its Chancellor, who together constitute the executive. They govern until the next general election, which occurs either after a five-year term or after a vote of no-confidence by the Assembly. At present, the main divide in Parliament is between the Reformed Party (which supports a strong social safety net, an aggressive foreign policy, high taxes, a European focus, and the Army) and the Commonwealth Party (which supports a more laissez-faire approach, a diplomatic foreign policy, lower taxes, a colonial/global focus, and the Navy).
The Senate is an idiosyncrasy of the French Constitution's early era, adopted for the modern world. Originally, it was intended to ensure representation for the nobles and the Reformed Church. As French society grew more democratic, rather than abolish this institution, the nation adapted it: today, the Senate is used to represent all those whose virtue entitles them to a greater voice, and all those whose interests might be neglected by the majority. Its members are appointed by the nobility, the Church, labor unions, rural départements, the armed forces, Indian and Algerian colons, and - most recently - even women's groups. Because of this, and because it does not choose the Council of Ministers, the Senate tends to be less focused on party politics than the National Assembly. It cannot originate legislation, but its consent is required for all legislation passed by the Assembly.
Unlike in our timeline, this France did not emerge as the result of a centralized monarchy; rather, it was an alliance of Protestant nobles and cities. As a result, the Commonwealth is a federal republic, though it has grown more centralized over time. Its 35 départements, ranging in size from the vast and rugged massif of Limousin to the city of Marseille alone, have the constitutional right to collect their own taxes, run their own schools, maintain their own roads, and generally handle local day-to-day administration in any way they see fit.
France is also notable for its court system. Its civil and criminal courts are insulated almost entirely from political pressure: judges are chosen by the French Bar Association and must meet demanding academic standards. Judges on administrative and constitutional courts, by contrast, must be appointed by a two-thirds majority of the Senate - ensuring that they are acceptable to a wide cross-section of society instead of just to a political majority. They have sweeping power of judicial review, which permits them to strike down laws that conflict either with the Constitution or with the "Scriptural principles" that are supposed to justify it; on these grounds, the courts have even sometimes required Parliament to address neglected social problems for which the Constitution does not make Parliament directly responsible.
Finally, France's Constitution does not effectively acknowledge that the Commonwealth now possesses a fairly extensive overseas empire. Some parts of the empire - mainly in North Africa and southwest India - are simply organized into new départements; in these Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority areas, the fact that only Reformed Christians are permitted to hold elected office ensures the continuation of colonial rule. The exception is Bombay itself, which has been under French control for so long that it now has a Reformed but non-white majority; as a result, the département of Bombay sends the only non-white representatives to the National Assembly. On the other hand, India's far northeast is administered by the French Army as a military frontier "on behalf of" the Mughal Empire, and the area's residents are technically outside the reach of most French law altogether. Finally, France's role in the Mughal Empire and smaller Indian states like Nepal is defined by decades of unequal treaties, which vest great influence in French officers and diplomats and administrators, but largely exclude Parliament itself from direct involvement in the affairs of these sovereign states. De jure, the Indian polities are allies, not colonies.
Outside India, the situation is still odder. Many colonies - like Hispaniola, where the majority of the population is Reformed but not "French" - are excluded from representation entirely, because they are technically still organized as joint-stock limited-liability companies in which the Commonwealth owns a controlling interest; consequently, these colonies are legally private property rather than public land, and are responsible for their own administration so long as they continue to turn a profit for the French West India Company, the French West Africa Company, and so on.
Majority/State Religion: The French Reformed Church (Église Réformée de France), sometimes called the Huguenot Church, is both the state church and the majority religion. Protestantism is widely regarded as a prerequisite for true French identity, and the Reformed Church has an immensely influential role in government and politics.
Religious Description: The Reformed Church is the direct descendant of the earliest forms of Protestantism that took root in France in the sixteenth century in response to the writings of Jean Calvin. It represents a sharp break from Chalcedonian orthodoxy, and asserts that Scripture alone is as a sufficient justification for doctrine.
The Reformed Church emphasizes man's absolute and inescapable sin and God's irresistible and all-sufficient grace, which leads to a belief in predestination: God saves and purifies those whom He will, whether they like it or not. These, his godly elect, are then freed to live virtuous and holy lives. Churches should be organized at the most local level possible, with ministers chosen by congregations and representatives to regional and national synods elected democratically. Education is a priority, because there can be no mature faith without a personal relationship to the Scriptures and the ability to think deeply about them for oneself. Religious art, while permissible, is suspect, lest it lure men into idolatry. The Roman churches are regarded as entirely corrupt, because they have been appropriated by oppressive governments to crush the godly; the Reformed Church, on the other hand, is strongly associated with republicanism, since it teaches that there can be no king but God, and all others are equal before His law.
At a cultural level, the Reformed Church is a staunch defender of bourgeois values: it sees nothing wrong with making money, celebrates hard work and innovation, and is surprisingly progressive in its attitudes toward women and the family. Most strikingly, by contrast to its Chalcedonian neighbors, the Reformed Church believes that its faith is and should be constantly evolving as it comes to a better understanding of the Scriptures. This idea of semper reformanda is at the root of the remarkable spirit of innovation and creativity that informs French culture, art, science, industry, and military power.
Economic Ideologies: France is, especially by European standards, a broadly free-market capitalist economy that allows considerable space for individual entrepreneurship and innovation, as required by the principles of the Reformed Church. However, France's besieged strategic position has required it to create a massive military-industrial complex, which is largely privately run but funded with public contracts, and this gives the government a great deal of economic influence over the largest industrial companies. Some of its smaller colonies are still run as the private property of joint-stock corporations in which the state owns a controlling interest, a peculiar and increasingly outdated arrangement that essentially creates a mercantilist state monopoly on those colonial revenues. Despite these issues, France is substantially the easiest place in continental Europe to do business (except for Scandinavia): the Commonwealth is blessed with reasonable tax rates, sensible and streamlined regulations, strong labor unions that produce highly skilled workers, and a culture that values entrepreneurship and innovation. And France has the enormous advantage of having secured highly preferential - at times almost exclusive - access to India's markets: the subcontinent provides massive quantities of raw materials for French manufacturing at rock-bottom prices, and the resulting manufactured goods can then be sold back to Indians at a mark-up, protected by tariff barriers from foreign competition. These trade rules represent a hugely lucrative de facto subsidy for French manufacturing.
Major Production: First and foremost, France is an industrial power oriented toward defense; it has very high output of high-grade steel, industrial chemicals, mass-produced textiles, aluminum, locomotives, and other industrial products. It also manufactures huge quantities of arms, primarily for domestic consumption but sometimes for export to trusted partners, and tends to be at the forefront of military innovations like the use of the internal combustion engine and poison gas. French agriculture, though no longer as central as it was fifty years ago, also remains important, and produces world-famous wines, cheeses, charcuterie, and other traditional goods, as well as a considerable amount of grain. From its colonies, France receives large quantities of sugar, gold, ivory, petroleum, rubber and spices, among other exotic goods. India in particular is a key source of cotton, salt, jute, coffee, tea, silk, leather, and other raw or minimally processed goods; some of these products are derived from the French-administered areas of the subcontinent, but many more come from the Mughal Empire, and French access to them is secured by unequal trade treaties.
Economic Description: France is an industrial powerhouse more by necessity than by choice: the imperatives of national defense, for a Protestant republic surrounded by Catholic empires, required early, rapid, and massive industrialization in order to sustain an army capable of fighting multi-front wars against powerful enemies. Its economy is dominated by about a dozen large industrial companies, most of which specialize in related fields of military and civilian manufacturing; Rhône-Poulenc produces both industrial solvents and mustard gas, and Bloch Industries makes both machine guns and home appliances. France is a major exporter of high-quality consumer goods and industrial machinery. French companies are blessed and cursed with a workforce organized by powerful unions, which keeps the cost of labor in France quite high, but which also provides highly trained workers whose skill greatly improves production efficiency. Despite the central role of government contracts in this industrial economy, France's biggest companies are mostly publicly traded, and so France has a very sophisticated financial sector that allows capital to move fairly quickly in response to market demands. This gives France greater economic flexibility and inventiveness than its more dirigiste neighbors; it makes it easier for new companies to access capital and turn good ideas into profits. French agriculture has substantially reduced in importance: its grain production remains adequate to feed the nation with minimal imports, and it still produces more wine than any other country in the world, but it is no longer Europe's breadbasket; most of its proceeds are consumed domestically, not exported. France's colonies are treated largely as sources of raw materials and as markets for French consumer goods; West African rubber and Algerian oil help to keep the French industrial engine running smoothly. And the countless millions of the Indian subcontinent, both those living in French-administered territory and the subjects of the Mughal Empire, provide an enormous market for French manufactured goods - a market that is conveniently closed to foreign competition by unequal trade treaties.
Development: Modern (Metropolitan France); Semi-Industrialized (the Empire)
Development Description: France industrialized early and intensely because of the need to out-produce hostile neighbors. This necessitated efficient production of military supplies and rapid movement of large numbers of troops. These needs were met by massive public investment in canals, railroads, modern ports (especially at Toulon and Brest), telegraph lines, and paved roads, which mean that France's transportation infrastructure is now more dense than almost anywhere else in Western Europe. The French government is also more willing to embrace new technologies on a larger scale than many more conservative regimes; for example, in the 1890s, public funds helped to construct hundreds of Pelton wheel hydropower stations along France's rivers, greatly increasing the electrification of rural light industry. The French Empire, by contrast, remains much less developed, since most French colonies are run with the primary goal of maximizing resource extraction: they tend to have a few carefully planned railroads and canals, but they lack the dense transportation network of Metropolitan France. The crowning jewel of Greater France's infrastructure is the Trans-Saharan Railroad, which runs from Algiers to Abidjan by way of the Ouargla oilfields and Bamako, with a spur line currently under construction to Dakar. And in India, France has invested much more heavily in the subcontinent's infrastructure, both in French-administered territory and in the Mughal Empire itself: while India's network of railroads and canals and reservoirs is not yet as dense as that of Metropolitan France, it is growing steadily every year.
Army Description :The French Army is a legendary fighting force, renowned around the globe for its centuries of wars against Spain, Zentraleuropa, and the Western Roman Empire. For a Reformed republic born in war and surrounded by hostile powers on every land border, a strong army has been an existential imperative throughout the Commonwealth's history. Many aspects of France's economy, society, and government have been deliberately structured in order to create the most effective possible land force.
Unlike in most other countries, where war is the province of social elites, the French Army is a resolutely middle-class institution. This lies at the heart of its success: it has an institutional culture that prizes innovation over tradition, independent thought over dogma, education over seniority, and efficiency over glory. It suffers from none of the social-climbing or stubborn traditionalism associated with most officer classes. France was the first nation in Western Europe to create a professional general staff: a meritocratic institution guarded by stringent entrance examinations, specializing in the study of war as a practical and industrial undertaking, and responsible for the planning of operations from start to finish. It was the first nation to develop a theory of mission-type tactics, in which every officer is expected to understand the goal of the mission well enough to be able to improvise in the field in order to achieve it - a military approach that has deep roots in the Reformed Church's emphasis on individual education and moral responsibility. And it was the first nation to develop a holistic Plan of National Defense for total war: an hour-by-hour timetable thousands of pages long that set out exactly which troops would be mobilized, which factories retooled, which bridges destroyed, and which passenger or cargo trains run, from the moment when mobilization was declared to the moment when the Commonwealth reached full war footing. This is the French Army's greatest strength: it has a strong claim to be regarded as the most innovative, professionally organized, and systematically planned fighting force on Earth - an industrial army for an industrial age.
Accordingly, France uses a highly organized levée en masse conscription system: all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and twenty serve a two-year term in the Army. In peacetime, this service is usually spent half in training and half in the construction of infrastructure, which helps to explain France's dense network of canals and railroads. Upon finishing this service, most Frenchmen enter the reserves until they reach the age of forty. All active-duty officers are career professionals, and active-duty units mix together young men from all over the country; reserve units are organized from specific communities and are required to train together one weekend per month (one day per week for reserve officers). There are forty active-duty divisions and just over three hundred reserve divisions. Part of the Plan of National Defense is a detailed mobilization schedule intended to allow the organization, armament, and deployment to the frontier of at least three million men in one week.
Like many French national institutions, the French Army is notably innovative and unrestricted by military convention or tradition. The General Staff's constant wargames test new technologies and strategies for practical applications, and weed out relics of the past. Accordingly, in 1906, the French Army has already theorized the use of the creeping barrage, and invested heavily in the manufacture of poison gas shells and individual gas masks; it has also begun to increase platoon-level tactical training and individual marksmanship, and to deemphasize the bayonet. The overriding French military philosophy, strongly conveyed in the training that every young man receives, is that the French citizen-soldier is intelligent, virtuous, and godly enough to exercise independent judgment, aim, and thought in the heat of battle. French doctrine places a great deal of trust in the capacity of ordinary citizen-soldiers, and then attempts to provide the education, equipment, and training necessary for them to rise to meet those high expectations.
The French Army's equipment reflects this approach. It uses a magazine-fed, straight-pull bolt action rifle intended to maximize individual firepower, since French soldiers are trusted to be sober enough not to waste ammunition. The Army has taken the unusual steps of integrating machine gun and mortar teams at the platoon level, rather than treating them as a form of light artillery; conversely, it has concentrated its heavy artillery at the battalion level, with the goal of maximizing intensity of indirect fire. The influence of the General Staff's obsessive attention to detail has paid off in one more notable way: French troops are generally acknowledged to have the best boots in Europe.
Finally, despite being a conscript army in which the only career professionals are officers and NCOs, the French Army has notably strong morale. Active-duty divisions have traditions and battle honors dating back centuries, with their own hallowed hymns and flags. And the French soldier is trained to regard himself as the exemplar of the Reformed Commonwealth's highest values: discipline, hard work, education, godliness, sobriety. He may not be as fanatical as some of his foes, but he is as resourceful, creative, and unflinchingly tough as any fighting man on Earth.
In the last fifty years, France's deep entanglement in the Indian subcontinent has had a significant influence on the organization of its military. The French Army in India is a force of ten divisions of French regulars and forty divisions of local Indian troops. The former, like all active-duty French divisions, are mostly made up of young Frenchmen from the Metropole doing their conscript service; this is why so many Frenchmen have spent a couple years in India. The local Indian divisions are officered by French professionals but manned by volunteers from the warrior yeomen of the Maratha caste that dominates France's colonies in southwest India. The Army in India is primarily stationed in French-administered areas, including the military frontier of the northeast, but a few of its divisions of French regulars are also dispersed throughout the Mughal Empire as evidence of France's guarantee of the Empire's independence.
Unusually, the French Army proper also includes twelve Indian divisions serving under French officers: five of these are Maratha divisions, while the other seven are Gurkha units that serve by special arrangement with the French-aligned government of Nepal. These divisions are trained and equipped to the level of French Army regulars, and can be moved back and forth between the French Army and the French Army in India as the need arises.
Army Weakness : The French Army's primary weakness is strategic. Paris is under 200 miles from the Zentraleuropan border; Marseille is just 150 miles from the Roman border. Accordingly, the French Army's first move in any war must be to attack, in order to create greater strategic depth. This has led to many of the French Army's distinctive strengths. But on the other hand, it makes the Commonwealth strategically predictable: France will always seek to take the offensive, because it must. This imperative has also led to a "cult of the offensive" in the General Staff, in which defensive thinking is largely neglected. Other weaknesses proceed from this: French strategic thought, based around the Plan of National Defense, emphasizes bringing overwhelming manpower and materiel to bear offensively as quickly as possible, with the goal of ending any major war in its first year. Should this fail, the Commonwealth is not as well-prepared to sustain a multi-front war, and especially not one that might have to be fought on French territory with minimal strategic depth or room to maneuver. Finally, the Army's love of innovation sometimes backfires. For example, the General Staff discovered in its war games that cavalry were ineffective on a modern battlefield that included machine guns and barbed wire; accordingly, the French Army dismounted almost all its cavalry in 1902. (Notably, the Army in India dissented from this change). This has left French Army divisions calamitously short of dedicated reconnaissance personnel, so much so that most French reconnaissance is now conducted by bicycle troops, and it has caused logistical issues due to the lack of trained muleteers and coachmen to handle oxcarts and wagons. After all, no one ever said that progress comes easily.
Naval Description :The French Navy, while a respectable heavyweight force, is very much the second child compared to the famous Army. It is split into two main formations: the Mediterranean Fleet and the High Seas Fleet. Unlike the Army, the Navy is an all-volunteer force that draws heavily from areas of France with a strong maritime tradition, like the Basque Country and Normandy; it is better-paid than the Army, and the naval academy at Toulon is highly selective and demanding, creating an officer corps that is distinctively detail-oriented and technically proficient. French ships are also, unusually, all oil-powered, thanks to France's limited coal reserves and the wealth of the Ouargla oilfields; this meaningfully improves ship survivability.
The Mediterranean Fleet is based at Toulon, and is slightly the smaller of the two. It is generally felt to be sufficient to control the Western Mediterranean - and therefore the crucial sea route to Algiers, the terminus of the Trans-Saharan Railroad - where its main challenger is the Spanish Navy; it is also a very even challenger to the Eastern Roman Navy. The High Seas Fleet is headquartered at Brest, but has major bases at Dakar, Cape Town, and Bombay. Its central role is to control the route from France, around the Cape, to India. Against many foes - Zentraleuropa, Spain, the Lusitanians, and so on - the High Seas Fleet is equal on paper to this ambitious task. But against a true, dedicated naval power, French leaders privately acknowledge that its success is unlikely. Finally, small squadrons of frigates are dotted across the French Empire for trade protection and antipiracy operations, and the French Navy also operates a greenwater fleet of gunboats that works closely with the French Army in India to patrol the subcontinent's great rivers.
Because the requirements of the Mediterranean Fleet and the High Seas Fleet are so different, France actually produces distinct classes of warships for each: Mediterranean Fleet battleships and cruisers are slower, more heavily armored, and better-equipped with small guns to counter torpedo boats, while High Seas Fleet vessels are more lightly armored, faster, and equipped with longer-range heavy guns. Although it currently does not operate any submarines, the French Navy has invested millions in research and development, with an eye to using submarine warfare to balance the High Seas Fleet's weakness in any future conflict with a dedicated naval power.
Naval Weakness: France's navy is simply spread too thin. The project of protecting both the Mediterranean sea route to Algiers and the route around the Cape to India, while simultaneously maintaining an army capable of fighting three European powers at once, is inherently economically impossible. In a war against a true, dedicated naval heavyweight, the High Seas Fleet would have little chance of success. Even a second-rate navy, which the High Seas Fleet could defeat in pitched battle, would likely be able simply to avoid battle for as long as it wanted: the High Seas Fleet just does not have enough ships to locate and corner an enemy that does not want to fight. As a result, it is basically unable to fulfill its core purpose: protecting the long route around the Cape to India.
Further Military Description :The troupes coloniales and the Mission Militaire à l’Inde are the final components of the French military. The French Army has responsibility for the protection of Algeria and Morocco, and indeed includes three reserve divisions of native personnel from those départements; likewise, the French Army in India has primary responsibility for the defense of French territory in the subcontinent. But the rest of the French Empire - including the joint-stock company colonies in Hispaniola, the Cape, and the West African Coast - is protected by colonial troops who answer to the local administrations, not to the government in Paris.
These troupes coloniales overwhelmingly comprise white or creole officers commanding native troops, and vary substantially in quality and discipline. But their one distinctive feature is that they know, in wartime, that the High Seas Fleet may not be able to reach them; there will likely be no relief from Europe. And so most colonial troops are specifically trained for unconventional warfare: the goal is not to defend the frontiers of French colonies, but to take to the hills and jungles and slums, and from there to wage a preplanned guerrilla war of attrition that will eventually cost any occupier more than the colony is worth to hold. They are the most creative and ungentlemanly members of an already innovative and ruthless military establishment.
The Mission Militaire à l’Inde is an equally unconventional force. While the French Army in India and French Navy gunboats both have some presence in the Mughal Empire, and while both would be the first line of defense in any conflict in the subcontinent, France contributes to the defense of the Mughals primarily through the Military Mission. This is an arrangement that allows professional French officers to hold dual commissions from Parliament and from the Mughal Empire at the same time, which means that they can directly command Mughal troops and hold rank in the Mughal army. Thousands of French officers are assigned to the Military Mission, many of them General Staff veterans, and they contribute immense expertise to the Empire's armed forces. The Military Mission also has a material component: surplus French weapons and equipment are sent, free of charge, to equip Mughal forces. Because France is so quick to embrace new technology, its arms become outdated every decade or two, guaranteeing a steady supply of fairly modern equipment for the Military Mission.
National Goals: France intends, first and foremost, to survive as a forward-looking Reformed republic on a continent dominated by backward-looking Chalcedonian monarchies. In order to do this, it sees a need for greater strategic depth, and will look to create a buffer zone or sphere of influence in the Rhineland, Catalonia, and the Po Valley. It will also seek to maintain its preeminent position in India, which has become centrally important to the French economy. In the largest sense, the French generally believe that they have a special world-historical destiny, which is to spread republican government and the Reformed religion around the globe. This sense of holy mission informs most aspects of the nation's policy, often in unpredictable ways.
National Issues: While France's political system is fairly stable - there are few riots, and no potential revolutionaries - its politics are not. The Commonwealth is structured so that the Senate and the courts can check the parliamentary majority and the government, and they do this regularly and enthusiastically, with the result that it is extremely difficult for the French government to attempt any policy that is remotely controversial without getting stuck in political gridlock. France is also diplomatically isolated - especially within Europe, where its religion and political ideology have long made it a bogeyman for its neighbors - but also globally, where even other democracies often find its Reformed vision of republicanism eccentric and distasteful. It has a few allies of convenience, but no true friends. France also is beginning to see birthrates decline, as widespread unionization catches up to industrialization and increases family incomes while eliminating demand for child labor; this is a problem, since France is already smaller than Zentraleuropa. Finally, many of France's colonies are more or less restive. This is least the case in Hispaniola and the Cape; the latter has a French colonist majority, while the former hosts a centuries-old fusion culture that enjoys a great deal of autonomy. But it is quite pronounced in the central Sahara, where Touareg tribes have never acknowledged French authority, and where their raids have become a major annoyance for critical infrastructure like the Ouargla oilfields and the Trans-Saharan railroad. And the question of India looms over French politics as it has for decades: the central problem of a Reformed republic supporting a Muslim monarch has no obvious solution, for no amount of money can reconcile the situation with Huguenot principles, and no amount of principle can convince Parliament to turn its back on all that money.
National Figures of Interest: Jean Calvin, 16th-century religious reformer and founder of the Reformed Church; Ambroise Champion, 16th-century military and political leader who unified the Protestant French polities and led them to victory over the Catholic polities and the Western Roman Empire; Émile Fleury, primary author of the Union of Tours, the original document that became the French Constitution; Henri Guerin, early 19th-century military leader and then Chancellor who won France's greatest victories to date over Spain, the Romans, and Zentraleuropa before dying at 41; Alban Brodeur, late 18th/early 19th-century trader/diplomat/adventurer/director of the French East India Company who secured the southwestern coast of India for France and laid the foundations for French hegemony in the subcontinent; and a vast number of famous artists and painters, most of whom are familiar from our own timeline.
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by Reverend Norv » Thu Mar 19, 2020 6:02 am
History:The historical roots of the French Commonwealth lie in the centuries after the fall and subsequent reestablishment of the Western Roman Empire. The preservation of Roman power in Italy exercised a decisive influence on the development of Gaul. In the north, the successors of Clovis maintained their feuding kingdoms, and frequently jockeyed for the support of the Western Emperor; but in the south, Roman law and Roman education remained far more common, and the great cities of Provence governed themselves under the theoretical suzerainty of Rome. Imperial authority did not stop sharply at the Alps; rather, it petered out slowly among the independent Gallo-Roman cities and Franco-Burgundian kingdoms of old Gaul. And so the Dark Ages were not quite so dark as they were in our timeline; many aqueducts continued to flow, and in great libraries the wisdom of the ancients was preserved.
The invasion of Islamic forces from Spain in the eighth century brought an abrupt end to this period of political division and vague Roman hegemony. The Gallo-Roman city-states and Visigothic kingdoms of the southwest fell one by one. Charles Martel, the bastard son of an Austrasian nobleman, successfully assembled a coalition of petty kingdoms and independent cities through guile, force, and persuasion, and defeated the Umayyad invasion at the Battle of Tours. This barely-united kingdom survived for two generations through the skill of Charles' son Pepin and grandson Charles II, known as Charlemagne. The latter successfully expanded the Frankish realm to include all of Gaul and most of the Germanic-speaking lands to the east. Charlemagne also set a crucial precedent by declaring himself an Emperor and the equal of the Caesars of Rome and Constantinople. This would come to be regarded as the legal foundation of the independence of both France and Zentraleuropa.
But Charlemagne's empire did not survive his death. It clung on, at least in name, east of the Rhine. But in Gaul, it soon collapsed back into its constituent petty kingdoms, duchies, and city-states. This does not mean that the people of these various polities - who came to call themselves French, in recognition of their cultural debt to the Frankish Empire - were living through a dark age. In fact, from the twelfth century on, the disunited French lands became one of Western Europe's richest, most densely populated, most culturally advanced regions. Universities appeared and then multiplied; classical traditions of arts and literature were rediscovered; agricultural techniques became steadily more advanced, supporting larger and larger populations. Even political division contributed to the growth of an early bourgeoisie of merchants and diplomats. Conflict was constant, but rarely terribly destructive; the Norsemen conquered Normandy, for example, only to transform into yet another petty state. The French polities were proud of their differences - Norman ferocity, Occitan minstrelsy, Parisian erudition - and their many dialects of French all flourished. But they still retained enough shared identity to band together in the face of any external threat - and though his authority was mostly only ceremonial, the Emperor in Rome provided a convenient judge for the peaceful resolution of disputes. French crusaders even played a major role in the great drama of the Crusades, and sacked Constantinople.
By the fifteenth century, the High Middle Ages in France were on the wane. Powerful forces, unleashed by the new printing press, were beginning to sweep across Europe. Most importantly, in an era of larger standing armies and primitive cannon, the Western Empire began to assert its traditional authority over the petty kings and city-states of old Gaul. More and more Frenchmen, despite their different dialects and cultures, found themselves sending tithes to Rome. The burden fell heaviest on the bourgeoisie: craftsmen and merchants, literate men who had worked hard for what they possessed, and who were strongly influenced by the humanism that educated men in France had begun promoting as an alternative to Roman conservatism. But these bourgeois humanists found themselves at an impasse: no French state could resist Rome on its own, and no one since Charlemagne had been able to unify France for more than a few years.
The catalyst that broke this impasse was the Reformation. From its Lutheran roots in Germany, the Reformation came to France through the teaching of Jean Calvin, a lawyer, theologian, and humanist from the Petty Kingdom of Picardy. Calvin preached that all human beings were equally and inherently sinful, and that only God's irresistible grace could save men from themselves, and set them free to live godly lives. In the face of this grace, all indulgences and offerings, masses and relics, saints and icons were irrelevant. The whole church of Rome was a scam, intended to prop up worldly tyrants instead of leading men to God. And perhaps most radically of all, no king had a divine right to rule; political power was legitimate only insofar as it was exercised in accordance with God's law, for God alone was sovereign. The king was God's servant - and if he disobeyed God, then the people had the right and the responsibility to overthrow him.
Calvin's doctrines spread like wildfire across France. The country's fractured politics meant that no one state had the power to effectively crack down on the new Reformed Church. Soon, seeing an opportunity to escape their tithes to Rome, the dynastic heads of petty kingdoms and the elected leaders of city-states began converting to the new creed as well. While it remained most popular with the middle classes, Protestantism came within a single generation to pervade public life across France.
Two years after Calvin's death in 1564, the Western Empire crossed the Alps and invaded southern France, with the goal of restoring the French states to religious and political "union" with Rome. This was the start of the Forty Years' War. For several decades, French cities and kingdoms switched sides, fought each other, fought the Romans, and generally bogged down the Western Empire in a conflict of impossible complexity with no clear end. That bloody chaos forged a new generation of leaders: born and raised in the Reformed faith, filled with a burning hatred of Roman imperialism and authoritarianism, and accustomed to thinking of themselves as Frenchmen - not Picards or Normans or Occitans or Provençals - suffering under foreign invasion. The greatest of these young leaders was Ambroise Champion, a commander of the Lyon militia who forged the forces of dozens of southern French states into a new kind of army on Reformed principles: sober and disciplined, egalitarian and meritocratic, innovative and efficient. Champion defeated the Roman legions at the decisive Battle of Saint-Étienne, inspiring the leaders of the French petty kingdoms and city states to gather at Tours to discuss a new, general alliance that could defeat Rome once and for all. There, the brilliant lawyer and theologian Émile Fleury convinced the assembled dignitaries to sign the Union of Tours, creating a kind of polity never before seen in Europe: a federal republic, the French Commonwealth.
Admittedly, that early Commonwealth was far from the state we know today: only wealthy landowners could vote for members of the National Assembly, the départements were almost as strong as the central government, and the ruling dukes and petty kings and city mayors sat in the Senate themselves. But it was radical for all that: the first national republic Europe had seen since the days of Julius Caesar, founded on a new religious tradition in the most wealthy and densely populated area of Western Europe. And with Ambroise Champion at the head of its army and Émile Fleury as its first chancellor, the Commonwealth was strong enough to defeat the legions, break through the Verian Wall, invade Italy, and capture Milan. Even an Eastern Roman intervention failed to swing the tide; Champion defeated both empires while outnumbered two-to-one at the Battle of Pavia. In 1601, the Commonwealth traded Milan to the Western Emperor in exchange for his formal recognition of French independence, and the Forty Years' War came to a close. The map of Europe had been changed forever; henceforth, the central conflict in the West would be between monarchy and republic, between reformation and reaction.
That conflict flared up roughly once every twenty years for the next two centuries. When Germany plunged into religious war in the seventeenth century, the Commonwealth intervened to defend the Lutherans, and its troops rampaged through the Rhineland for a decade before being narrowly beaten. Spain, which had amassed a mighty colonial empire, soon emerged as a more prosperous rival for the new republic; in two wars in the late seventeenth century, France first suffered a tactical defeat, and then returned to strip Spain of Roussillon and the island of Hispaniola. In the early eighteenth century, conflict with Rome returned, and French troops wrested Nice from the Western Empire before being brought up short at the Verian Wall. By the 1760s, France was powerful enough to fight Spain, Germany, and Rome simultaneously, and while it did not win and could not penetrate the Verian Wall, neither did it lose any territory when it was finally defeated. With each war, the Commonwealth's differences from its neighbors grew more stark: its army became a disciplined force of motivated citizen-soldiers, not of mercenaries or legionary professionals; its central government gradually absorbed powers from the départements in order to run ever-larger campaigns. Even France's finances moved inexorably toward more progressive models of taxation, so that the aristocracy rather than the powerful bourgeosie were gradually bled white by wartime expenses - allowing the economy to remain dynamic despite frequent strife. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was clear that France had adopted a civilizational model - civic republican politics, Reformed religion, bourgeois capitalism, egalitarian society - that placed it on an entirely different trajectory from the rest of Europe.
Thus, the period between 1601 and 1798 was also a time of gradual but sweeping cultural change. France's new national and religious identity, once so revolutionary, gradually became a treasured heritage. Certain puritanical impulses relaxed; France became one of Europe's great centers of painting and music, of literature and drama. It was the country of Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Baptiste Lully, Francois de la Rochefoucauld and the great Molière. The French Reformed ethic became a delicate balance between freedom of thought and purity of spirit, between gorgeous paintings and whitewashed churches, between sensual poetry and Puritan self-discipline. This tension found its fullest expression in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when an entire generation of brilliant French philosophers and authors and scientists and economists embraced a radical empiricism in the pursuit of rational truth - all, somehow, without denying the Reformed faith that had become essential to their identity as Frenchmen.
Even so, the Enlightenment's effects were profound. The Commonwealth allowed military service as well as property to qualify men for suffrage, transforming the National Assembly into a vastly more democratic institution and unleashing modern political parties upon Parliament. And as brilliant Enlightenment scientists churned out a constant stream of useful inventions and devices, the French merchant class's ready capital applied them to the mass-production of military and consumer products: gunpowder factories and waterwheels, steam engines and machine tools. The Industrial Revolution began in late eighteenth-century France. And yet, at exactly the same time, Reformed missionaries fired by the old dream of a world purified of Roman idolatry continued their work beyond the Commonwealth's borders, so that by 1800 most of Zentraleuropa's territories west of the Rhine followed the Reformed faith.
This Enlightenment impulse had another result: the establishment of the French East India Company. French traders had been present in India since the Forty Years' War, but the increasing importance of the Indian trade in the eighteenth century - and the increasing risk of competition from other powers and domination by the rising Mughal Empire - led these traders to pool their resources and establish a single joint-stock company in 1742. The wisdom of this became apparent several decades later: as southern India slipped into chaos in the late eighteenth century, a young Company official named Alban Brodeur ably played the Mughals and the Marathas against each other. In the end, the Company was able to secure control of a swathe of ports in southwest India - including Bombay - in exchange for its assistance to the Mughals. At the same time, the Company won the reluctant support of the Marathas, who saw Paris as marginally preferable to Delhi. France would never again be able to disentangle itself from the subcontinent.
Despite this success abroad, the contradictions of the Enlightenment boiled over at home in a period of sustained unrest beginning in 1791. More and less puritanical factions within the Reformed Church, départements that had benefited more or less from the Commonwealth's nascent industrialization, the growing masses of the urban poor and the thriving middle class - all turned on each other, provoked by a series of failed harvests and a massive corruption scandal that forced the National Assembly to hold three general elections in a single year. Riots swept the cities, businesses failed, the national synod of the Reformed Church collapsed, and barricades appeared on the streets of Paris. Civil war seemed imminent.
The man who prevented that catastrophe, though in ways that remain deeply controversial, has cast his shadow over Western European history for a century. His name was Henri Guerin: a pastor's son and artillery officer from the Ardennes, a brilliant military commander whose ruthless pragmatism was tempered only by his steely religious conviction. Guerin rose to prominence in 1798, when Spain, Germany, and the Western Empire all invaded the Commonwealth in an attempt to exploit the ongoing political crisis. Placed in command of a makeshift army after a last-minute field promotion at the age of 29, Guerin won three battles in a row against poorly organized German forces, all while heavily outnumbered. He exploited his popularity to promote a radical policy: mandatory conscription of all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and twenty. This would not only transform French society; it would also, by the previous law that veterancy conferred the vote, institute universal manhood suffrage. Under internal and external crisis, Parliament assented. When Guerin presented a series of bills calling for the creation of new, unprecedentedly centralized armaments factories, Parliament passed those measures too. Guerin would personally supervise the training of his enormous new army, the first of its kind in European history; many of the French Army's modern songs and banners date directly to this period, and so does its emphasis on the individual initiative and judgment of competent and trustworthy citizen-soldiers. Guerin also demanded the Army's representation in the Senate, practically at swordpoint.
In 1801, having fought a holding action at the frontier for three years, Guerin unleashed this new army upon Europe. For the first time, instead of moving an army from one border to the next, the Commonwealth possessed the numbers, logistics, and tactical sophistication to fight on all fronts simultaneously. One army wiped out the entire Spanish army in fourteen months before finding itself mired in counterinsurgency operations characterized by futile attempts to stamp out the Catholic Church. Another army marched so far into Germany that Vienna had to be evacuated before Guerin reached the city; a third punched through the Verian Wall, cut its way down Italy, and sacked Rome before retreating to set up a puppet republic in the north of the peninsula. In 1804, Guerin stood for a seat in the National Assembly, and was immediately made Chancellor upon his election; the next year, he became the first - and thus far only - Chancellor to command French troops in battle, and defeated a coalition of Eastern Roman, German, and other forces at the Battle of Stolp - one of the greatest victories in history, taught in military academies to this day. Traumatized, Europe waited for the next blow to fall. Instead, like Attila, Henri Guerin died abruptly in his sleep of a stroke. He was 41 years old.
Guerin's death was the end of an era, but it was not a convenient end: there was no winner and no loser, for the defining figure of the age had simply vanished. The coalition that had assembled to contain him fell apart once Guerin's threat was removed, and once the Commonwealth hastily withdrew from most of the territory that he had occupied. In France, after a month of mourning, many politicians and business leaders quietly noted that Guerin had come closer to destroying the Commonwealth than anyone in history, and they pushed through a number of amendments creating a new and independent system of constitutional courts, intended to restrain the power of any future demagogue.
But Guerin's legacy cast a long shadow. By embracing the new techniques of machine-based production on an industrial scale, he had transformed the French economy; as peace returned, the textile mills that had made millions of uniforms and the armaments plants that had churned out gunpowder by the ton remained active, testimony to France's transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. So did the system of universal conscription, with its political consequence: every adult Frenchman could now vote. And because it was obliged to find work for a peacetime army of half a million men, Parliament embarked on a massive, decades-long project of infrastructure development, building tens of thousands of miles of railroad and canals.
That only accelerated industrialization. By midcentury, a new kind of corporation had became dominant in the French economy: a massive industrial concern that operated dozens of chemical plants or steel mills or armaments factories, and that made its fortune on government contracts worth millions of francs. An entire financial infrastructure of stock markets, investment brokers, and speculators sprang up to feed the new corporations' endless hunger for capital. By the late 1860s, the immense wealth and power of these new industrial companies had provoked its natural response: French workers, backed by the Reformed Church and the Reformed Party in Parliament, began to organize labor unions and bargain collectively for higher wages. A decade of intense labor unrest followed, during which French troops were deployed to contain riots for the first time since the Guerin era.
But in the end, thanks to their sheer numbers at the ballot box and the support of the Church, the workers prevailed: not only were collective-bargaining rights guaranteed by law, but the labor unions also won the right to appoint representatives to the Senate - just like the Church, the Army, and the nobility. And workers' rights proved the gateway for women's rights. No sooner had the labor unrest concluded than the suffragist movement took to the streets of French cities, demanding the vote for women on the grounds that: "there is no more godly, longsuffering, uncompromising, and liberty-loving servant of Christ than the wife of a French solider." Though the support of the Church was slightly more tepid, once again, the reformers prevailed. In 1894, the franchise was extended to women, and suffragist organizations even won the right to appoint four members of the Senate.
In the midst of this rapid economic, political, and social change, France has for the last century enjoyed a flourishing of culture. The Impressionist movement, led by Monet and Renoir, has revolutionized painting. Debussy and Saint-Saëns embody musical elegance and sophistication for aficionados around the world. Authors like Balzac and Flaubert, Hugo and Zola, have made the recent decades a golden age of French literature. Paris has been sweepingly renovated, creating a new and forward-looking city of pioneering architecture, broad boulevards, and elegant cafes. As it was during the Enlightenment, French culture is once again characterized by the creative tension between Reformed principle and Gallic joie de vivre.
But the long nineteenth century that followed Guerin's death has brought external challenges as well as internal ones. For one thing, it has seen France gradually and almost accidentally acquire a fairly extensive colonial empire. While the Commonwealth has controlled Hispaniola since the late seventeenth century, the rest of France's colonies were acquired in the last hundred years. In the 1820s, the Commonwealth invaded Algeria to halt the raiding of the Barbary Pirates; its attempts to stabilize its position there eventually led it to conquer Morocco as well. But those entanglements paled by comparison to India, where Alban Brodeur expanded the East India Company's territory to encompass almost the whole southwest coast, turned Mysore and Cochin into de facto French protectorates, and insinuated Company representatives into the heart of the Mughal Court. He then died, and the Company promptly went bankrupt. Parliament, not seeing any other option, assumed the Company's obligations and territories - and with them, the Company's role in Mughal politics. Over the course of the nineteenth century, that relationship would deepen steadily: France leased concessions in Mughal cities, secured unequal trade treaties that made India critical to the French economy, ensured that the French consul would be a high official of the Mughal court, and ultimately guaranteed Mughal independence, establishing a new French Army in India to make good on its word. By the second half of the nineteenth century, France found itself the preeminent power in the Indian subcontinent - at the cost of supporting a monarchy that violated every principle of Reformed, republican politics. The "Indian Question" has tormented French politics ever since.
But no one can deny the immense economic value of France's position in India. In order to secure the crucial trade route from the subcontinent, French companies established a powerful presence on the Cape and in Senegal, which ultimately led French troops to occupy both territories. By the 1880s, most of the rest of the French Empire had fallen into place, as colonial administrators undertook independent campaigns to connect the Commonwealth's various territories in northwest Africa. Most Frenchmen are not at all sure how they feel about this development. Algeria, where three generations of French colonists have now lived and died, is axiomatically assumed to be part of France; and certainly, everyone appreciates the oil of Ouargla and the rubber of Abidjan and the sugar of Hispaniola. But the shadow of Rome has tainted the whole idea of empire for France, and so it struggles to rationalize its colonial role. In India most of all, France's role is controversial: for there, not only is France itself an imperial power, but it is supporting a true monarchical empire that many Frenchmen see as no better than Rome itself.
Finally, though Henri Guerin's death ushered in almost forty years of shell-shocked peace, the nineteenth century still witnessed two major French wars. In the 1840s, Franco-Roman tensions in North Africa boiled over into yet another major conflict pitting the Commonwealth against both Roman Empires. By this time, France's levée en masse had been copied by many of its enemies, and the fighting was much more even than anyone in France had expected. Shockingly, the vaunted French Army failed to penetrate the Verian Wall, lost a series of close-fought battles in the foothills of the Alps, and finally found itself surrounded and blockaded in a campaign on Cyprus. In the end, the Commonwealth was forced to make a negotiated peace to rescue its trapped army. Over the next thirty years, young officers and politicians applied the lessons of that defeat to shake up the French military establishment, which had changed hardly at all since Guerin's death. The modern French military's key institutions - the meritocratic General Staff and its constant wargames, the Plan of National Defense to schedule industrial and military mobilization down to the hour, the research-and-development contracts aimed to encourage continual military innovation - all date from this period.
When war came again in 1876, the French Army had reestablished its qualitative advantage. At issue was Alsace-Lorraine and parts of Wallonia, which had followed the Reformed faith for generations but remained under Zentraleuropan rule. This time, thanks to the work of the General Staff, the Commonwealth was able to mobilize a million men in ten days, faster than any of its neighbors had believed possible. When French troops encountered Western Roman, German, and Spanish forces, they used techniques and technologies that had been developed in wargames but never before seen on the battlefield: flexible mission-type tactics, massed breachloading artillery, aimed individual rifle fire instead of volley fire, and field construction of narrow-gauge railroads to move supplies and men directly to the battlefield. Spain - already troubled by unrest at home - was forced out of the war in six months, and Germany sued for peace in eighteen months, by which time French troops had occupied Nuremberg and cut Zentraleuropa nearly in half. The disputed Reformed territories passed to France, and an uneasy peace returned to Western Europe.
In the decades since, the Commonwealth has appeared focused mostly on labor rights and women's suffrage, arts and music, electrification and technological advancements, and other pursuits less likely to alarm its monarchical neighbors. But every summer, hundreds of thousands of men still take to the field for massive wargames, and the bespectacled experts of the General Staff watch, and take careful notes, and plan the constant reforms that will keep France ready for the one constant in its history: the next war.
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by Reverend Norv » Thu Mar 19, 2020 6:04 am
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